a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We had a nice break in the rainy
weather on Saturday, and I ran out to go buy new LED light bulbs for my kitchen. Not everyone has warned up to them : they require super-low wattage, but are also super-expensive ($15 per bulb). And some people say they still prefer the warm glow of Edison’s 110-year old incandescent bulbs .. to which I say : it’s 2016, people! Doesn’t saving energy and money (over the long haul) feel good as well?
I’m following the
match-up between the world’s best player of the game of go, and a computer from DeepMind*, an artificial intelligence software house in London that was bought by Google in 2014. Go is played on a 19×19 grid of vertical and horizontal lines with black and white checkers. The number of games that can be played on it is enormous: The Economist’s article says a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10170. (Keep in mind there are only an estimated 1080 particles in the observable universe). Anyway : it’s 2-0 for the computer so far, but humans need not despair. General-purpose machine intelligence remains a long way off, says the article.
*Not to be confused with Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat Gary Kasparov in 1997.
Update : 
Sunday 3/13. I see it’s 3-1 for Deep Mind’s AlphaGo program. The South Korean Go master Lee Sidol won a game against the machine, at least denying it a clean sweep in the 5-game match-up.
I am planning a trip to South Africa in April, and so my nightly ‘game’ of scouring the connections to Cape Town on a variety of on-line travel booking sites (Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak) and the airline sites themselves had been going on for a while. First one has to find an itinerary with decent connections, and then it is a whole new ball of wax to figure out how to pay for it if you are Mr Frequent Flyer with several accounts with air miles in them.
So last night it was time to buy a ticket. BUY IT RIGHT NOW, I thought. The Europe connection to Cape Town is the hardest. It’s usually between London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris as a connecting city, to get me to Cape Town, and usually with a stop in Johannesburg. I found a direct Paris to Cape Town and was about to buy an Air France ticket on Expedia when I thought : let me log on to airfrance.com and see if I can use at least some miles to pay for the ticket. Hmm. A pitiful 3,000 miles on my Flying Blue account. Maybe I can transfer in miles from my American Express Membership Awards account. Yes. 60,000 miles available to transfer. Great. For a business class seat in, and a premium economy back, I still needed 57,000 more. Man. Let’s see what happens when I try to pay with partly miles, and partly dollars.. voila! Air France let me buy extra miles at the bargain rate of €1.10/ dollar .. and they have a sale until March 18. They throw in an extra 50% miles in addition to the ones you buy. So buying 38,000 got me 19,000 for free. So : all told, an almost business class return fare for US$1,100. Not bad at all. That kind of fare on the open market goes for at least $6,000 and Nelson Rockefeller I am not! (Of course : it took several years to rack up the American Express miles that I now burnt up in one go. But hey, that’s what they are there for).
We had a natural gas explosion here in a Seattle neighborhood this morning. There were nine firefighters on the scene – to investigate a gas smell that residents had reported first reported at 1:04 a.m. on Wednesday. The explosion tore through the neighborhood 39 minutes later, flattening a coffee shop, a convenience store and a Greek food store and damaging the store fronts of 36 businesses. The firefighters were injured, but not seriously, and luckily no one else was hurt. The cause of the leak and the explosion is still being investigated.
There was a wide-spread
Google server outage this Monday morning, which wreaked havoc on my ability to do any work. Our Google ‘cloud’ e-mail is accessed through the Chrome browser, as are several other mission critical applications : Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Hangouts. On top of that my local internet service provider Comcast, experienced a brief
outage as well.
Finally, as I turned the TV on during lunch to check on the stock market close, it was apparently time for the monthly test of the King County emergency broadcasting system. Well ! I thought. At least I will know if that 9.0 earthquake- tsunami is coming for me during the next 15 minutes!
Spring is on the way. It’s still not very warm here in Seattle this time of year, with the day temperatures between the 40 and 50°F (4 and 10°C). We do have blossoms on the trees and some flowers that have started to open up.
When I was young, my dad would take all of us for drive around the neighborhood on Sunday afternoons, and he and my mom would point out houses for sale, or check out houses under construction. I thought about that as I walked around my neighborhood and checked on the progress of houses getting built and fixed up this weekend.
Here is Exhibit A : the house that suffered a bad fire, that I wrote about in April 2015. The house had been completely renovated inside: new roof, new floors, new plumbing, new kitchen cabinets, new bathroom fixtures, and new paint. More than $220,000 spent on the renovation (!), says the write-up on the Zillow home listing website.
Then for ‘Exhibit B’ there is the old dilapidated house on a street corner nearby that was torn down, that I wrote about in July 2015. Construction of a 5 unit townhouse set is progressing rapidly (picture below).
(All this information from TIME magazine’s March 07 cover story). ‘You can’t have a person driving a 2-ton death machine’ said Elon Musk at a conference last year. The numbers are sobering : about 33,000 Americans die in auto accidents in a year, with an additional 2 million or so injured. Some 94% of accidents are the fault of drivers. The price tag for this mayhem comes to some $836 billion by one estimate. Even if only 10% of vehicles can be converted to self-driving cars or trucks, the number of accidents could be reduced by 211,000 and 1,100 lives be saved every year. But it will not be easy. Whole industries (such as the auto insurance industry) will be upended, and as TIME puts it : even though there is no ‘right to drive’ enshrined in the US Constitution .. ‘in the throne room of the American psyche, a driver’s seat occupies center stage’.
Man. What an embarrassment the Republican ‘Presidential’ debate on Thursday night in Detroit, Michigan, was. (Quotes added since hardly any presidential demeanor was on display. It was a schoolyard brawl.) Donald Trump called Marco Rubio ‘Little Marco’ and Ted Cruz ‘Lying Ted’. Forget ‘Mister’ or ‘Senator’. Forget waiting your turn to speak. Just interrupt as soon as the other guy starts talking. And is this exchange for real? (yes, it is, verbatim): Trump to Rubio joking about his anatomy. “He referred to my hands,” said Trump. “If they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.” The nation averts its eyes and covers its ears.
I got to go home on Wednesday, and I drove out to San Francisco airport with the hope of getting onto an earlier flight. There was a 4.35 pm a 7.30 pm in addition to the confirmed seat I had on the 8.30 pm. No 3 on the stand-by list for the 4.35 pm was not good enough, but I made it into a middle seat on the 7.30 pm : an acceptable trade-off for my window seat on the 8.30.
The results for the ‘Super Tuesday’ elections are in. (Super Tuesday is called that since 11 states have their 2016 Presidential primary elections on this same day). I love the maps of the USA that show the states that voted. Here are the Republican Party’s results and the Democratic Party’s results on two maps (from the on-line edition of the New York Times). It’s looking more and more like it’s going to be Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton in the November general election.
It’s the 29th of Feb! .. a day that comes by only once in four years, but then again, it’s a completely arbitrary thing and a human invention, the leap year with its leap day. Check out Amanda Foreman’s write-up in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal about the calendars and how Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar became the one that we have measured the days of the year by since 1582.
I picked up my rental car again today and drove up on 
Highway 101 from the airport through the city and onto Broadway. Man! There are plenty of one-way streets, stop signs, bus only and bike only lanes, and pedestrians to watch out for. Once I reached Broadway, I told myself : park the car now; you cannot ogle at everything and drive at the same time. I was shocked to actually find a parking space, but I did, and I could walk around a bit to explore Broadway and a few blocks close by.
Here are some pictures of Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. I bought a Clipper card and learned how to use the ‘Muni’ transit system : a network of buses and historic streetcars, the Muni Metro light rail, and the famous San Francisco cable cars.
We completed our work session late afternoon, and we have another one early Monday morning, so it was hardly worth for me to fly back home for a very short weekend. And so I’m staying over in the City. I took the rental car back to Hertz, and I took the train into the city. (I will pick up the rental car again on Sunday).
I am staying in a Marriott close to Union Square. There was a little drizzly rain in the air as I went out for a walk, but barely enough to make the streets and pavements wet.
It’s spring here in California, that’s for sure! Our project is in its final three weeks, and the remaining project team members have given up their office space in Walnut Creek and moved to San Ramon. It is an upgrade of sorts : the old building in Walnut Creek was built in the 1970s with outdated cubicles and all. This building is more or less state-of-the-art; not Google or Facebook league, but still new with a ‘town square’ cafeteria space, ‘huddle rooms’ for quick meetings, and meeting rooms with built-in projectors and electrical outlets right there on the desktop (and not on the floor in a corner somehere).
I took BART out to San Francisco to spend the day at my firm’s office in the Embarcadero. The Ferry Terminal is close by, and it was warm enough to enjoy the cool air and sunshine by the waterside during lunch.
Turn down the thermostat to 65 °F (18.3 °C) to fall asleep easier, and sleep better, says the science about sleep. The body’s core temperature actually needs to drop by 2 or 3 °F to initiate sleep. And what I suspect many of us in warmer climates know : the body tries to lose heat through the hand and feet, so stick one or two out from under the blanket if the room temperature is a little too high.
I ignored Saturday’s baffling and crazy mass shooting in Kalamazoo, Michigan* and ordered an Uber driver nonetheless, to get me to the airport today. The driver was fine, but I really should take the train next time. We got completely stuck in traffic for 15 minutes even before we got to Interstate 5.
*Uber is a popular online taxi dispatch company (rides are ordered with a smart-phone app). Uber does vet its drivers and does background checks on them. During Saturday night in Kalamazoo, a forty-something Uber driver – a dad with two kids, no criminal record – shot eight people in cold blood at three locations, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Six people dead. He was found and stopped after seven hours. He really had no explanation to offer for his actions at his arraignment today.
The Jeb Bush for the 2016 Republican nominee for President campaign is over : a spectacular failure of the very high expectations of all his donors that had amassed a $103 million campaign war chest just a year ago. Earnest, thoughtful and modest, Jeb might well have been the best of the Bush presidents. If only he hadn’t been the third one, writes Matt Latimer on Politico.com, here.
Hey, I don’t agree with the man’s politics and policies, but now we are left with candidates such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. As political observer Ezra Klein says here, we need to stop laughing at Trump (and take him seriously); he’s downright dangerous. Or : never mind Trump. Watch out for Ted Cruz, and do not vote for him. See what Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, says about him, here.
