Willem's Planet

I waited until Monday to run out the department stores here in downtown Seattle – not for Christmas shopping, really. Just stuff.  What was on my shopping list?  Two new pairs of dress pants for work, as well as a winter jacket.  A new suitcase.  And one never knows, whatever catches my fancy .. but no on-the-spot impulse buying of any one item more than $100 is allowed in the Willem shopping modus operandi (method of operating).

Alas, my experiences downtown and at the Northgate shopping mall were decidedly lacking.   Nordstrom did not have my size ‘Bonobos’ (a brand name) dress pants in colors other than khaki.  I have two pairs of khaki pants already. (I should just buy it on-line). Macy’s had no jackets that I really liked (and I have bought several jackets there over the years).   Finally, when I got to the Bergman luggage store to buy a new black Samsonite 22″ suitcase for all my travels, no luck either.  They had the ugliest set of new Samsonite suitcases! Ugg-ly! They now only make shiny hard-shell ‘spinners’ .. those suitcases with the four little wheels.  I prefer the big two-wheeled design – with those you can run to the gate and not miss your flight, and they have more space inside.

Today marks the winter solstice (up here in the Northern hemi-sphere).   As it turns out, we already had our earliest sunset : on December 11.  (Check out the sunset in Fairbanks Alaska.  One’s afternoon nap might as well turn into a loong full night’s sleep!).  The reason is that there is a slight difference between the solar day (the time it takes for the sun to appear in the same position in the sky from one day to the next) and the calendar day.  Here is the rest of the explanation from the Washington Post blog (hang in there):  The Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees, and our orbit around the sun is elliptical (non-circular). In December, these two factors combine in such a way that our days are actually a few seconds longer than 24 hours – as seen by the amount of time it takes the sun to cross our local meridian (longitude) from one day to the next. In effect, this pushes the time of solar noon several minutes later during December, advancing both sunrise and sunset times even as the days continue to shorten until December 21.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[From Wikipedia]  A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally-bound system consisting of stars, stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and dark matter, an important but poorly understood component. (Our solar system’s galaxy is the Milky Way).

Guardians of the Galaxy is a 2014 super-hero film based on the Marvel comic books with the same name.  Watching it Saturday night, I tried to hang with the plot, the best part of which is the ‘Infinity Stone’ that can destroy an entire galaxy (but it’s not clear which galaxy the movie refers to, actually).   The movie is not quite Star Trek-ky (maybe more like Star Wars?) but anyway : I could not quite warm up to it.   The music in it is a throwback to the 70’s when cassette tapes were used to play the likes of BJ Thomas’s hit ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ – which I liked a lot when I played a little of it on iTunes.   But I disagree with the 90% or 4 stars out of 5 the reviewers give the flick.   I give it a 6 or a 7 out of 10.

Toyota has started selling its first commercial hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle in Japan.  These cars are not cheap (est. price $62,000) and only slated for late 2015 availability in the USA.  Outside of California and Washington State, lots of hydrogen gas stations will still have to be constructed.  Also, says Bloomberg Businessweek : ‘The auto industry has already sunk serious money into hybrids, plug-in electrics, and advanced batteries in the expectation that these technologies will dominate in the post-gasoline era, whenever that may be’.

 

We have had on and off rain here since Monday.  I read on-line that San Francisco has received 8.43 inches this month, the most for a December since December 1950 ! Hmm. And it definitely feels a little like Seattle here this week.

As we approach the winter solstice the days are getting ever shorter here in the North.  The sun now sets at 4.18 pm already .. so it was completely dark when I went for a walk.

My neighborhood of Capitol Hill does not go overboard with Christmas decorations, but I would say one in three or one in four houses has some lights up on the house, or on the fence, or in the garden.  Does my porch light count?  (No, I would say not!).  That’s all I have.  I put ‘icicles’ on my front gutter one year, but that was several years ago.

Bryan, Gary and I watched an episode of ‘Rome’ last night (an HBO TV series that aired some time ago, and is now available on Amazon Prime as streaming video).  We were not too wild about it, but it prompted us to check refresh our history knowledge : over which years did the Roman Empire exist?  We know of course, that the Romans were around at the birth of Jesus Christ in the year 0.    And certainly, before that, the Romans did not refer to the years as 100 BC, since they could not peer into the future.    It turns out the Roman empire was at its height in 117 AD.  So, after the birth of Christ.  Anno Domini means ‘In the Year of our Lord’. There is no year 0 between the years designated as 1 BC and 1 AD. The Roman Calendar was made over by Julius Caesar and became the Julian Calendar, and several centuries later the Gregorian Calendar came about.

Check out these cool maps of the Roman Empire that I found on-line, at this link.

My enthusiasm for playing Scrabble against my iPad has not waned, and shows no sign of doing that.  In fact, I discovered I can switch to German, if I ever get tired of English (sadly, there is no Afrikaans on-line version of Scrabble).   The iPad comes up with words that make one say ‘Say whaaat? Are you sure about that one?’ .. such as TEEEI.  What is that? Then you realize it is TEE EI = tea egg,  just written together.  The others are PAAREM = a couple of (PAAR = pair), ESTER-N = plural of ester (a chemical compound), and YIN of course from ‘yin and yang’.   And check the bizarre combination of tiles on my rack : Q (with a U, luckily), X and the weird A with the umlaut.

A ‘pineapple express’ from Hawaii is making its way to California, and is slated to arrive by midnight on Wednesday and continue into Thursday.  The ‘pineapple express’ is an “atmospheric river” of precipitation carried in on a jet stream from the Pacific (Hawaii). So schools are shut down and shops are barricaded.   We are all hoping it does not disrupt our travel plans for tomorrow, but we will have to wait and see !

The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s 600-page report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture – and lying about it, and covering it up – in the wake of 9/11, was finally issued on Tuesday.    Torture is a complete violation of human rights.  But I guess one has to believe there is such a thing as human rights, and sadly – not everyone does.

Here’s what I read on the plane on the way to San Francisco today – to our perfectly bland cubicle farm in the Walnut Creek office.  (It’s from a TIME magazine article about Mark Zuckerburg’s quest to connect the world with Facebook. Facebook now has 8,000 employees, 1.35 billion users, and generated $7.87 billion of revenue last year, a billion and a half of that in profit).  Check the full story out here.

When you walk into Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don’t have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well.

The campus is built around a sun-drenched courtyard criss-crossed by well-groomed employees strolling and laughing and wheeling bikes. Those Facebookies who aren’t strolling and laughing and wheeling are bent over desks in open-plan office areas, looking ungodly busy with some exciting, impossibly hard task that they’re probably being paid a ton of money to perform. Arranged around the courtyard (where the word ‘hack’ appears in giant letters, clearly readable on Google Earth if not from actual outer space) are restaurants—Lightning Bolt’s Smoke Shack, Teddy’s Nacho Royale, Big Tony’s Pizzeria—that seem like normal restaurants right up until you try to pay, when you realize they don’t accept money. Neither does the barbershop or the dry cleaner or the ice cream shop. It’s all free.

You’re not even in the first world anymore, you’re beyond that. This is like the zeroth world. And it’s just the shadow of things to come: a brand-new campus, designed by Frank Gehry, natch, is under construction across the expressway. It’s slated to open next year.

Check out the spectacular graphics that came with this week’s issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.   They chronicled 85 disruptive ideas or technologies, to celebrate the magazine’s 85-year history.

The U.S. economy added 321,000 jobs in November.  The economy has now added at least 200,000 jobs for 10 straight months, the longest such stretch in more than 30 years. In Oklahoma City a gallon of gas goes for $1.99 .. the first time in the US that has happened since July 2010.    Finally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average continues to go higher and almost got to 18,000 this week.  I had to look it up and remind myself that it was at 6,626 in March 2009 !   Yikes .. so starting to look a little scary, quite frankly.  The rest of the industrial world is still not doing great.