A battery of Teslas filled up the driveway, while their owners walked down the two blocks to Elysian Fields Brewery for burgers and beers tonight.
Saturday/ a battery of Teslas ⚡
Tuesday/ inside the new Y⚡
I tagged along for a test drive in a new Tesla Model Y today.
Check out the lavender LED accent stripe that runs around the dashboard and windows. It can be set to any color, or to white, or turned off altogether).
The materials used for the dashboard and inside are mostly not top-notch, but seems good enough. Everything fancy costs extra money, right?
The FSD is getting better and better and performed well at intersections. Things can still get complicated when trying to get the car to pick a parking space in a parking lot, or when a vague destination is given to the car, such as just to go to a large shopping mall.
The drive mode stalk on the right of the steering wheel was taken out, and the console is now used to engage Park or Drive or Reverse. (The turn signal stalk is still there, on the left of the steering wheel.)
Our car does not use gas and oil – Yay!
Sunday/ humming along ⚡
Here’s a Hummer EV SUV that I found on the street tonight.
It made me look up the history of the Hummer, as well as a picture I had taken in Chicago of a Hummer stretch limousine.
Here it is (information gleaned from Wikipedia):
The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV; colloquial: Humvee) rolled into service in the US military in 1985, and saw widespread use in the Gulf War of 1991.
The Hummer H1 was released for the civilian market in 1992, followed by the Hummer H2 (2002-2009) and a Hummer H3 pickup truck (2005-2010). There was a Hummer HX open-air, off-road prototype concept car in 2008, and a prototype plug-in hybrid in 2009.
It was only in late 2021 that the GMC Hummer EV (badged as HEV) made its debut, though— a line of battery electric heavy-duty vehicles produced by General Motors, and sold under the GMC marque.
Hard to say exactly what this beast cost its owner, but it must be close to $100k, or even more than that.
A Hummer H2 was cut behind the cab, and the chassis was extended to create a passenger section for more than a dozen passengers.
There is surely a mini-fridge inside as well, to chill a bottle of champagne, or two— right?
Wednesday/ YouTube is 20 📺
The video is short — just 19 seconds — and not particularly compelling. A viewer would be forgiven for clicking away before it ends.
The grainy footage, uploaded on April 23, 2005, of a man standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo — “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants” — does not look like the sort of thing that would touch off a video revolution.
And yet, two decades after that inauspicious start, YouTube is now a cornerstone of the media ecosystem. It’s where people go for music videos and four-hour-long hotel reviews. It is a platform for rising stars and conspiracy theorists. It’s a repository for vintage commercials and 10 hours of ambient noise. It has disrupted traditional television and given rise to a world of video creators who make content catering to every imaginable niche interest.
-Amanda Holpuch writing for the New York Times
Says the narrator, Jawed: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s cool”.
Monday/ stamps from Japan 🇯🇵
I bought these sheets of stamps at the post office museum shop high up in Skytree tower in Tokyo in 2018.
These pages will go into my ‘World Travels’ stamp album.
Saturday/ a white one ⚪
Here’s the new Tesla Model Y, a pearl white one that I spotted on the Denny Way overpass over I-5 today.
I was on the sidewalk and I should have swung around to take a picture of the rear end of the vehicle as well— but I didn’t.
Tesla’s website says these are ‘Available Today’. It will set you back $50,630 ($43,130 if you are eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles).
Meanwhile, Tesla’s website in China no longer offers the Model S and Model X (imports from the USA), after Beijing raised tariffs on U.S. imports in response to President Trump’s levies against the country.
The Model S and Model X are expensive cars and not big sellers in China, though. Even so— China’s tariffs on US goods are now at 125%*, after President Donald Trump’s decision to hike duties on Chinese goods to 145%.
*Observers say China does not need to raise tariffs any higher than this. This is effectively an embargo against imports from America.
Monday/ railway parcel stamps 🚂
Railway parcel stamps were used in South Africa for many decades: in the four colonies before they became the Union of South Africa in 1910, and all the way through to the early 1980s. (By the mid-1980s, commercial courier services had stepped into the parcel delivery market).
These stamps were used to record the cost of the conveyance of a letter or parcel by rail. They are only documented in specialized stamp catalogues and information about them is hard to find online. I thought I should see what the AI chatbot from Chat GPT could help me with.
The results were interesting, and shows that one should not just accept results presented by Chat GPT as fact.
Let’s start with a scan of a railway parcel stamp that I submitted to Chat GPT, and go from there.
Chat GPT does come up with the railway station names (above) for the abbreviations that I had submitted, but there is a problem ..
*This was a test for Chat GPT, or for confirming what knew for most of the abbreviations already. It took a lot of legwork to arrive at the railway station names for the abbreviations. For example, one can look at railway station maps and name lists, or look at the cancellation marks on the stamp (which could be extremely faint, and offer only tantalizing clues as to the railway station name since only a few letters or parts of letters would be visible on the stamp).
The key is the upside down cancellation in purple ink, offering clues to the railway station name at the very edges of the stamp. I am sure the letters stand for BRANDFORT, a railway station for a tiny little town in the Free State. The train station is no longer in use.
Friday/ at Westlake station 🚉
Happy Friday.
Here are a few (very ordinary) pictures of Westlake station in downtown Seattle.
I was waiting for the northbound train bound for Capitol Hill.
The southbound train bound for the airport and Angle Lake arrived first.
Then just a few minutes later, another single southbound train car arrived.
It stopped, but it seemed that passengers were not allowed to board.
Then as that car departed, my northbound train was just arriving.
Tuesday/ Tesla spotting 🍊
Here’s a tangerine Tesla Model 3 from the Whole Foods parking lot. I love the giraffe in the space helmet.
100% ELECTRIC, ZERO EMISSIONS, says the lettering on the back of the car.
There is a new Model Y as well, codename ‘Juniper’, for which deliveries are imminent (available March 2025, says Tesla’s website).
Cybertrucks are still a very rare sight here on the streets as well.
Thursday/ at the carwash 🚙 💦
It was time to take my nifty blue car to the Brown Bear carwash today.
I bought the car in 2021, but now, in 2025, I see that some people like to call my car a swasticar.
(Why? On Jan. 20, while speaking at a rally celebrating U.S. president Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Tesla CEO Elon Musk twice made a salute interpreted by some as a Nazi or the fascist Roman salute.
As a result, flyers in San Francisco, and memes on X— by the so-called Tesla Takedown movement— now refer to Teslas as swasticars.)
Not a welcome situation for Tesla owners. Really not welcome at all— and as I was driving to the car wash, I told myself to just flatly ignore anyone yelling at me, or showing me a middle finger.
Saturday/ powder blue 🚙
I spotted this eye-catching powder blue Ford Bronco Sport on my walk today.
It’s a fossil-fuel vehicle, but it made me wonder how the sales numbers of Ford’s all-electric* F-150 Lightning trucks are looking.
The answer: not great.
According to Google Search Labs | AI Overview:
“As of the third quarter of 2024, Ford has sold 22,807 F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks. This marks a significant increase from the same period in 2023, when 12,260 Lightnings were sold. However, demand remains lower than expected, and Ford has temporarily paused production.”
*Ford also offers a hybrid truck. According to the company, “the F-150 PowerBoost Hybrid is the best-selling full-size, full-hybrid pickup in the United States.” That statement certainly packs in the adjectives!
Tuesday/ Tesla spotting 👀
Here’s a Tesla Model 3 (official color name: ultra red) that I spotted on my way to indoor pickleball this morning.
The neighborhood is Judkins Park.
Saturday/ a rainy weekend ☔
It’s a rainy weekend here in the city, with about 0.3 inches recorded as of 7 pm tonight. We may reach an inch or so by Monday morning.
“Does Elon Musk Still Care About Selling Cars?
Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive.
Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. .. Tesla sales fell 12 percent last year in California, which accounts for nearly one-third of the electric cars sold in the United States.”
– Jack Ewing writing for the New York Times
Thursday/ the many states of matter ✨
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]
Tuesday/ make AI do the work 🧠
Here’s a quick example of how to use an AI app such as Chat GPT make easy pickings of grunt work.
I wanted to know what the total cost of a long list of items for sale on a scrollable web page, would add up to.
Well, what does everything in my Watchlist add up to? I wondered. The web page does not provide a total number. (To illustrate, I just selected the first 6 items of the 40 on my Watchlist.)
Step 1: Highlight everything on the web page and paste it into a text editor. I used Notepad on Windows.
My instruction to ChatGPT at the top says:
“Find all the numbers in this block of text that have two decimal places and that are immediately preceded by the letter R*, and then add them up: ‘[and then I pasted the text from Notepad in here]
*The currency, it stands for South African Rand
Tuesday/ all those Teslas in Seattle ⚡
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?)
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%.
Monday/ perfins 📌
A perfin is a stamp that has a name or initials perforated into it.
The word “perfin” is short for “perforated initials” or “perforated insignia”.
Perfins are used to prevent theft and control how the stamp is used for mail.
How are perfins created?
Individuals, organizations, or government agencies add perfins to stamps after the production process.
The holes are punched into the stamp’s design to create a pattern.
Source: Google Search Labs/ AI Overview
The U.S. stamp bottom left is also pre-cancelled. Pre-cancelled stamps were used for mass-mailings, making it unnecessary for the post office to cancel them, and expediting their processing.
1961 First Definitive Issue (New Design), South Africa
Issued Jan. 20, 1969
Perf. 13½x14 |Phosphor frame |Wmk. RSA tête-bêche
SACC282 |1c |Rose-red & sepia |Coral Tree Flowers (Erythina lysistemon)
Perfin initials “D.C.”
1982 Fourth Definitive Issue (Architecture), South Africa
Issued Jul. 15, 1982
Perf. 14 |Design: A.H. Barrett |Engraving: Arthur Howard Barrett |Litho. |Phosphorized paper |No Wmk
SACC524 |10c |Carmine brown |Pietermaritzburg Town Hall
Perfin insignia “C C C” (or possibly “V V V”)
1923 United States of America (U.S. Presidents and prominent Americans)
Issued Jan. 15, 1923
Perf. 11×10½ |No Wmk
Scott 562 A165|10c |Orange |James Monroe (5th U.S. President)
Perfin insignia “WFH”
Pre-cancelled “Chicago IL”
[Sources: stampworld, South African Colour Catalogue 2023-25, Scott 2003 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue Vol. 1]
Thurday/ a snake on a stamp ✉️
There was mail today, with a new Year Of The Snake forever stamp on, issued by the US Postal Service.
Issued Jan. 14, 2025
Perf. 11 Serpentine Die-cut | Self-adhesive | Design: Camille Chew | Engraving: Banknote Corporation of America | Issued in sheets of 20
6376 FOREVER (73c) Multicolored | Lunar New Year – Year Of The Snake
[Sources: stampworld.com, USPS]
Monday/ a rough day for Nvidia 📉
Advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts rattled U.S. markets on Monday, with the threat of greater competition prompting a slide in shares of the biggest technology companies.
The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek has said it can match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies rely on. That’s prompted investors to rethink the heady valuations of companies like Nvidia, whose equipment powers the most advanced A.I. systems, as well as the enormous investments that companies like Alphabet, Meta and OpenAI are making to build their businesses.
On Monday, the S&P 500 index fell 1.5 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 3.1 percent. Nvidia was hit hard, plunging 16.9 percent and losing roughly $600 billion in market value. Falling tech stocks also dented market indexes in Europe and Japan.
-Jason Karaian and Joe Rennison writing for the New York Times
Nvidia (NVDA) stock dropped nearly 17% Monday, leading a sell-off across chip stocks and the broader market after a new AI model from China’s DeepSeek raised questions about AI investment and the rise of more cost-efficient artificial intelligence agents. Nvidia’s decline shaved $589 billion off the AI chipmaker’s market cap, the largest single-day loss in stock market history.
My comments: It is an eye-popping decline in market cap for the day, but this stock has rocketed up twentyfold (that would be 2,000 %) over the last five years— and then some.
It was at $6 in Jan. 2020 and at $149.43 (let’s say $150) Jan 6, 2025.
Saturday/ underwatermelon 🍉
Uh-oh.
I started playing one of the games that Neflix offers: Underwatermelon.
I like it. (It reminds me a little bit of Tetris from wayy-back when I first started working).
I hope I don’t get too addicted to it .. but what if I do?
The levels of the game are indicated by Gate numbers. This is Gate 4 and I still have to earn 35 points (by combining fruit), before the gate will open up, and the fruit float up to a new gate. The nice thing about going to a new gate (a new level), is that the biggest fruit floats to the top quickly, collide and combine into one bigger fruit, and leave a little more space to work withe in the new gate.
