Category: General

Target is my go-to-store for replenishing essential household and bathroom supplies such as paper towels, toilet paper, detergent, bar soap and ‘Soft Scrub’.  The store does have a nice variety of all kinds of other stuff such as clothing, shoes, electronics, bedding, kitchen supplies, toys and stationery.

There was a time when shoppers would say jokingly ‘I’m going to Targét (a ‘French’ pronunciation)  .. a nod at the stylish but affordable offerings of the store.  I think the store has lost a little of its panache, though.  I have not heard of  the Targét moniker in a long, long time.

There are a lot of scenes from the city of Budapest in the 2015 spy-spoof flick ‘Spy’, starring Melissa McCarthy, Jude Law and Jason Statham.

Some of them feature the Gresham Palace, now a Four Seasons hotel.   Hey! I know that place, and I love that building, I thought when I saw it on the screen.  My colleague and I went there for cocktails many years ago.  So I had to dig up the picture I took of it, and here it is.

The October jobs report for the world’s largest economy (the USA, measured by gross domestic product*) was very positive : 270,000 jobs added.  That’s a lot more than the 180,000 that had been expected.   And economists now say a December federal funds rate hike is almost a certainty.

*Another way to compare the sizes of the economy in countries is by purchasing power parity.  By this measure, the size of China’s economy is actually slightly larger than that of the USA.

The death rate diagram below is from Monday’s New York Times, from a study by two Princeton economists.  It shows the shocking counter-trend of death rates for middle-aged white Americans.   They do worse – far worse than any other industrialized nation – and worse than any other race and ethnic groups in the USA (African American, Latino, Asian), and other generations.  And no, it’s not the big killers like heart disease and diabetes, says the article,  but an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.  The article shot to the top of the most-emailed list, and attracted nearly 1,900 comments.

Most of us here in the USA set our clocks back one hour on Saturday night (back to Standard Time).  A state such as Arizona is on Mountain Standard Time all year. And these days only dumb, disconnected mechanical clocks require adjustment. My iPhone’s little clock is smart and changes on its own.

So where does my iPhone’s time come from? Well, it comes from GPS satellites that broadcast the time to cell towers, from where the smartphones pick it up.  And GPS satellites get their times from atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory (a whole bunch of them).

In 1967, scientists got together and defined one second as equivalent to the time it takes a cesium atom to move 9,192,631,770 times between two particular energy levels.  That defines the time in terms of 16 decimal points of a second.  Is that really necessary?  Well, yes ..  GPS satellites that are out of sync by as little of one billionth of a second with the master time will already result in inaccuracies of a few feet on the ground, so these GPS satellite times are literally synced to the nanosecond.  Researchers are working on atomic fountain clocks, to push the definition of time out to 18 decimal points (a hundred times more accurate than today’s clocks, or an accuracy of 1 second in 300 million years).  But at that point, relativity and quantum effects start to take hold : an atomic clock a few feet higher than one right next to it will consistently run slower than one at the lower height due to the differences in the earth’s gravity at the two points.

For further explanations and speculations on time measurement, check out this little video clip from Wired Magazine/ The Atlantic magazine  link.

It’s the mushroom time of year again here in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and the white and red toadstool mushrooms are making their appearance again in my backyard. Those marks are squirrel nibbles!  I guess they try it and then go back to the maple seeds (with the brown propeller wings, in the foreground).

There was another Republican presidential debate last night, and I watched some of it. I guess it was entertaining (in the way that clowns are); at the same time it was really unsettling to me, to think that one of these guys (or Ms. Carly Fiorina) could become President in 2016.  Donald Trump was much quieter than usual and Jeb Bush had a really bad night.  An all-out attack he made on his erstwhile protégé Sen. Marco Rubio backfired so badly, that the broad consensus among pundits now is that his candidacy is all but dead.   Amazingly, the 2016 US Presidential general election is still a full year away.

Word on Tuesday was that a budget deal has been struck between the White House and Congress to avoid another debt-ceiling fiscal calamity.  The two-year agreement would raise domestic and defense spending by $80 billion and lift the national borrowing limit until March 2017.   There are also cuts to the Social Security disability program and to Medicare, though.  The Federal debt stands at about $18 trillion, two-thirds of it added just in the last decade, as this infographic from the White House website shows.  (So some politics written into the chart?  Red is Republican and Blue is Democratic.  The chart says the George W. Bush tax cuts added $5 trillion to the debt.  The chart also says the US Government owes the Social Security Trust Fund $14 trillion).

<Sigh> I thought on Sunday, as I felt progressively worse and canceled my Monday morning travel to San Francisco : we are starting to build fusion reactors but we cannot yet stop the common cold virus. Does Vitamin C help? Not really : WebMD says ‘Vitamin C has been studied for many years as a possible treatment for colds, or as a way to help prevent colds. But findings have been inconsistent. Overall, experts have found little to no benefit from vitamin C for preventing or treating the common cold’.

One of our Democratic Party 2016 presidential candidates – Bernie Sanders – is a democratic socialist. (As opposed to a socialist.  Sanders isn’t pushing for government to take over large sections of the economy.  He does want the government to pay for health care and college tuition to a much larger extent, even for college tuition to be free, and for rich people to pay more taxes).

Further out to the left on the political spectrum here in the race for one of the seats for Seattle City Council, we have a true socialist : Kshama Sawant (as far as I can tell from her eye-catching Soviet-era red* campaign posters).    *A bad choice of color? Or maybe she wants people to see red.   Check ’em out below.  Comcast is a cable TV and internet services provider.

I see I messed up : there were copies of this weird-looking USA Today newspaper in the hotel lobby this morning, and I did not grab one.  I should have!  Strange, I thought : USA Today changed their logo.  Well, the iconic 1989 ‘Back to the Future’ movie with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) had a copy of the USA Today from the future in it.

The future was today : Oct 22, 2015.

So USA Today printed a special edition of the newspaper that looked like the one in the movie. I see they were for sale on their website, but are now sold out there as well.  Aw.

I had to rush this morning to get into the morning commute traffic on highway I-680 South to drive down to San Ramon for an 8 am meeting.  Well, I had been in the rental car (it’s a red Toyota Corolla) only a minute when I noticed the tire pressure warning light on the dash was on.   Now what?  And which tire?  The dumb little light does not say, of course.  Better hope there is still enough air in to make it down to San Ramon, I thought. After I stopped in San Ramon and checked out the tires, it looked as if the front tire was underinflated.  So this afternoon before I headed back, I found a gas station. Luckily all California gas stations are required by law to provide free air and water, so it was easy to add some pressure to the two front tires.   That did not take care of the warning light, though.  So there.  Who cares.  Now I drive around, probably with overinflated front tires, and a warning light that still says some tire is underinflated.

I don’t have a lot of games on my iPad, and don’t play much – but Scrabble is still a mainstay.  In expert mode the Scrabble opponent ‘CPU1’ plays a mean game, plunking down 7-letter words every other turn sometimes.  PROCAINE = a local anesthetic, PERFECTA = a bet in which the first two places in a race must be predicted in the correct order, ORBATID = a genus and species of mite, TOUZLE = a disheveled or rumpled mass, especially of hair.  QUAGGIER was my word.   And at this critical junction in the game, man!  I needed an open N or S to build AILERONS.  But alas, there was none, and I lost the game.

 

We watched ‘San Andreas’ last night : a 2015 disaster movie with Dwayne Johnson ‘The Rock’ and earthquakes and a tsunami in California. So of course, I felt I wanted to separate fact from fiction by looking up a few things.   Magnitude 9 earthquakes in California? Not real.  The complete collapse of Hoover Dam? Not real. One or two tall buildings toppling over in downtown San Francisco? Yes, that’s possible, but not all of them.   The movie mentions the biggest earthquake recorded in history – (with a little help from Wikipedia) :  The 1960 Valdivia earthquake (Spanish: Terremoto de Valdivia) or Great Chilean earthquake (Gran terremoto de Chile) of Sunday, 22 May 1960, was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, rating a 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale. It occurred in the afternoon (15:11 local time), and lasted approximately 10 minutes. The resulting tsunami affected southern Chile, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, eastern New Zealand, southeast Australia, and the Aleutian Islands.

Electric and hybrid cars abound in California, since drivers can use them in the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane – and the State mandates that car manufacturers sell a lot of zero emission vehicles.  By the 2025 model year, automakers that sell vehicles in California will have to make 15.4 percent of them ZEV.   But the New York Times report in an article that there are not nearly enough charging stations yet : one public charger for every 10 electric vehicles; about 15,000 in California (33,000 in all of the USA).  One woman says of a man that hogged a public charging space while not charging his car and said  ‘he has to run one more errand’, then walking off, that she seriously considered keying his car.  What is that? I wondered .. and then found out uh-oh! it’s running your car key along someone’s car, making a deep long scratch in it.

Hmm .. I thought as I walked by this poster on Sunday.  Would have been sort of interesting to check out the crowd and hear the arguments for a basic, guaranteed income.  It is worth it to note that the State of Alaska has a system which provides each citizen with a share of the state’s oil revenues – although the amount that has averaged around $1,300 p.a. in recent years, is far from enough to live on [Wikipedia].   Switzerland may actually hold a referendum on the issue.  The date is not yet determined and it is not an initiative supported by the Swiss federal government .. but the proposal is for some $2,800 per month for each citizen.  Now that is starting to sound like real money to me.

An estimated 250,000 Syrians have been killed and some 11 million have fled the country to escape the civil war* that has now been raging 4½ years. The USA’s limited involvement has made little difference so far, and now Russia has joined in the conflict as well.  The map is from Friday’s issue of TIME magazine.

*What’s so ‘civil’ about war anyway?, as Guns’n’Roses noted on their 1993 song ‘Civil War’

Our project team went to Palomino’s for munchies and a beer on Wednesday night, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge and the Salesforce Tower.   Just this morning (Thursday) there was talk on the radio that the Salesforce Tower could be a harbinger of another tech bubble that is about to burst.  Consider : the building is going to cost a billion dollars. And from Wikipoedia : ‘ .. as of 2015, it is one of the most highly valued American cloud computing companies with a market capitalization of $50 billion, although the company has never turned a GAAP profit since its inception in 1999′.

So ..!  My loyalties are divided in the upcoming 2015 Rugby World Cup match-up between South Africa and the (gasp!) American team, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon in The Stadium, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in London.  Yes!  There actually is an American team playing rugby.  South Africa suffered a completely unexpected loss in their pool match against Japan and is still holding out hope that they can make it through to the final matches.  As for tomorrow’s game against the USA, let me just say : may the best team win.

 

Sunday was the wettest day on record for the city of Columbia with 6.71″ that was measured at Columbia Metropolitan airport.  By Sunday morning at 7 am, some areas on the South Carolina coast had gotten 20 inches of rain in just 4 days.   State officials the rain from hurricane Joaquin that is churning out in the Atlantic as a thousand-year storm.