Category: General

It was a somber day for me .. late afternoon I went for a walk to Volunteer Park.  We are all flowers, fragile as flowers in the wind, I thought, when I saw these.

On the internet front, news broke this week of researchers discovering an widely-used internet security door (an encryption protocol called OpenSSL) that has been left ajar for almost two years now.  It is called the ‘Heartbleed’ bug because it draws encryption keys (!) and password information (!) from the back-and-forth sending of encrypted data between a server and a client computer. Hackers using it leave no trace, so it is unknown how widespread its exploitation has been.

Says internet security expert Brian Krebs on his blog : It is likely that a great many Internet users will be asked to change their passwords this week (I hope). Meantime, companies and organizations running vulnerable versions should upgrade to the latest iteration of OpenSSL (1.0.1g) — as quickly as possible.   So the company has to upgrade its OpenSSL, and the users have to change their passwords as well.  The problem is, given the growing public awareness of this bug, it’s probable that phishers and other scam artists will take full advantage of the situation.  (Sending users fake and infected requests for clicking on a link to changing a password, for example.  ALWAYS go directly to the website by typing in the URL or using an established ‘favorites’ link, when changing a password).

Here are Krebs’s 3 Basic Rules for online safety, that should drastically reduce the chances of handing control over of one’s computer to the bad guys.

Rule 1) If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it.
Rule 2) If you installed it, keep it updated.
Rule 3) If you no longer need it, get rid of it!

I had some credit on Amazon after sending in my old iPad for recycling, and browsed around for items of interest to buy.  (The challenge with Amazon is not what to buy, of course.  It is what not to buy, with the overwhelming variety of items on sale).   Anyway, I checked out the section that sells little bits of scrap metal (yes, there is one). Why would I buy a bit of metal? Well, the notion of a little bit of 100% pure metal appeals to the alchemist in me.

And there are some curious metals.  Mercury is definitely at the top of the list, but it is very poisonous. So I settled for a vial of the metal called gallium. Gallium is a brittle, soft metallic element that becomes a liquid at around only 85°F (29.4 °C), meaning it will melt in one’s hands or in warm water. (Even though it’s not poisonous, it’s probably not a good idea to touch it, since it sticks to one’s skin, I read on-line).   Check out this YouTube clip of a gallium spoon used to stir hot water, here.

 

It was a beautiful day outside here in Denver, much too nice to spend it in the office.  I see there is sunny weather on tap for Friday and the weekend in Seattle as well, though. That’s a good thing : the new green paint on my house will be able to dry nicely.

The Washington Post published this enormously long picture to illustrate how deep the ocean is where possible flight MH 370 black box signals have been picked up the last three days (but none on Tuesday).   Wait for it to load and keep on scrolling down to the ocean floor!

My ole house needs a new coat of paint! .. and I’m going for a shade greener compared to what I have put on some 10 years ago.  Below is a picture I took this morning of a little experiment we did on the back of the house.

Six of us ordered in Dominoes pizza on Saturday night, and then settled in around a few games of Mexican train.  Everyone starts with 11 dominoes, and tries to be the first to dispense of all of them on the ‘Mexican train’.  Chess or scrabble it is not, as far as strategy or mental sharpness go, but hey : great for socializing and teasing the ones that get stuck and have to draw extra dominoes from the pool.

I watched the ‘The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)’ on Saturday night with Bryan and Gary.  The movie is quite a spectacle of excessive partying, drug use (abuse), sex and money worship .. and getting away with it for the most part.   It is by most accounts an accurate depiction of stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s rise and fall in the 90’s.  Today Belfort owes $100 million in restitution, of which he has paid some $10 million. (Paling in comparison against fraudster Bernie Madoff’s $17 billion owed in restitution, though).  Belfort spent only three years in prison.

So .. what to take away with from the movie?  One assumes/ hopes the vast majority of Wall Street firms operate with much more integrity than that demonstrated in the movie!  And have things gotten better after the 2008 financial crisis? I’m not so sure.  The federal funds rate still sits at 0% almost six years later.  Here in the USA, student loan debt has quadrupled to $1 billion over the last ten years.  What is very clear is that each of us has to look out for our own money interests.   ‘Socialism never took root in America,’ John Steinbeck wrote, ‘because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’*

*Credit to Matt Zoller Seitz for mentioning the Steinbeck quote is his review of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’.

I got booted from my 10 D aisle seat this morning (actually, the flight attendant asked nicely if a family of three could sit there). The exit row on the wing still had open seats, and I picked one by the window .. a mistake. The seal on the exit door is not perfect, and the airplane hull is a little thinner there, and cold to the touch. So I was cold all the way to Denver.  Had my warm jacket on but my legs and feet were cold, and there were zero blankets on board.    Where we fly at the top of the troposphere at 35,000 ft*, the air is at about minus 55°C/ minus 67°F outside.  Surprisingly, from thereon up in the stratosphere, the temperature of the air increases again.  The layer of ozone in the stratosphere absorbs sunlight, which makes it warmer again as one goes up .. and there is a lot of up from there!

*alongside Ruppell’s Vulture, amazingly – see the diagram below

Spring has arrived here in the northern hemisphere, and it was a beautiful day in Seattle today (51 °F/ 10°C).  I had time tonight to check out more pictures from the Big Bang research that had been done with the BICEP2 radio telescope at the South Pole in Antarctica. And no, BICEP is not a muscle – it’s short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation.   The equipment measures gravitational waves caused by the Big Bang.  Check out the spectacular pictures of BICEP2 at this link.

Be sure to also read the Wikipedia entry for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.  The sun has just set there, and there is a six month night ahead!   I hope those scientists stationed there have sun lamps, to stop them from going absolutely bananas.  The South Pole is the only place on land where this happens (the North Pole is in the sea).

There are a number of articles out this week that report that the Inflation Theory is very probably true: a postulate from the 1990s that the initial expansion of the Big Bang happened even quicker than had been thought before then.   The Big Bang is calculated to have happened 13.8 billion years ago.  So that made me run down all kinds of other milestones in the known universe and in our tiny little corner in the darkness, called Earth.  Check out my compilation below.

13.8 billion years ago .. the Big Bang happens
13.2 billion years ago .. the Milky Way galaxy is formed
4.54 billion years ago.. our planet Earth forms
3.6 billion years ago .. the first simple cells (prokaryotes) are formed
231.4 million years ago .. radiometric dating of the rock formation that contained fossils from the early dinosaur genus Eoraptor establishes its presence in the fossil record at this time
65 million years ago .. dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period
20 million years ago .. great apes from the family Hominidae appear
2.5 million years ago .. the genus Homo (human predecessors) appear
1 million years ago .. evidence from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa point to the use of fire by early humans
200,000 years ago .. anatomically modern humans appear
110,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago .. the most recent Ice Age; a small number of humans survive, one such community on the southern coast of Africa
10,000 years ago .. the last mainland species of woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) die out, as does the last Smilodon species
5,000 years ago .. the earliest known iron artifacts are nine small beads, dated to 3200 BC, from burials in Gerzeh, northern Egypt, that were made from meteoritic iron, and shaped by careful hammering
2,600 years ago .. the ancient Greeks discovered that rubbing fur on amber (fossilized tree resin) caused an attraction between the two : static electricity
900 years ago .. the invention of gunpowder was made perhaps as early as during the Tang Dynasty (9th century), but certainly by the Song Dynasty (11th century).
578 years ago .. the printing press is invented, in 1436
326 years ago .. in 1688 the dodo goes extinct
131 years ago ..in 1883, the quagga, a subspecies of zebra, goes extinct
129 years ago .. Benz invents the first gasoline automobile, in 1886
111 years ago .. the Wright brothers invent the first airplane, in 1903
100 years ago .. in 1914, Martha, last known passenger pigeon, dies
69 years ago .. the Manhattan Project culminates in the test explosion of a nuclear device at what is now called the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen a few weeks later.
45 years ago .. man lands on Earth’s moon in 1969
21 years ago .. the World Wide Web is created, in 1993
17 years ago .. the Prius first went on sale in Japan in 1997, and was available at all four Toyota Japan dealerships, making it the first mass-produced hybrid vehicle
6 years ago .. in 2008, the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, becomes functionally extinct
Just a few seconds ago .. this entry is posted on the Willem’s Planet blog

I thought I was free and clear with an open seat next to me on the plane this morning, but at the last minute at 5.10 am, a middle-aged couple stepped on board filling the last two middle seats, one next to mine.  One could tell they were flying for maybe the first time. After getting up one time, the guy made himself at home on the jump seat in the exit row, even putting the seat belt on (that’s where the flight attendants sit).  Sure enough, only a minute or two, and he got chased back to his seat.

Later – arriving at the office in Denver, and seeing the other people, I immediately realized : where’s your green? Should have worn something green!  Groan.  (But not too big a deal). It’s officially St Patrick’s Day (even though there were parades and celebrations over the weekend already).

It is almost spring, and I was looking for cherry blossom pictures from the Seattle Japanese Garden when I stumbled upon origami artist Sipho Mabona’s life-sized paper elephant project.  He must be African, I thought, but he was born in Switzerland and lives there in Luzern.  The artist took a single 50 ft by 50 ft piece of paper, and folded an elephant out of it.  (He did have assistants help him lift the paper and fold it with his instructions).

Check out some of his other work on his Flickr page, at this link.

‘True Start’ is what Toyota calls its car battery that I had installed in my 1996 Reliable Driving Machine (Toyota Camry) on Saturday.   The old car battery had some dead cells.  The car had trouble starting up several weekends, every time after sitting in the garage for only 5 days.  Yes, lead-acid batteries is ancient technology (compared to those found in electrical and hybrid-electrical cars), but the recycling of lead-acid batteries is extremely efficient.  Some facilities recycle 95% of the battery, its electrolyte and its housing.  Lead is extremely durable.  I love my collection of pictures for the elements, scanned from pages from an old TIME-LIFE book – and I posted the one for lead on the right.

The day started out nicely here in Denver, but a blustery wind storm moved in around lunch time, bringing with it a smattering of snow.  The snow flakes stuck to the car tops and sign posts for a little while, but most of it was gone by the time the day was done.

It was heads down for me in the office.  I am preparing information in our software testing called HP Quality Center to track the results for the first round of testing. (The first of four rounds).

I made it out to Denver with my usual early Monday morning flight.   There was a pooch for a passenger across the isle from me, a service dog (black Labrador) on the way to Colorado Springs for training, I overheard her handler say.

Here in the city of Denver we had spring-like weather today. It reached all of 70°F (21 °C). But hold on!  .. there’s snow and a low of  18°F (-7 °C).in the forecast for Tuesday night in the forecast.

And still no word on the fate of the Air Malaysia flight MH370.  What a mystery to know so little on the 3rd day after its disappearance.

We watched Dallas Buyers Club tonight, the 2013 film that boasts Oscar-winning performances from Matthew McConaughey (best actor) and Jared Leto (supporting actor).   [From Wikipedia] The film is based on the life of real-life AIDS patient Ron Woodroof, who smuggled unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas when he found them effective at improving his symptoms, and distributing them to fellow sufferers by establishing the ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ while facing opposition from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

My take? I had a lot of trouble sympathizing with McConaughey’s Ron Woodroof character (portrayed as a macho, womanizing, homophobic, rodeo-loving cowboy*).   But hey – it’s Hollywood’s first major AIDS film since ‘Philadelphia’ (1985).  It illustrates the challenges when people are dying in an epidemic, and there are no good treatment options available.  The drug AZT is vilified in the movie, but actually became a key part of HIV combination medicines later on (in a much lower dosage, though).   The FDA also gets a rough treatment in the movie, but some activists today contend that the FDA caved to almost all of their demands, and basically became their partner going forward in the 1990s.

*Some of Woodroof’s close friends and associates have said he was never homophobic, and had no problems being around gay men.

I came home shortly before 6 pm on Friday night, in from the barber shop. Man!  Sean my barber was even chattier than usual, sometimes completely stopping with my hair, and looking at me while he talks.  Uh-huh. Yes, I agree, I would say, trying not to encourage him too much to keep on talking : ).

As soon as I turned the TV on at home, I learned of the missing airplane from Air Malaysia. The latest reports say that ships have been dispatched to look for signs of the aircraft in the South China Sea.

Whoah!  Go to this link – courtesy of TIME magazine – and check out the 3D interactive picture that offers stunning views from the top of the new World Trade Center 1 in New York City.   (Scroll down to the picture under the heading ‘A View Reborn’, do a right-click and select ‘Full Screen’. Use the mouse to ‘look around’.)   There is also a fish-eye view that bends the horizon.  It makes me want to run out and go and buy a new camera, or at least a fish-eye lens!

I can use my ‘Remote Desktop Connection’ to pull up my screen on the office computer in Denver, and access all the files and systems just as if I were there.   Yes, I have to ‘VPN’ in to do that – slang that we use for establishing and logging into a virtual private network first.   Confession : I don’t know how all this stuff works at the protocol level, I just use it.

So while I was logged in to Denver remotely yesterday, I saw that the morning had flown by and that it was 12.30 pm already.  Oh!  I’m hungry, I need to run downstairs and fix myself some lunch, I thought .. which I did.   Then as I was eating my toast and soup, I glanced up at the kitchen clock.  The real time was only 11.45 am.  The virtual world I was working in, showed Mountain time (Denver time) on the computer screen, which is an hour later than Seattle.