I took the G-line bus to Colman Dock (the ferry terminal) and the Waterfront late this afternoon, and walked up to Pike Place Market.
Hey! Three gray Teslas at the Madison Street & Broadway intersection. (I had missed the G-line bus up at the 17th Avenue stop by a minute and now I’m walking down Madison Street to the stop on Boylston Avenue).Now I’m at the Boylston Avenue stop, and looking back up along Madison Street to see if the bus is coming. Yes! there it is at the top of the hill. Can you see it?I hopped off the stop at 1st Avenue near the waterfront. I could not resist taking a picture of the beautiful The Federal Office Building nearby— constructed in 1932 and ‘an exuberant example of Art Deco architecture’, says Wikipedia.At Colman Dock (Pier 52) now, and a look at the city skyline from there.One of two blue herons on the rocks below catching a little of the last sunlight of the day. It was sunny today, but definitely not warm— 50°F/ 10°C for a high.Art installation on the waterfront promenade. I will have to look up the artist.Here’s the patio by Old Stove Brewing Co. at Pike Place Market with its lovely overlook of Puget Sound’s Elliott Bay. A Scottish band’s members are playing their drums and bagpipes for the crowd, but I don’t know the band’s name or if it was for a special occasion.Vivid colors on the mural at the entrance to light rail’s Westlake Station downtown. A quick 4-minute ride from here gets me back up to Capitol Hill.
There is wind and rain in the city this weekend, and snow in the mountains.
This camelia with its petals on the ground is by Aloha Street here on Capitol Hill.
Lots of circles for Pi Day in this picture, right? The blood moon from the total lunar eclipse appears to perch on top of the Space Needle on Thursday night in Seattle. [Picture by Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times]
Sunset is now at 7.10 pm, so a quick walk after dinner and before dark is possible.
The sun was behind a blanket of clouds for most of today, though. Here’s looking east at downtown Bellevue and the Cascade Mountain Range in the distance at 5.50 pm. And how are those snowpacks doing?Still a little behind from where we should be, approaching mid-March. On average, Washington State’s snowpack is at 84% of normal. Central Puget Sound’s number is the lowest in the state, at 60% of normal. [Graphic and information from a post on X by Todd Myers @WAPolicyGreen]
SEATTLE (AP) — A pod of orcas swam close to shore and amazed onlookers in Seattle on Sunday by treating the whale watchers to the rare sight of the apex predators hunting a bird.
The pod of Bigg’s killer whales visited Elliott Bay and were seemingly on a hunt underwater just off Seattle’s maritime industrial docks. The pod exited the bay close to West Seattle, where people were waiting to catch sight of them.
-Manuel Valdes writing for The Associated Press
People watch a killer whale swim close to shore in the waters in Elliott Bay by Seattle’s industrial docks on Sunday. [Picture by Jeff Hogan via AP]Watch out, little bird! A killer whale swims next to a grebe (an aquatic diving bird) in Elliott Bay, moments before the bird was taken under water. [Kersti Muul via AP]
Happy Friday.
The false spring here in the city continued today with temperatures reaching 58°F (14°C). Late in the afternoon, I spotted sunseekers lounging on the lawn at Volunteer Park. Nearby, stargazers by the Black Sun sculpture were already setting up their telescopes to observe the planets. I hope the clouds at sunset didn’t thwart their efforts.
It was a blustery, rainy day here in the city (high 53°F/ 12°C), but there was a bit of quiet at 5 o’clock, which allowed me to go for a walk.
The pickleball courts at Pendleton Miller playfield on Capitol Hill were all soaked .... but right next door some little leaguers were engaged in that team sport with the sticks with nets on. As I looked on, I could not for the life of me remember the name of the sport 😁.. thought about it as I walked, feeling my mind reach for it, only to have it slip away. I refused to look it up, got home and sat at the kitchen counter, and doodled a few words on paper: water polo .. hockey .. fuss ball .. foley .. polo .. lacrosse! got it 😚.Lacrosse is the oldest organized sport in North America, with its origins with the indigenous people of North America as early as the 12th century. The French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf saw Huron tribesmen play the game during 1637 in present-day Ontario. He called it la crosse, “the stick” in French. The name seems to be originated from the French term for field hockey, le jeu de la crosse. [Source: Wikipedia. The picture is titled ‘Ball Players’ and the artist is George Catlin]
Reporting from observer.com Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned the three states of matter that we know on Earth (solid, liquid, and gas) while talking about the quantum chip Majorana 1. There is a fourth one that is ubiquitous in the universe: plasma.
For a field that many have long considered decades away, quantum computing sure is getting a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley. Yesterday (Feb. 19), Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled a quantum chip known as Majorana 1, created with an entirely new state of matter that’s beyond solid, liquid and gas. “Most of us grew up learning there are three main types of matter that matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Today, that changed,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X yesterday. “We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.”
… Microsoft isn’t the only Big Tech company attempting to crack the quantum computing. Decades of research from companies like IBM, Intel and Google (GOOGL) has seemingly begun to pay off. Most recently, Google sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley when it unveiled a new quantum chip called Willow. In less than five minutes, the computer was able to perform a standard benchmark computation that would take today’s supercomputers 10 septillion years—a number that surpasses the age of the universe—to complete.
But not everyone is convinced that true breakthroughs are just around the corner. Tech leaders like Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang have raised red flags about the technology’s timeline. In January, Huang sent quantum stocks tumbling after declaring that “very useful quantum computers are still a few decades away.” Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg echoed these concerns a few days later while speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “My understanding is that’s still quite a ways off from being a very useful paradigm,” Zuckerberg said.
-Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writing on observer.com
Plasma is considered the fourth state of matter, following solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas where electrons are separated from the nuclei of atoms, creating a soup of positively and negatively charged particles.
Plasma is considered the most common state of matter in the universe, making up nearly all visible matter.
The Sun’s corona, solar wind, magnetospheres of planets, comet tails, and interstellar gas clouds are all composed of plasma.
[Source: Search Labs | AI Overview]
Scientists from Caltech have developed ‘a new type of matter,’ which they are calling polycatenated architected materials, or PAMs. This new matter doesn’t occur naturally, and uses chainmail-like design with entangled rings in place of fixed particles typically found in a crystalline structure.
[Source: Popular Mechanics, Feb. 4, 2025]
There are many other states of matter, some of which are listed below. – Superconductive material
Superconductivity is when matter is in a state with no electrical resistance – that is, its electrical conductivity is greatly increased. A superconducting material has a critical temperature below which this change happens; this point is usually close to absolute zero. – Bose-Einstein condensate
Bosons are a type of particle that include photons, gluons and the Higgs boson. When bosons are cooled to incredibly low temperatures at low density, they start to show quantum mechanical effects at large scales. – Time crystals
An ordinary crystalline solid has its molecules arranged in repeating patterns in space. The molecules of a time crystal, however, follow a repeating pattern in time. The particles are in constant motion, following the same repetitive movements without losing any energy.
[Source: sciencefocus.com, Feb. 4, 2022]
There were 2 more inches of snow this morning (most of yesterday’s had melted by last night).
I know it’s not a lot of snow compared to the Midwest or the Northeast, but even so, I went out and took a few pictures. Snow on the ground is not something I ever had while living in South Africa!
There were 2 inches of snow on the ground by 8:30 a.m. here on Capitol Hill this morning—just enough to prompt the city to send out an alert that my garbage pickup has been rescheduled for tomorrow.
Looking at these projections, this week’s garbage pickup may have to be postponed to next week.
Tesla is famously owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who was once admired by liberals for helping to popularize the electric vehicle. But in the last few years — in particular since he purchased the social media platform Twitter (now X) in October 2022 — Musk has become something of a villain among the left. He’s often expressed conservative views and backed Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid last year.
And that’s put some Tesla owners in the Seattle area, where most people tend to vote Democrat, in an awkward position, especially since the car is so closely associated with Musk himself.
Even so, it doesn’t seem to have hurt Tesla ownership rates here — or if it has, it’s too soon to be reflected in the data. And there’s been a significant increase in Tesla households in the Seattle market over the past few years. For example, in Nielsen surveys conducted from December 2020 to April 2022, only around 22,400 Seattle-area households owned a Tesla.
(My note: by the end of 2024 that number had increased threefold, to 66,700).
– Seattle Times columnist Gene Balk
‘You can tell South Africa they can have Elon Musk back‘, quipped my neighbor, after I had told him of my recent trip to South Africa.’ Yeah, I know. Some days I think he can have my car back’, said I.
(.. but thinking afterwards: I really did not buy my Tesla because I was an Elon Musk fan. It’s an electric vehicle— with zero emissions, as a reminder— and a lot of fun to drive. So why should I not drive it?)
What is meant by overrepresented? From the report in the Seattle Times: In the Seattle market area, a projected 311,000 households had at least one Subaru. That pencils out to 16.8% of the 1.86 million households that had at least one vehicle. The nationwide Subaru ownership rate was just 7.8% of households. A projected 66,700 Seattle-area households had at least one Tesla, which represented 3.6% of local households. The national average was only 1.6%.
There was a little bit of thunder at noon today, followed by a spell of freezing rain.
An hour or two later, there was blue sky. Today’s high was 40°F (4°C).
There might be a dusting of snow on the ground tomorrow here in the city, say the meteorologists.
Happy Lunar New Year— the Year of the Snake.
It sounds a little ominous, but I guess every year cannot be the Year of the Dragon.
The public art installation at the corner of Madison Street and 14th Avenue here on Capitol Hill is complete. (The installation is not specifically related to the Lunar New Year. The artist is Seattle resident Ben Zamora.)
Happy Friday.
We will have our first 5 pm sunset for the year here in Seattle tomorrow.
It’s been frosty in the mornings and cold by day every day since I’ve been back. And no rain.
Departure at Munich International Airport. We were bused out to the Airbus 350-900 sitting on the tarmac, so that we could clamber aboard with the stairs. Let me just stipulate that the guys wearing t-shirts may create the impression that we had summer weather out there. We did not— it was freezing!A last look at the fuselage before I step into the warm airplane.Making the turn onto the runway for take-off.Halfway into the 10-hour flight, and we are over the north of the giant slab of ice called Greenland.Somewhere over Canada, with about two hours to go to Seattle.Arrival at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. We were international arrivals, and so we walked across the skybridge to the baggage claim and passport control, which is where I stopped to take this picture. Our flight waited a little bit for our luggage, and then found it on the baggage claim carousel next to ours, for the flight from Frankfurt that arrived about the same time as ours. Then it was on to the Global Entry kiosk for me. There the was no line, and it took literally a few seconds for the face-recognition system to greenlight my entry into the United States. This way out, said an official, and that was it. So no passport stamp needed, no passport, no nothing. (Registering for Global Entry does cost $120 for a five-year membership.)
It has rained all day in Rain City.
It will rain on and off all week here, in the run-up to winter solstice.
Here’s an artificial intelligence (AI) generated image that I generated with Apple’s Playground application. I selected a day-time image of the Space Needle that I had on my phone, and added a text instruction ‘Space Needle in the rain’.
The five amigos went to the Irish pub called The Chieftain on 12th Avenue for a beer and a bite tonight, but found it closed for the night.
We ended up right next door, at the German beer hall-and-restaurant Rhein Haus Seattle, where we found this cheerful Christmas tree.
Here comes the selfie! Cheers! Gary, Willem, Steve, Ken and Bryan. Thanks to Bryan for taking the picture.
