Kirin beer is named after the ‘Qilin’, a mythical hooved Chinese chimerical creature. This little Kirin is alcohol-free, not ‘for-nothing’ free ! (It was $1.65).The Wall Street Journal explains how the popular college game beer pong works.
I like Kirin beer and when I saw an alcohol-free version of it in the Uwajimaja grocery store that carries products from Asia, I thought .. hmm, let me try it. It’s no Moose Drool, but drinkable. Kirin says it’s made from ‘an unprecedented new recipe containing barley malt and hops just like regular beer’. It has only 37 calories in the 11.3 oz (334ml) bottle that it comes in. I read on-line that earlier methods of making alcohol-free beer involved evaporating the alcohol from it, but tended to leave it with an ‘industrial’ taste.
There’s definitely a market for alcohol-free beers (pregnant women, beer-lovers on medication) .. but the market probably excludes college students out to getting their throats wet with the real stuff while they play beer pong!
I had time on Sunday to swing by King Street station just south of downtown Seattle. The station was originally constructed in 1906 but recently renovated inside and out. Wikipedia says it has Italianate architecture and Beaux-Arts architecture (OK! so now I know what that looks like as well). The station is a stop on the Amtrak Cascades route that runs along the Cascade Mountains on its east, up from Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver in Canada.
Amtrak’s Cascades route is named for the mountain range on its east (when the train runs northbound).King Street Station with the Amtrak track that brings the trains to it. Downtown Seattle is in the background.A closer look. I love the copper trim on the awning.This ceiling is upstairs, when one has entered through the main doors on Jackson street.The main waiting room. The Amtrak train has actually just arrived from the south. It stops only for a few minutes, so I was too late to run outside and catch a better glimpse of it!A beautiful inside corner with doors going to the streets and taxi stand.A close look at the lamp fixtures and little mosaic tile trim on the wall.This is the pedestrian overpass with the Amtrak track coming in from the south. Century Link field is home to the Seahawks (football team).More plate cut-out artwork on the pedestrian overpass, showing the connection Seattle has with Japan.
‘I will have a moose drool, please’ said I on Wednesday at a ‘connectivity event’ after work. Moose Drool is a brown ale made by the Big Sky Brewery in Montana. And so I had to look up if we actually have moose in Washington State (we do, in the northeast). The creatures are roaming all over Canada and Alaska.
Here’s the packaging from a Moose Drool six-pack. Yes. the moose is really drooling!Here’s a map (from Wikipedia) showing the moose distribution in North America. The four shades of colors are sub-species. There’s probably 300,000 in the USA with double that number in Canada.
Here are two pictures from Friday. I took the bus the the gym and back late afternoon (nice not to deal with the crush of traffic downtown). There was still some sun left after that, and so I walked down to Broadway (the main out-and-about street here in Capital Hill) to see what’s going on there.
Here’s the opposite direction No 43 bus across from where I was waiting. Jet City on the sign is Seattle (Boeing being the ‘jet’), and seeing ‘Johannesburg’ jolted my memory of all the times our family would drive out there to visit my grandparents. The town where I grew up is just about an hour’s drive from Johannesburg.And here’s an ‘amazon fresh’ truck that I walked by. They are still not a very common sight, and offer service only in limited areas in Seattle. One can order groceries as well as complete meals from restaurants.
I’m a pedestrian on the Olive Way overpass of highway I-5 late Thu afternoon, looking north. It’s 5 pm, so northbound traffic is slowing down.
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!
This photo illustration from the weekend’s Wall Street Journal. The $31, 032 is the average price of a car and the $460 a month is what the buyer will pay for each of 97 months. So let’s see. 97 times $460 comes to $44, 620 : the buyer will pay some $13,000 in interest. And it will be a long time before the buyer comes in for another car!
No – I wasn’t really watching the Apple stock price as the Q2 earnings figures were announced on Wednesday. Since my iPhone 4 is now long in the tooth, I was hoping there would be hints about when the new iPhone, widely referred to as the 5S, would become available. Of course there were not! .. but it seems clear now that the estimated June/ July availability of the 5S will be pushed back to September, at least. One article points to fingerprint sensor issues (picture). In the meantime, arch rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 phone is now out. The company took out no less than eight full pages of ad space in the USA Today of Wednesday. Here is the USA Today review of the Galaxy S4 http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/04/24/samsung-galaxy-s4-review/2104959/.
Here’s funnyman Jon Stewart reporting on ‘The Daily Show’ on Monday night that the Czech Embassy felt compelled to issue a statement in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks to clarify that the two suspects actually traced their roots to Chechnya, and not the Czech Republic. (Expletive-filled anti-Czech remarks permeated Facebook and Twitter postings). Asked Jon S. only half-jokingly : ‘Do they (the Czechs) really think the US would invade a country that had nothing to do with the attacks?’.
Jon Stewart from the Daily Show on Monday night. The Daily Show is an American late night satirical television program. The show describes itself as a fake news program, but it makes some serious points along with the jokes.
Monday was Earth Day. I took the Earth Day web site’s footprint calculator (here http://www.earthday.org/footprint-calculator) and the outcome was not good. If everyone on the face of the earth lived as large as I did, there would have to be 7.1 earths to provide the resources needed. (Maybe it was the 100 hrs+ of airplane flying that did me in? At least I have not traveled much at all the last four weeks! .. I suppose the same number of planes flew anyway, though. But hey, at least I recycle everything I can, and try hard not to waste water and electricity). And I couldn’t resist posting the cute aardvark with its huge rabbit ears. Aardvark is Afrikaans (or Dutch) and its direct translation is ‘hog of the earth’.
The Foot Print Calculator on the Earth Day website says if everyone lived the way I did (house, eating habits, transport) there would have to be 7.1 planet Earths needed. Ouch.An aardvark. They are still found widely in Africa and are not an endangered species.
Here is one more post for the Bullitt center as a follow-up to the ones I made some six months ago when construction was underway : Seattle’s new ultra-green building and Bite the Bullitt. The sleek and shiny solar-paneled building is now ready for its opening on Monday (Earth Day).
Here’s the completed building with its fully fitted solar-paneled roof, its big windows and shiny outside cladding. There will be a little opening ceremony on Monday (it now looks like the blue skies will hold and the white canopy will not be necessary!). And is the white Nissan Leaf electric car on the right parked alongside by coincidence, or there to complete the picture? There is no parking garage below the building, only some bicycle racks.Here is the view from the front. The little triangular park in front of it has always been there, but got a little make-over with ferns and wooden log ‘benches’. The big trees will get a lot leafier with summer approaching.
The Lenovo Thinkcentre M82 is the mean machine that I ordered.
I finally took the plunge on Saturday and had to make several decisions to arrive at the point of ordering a replacement desktop computer for my home office. #1.Windows and not Apple (enough Apple on my iPhone and iPad). #2.Windows 8 and not Windows 7 (got the have the newest in spite of some reports that W8 is ‘awful’. I will tweak the interface to make it work the best for me). #3.Tower and not all-in-one or mini-tower (to keep my options open; tower offers most USB connections and a solid state boot disk with no moving parts). #4.No touch screen for now. It’s not an iPad and I can get one later. Besides, Apple has done a ton of research on vertical touch screens, and concluded they are terrible ergonomically. #5.Lenovo over Dell and H-P. I liked the look of the box; and I get a nice discount through my company.
This might very well be my last desktop machine I buy, but I also have some doubts. For a home office I think one needs a stationary machine with a nice big screen, with connected printers* (I have two), a document scanner and the cable modem hard-wired. *I guess I could get wireless printers, but the ones I have are not and work perfectly fine.
This Thinkpad is just out and my company has announced that everyone will get one of these from now on as well. I just got a new notebook computer for work, though – so I will have to be patient and wait a while before I get my grubby hands on this one.
(Caveat : I am not a news organization. I am just reporting what is interesting and fascinating to me!). So the manhunt did end on Friday night, thankfully. Shortly after the lock-down was lifted at the end of the day with one suspect killed and the second suspect still on the loose, a resident discovered #2 in his boat in his backyard. He was apparently badly wounded with blood on the tarp, and on him. (What a story the resident has story to tell). The resident retreated and called 9-1-1. Then all hell broke loose (again). A helicopter with thermal imaging showed the suspect couldn’t really move, and so the SWAT team moved in, captured him, and sent him off in an ambulance. So all of Boston is out on the streets. The President gave an address on TV. But the harder questions remain : why did the two brothers do it? Was there anyone else? Here is an article from the Washington Post that explains some of the history of Chechnya and Dagestan where the brothers grew up before their parents brought them to the USA (they were given political asylum) : http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/19/9-questions-about-chechnya-and-dagestan-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/
The boat where the second suspect was hiding away, wounded, and discovered by the home owner that went outside to smoke .. and noticed something wrong on the tarp on the boat.Andrew Kitzenberg used his Twitter account to post an eyewitness account from what was going on outside his window on Thursday night. One post said ‘the black hawks are here’. Another showed a picture with a bullet hole in the wall and through the back of the desk chair.
I knew going to bed last night something was going on in Boston .. and sure enough, it was related to the bombings and the two suspects. This morning the country woke up to the news : the suspects are two Kyrgyzstan-born brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev (26) and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (19). The older brother reported dead this morning and his younger brother on the run. They have been in the Boston area for a number of years. Their dad is in Kyrgyzstan. They have an uncle in Boston, but he has not seen them for many years and had no good words for them during a brief interview. So right now we have close to 1 million people in the Boston area on lock-down, the streets there deserted, Black hawk helicopters overhead. How will this all end?
Here’s a map from CNN’s website showing the locations and events of Thursday night. The two suspects have obviously no regard for human life, but they did let the person who’s car they hijacked, go free.
There was a lot in the news on Wednesday! Ready? 1. The FBI announces a break-through with surveillance video for the Boston bombings. CNN ends up with egg on its face, first saying arrests have been made, then retracting that ‘Breaking News’ announcement a hour later. 2. A gun control bill (for universal background checks) fails in the Senate. This for something that 90% of the citizenry supports. A big boo! – BOO! – to the US senators that voted no. Go home! 3. Huge explosion at a fertilizer factory in Texas, probably killing 15 people, hurting scores, and decimating homes and buildings in the little town of West. 4. The wife of a former justice of the peace (I guess that’s similar to a sheriff), confesses her role to the killings of a District Attorney and his wife AND a deputy district attorney, ending a nationally publicized man-hunt. Her husband had been convicted of stealing public property, and he was the trigger-man. Her bail was set at $10 million. 5. A 45-yr old Elvis impersonator with paranoia and delusions of government gets arrested for sending ricin-laced letters to the President and a US senator. The mail did not make it to the US Capitol building.
Here is an explanation of ricin’s effects on the human body published in the USA Today. It’s not a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ such as anthrax, though .. and handling a ricin-tainted letter is unlikely to be a lethal dose to the recipient.
Illustration of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment from the book ‘Paradoxes – The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics’ by Jim al-Kalili.
I bought a book this weekend, called ‘Paradox – The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics (byJim al-Khalili)’. One of the ‘paradoxes’ is the famous thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, devised in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of an interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects, resulting in a contradiction with common sense. In a nutshell : the cat’s destiny is subject to a completely random event (the decay of atoms). The observer does not know if the cat is dead or alive before he opens the box and looks. Therefore the state of the cat is ‘dead and alive at the same time’ : exactly what quantum mechanics says the state of sub-atomic particles are. They exist and they do not. They are here – and there – at the same time. Whoah.
My favorite Afrikaans poet happened to write a poem about the cat as well, using it as a metaphor for loss and for life and death. I also came up with a rough translation to English – even though one can argue that poems cannot (and therefore should not) be translated.
Schrödinger se kat
† Gunar, 1 Junie 2003
Johann de Lange
1
In die nanag het ek opgeskrik
& meteens geweet jy’s dood:
eindelik met die heelal kiets,
my ligvoetse geesgenoot.
Volgens wette van die wetenskap
verdwyn jy in geen vergetelgat,
maar is gelyktydig hiér én weg:
’n opperste kwantumkat.
Schrödinger was reg: verseël
in geheue se tydlose kis –
oë soos nuutgemunte pennings –
bly jou uiteinde helend onbeslis.
2
Hoe om oor verlies te skryf:
die regte woord te soek
vir iets wat my onverwoord-
baar klink. Ek stuit steeds
stom voor jou vertrek:
grepe en momente sal
moet deug vir tyd en wyl.
Uit hierdie penpunt huil
vanaand net gitswart ink.
Schrödinger’s Cat (my own rough translation to English)
† Gunar, 1 June 2003
Johann de Lange
1
In the after-night I frightened up
& at once knew you’re dead:
at last with the universe as one,
my light-footed mate.
Subject to the laws of science
you disappear in no oblivious hole,
but is at the same time here and gone:
an utter quantum cat.
Schrödinger was right: sealed
in memory’s timeless chest –
eyes as newly minted pennies –
your end stays healingly undefined.
2
How to write about loss:
to search for the right word
for something that sounds me un-
wordable. I still stop dead
mute at your departure:
bytes and moments will have to
make do for now and longer.
Out of this pen’s nib weeps
just pitch black ink tonight.
It was a dark Monday here in the USA with the events that unfolded in Boston. There was blanket coverage on the major networks all evening following the bomb explosions at the finish line of the Boston marathon today. At this point it seems any person or group could be responsible. Commentators today mentioned ‘that we live in a 9/11 world now’ several times .. but others pointed out that we have had these kinds of attacks from home-grown terrorists/ extremists as far back as 1995 with the Oklahoma City bombing, and in 1996 with the Atlanta Olympics bombing.
Here’s an aerial view of the locations of the bomb blasts at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, from the on-line edition of the USA Today.
It’s tax day on Monday April 15. US Federal Income taxes for 2012 are due OR the tax payer has to pay an estimated tax and file a 6-month extension request. Check out the nice graphic design from the Wall Street Journal with all the numbers that come with a really big country such as the USA. We ‘celebrate’ (cry in our beer?) a 100 years of paying Federal Taxes to Uncle Sam this year. There are about 7,000 millionaires that didn’t pay any income taxes in 2011 and for the rest the percentage of Adjusted Gross Income paid is less than 12%. If you earn a nice salary, there no getting away and you could easily pay 20% or more. I think millionaires should pay a little more, and I also wonder if it’s a good thing that 46.4% of households pay no federal income tax at all. (It’s complicated : 22% of them are retirees, and the ‘Earned Income Tax Credit’ brings the taxes due by many families to zero).
It was a turbulent weather day here in central Puget Sound with thunderstorms and hail. Heavy snow also fell near Snoqualmie Pass (53 miles east of Seattle on I-90). This mountain pass saw two avalanches as a result. In the one, a 12-person snow-shoeing party got hit, but all were accounted for without serious injuries by end of day Saturday. In the other avalanche three experienced hikers were carried more than 1,200 feet. By Saturday night one still had not been found, with hopes now dimming that he is still alive.
The view from my front door late Saturday afternoon .. but it’s fine hail, not snow.
Google has just announced Austin, Texas is the second city (after Kansas City) to get a Google Fiber network. Google Fiber is some 100 times faster than typical broadband access in the USA. The project is demonstrating that cable companies are too stingy or too greedy to improve their infrastructure. With a gigabit connection, downloads are instantaneous, and there is no buffering of HD video for education (or entertainment), and the much-touted cloud services will run smoothly.
I wanted to post this around April Fools Day : Sergey Brin’s Tesla that was given quite a (Batman motif) makeover by his co-workers. Apparently the pink is not permanent and can be removed !
Here’s 14-year old (!) Tianlang Guan from Guangzhou, China making Augusta Masters history as the youngest player to start. He finished Thursday with a 75 (he was handed an one-stroke penalty for slow play). He is right at the mark for making the cut after Friday (when the field of players is reduced for the last two days of play on Saturday and Sunday). CBS sports has done a great job with the website for the Masters (at www.cbssports.com/masterslive). The webcast is sprinkled with commercials, of course, and one does needs a fast internet connection.
14-year old Tianlang Guan at the 11th hole on the first day of play at the Masters.
Is this a missile launcher? No, a vacuum truck. And it may not look like it – but boy, when they start up this machine, it makes A LOT OF NOISE ! (That house behind it looks a little like the south portico of the White House, does it not?).
Sometimes I cannot tell if a noise near my house comes from the back alley or from the street in front of the house. So when it sounded like a Boeing airplane was about to take off from right in front of my house, I had to go outside to check out the source of all the commotion. It was a vacuum truck, apparently cleaning out a blockage in the water drain (water main?) on the sidewalk.
