Willem's Planet

The world learned this week of the sad ending to Antarctic explorer Henry Worsley’s attempt to cross the continent on foot (he died in a hospital in Chile after being airlifted there).  That also made me recall a stamp issued in South Africa, commemorating the 1961 Antarctic Treaty (my mom took me to the post office so that I could buy the special first day of issue envelope as well).  The Antarctic is a fascinating continent : the only one with no native human population.  So what does the treaty say? Here are the articles [Source : Wikipedia].

Article 1 – The area is to be used for peaceful purposes only; military activity, such as weapons testing, is prohibited but military personnel and equipment may be used for scientific research or any other peaceful purpose;
Article 2 – Freedom of scientific investigations and cooperation shall continue;
Article 3 – Free exchange of information and personnel in cooperation with the United Nations and other international agencies;
Article 4 – The treaty does not recognize, dispute, nor establish territorial sovereignty claims; no new claims shall be asserted while the treaty is in force;
Article 5 – The treaty prohibits nuclear explosions or disposal of radioactive wastes;
Article 6 – Includes under the treaty all land and ice shelves but not the surrounding waters south of 60 degrees 00 minutes south;
Article 7 – Treaty-state observers have free access, including aerial observation, to any area and may inspect all stations, installations, and equipment; advance notice of all activities and of the introduction of military personnel must be given;
Article 8 – Allows for good jurisdiction over observers and scientists by their own states;
Article 9 – Frequent consultative meetings take place among member nations;
Article 10 – All treaty states will discourage activities by any country in Antarctica that are contrary to the treaty;
Article 11 – All disputes to be settled peacefully by the parties concerned or, ultimately, by the International Court of Justice;
Articles 12, 13, 14 – Deal with upholding, interpreting, and amending the treaty among involved nations.

There was yet another Republican Presidential candidate debate, this one in Des Moines, Iowa on Thu night.  Mr Donald Trump was AWOL, the result of a tiff between him and the Fox News TV Channel.   The pundits say it’s between Trump and the Texan senator Ted Cruz (that was born in Canada, as Trump reminds voters every day now).  The Iowa caucuses are on Monday, officially kicking off the 2016 USA Presidential election.

The problem with Iowa’s way of voting is that you have to physically show up at the caucus events. As the Des Moines Register (local newspaper points out), the caucus process takes two hours and inadvertently disqualifies a lot of voters.    ‘When you go to the caucus, if you go, on Monday night, look to your left and your right and imagine the people who are not there, the ones not participating in this so-called great example of “participatory democracy.” You will not see the voter who has too many health issues, the shift worker, the emergency services worker, the voter with social anxiety, the voter who got sick the last time they caucused, the voter who wants to vote in private, the abused woman who is still in hiding, the snow bird who is gone every winter, the voter on a business trip, the person in the hospital and the voter without child care’.

One would think that what happened in Flint, Michigan, the last 18 months or so, is surely out of the question, and just not possible in the United States of America.  But check out this recent article in the The Flint Journal that chronicles the series of bad decisions, bad governing and utter lack of care for the well-being of people, that resulted in the lead poisoning of the residents of Flint – and particularly its most vulnerable ones : young children.

Check out this New York Times article that gives pointers as to how to see five planets all at once in the night sky.  This sighting will be possible only for the next three weeks or so . .. but then from Aug 13 to 19 there will be an opportunity for Southern Hemisphere stargazers to see the five planets in the dusk sky.

Here’s Homer in a Simpsons episode called ‘Mathlete’s Feat’ that aired in May 2015.  It’s actually a pretty sophisticated mathematical joke we have going here.  I suspect some people may recognize the π at the end (Greek letter pi, and for Homer it would be ‘pie’) .. but the other symbols are more hard-core math.  So let me decode it.  The square root of negative 1 is a mathematically imaginary number usually written as ‘i’.  Two to the power of three is 2 x 2 x 2 which is eight.  The Greek letter sigma is used to indicate ‘sum’ or ‘sum of’.  And so : Homer says ‘I ate some pie and it was delicious’.

Alright .. so by Friday afternoon the big snowstorm had started to make its mark across the mid-Atlantic, and into New York City.  There are lots of creative pictures of the snow on Twitter.   And this video clip of Tian Tian, a giant panda enjoying the snow at the National Zoo in Washington DC, is great, too!

Just a silly animated .gif picture I found on line.  The cat’s expression as the dog starts to stir is priceless. (Maybe there is food?).  And then the cat knows : this siesta is so over. Scram !

There is a big winter snow storm on the way to the mid-Atlantic region (Washington DC and surroundings) that will start on Friday and bring as much as two feet of snow to an area that usually measures its snow in inches, not feet.   Already on Wednesday night, an unexpected inch of snow turned the freeways around the city into a skating rink, and some commuters reported spending 6 or 7 hours in their cars before reaching their homes.    The problem with snowfall that had not been forecast, is that salting of the road surfaces was not done – and then the roads and freeways also become completely clogged up with slow moving traffic. So there is no way to react and remedy the situation after that, either.

Just when one thinks (have we not learned better by now?) one has seen it all with the Donald-Trump-for-President candidacy, he reaches into his top hat and pulls out another rabbit.  So there she was on Monday, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s 2008 Vice Presidential running mate, endorsing Mr Trump in a ‘meandering, fiery, sarcastic, patriotic and blustery speech that does not easily submit to categorization’, says The New York Times.   The tabloid Daily News was way more blunt : ‘I’m with Stupid!’ said their Tuesday edition front page, in the biggest letter font that they could fit onto it.

*Squirmish : a word used in the Palin speech (not sure if by accident or intentional).  Per the New York Times  ‘.. and, more notably, coins a new word, squirmishes, a cross between squirm (which means to wriggle the body from side to side) and skirmish (which means a brief fight or encounter between small groups). Twitter embraced the new term instantly’.

 

The B.P. oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, is the worst environmental disaster in U.S history. In July 2015, B.P. agreed to pay about $18.7 billion in damages for water pollution caused by the spill, after being found ‘grossly negligent’ for its role in the oil spill.   Well – since October of last year now, there is a natural gas leak in Porter Ranch, California that threatens to rival the B.P. oil spill with its environmental impact.  By all accounts, the company (Southern California Gas), followed all the rules and regulations to maintain control of the massive gas storage facility in Aliso Canyon, its volume about one cubic mile, and a mile and a half below ground.  The problem is that the rules are too soft, and undemanding, and does not take into account the ageing infrastructure of many of these storage facilities.  All attempts so far to ‘kill the well’ has failed.  The company has spent $50 million on the repairs and the relocation of 2,500 families.  The current plan is to drill a relief well alongside the existing leaking well – a project that is estimated to fix the leak sometime in March.   The LA Weekly reports : The Aliso Canyon leak has increased the state’s methane emissions by 21 percent. As of now, 2.3 percent of the state’s entire carbon footprint is coming from one hole in the ground above Porter Ranch.

 

I visited one of my favorite stores in Seattle, the University of Washington bookstore, on Saturday.  Outside the bookstore, two Bernie Sanders campaigners (students) had a table set up and they were handing out Bernie Sanders flyers (Yes, I’ll take one, I said), .. ‘and would I come to the Movement for Bernie march next Saturday?’  Well, ‘I will try’, I said. The first votes in the State primaries start with Iowa’s caucuses on Feb 1st.  After March 1st, the so-called Super Tuesday, a clearer picture should emerge as to who the Republican nominee for President may be, and who the Democratic nominee may be.

Well, well, well.  So by the end of the second week in 2016, the oil price had crashed to below $30 a barrel, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 12.7% off its high of May 2015.   The 200-day moving average on the S&P 500 is now trending down, an ominous sign that things are moving in the wrong direction (and have been for a while).  And man!  are the opinions all over the map!  Some say the Fed should reverse its rate hike of December.  But no, says the Federal Reserve Bank Governor from New York : the four rate hikes foreseen in December for 2016 are absolutely all still on the table.  Micheal Pento argues on CNBC’s web site that A recession worse than 2008 is coming.   Worse than 2008? because the Fed is out of ammunition to fight another big recession (‘former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke took the overnight interbank lending rate down to zero percent from 5.25 percent and printed $3.7 trillion’).  We will just have to wait and see.

 

I see there is a new strain of dog flu doing the rounds in the Western USA.  Here in Washington State, the health department is warning pet owners after possible exposure at a Seattle-area kennel.  (The reports don’t mention any risk to humans, so I assume there is none).

Check out the New York Times’s spectacular ’52 Places to Go in 2016′ article, here. Some of the photos are animated (they are really short video clips).  I see Mozambique made the list as well, with kudos to its government for promoting peace and tolerance.

P.S.  At least three tickets match the winning numbers of the gargantuan jackpot, it was reported this morning.  Good, said a financial adviser on TV this morning.  With that out of the way, people can get on with their lives and take control over their own financial futures!

We have quite an outrageous lottery drawing prize in the making here in the United States Powerball lottery for Wednesday night : $1.5 billion. Whoah. (The result of 19 drawings with no winning numbers).   As the website twocents put it : You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning in a frog thunderstorm than you do winning the Powerball, but hey, it’s always fun to play billionaire.  

Winning would invite all kinds of problems, of course.  (Mostly good ones!  .. such as how to invest tens of millions of dollars at a pop.  What kind of new house to buy, and where? Or how to help family members without losing half the money you give them to taxes .. for example, there is an annual limit of $14,000 on gifts before a form of gift taxes kick in).

Check out my manga book (bought it in Japan), part of a series with protagonist ‘Division Chief Kosaku Shima’ .  I liked the style of the pictures, I liked that it was in English, and I thought it was unusual to find manga* that depicted dealings in business/ commerce.

*[From Wikipedia]  Manga is a Japanese word referring both to comics and cartooning. ‘Manga’ as a term used outside Japan refers specifically to comics originally published in Japan. … In Japan, people of all ages read manga.  The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action-adventure, business/commerce, comedy, detective, historical drama, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, sexuality, sports and games, and suspense, among others.