Category: General

Here is the little clapboard that was on the pavement tonight just outside my neighborhood pub called the Canterbury Ale House.   Well, yes.  Booze and food does make for fun, but could be too much of a good thing as well, right ?

As one analyst put it : Google grabbed itself by the lapels of it colorful jacket, and turned it inside out, with the announcement that Google is turning into a holding company called ‘Alphabet’.   Google still has search, ads, YouTube, Android and maps, but then there are the other companies called Fiber, Calico, Nest, Life Sciences, Venture, Capital and Google X.  (Google X includes driverless cars and drones).

We made it out to the tennis court as well as the swimming pool on Sunday, and checked out the sporting goods store on the way back.

Check out the blow-up shark ‘floatie’ that was on display.  (Better be careful and not sneak up and surprise unwitting swimmers with that thing in the sea.  You will frighten the living daylights out of them : not good !).

The first of the Presidential debates started tonight here in the USA with the 17 – seventeen!  – candidates for the Republican party squaring off in two groups.   I had the TV on and listened with half an ear.  Republicans have a very different world view from mine!  And was there anything really new?  Not really.  Cut taxes, repeal Obamacare, make war with the Middle East.  Maybe I’m being a little unfair .. there were brief exchanges on a number of other topics too.  Jeb Bush defended the Common Core standards for schools that he is a proponent for.  John Kasich had to ‘defend’ his expansion of Medicaid in his home state of Ohio.  Mr. Trump had to defend the four bankruptcies his businesses had gone through, and awful comments he had made in the past about women from his Twitter account.

It was just getting dark tonight at 8.45 pm when I noticed something on my fence outside. Hey! that’s not a cat ! I thought, and then there were three and soon a whole family of four raccoons.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the little bandits out and about, which is good, I suppose.   I am sure they smell the food scraps that we now put in our yard waste bins here in Seattle for recycling into compost by the public utility company. It may be time to lock up the lid of my yard waste bin.  If a raccoon gets trapped in there it’s going to scare the heebie jeebies out of the garbage collector .. or out of me!

The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct is a system of canals, tunnels, and pipelines that conveys water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and valleys of Northern and Central California, to Southern California – across hundreds of miles.  I drive across three aqueduct bridges from my hotel here in Kettleman City* to the training sessions.    There are signs by the orchards here that says ‘No Water = No Jobs’ and ’25 million Californians are not getting millions of gallons of water they paid for’.

*I’m going to report them to Governor Jerry Brown.  The sprinklers for the little bitty green lawn by the hotel entrance were on this morning.  Sorry, but the lawn needs to go.  Put some rocks and cactuses in!

 

Amazon reported blow-out earnings today.  The company’s cloud computing business -which include Amazon Web Services – is up a whopping 81% from a year ago.  Sure, Amazon sells and ships $23 billion of stuff in a single quarter, but it is only making 2% of profit on those sales.  Its cloud computing business is now a $6 billion-a-year business and growing rapidly. The other thing that’s growing rapidly is the office space that Amazon is devouring in Seattle’s Lake Union District.  The Seattle Times reports that Amazon may occupy as much as 10 million square feet in downtown Seattle in another few years.  By comparison, Microsoft occupies an estimated 14.6 million square feet spread across the greater Seattle area.

My ‘little toaster oven that could’, a cheap Black & Decker model, finally gave out after 12 years of service, so it was time for a new one.  The new Black & Decker went for $60, but there was also a stainless-steel clad ‘Breville’ brand toaster oven (no, it’s not French or German, it’s made in China all the same).  So I uhm-ed and ah-ed the way I sometime do in the store : do you really need a $150 model?  Well, the more expensive oven won out.  It had more heating elements for a perfect toasted cheese, and the crumb tray at the bottom is super easy to draw out and clean (not the case with the Black & Decker).

Windows 10* will be available on July 29.  Some call it a make-or-break operating system for Microsoft, since Windows 8 was widely panned for its missing Start menu, complexities and brazen attempts to further Microsoft’s business goals (never mind what users want).  So lots of people with Windows 7 need to be enticed to embrace Windows 10, and it is telling that for the first time, the new Microsoft operating system is a free upgrade.

*There is no Windows 9.  ‘It didn’t feel right to call it Windows 9’ said one executive.  How about WindowsOne, to indicate it will serve as one same/ similar OS for the desktop, tablets and mobile phones? Well, the ‘One’ moniker has been used in many other Microsoft products already.  And there has been a Windows 1.0 already after all – back in 1985 when the PC world was in its infancy!

Monday was ‘moon day’ : the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, now 46 years ago in the rear view mirror.   We may no longer land on the moon (or Mars, as people surely thought back then, we would be by now) .. but we are certainly exploring our galaxy with telescopes and unmanned spacecraft.   ‘Our galaxy’ is the Milky Way, of course.  And ‘our’ sun is but one of 200 billion stars in the Milky Way.  That makes for about 11 billion other planets that are orbiting their suns in the habitable zone : at a distance not too warm and not too cold, so that there could be liquid water on the planet.  And where there is water, there may be life.

 

It’s not everyday that a giant company’s stock price jumps up by 16%, but that is what happened to Google on Friday. The  Google’s Class A shares gained $97.84 to close at $699.62 to leave the company with a market value of about $469 billion.  (That’s still a distant second among U.S. companies to Apple, whose market value stands about $747 billion).

P.S.  Try these two Google search ‘Easter Eggs’ .. type in a search for ‘do a barrel roll’, and another for ’tilt’, and see what happens.

 

Plutonium was made in the laboratory by bombarding uranium with deuterons (an isotope of hydrogen consisting of a proton and a neutron), and named after the (then-) planet Pluto.  So it is an artificial element, and there is likely no plutonium on Pluto. Uranium is the last of the natural elements (atomic number 92) in the periodic table.  When the historic Iran Nuclear Deal was announced this week, uranium and plutonium was in the news.   Here is the New York Times’s simple guide to the terms of the deal.

Here’s a nice animation from NASA’s website to show the close-up detail that we know have gotten with the intrepid New Horizons explorer’s flyby.

 

I have not checked up recently on the world’s skyscraper constructions .. so here is an update!   (In another life in another universe I would have been an architect, I believe).  The Kingdom Tower is under construction in Jedda, Saudi Arabia.   It will be the first tower to reach all the way up to 1,000 m with an inhabitable floor count of 167 (2 below ground), and a total height of 252 floors if the uninhabitable ones in the spire of the tower is counted as well.  It is estimated cost is US$ 1.23 billion, and it was designed by American architect Adrian Smith, who also designed Burj Khalifa.

Check out http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/  and Tallest 20 in 2020 for beautiful line drawings of the world’s skyscrapers.

Wednesday was a rough day for big technology in the United States.   First, a computer problem in United Airlines’s reservation system caused the FAA to impose what is known as a ground stop at 8:26 a.m. ET.  The stop only lasted about two hours, but this impacted 4,900 flights worldwide.   Then at 11.32 am ET the New York Stock Exchange went out for 3 ½ hours.   While this was unnerving, these days there are some 11 other exchanges that could still be used for trading, though.  Finally, Microsoft announced it was laying off 7,800 jobs as its mobile phone unit and Nokia acquisition continue to struggle.  Far, far away in Finland, the head of web communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, Pekka Pekkala minced no words about the impact of these layoffs on the city of Salo (pop.54,000).

.. or are you just looking to get shot?  The New York Police Dept sent out a tweet discouraging people from buying this cell phone case.   I looked it up – it was on sale on the web site http://www.japantrendshop.com/ but they pulled the item from the catalog. (Smart thing to do).   Go for the ‘Samurai Umbrella’ instead, also on offer on the website.

 

Check out these charts of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s composite index. As of the end of the day Friday in China, the index is down 27% from its June 12 peak, wiping out some $2.4 trillion of value.  Individual investors* account for about 80 percent of trading on mainland Chinese exchanges.

*Investor or trader or speculator? I’d say one would you have stay in the market for oh, one year, to be called an investor.

Will the Grexit happen?  (Greece exiting from the Eurozone and going back to the drachma, and forge ahead on its own).  Greece owes its creditors way more than it can pay, even after several years of painful austerity that has crimped its economy by 25%, and left half of young people unemployed.   On Tuesday night it defaulted on a key payment to the International Monetary Fund, becoming the first developed nation to ever default on its international obligations.

So now there is a referendum on Sunday, which makes no sense in a way.  As the New York Times says : Imagine the fate of your country hangs on a yes-or-no question. The question is drafted in cryptic, bureaucratic language and asks you to decide on an economic program that no longer exists. Leaders in neighboring countries are begging you to vote yes. Your government is begging you to vote no.  

It turned out to be a very eventful week here in the USA.  Says CNN : ‘After a momentous week, same-sex couples can now marry in all 50 states, the Confederate flag’s historic hold on the political institutions of the Deep South is fraying by the hour and Obamacare, after defying another attempt to dismantle it, is now reaffirmed as the law of the land’.   In another win for the President (he had to fight his own party), the Trans-Pacific Partnership was approved by the Senate by the absolute minimum of votes that were needed (60) on Wednesday.  This is a 12-nation trade deal years in the making, that would link 40% of the world’s economy — including the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico.

 

 

There is a lot of discussion in the media about the legitimacy of public displays of the Confederate Flag in the wake of the terrible shooting last week, and menacing pictures that the gunman posted of himself on holding a Confederate flag.   Well, says the Washington Post :  ‘As long as we’re on the subject of flags that should and should not be flown in states, let’s take a moment to talk about state flags’ .. and then it proceeds to just mercilessly poke fun at the state flags of the USA, here.