Willem's Planet

Yes, I am an early bird and got my flu shot today.   I also checked the Centers for Disease Control website to make sure I’m up to date with my recommended vaccinations for China.    Of course, there are some nasty viruses and bugs out there for which there is no vaccine.   Dengue fever is one of them, with no specific medicine that can cure it ! (map for the Eastern Hemisphere dengue fever areas from the CDC website).   I travel to the green strip around Hong Kong.   Seems the best one can do is to pack a thermometer and check in for medical care right away in case of fever.

The pictures are from Sunday.  My friends and I went to the 9th Annual Concours d’Elegance*event in Kirkland here in the Seattle area.  The antique Mercedes hails from 1904.  The in-line 4 cylinder engine produced 32hp and a top speed of 40mph, the fastest at the time.   The star of the show was the James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, one of the most famous cars in the world, and it sold at an auction last year for some US$ 4 million.   The local Mercedes dealer sponsored part of the event and ‘only’ $131,000 will get you this 2011 Mercedes Benz S63 Amg V8 Biturbo – now we’re talking!  For the brand-new Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4, one would have to cough up some US$380,000.  (The black one was at the show, the other picture is from Lamborghini’s website).   Some specs : the LP700-4 has a curb weight of just 1575 kg (3,472 pounds) due to its carbon fiber-reinforced polymer monocoque structure. The 6.5 liter V12 puts out 690 bhp / 515 kW.  The gearbox is a 7-speed independent shift rod transmission (with dual synchronizers) supplied by Graziano Trasmissioni Group with 50 millisecond shift times.

*from French meaning a competition of elegance, lit. “concourse of elegance”, referring to the gathering of prestigious cars, dating back to 17th Century French aristocracy, who paraded horse-drawn carriages in the parks of Paris during Summer weekends and holidays.

The football field-size flag was unfurled before the singing of the national anthem for the New York Jets-Dallas Cowboys NFL match in the stadium on the New Jersey side.  The 9/11 Memorial was open to families that lost loved ones 10 years ago today and opens to the general public tomorrow. (Pictures from NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast).

We celebrated the end of the week with some beers in the hotel bar.   Heineken for me.  I tried to look up where the red star on the logo came from, but without success.   Maybe I shouldn’t read too much into it, but then again the 3 e’s were tilted back slightly to make them ‘smile’, according to one description of the logo.  So little details matter.

My bags are packed.   A driver is picking me up early Saturday morning here at the hotel to take me to Hong Kong.   There is usually an extra bag search before boarding a flight for the USA; I am sure it will be even stricter tomorrow. 

 

.. yes, the car.    (Spotted from my perch in the bus on the way to work).  The original Nissan Bluebird was launched in 1957, so the name has been around a very long time.   In China the cars are made under licence by Dongfeng Motor Corporation, one of the three big automakers in the country.

The tech world (at least or the Apple fandom part of it) is on iPhone5 watch.  The rumors here in Shenzhen are rife : its release is imminent.   (One of the factories making the phone is right here in the city).   Here is a screen shot I snapped from aTV commercial for iPhone4.     

Typhoon Talas is headed for landfall west of Tokyo on Friday, reported the TV channel NHK World Thu night.   The heavy rains ahead of the center of the storm has already caused flooding in some coastal areas.

The Sunday edition of the South China Morning Post reported today on a research project that has been going on, right here where I have worked on Daya Bay Nuclear Power station’s information systems project (picture from the newspaper’s website).   A global team of scientists  study the neutrinos generated by the nuclear reactors here, in an effort to understand antimatter better.

What is antimatter?  Well, we all know electrons.  They have equivalent anti-particles called positrons.   Neutrons have antineutrons, and protons have antiprotons.   So it is entirely possible for a hydrogen atom made up of a proton and an electron, to instead be an ‘anti-hydrogen’ atom made up of an anti-proton and a positron.   How cool is that?

From Wikipedia’s antimatter entry : There is considerable speculation as to why the observable universe is apparently composed almost entirely of matter (as opposed to a mixture of matter and antimatter), whether there exist other places that are almost entirely composed of antimatter instead, and what sorts of technology might be possible if antimatter could be harnessed.  At this time, the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics.