Category: General

Monday marks the 93rd birthday of Nelson Mandela.    The United Nations today marked the second annual Nelson Mandela International Day with a series of public service events, exhibitions and film screenings in recognition of the former South African president’s contributions as a human rights defender, freedom fighter and peacemaker.    The Nelson Mandela Foundation decided last year to ask well-wishers and gift-givers from around the world not to send gifts, but instead, to take action in their local communities and do something to help someone in need, so that the world is changed for the better.

This cute picture is from Die Burger newspaper.    The dachshund is Dodger, and he (yes, he) takes care of Absalom the six-weeks old lion cub.    The lion cub was bullied and badly bitten by his litter mates at a lion breeding center and brought to this animal rescue farm in Potchefstroom.    The  cub will not stay too long, so that it can still go back and be returned to the wild with other lions.

(Late post).  There was so much talk Wednesday and Thursday on TV about Social Security apparently being part of the debt-ceiling-and-balance-the-budget negotiations that I had to dig up my two Social Security cards.  I got the first one when I arrived in the USA in 1995 – you cannot legally work and pay taxes without one.   It says ‘Valid for work only with INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services, now called Homeland Security) authorization.    Then I got the ‘permanent’ one when I became a US citizen in 2007.

Social Security is not out of money, but the contributor-beneficiary ratio was 40-1 when Social Security became law in 1935 after the Great Depression — and is 3-1 now.  And over the years the trend have been for people to retire earlier and live much longer.    So current projections show that in 2023,  total income and interest earned on assets will no longer cover expenditures for Social Security.   (In the mean time, I wondered : what happens with the excess money the system collects?  Well the Social Security Administration system buys US Treasury Bonds with its surpluses. Essentially, the government – in the form of the Social Security Administration – loans the surplus to itself).

What to do, to head off the shortfall ?  Some possible remedies are :

Raising the maximum taxable earning levels  (for 2011, the maximum taxable earnings amount for Social Security is $106,800.   The Social Security tax (OASDI) rate for wages paid in 2011 is 4.2 % for employees and 6.2 % for employers);

Increasing the retirement age;
Reducing cost of living adjustment (COLA);
Changing of the benefit formula.

Ouch.  All of them are painful !  I guess we all have to work harder – those of us that have jobs – and save more.    But hey, if you have enough money, please go on a shopping spree at the mall, go eat out lots and go the theater for a show every week !  Go !  : ).

We’re into the last half of 2011 .. amazing.   The sky is blue and the house behind mine used to be green, but is now getting painted blue – but a very different blue than the sky!  Which Crayola crayon color would that be, I thought?  I recalled a color called midnight blue, but checking out the Crayola color chart, it seems violet blue is closer.    (There is a full listing of the Crayola colors in an entry in Wikipedia).   The chart below was published by Stephen Von Worley on his blog named Data Pointed.    The person that created the chart for him (someone called ‘Velo’) posits from the years and the number of colors Crayola’s Law : the number of Crayola crayon colors doubles every 28 years! *

*A tongue-in-cheek reference to Moore’s Law which says the number of transistors which can be placed on a silicon chip inexpensively doubles approximately every two years.

This interesting ‘guide to splattered bugs’ is posted at some ’76’ gas stations here in Seattle.  (Thanks to Bryan for sending me the picture!).   ’76’ is a brand from Conoco-Philips oil company and is well represented here in Seattle.    Anyway, once you have identified your splattered bug, the guide will tell you the insect’s classification order as well.     Insects are classified into 29 orders in total.   The ladybug (top row on the right) actually belongs to the largest order, one with some 300,000 species of beetles, weevils and fireflies.

I got this picture of the streets in Athens from close Seattle friends that are there right now!   Why the riots?   Previous Greek governments (‘administrations’ as we call them in the USA) incurred massive budget deficits, and for a long time misrepresented how big the total debt outstanding was to foreign investors.    In Oct 2009 the new government revised the estimate of their 2009 deficit from 6.7% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to 12.7%.*    There’s more information in the Bloomberg Business week article.   Greece already got a loan of € 110 billion last year, and had hoped to increase its revenues after receiving the loan by 8.5%.   Instead it has fallen by 9.2% so far this year, no doubt because of decreased economic activity (including tourism).    So the government has no choice but to raise taxes and curtail its spending, which makes people used to paying lower taxes and getting jobs, pensions and social security types of payments from the government, very angry.

*In the USA our deficit is currently about 7% of GDP (rough numbers, $1 trillion deficit, $14 trillion GDP).    The national debt as of May 6, 2011, is $14.32 trillion.   The Federal debt ceiling needs to be raised, and soon.

My friends and I went to the Greenwood Car Show on Saturday (Greenwood is a neighborhood in Seattle).    Some 700 vintage cars were on display as well as a handful of the newest electric/ hybrid cars.    I picked just a few of my pictures and I’ll try my best to get the vintage cars correct from top to bottom.   Here goes :  1955 Nash, 1960s(?) Chevy Truck, Dodge Truck, 1958 Cadillac Eldorado, Volkswagen like the one my mom had, 1963 Mercedes-benz 300 SL Gullwing, 1939 Studebaker L5 Coupe-Express.    There was a lot of nostalgia going around .. as the one car website says ‘For those of us who can remember these cars, can we ever forget them?’.

The sight of some electric cars fast forwarded us to 2011.  The red Tesla Roadster Sport (see teslamotors.com and the Wikipedia entry for Tesla Roadster) has a base price of US$109,000 and is billed as the first highway-capable all-electric vehicle in serial productionavailable in the United States.   Construction of the car needs no rare-earth metals whatsoever and is based on the cheap and rugged alternating-current (AC) induction motor patented by Nikola Tesla; get this – back in 1888.  In the past the main problem with asynchronous induction motors was the difficulty of varying their speed, but the speed of these motors can now be controlled with modern semiconductors.

Finally, some pictures of a 2011 Chevy Volt with a white diamond tri-coat of paint.  It goes for US$42,000.  It has a Li-ion battery (8 year, 100,000 mile warranty) as well as a 1.4l internal combustion engine).   And of course it is loaded with electronics for audio, video and navigation.

On Friday night, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that give gay and lesbian couples the right to marry in the state of New York.   New York is the sixth state in the USA, but a state that is far bigger than the previous five.  Elsewhere, states have NO rights, limited rights or civil unions on the law books – see chart.     This creates all kinds of legal disconnects.  For example, last year a Texas court ruled that married gay couples (that moved there from out of state), cannot get a divorce in Texas.

And of course there were opponents of this New York legislation that spent millions of dollars to try to defeat it.  ‘We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization’,  the state’s Catholic bishops said in a joint statement released late Friday.  Well, is that a valid concern?   I really don’t think it is.

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.

Chinese tennis player Na Li is in the final of the French Open tournament – a big deal for China’s tennis fans. She will play against Francesca Schiavone of Italy in the final.

Na Li already made the front page of a regional newspaper after reaching the semi-final.

The other picture, after her semi-final win, is from the French Open website.

These evening pictures are of the Dameisha beach.    Some of the beach is being prepared for events (beach volley ball, I suspect) for the Universiade (international student Olympics) in August.   So don’t climbing over that fence !   Word is that with a holiday weekend coming up the incoming tide of beach-goers will be limited to 40,000.  .. that still means it will be packed, though.

Here is my best effort to look up the Chinese characters by using the English.

切莫qiè ​mò​  – you must not / please don’t…  / be sure not to / on no account (do it) 

攀爬  pān​ pá​    to climb 

And of course there are colorful idioms associated with climbing as well :

难于登天nán​ yú​ dēng ​tiān –  harder than climbing to heaven (idiom) 

爬山涉水pá​ shān​ shè​ shuǐ​ – to climb mountains and wade rivers (idiom); fig. to make a long and difficult journey 

缘木求鱼yuán ​mù​ qiú​ yú​     lit. climb a tree to catch a fish (idiom); fig. to attempt the impossible