Willem's Planet

I read about this book in an article and ordered it for only $7.95 from Amazon.  This is the text from the front and back flap of the book cover.

Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, the e-book special heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of our economic malaise, is now-at last-a book.
America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from?
As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy.
Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again.   This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

The book is only 89 pages long, and is written in language that is easy to read.     It should be compulsory reading for everyone in the USA.  Are you worried yet? he asks on p42.  (Yes, I am).  We have used up free land, exploited technology and have turned uneducated kids into educated ones.    But we spend way, way too much money on government, health care and education (for what value we get back for it).  He says that my generation has not seen the creation of electricity, electric lights, the automobile, the railroad, radio, the telephone and television (actually I only got to see television for the first time when it came to South Africa when I was 13!), to name just a few.    In recent decades we have seen the creation of computers and the internet but their impacts have proved to be much more complicated and much subtler then the earlier technological breakthroughs – and are not nearly as widespread yet as say, that of the television or the automobile.   We had a great financial crisis because ‘We thought we were richer than we were’.   Can we fix what went wrong?  Yes, but it will take time.    Among his recommendations : we have to raise the social status of scientists.  (I’d like to assume that includes engineers as well !).

The first picture is from Monday’s hike.   From left to right : Bill, Dave and Willem with Lucy and Ethel in front.

I found the poster on 12th Ave here in Seattle.  It was designed by Barry Blankenship for stand-up comedian Chris Hardwick’s show.    I have not seen Chris H. on TV or in person, but the poster appeals to the geek in me.  (Or the nerd in me? I like ‘geek’ better than ‘nerd’.   As Wikipedia reports – a more recent school of thought sees ‘nerd’ as being a derogatory phrase, while ‘geek’ is simply a description).

I took the day off and tagged along with my friends Bill and Dave on the Chirico Trail near Issaquah today.  (Some of the information that follows is from pnwhikes.com).   The Chirico Trail (also refered to as Pilots Trail) is a steady climb up the western side of Tiger Mountain to Poo Poo Point.  The Point and the field below are used as a major paragliding park.  We ran into a few intrepid paragliders making their way up the steep trail with 60lb packs.    The area features two launching sites, one facing south at 1,550 feet and one facing to the north and west at 1,650 feet.   We ended up at the north one (look for the green strip of ‘run way’ on the left of the last picture.    That is Lake Sammamish in the distance with views of Issaquah, Bellevue and Seattle.

The trail is about 3 miles long.  It took us a little over an hour to make it to the top, and about the same time down.    I will post a picture of the three of us when I get it!

This is a late post!  Happy belated Father’s Day to every dad, especially in my family.   Every one of you is a very special person.

This 10,000 yen note is worth $125.  I held onto it when I changed my foreign currency at Seattle airport so that I can check it out and decide if I want to add it to my collection of foreign bank notes.   The yen is the third most-traded currency after the US dollar and the Euro, and widely used as a reserve currency.   Maybe I should have gotten more yen when I was in Tokyo! : )

Anyway – that is Fukuzawa Yukichi (Jan 10, 1834 – Feb 3, 1901) on the front (obverse) of the note.  He is regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan due to his ideas about government and social institutions.    I held up the note against a window blind to check out the watermark.     And that bird on the back is not your average farm rooster!  It’s a fenghuang, a mythological bird of East Asia that reigns over all other birds.    The bird is a symbol of high virtue and grace, and now I know where the bird comes from that I found on a lamp post in the Ginza district in Tokyo.

Here are most of my trip’s little souvenirs and ‘acquisitions’ that came out of my suitcases.   ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’-themed porcelain plate and Doraemon-the-robotic-cat coin bag are from the Japanese department store Sogo in Hong Kong.   The mini-display case, bone china mug and grey rescued cotton* shirt are from Muji, another Japanese store.   The white Puma t-shirts are X-L (yes – I am big and burly by Asian clothing standards! Watch out, don’t make me mad!)     The books, CDs and ‘nano-block’ Tokyo Tower were bought in Tokyo.   (I still have to build the tower, of course).

*also called ‘ochiwata’, it is essentially the material left over in the weaving processes that use cotton threads.

Finally, the last item was given to me by a colleague, which I was very grateful for : these were handed out at the go-live celebration, but there was not enough available to give one to each team member.     It is a laser-etched glass model of Areva’s CPR-1000 Pressurized Water Reactor.    These are the reactors that we built our enterprise resource planning system for.

I’m going to Hong Kong from work on Wednesday night to fly home Thursday morning.   I will not come back for a final trip as planned originally.    So Tuesday night it was time to pack up everything I have out here!  Well – almost.   The clothing iron, pillows and a food package with Ramen noodles and soup I just left in the hotel room.   I reluctantly threw away the left-over milk (it made it here to a store all the way from the state of Wisconsin in the USA)  and Tropicana orange juice I had in the refrigerator.     

CCTV was on in the background, warning about more torrential rain in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangzte river (and the Shanghai arae).   But in the meantime Hubei Province, where Three Gorges Dam is located, is facing the worst spring drought in 50 years.   (Map from Wikipedia’s entry for Yangzte River).

This is the scene from my train ride back to the mainland border on Sunday.  It’s always nice to have the reflection in the window to work with so you don’t have to scare strangers by taking their picture!   There was an Oriental Daily Sunday newspaper on the seat next to me (known for its sensational style and often gory pictures, says Wikipedia).     

So there was news of the 2011 NBA final (the Dallas Mavericks won and that is Dirk Nowitski exchanging Cantonese words with the Miami Heat players*), there’s the jockey cursing at his poor horse, and there is the 2011 Year of the Rabbit wabbit in the weather forecast.      And check out the classifieds – I love the cryptic look of the classifieds page.

*I had trouble finding a translator here at work since it’s Cantonese and not Mandarin, but he’s essentially saying ‘One of me is enough for three of you’ and they are replying ‘You’re playing with fire’.

The implementation of the new internet protocol IPv6 (a standard for electronic communications) is underway.  Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks are among some of the major organisations offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”.    The goal of the Test Flight Day is to create visibility and to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.     We have to make room for the next billion internet users!  I compiled this punch list of the internet’s history.   I am sure the list is not complete, but it was interesting to compile it.  

1973 The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiates a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds.

1986 The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiates the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet.

1988  Jarkko Oikarinen invents Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing that is widely in use today.

1988  ‘The network is the computer’ .. a phrase credited to John Gage from Sun Microsystems.

1992  The Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered to provide leadership in internet- related standards, education, and policy.  The number of hosts breaks 1,000,000.

1994  Electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo at Stanford University creates a website named “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” which later becomes Yahoo!

1995  Online dial-up service providers (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access.

1996  Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years).

1996  Google starts as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP).

1998  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is established in Marina Del Rey, California.   Before the establishment of ICANN, the Government of the United States controlled the domain name system of the internet.

1998  Netscape releases the source code for its Netscape Navigator browser to the public domain.   Microsoft releases Windows 98 with its Internet Explorer browser integrated into the desktop.  It showed  Bill Gates’ determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet but it brought court challenges and penalties to their dominance.

1999  Did Al Gore create the Internet? Al Gore makes his famous/ infamous statement  ‘During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet’ according to a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer.   To be fair : Gore has probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970’s to the present .

2001  The first commercial launch of a 3G (Third Generation) commercially automated cellular network is done in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard, enabling text messaging, MMS, email and Internet access.

2004   Mark Zuckerberg starts writing the code for Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.  The social networking website that was at first only available to Harvard students, today has 600 million members worldwide.

2007  Apple releases its first iPhone.  It would soon change the mobile handset interface paradigm from hard-ware based to software based. .

2011  The internet runs out of addresses!    Internet Protocal version 4 (IPv4) allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 2³² (4,294,967,296) addresses. The new protocol IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2¹²⁸ (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×10³⁸⁾  addresses.

There was a spirited panel discussion by newspaper editors on a German TV channel in my hotel on Sunday night.  (Parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government agreed on Monday May 30 that Germany will target 2022 to have all their nuclear power plants shut down).   The text on the TV program picture says ‘Remaining Risks of Nuclear Exit : Too Quick? Too Soon? Inconsequential?’    My German was far too poor to follow the discussion, but it prompted me to find out more about the debate. 

What I found out so far :  1. The majority of Germans do not want nuclear power, it’s a very political issue.    2. Germany gets about 25% of its energy from nuclear power  (the chart says 29% because it is a little outdated), about the same percentage as the USA.   3.   The government will lose about €1 billion ($1.44 billion) in tax revenues every year.   4.  Someone will have to pay for the new sources of energy – who?  The utility companies? (They are planning to take legal action against the government) The consumer?  

Finally – the chart shows the Netherlands get only 4% of their power from nuclear sources (and look at the French).    They get most of their energy from gas and coal, but they do have a significant installed capacity of wind power.