Willem's Planet

Got something confidential that you want to send to ‘The New Yorker’ magazine for publication.. but you want to remain completely anonymous?  To do that, previously there was the mailing address of the magazine (1925), later joined by a phone number (1928) and much later by an e-mail address (1998).  But e-mail addresses and the location of the computer from where it was sent is traceable and not good for super-secret communications.  So now in 2013 there is the ‘Strongbox’ on the Tor network.  Check out the steps below .. I am no encryption expert but it looks pretty cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy super-secret to me!   On the upside The New Yorker cannot divulge their confidential sources to say, the FBI .. but on the downside : they cannot verify the authenticity of the material easily, either.

I watched an animated movie called ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ from Ghibli studios last night – because the cover had a quote from movie critic Roger Ebert that said it belonged on a list of the 10 best war movies of all time.   Well, I did not quite know what to expect, but it was harrowing to watch.  This is not a feel-good pop-cultury Pixar movie.  To me the message was ‘War is brutal, and its consequences show no compassion to defenseless people’ (such as children).

Rocket man Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, had a great week.  His electric car company reported $11 million in profit for the latest quarter (first time it’s in the black, or is that in the green?), and the company’s stock is up 38%.   The Tesla Roadster uses a three-phase Alternating Current (AC) induction motor. The AC induction motor was first patented by Nikola Tesla in 1888, is about the size of a watermelon, and can run at up to 14,000 rpm .. but instant torque is available at any rpm (Whoah).  I’m reading all of this here on the Tesla Motors website  http://www.teslamotors.com/roadster/technology/motor.

Nikola Tesla (born 1856, died 1943) was a Serbian-American, an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, an inventor that worked for Thomas Edison for some time, but then struck out on his own – and how.  He would build fantastic inventions and show them off, was capable of speaking eight languages, could memorize entire books, and visualize his machines and contraptions in his head.   In 1960 the unit of measure for magnetic field strength was named a ‘tesla’ in his honor.

The ‘crisis’ in the Dow Jones pre-crisis and post-crisis the the Wall Street Journal refers to in its front page article about the DJIA reaching 15,000 for the first time on Tuesday, is the Lehman Brothers/ World Financial/ Great Recession crisis of 2008, of course.  But there are other crises that have certainly not played themselves out fully – such as the European debt crisis, the repeated US debt-ceiling wrangles in Congress and the US unemployment crisis.  And the USA is still awash in cheap money with the Federal funds rate sitting at zero almost 5 years after 2008.

The ABBA museum has opened in Stockholm. (Yes, yes. I’m an ABBA fan. Is there anyone that is not?).  There’s a red telephone in the museum for visitors, and supposedly ‘only four people in the world has the number’ (named Agnetha, Björn, Bennie and Anni-Frid).  Hmm.  So if it rings, pick it up, says the website (can I wrestle it away from the person that dared get there ahead of me?).   Björn Ulvaeus was very modest when Natalie from the Today show (morning TV show in the USA) interviewed him, saying that their timing was right and for some reason many, many people around the world just liked the music that they produced.  He also said that it was ‘a little weird’ to play such a big part in creating a museum for oneself — but the city of Stockholm had been asking them for many  years to do that, and they obliged.

Speaking of capitalism (Wednesday’s post), I will have to wait until October before I can get my grubby fingers on the new US$100 bill.  The first $100 bills were issued in 1862 .. and by the end of 2010, a total of 7 billion hundred dollar notes were in circulation according to the Federal Reserve (more than two-thirds of these overseas).  Of course the new note has several new security features – to make it harder for counterfeiters such as North Korea that is known in particular for producing extremely high-quality but fake $100 bills. My favorite security features from what I read on-line are the blue 3D ribbon woven into the note’s fabric, and the micro-printing reading “The United States of America” on Ben’s collar.

So with the economy slowly improving, car sales are back, and so are traffic jams on the freeways around the major cities in the country.  On average, there is an uptick of 4% in congestion so far this year, after a 22% drop in congestion from 2011 to 2012.  These are numbers from the INRIX traffic score card, here http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/. As for car sales, there are now car loans available for an astonishing 97 months.  Better take a hard look at a cheap used car, the bus, the train, car pooling, making do with one family car, before signing up for that loan!