I have only been to Indiana a few times, many years ago. I would fly into and out of Evansville in its far southwestern corner – to drive across the border to Weyerhauser Company’s paper mill in Henderson, Kentucky. So after all this time, I just had to check out the map of Indiana again. There is quite a media firestorm over the State Assembly there passing a ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’ that allows businesses to refuse service to customers based on their (the business’) religious beliefs. Example : a florist can refuse to deliver flowers to a gay wedding. (Yes, believe it or not : same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Indiana since October 7, 2014). Is this such a big deal? Just go to another florist instead, if you are ‘Adam and Steve’. Well, it’s bad for public relations and it paints the state as unwelcoming and intolerant.
I finally knuckled down on Saturday and submitted my 2014 federal and state tax forms (due April 15th here in the USA). It was the first time in many years that I had to get my hands dirty and do the work myself (without the help of H&R Block or my firm’s resources).
I selected TurboTax tax software to prepare and file the forms electronically. The outcome : NO tax refund for me! I have to send in a check since I paid too little during the year. It was a little unnerving to enter my Social Security Number and financial information on-line. Identity theft and tax refund fraud have skyrocketed in recent years .. and the IRS is simply not equipped and staffed to handle all the thievery. Come on, Congress ! Get some funds and help the IRS to put better processes, checks and systems in place !
Yes, we know how you feel .. but please note: 1. It’s amendment; 2. So cut the US Defense Budget by 18%? I’m all for that. 3. Not so sure about doing away with Social Security and healthcare for everyone. You will grow old as well. 4. And finally – like it or not – as an American you own the payment of a little interest on the US $18 trillion national debt every year.
‘Another week starts, right?’ said my regular cab driver as I got in at 5.30 am this morning. Yes, I said. The winter travel doldrums of January and February are behind us, and the early morning traffic at the airport is picking up. Here are two interesting snippets from my reading on the airplane : a picture of one of dozens of mysterious craters that started to appear in Siberia, thought to be caused by underground gas explosions. And how about an iPhone index with 1.6 billion phone numbers? Get the app and find everyone that had signed up by searching for names in the world-wide phone directory!
Michael Keaton aka Birdman in an (imaginary) scene from the movie.
We watched Birdman (Micheal Keaton, the movie that won the Oscar this year) last night. I guess it’s refreshing to see an ex-‘superhero’ be a non-hero, with the flood of Spiderman, Captain America, X-Men and Ironman movies these last few years.
The real Birdman is not a ‘nice’ person – an absent dad; he seems to endlessly trash his room using telekinesis (or was that his imagination?) and rants frequently about his frustrations. His memories of being ‘Birdman’ that can fly around, blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s imagined.
Micheal Keaton’s co-performer in the movie’s stage play, Edward Norton, says at one point ‘The stage is the only place every day where I do not act’. So. Few of us are actors – or are we all? is what I took away from the movie. As Shakespeare famously wrote ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players .. ‘. So who are we really? Is there a different/ real person from the self that interacts with the world every day?
Spring blossoms on 16th Ave here in Capitol Hill, Seattle.
It’s officially spring here in the Northern Hemisphere. Earthlings in the UK and Scotland were treated with the sight of a solar eclipse on Friday. No such luck anywhere in North America. The Faroe Islands were actually the best place to be. The islands are north of the Shetland Islands, a ‘self-governing country in the Danish realm’, says WIkipedia.
The power outage from the PG& E website. It later turned out to be a transformer that went out, that caused the power outage.
‘Do I really need to go?’ I asked the Project Manager on Tuesday : to a team dinner for all of us in Walnut Creek. ‘Yes! – everyone is going, and the food will be great!’ he said. Well, we had barely settled in, all 36 of us, when the lights went out completely. ‘Should you guys not go back to work, and get the lights back on?’ joked the waiter. Um, noo, we said, we work in the Gas business of PG&E, so go and get our food cooked, please. Well, so they did, and they got the food to the table. They did very well given that they must have had the kitchen lit up with candles and flash lights. They bill for the evening was presented in handwritten format on a long scroll of paper. The cash register was out as well, of course!
It was late afternoon before I finally got out of the house and away from work to go run a few errands. It helps that we now have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening (daylight saving time started last weekend). One of my stops was at the little postal store to check again if the Chinese lunar new year stamps had arrived – and they had. I can add them to my little collection.
Here are the 2015 Chinese Lunar New Year stamps. Are those fluffy sheep in a meadow? was my first thought. No – they’re white hydrangea on the lid of a tray with snacks : lotus root, spicy peanuts, and pistachios.
Hmm. So count me anong the sceptics, wondering if Apple will indeed sell a projected 15 million Apple watches this year. I doubt I will get one. After all, it will have to replace my cheap but beloved Seiko watch that I bought in Tokyo a few years ago and to which I have grown attached to.
But here I am, browsing through the models they will offer on apple.com, after Tim Cook’s press conference of yesterday. My favorite is this little black number with its Milanese loop in stainless steel and with the magnetic closure on the strap.
The 2015 Iditarod dog sled race (link here) had its ceremonial start in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday. The race starts officially on Monday, but a little to the north of Anchorage. It is just the second time in 43 races and the first time since 2003, that officials had to do that, to find suitable trail conditions. There is simply not enough snow on the ground around Anchorage. Hey, and I learnt a new word while checking out the website : musher, the driver of a dogsled.
There was a beautiful full moon visible from between the trees, and perched on a rooftop, as I walked back from the grocery store on Thursday night.
In medieval times the moon was blamed for craziness or aberrant behavior (such as people turning into werewolves.. remember the 1981 movie An American Werewolf in London?). That’s why the word lunatic comes from the Latin luna, for moon.
It was revealed today by a report in the New York Times that the presumptive 2016 Democratic nominee for President – Hillary Clinton – used a personal e-mail account throughout her entire tenure at the State Department as Secretary of State. This raises many questions. 1. Why? It’s sort of against the law. 2. Was the e-mail account secure? I am not even allowed to send work e-mail outside our encrypted e-mail system. And I don’t deal with state secrets. 3. Why has this not been raised before? By her aides, her advisors, by people receiving her e-mail. 4. Will this turn into a scandal that undermine her (as-yet-unannounced) bid for the White House in 2016 ? 5. What I want to know most of all : what was the account’s name? Presumably more formal than hillary@yahoo.com, right?
From the bookstore on Sunday – Extreme Soduku means (no doubt) that mental gymnastics are required – to fill out the almost empty 9×9 grids of numbers.
I sometimes take the No 43 bus to the University District to go to the bookstore there, and just to check out the joint .. and so that is what I did on Sunday.
There is a whole shelf of Soduku books. I am a Scrabble addict, but so far the Soduku bug has not bitten me. Per WIkipedia, Soduku was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru (数字は独身に限る?), which also can be translated as “the digits must be single” or “the digits are limited to one occurrence.” The Times of London began featuring Sudoku in 2004.
The number of classic 9×9 Sudoku solution grids is approximately 6.67×1021 .. so players can rest assured that it will be a long, long time before they exhaust all the possible permutations !
San Fransokyo is the futuristic (fictional) city where the animated Disney movie ‘Big Hero 6’ plays out : our Saturday night home movie at the Bryan-and-Gary Cineplex. We liked it a lot. These 3D animated movies take monstrous computing power to animate and render fluidly. Check out the notes about this in the Wikipedia entry.
A software program called Denizen was used to create over 700 distinctive characters that populate the city, another one named Bonzai was responsible for the creation of the city’s 250,000 trees, while a new rendering system called Hyperion offered new illumination possibilities, like light shining through a translucent object (such as the robot Baymax’s vinyl covering). Development on Hyperion started in 2011 and was based upon research into multi-bounce complex global illumination originally conducted at Disney Research in Zürich. Disney in turn had to assemble a new supercomputing cluster just to handle Hyperion’s immense processing demands, which consists of over 2,300 Linux workstations distributed across four data centers (three in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco). Each workstation, as of 2014, included a pair of 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processors, 256 GB of memory, and a pair of 300 GB solid-state drives configured as a RAID Level 0 array (that is, to operate as a single 600 GB drive). This was all backed by a central storage system with a capacity of five petabytes*, which holds all digital assets as well as archival copies of all 54 Disney Animation films. Pixar’s RenderMan was considered as a ‘Plan B’ for the film’s rendering, if Hyperion was not able to meet production deadlines.
*A petabyte (PB) is 1015 bytes of data, 1,000 terabytes (TB) or 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB).
The fictional city of San Fransokyo from ‘Big Hero 6’.The huggable robot Baymax saves the protagonist Hiro Hamada in a scene from the movie Big Hero 6.
I had the Academy Awards on on Sunday night while I made dinner and watched some of it, saw Patricia Arquette get her Oscar for
Best Supporting Actress in Boyhood. We had watched it on Saturday night, and so I was rooting for it for Best Film (which went to Birdman with Michael Keaton). Meryl Streep and others jumped up when Patricia Arquette said ‘to every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights‘ .. ‘it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America’. But as TIME magazine reports soon after that Arquette was being attacked on social media by people who said she was prioritizing the rights of white women over those of LGBTQ people and people of color.
2015 The Year of the Goat? The Year of the Sheep? You decide. (A sign at a San Francisco airport shop).A Lufthansa Airbus A380 at San Francisco International Airport this afternoon. None of the US airlines has actually bought any of these magnificent flying machines. The A380’s sales have been somewhat disappointing, in part due to the 2008 financial crisis.
So is it the Year of the Sheep or the Year of the Goat? Or even the Year of the Ram? One sees different interpretations. Apparently they are all correct, depending on the context, or even one’s own preference. I will go with goat – since that is what the Chinese word yang meant in ancient times. Check out the National Public Radio on-line article Whatever Floats Your Goat.
I like the little graphics panels with statistics or factoids that come in the USA Today everyday. I always try to pick up a copy of the newspaper in the hotel lobby. This one from today says a lot of snow fell in Chicago, and explains why it is quieter when the snow falls : soundwaves get absorbed by the snowflakes.
It was soo close, but in the end the Seattle Seahawks went down 28-14 against the New England Patriots in Superbowl XLIX. Dan Wentzel writes in Yahoo Sports in a post called ‘The Butler Did It’ how it all ended in the 4th quarter: On the ropes, down by 10 in the fourth quarter, Tom Brady engineered a dramatic comeback to give the New England Patriots a 28-24 lead with just over two minutes to play. Then defensive back Malcolm Butler picked Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson on the ensuing possession at the goal line to secure a dramatic championship for the Patriots in what will go down as one of the most exciting Super Bowls ever played.
Katy Perry’s entrance during the half-time show was on a mechanical lion (operated by four walkers, one on each leg). Picture : Getty Images.
This picture in the latest TIME magazine caught my eye (taken in New York City as it started snowing). It captures the ‘excitement’ I still feel when snowflakes fall down from the sky. Apparently the European supercomputer weather model (which they went by for the weather forecast) got it wrong this time .. but not by much. Just twenty miles east of New York City on Long Island, there were places that recorded 18 inches of snow. And heavy snow came down just north of New York City as well.
The snowstorm of Monday and Tuesday in New York City and Boston turned out not to be so epic after all. ‘Only 10 iinches’ (still a lot) of snow fell in the city. There was more up in Massachusetts, with 2 feet and more reported in some places. Here in the Bay Area in California – after a wet December – there has been almost no rain. The driest January on record is expected for Northern California.
