The video is short — just 19 seconds — and not particularly compelling. A viewer would be forgiven for clicking away before it ends.
The grainy footage, uploaded on April 23, 2005, of a man standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo — “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants” — does not look like the sort of thing that would touch off a video revolution.
And yet, two decades after that inauspicious start, YouTube is now a cornerstone of the media ecosystem. It’s where people go for music videos and four-hour-long hotel reviews. It is a platform for rising stars and conspiracy theorists. It’s a repository for vintage commercials and 10 hours of ambient noise. It has disrupted traditional television and given rise to a world of video creators who make content catering to every imaginable niche interest.
-Amanda Holpuch writing for the New York Times
Text by the New York Times and video still image from YouTube. Says the narrator, Jawed: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s cool”.
Here’s the new Tesla Model Y, a pearl white one that I spotted on the Denny Way overpass over I-5 today.
I was on the sidewalk and I should have swung around to take a picture of the rear end of the vehicle as well— but I didn’t.
Tesla’s website says these are ‘Available Today’. It will set you back $50,630 ($43,130 if you are eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles).
Meanwhile, Tesla’s website in China no longer offers the Model S and Model X (imports from the USA), after Beijing raised tariffs on U.S. imports in response to President Trump’s levies against the country.
The Model S and Model X are expensive cars and not big sellers in China, though. Even so— China’s tariffs on US goods are now at 125%*, after President Donald Trump’s decision to hike duties on Chinese goods to 145%.
*Observers say China does not need to raise tariffs any higher than this. This is effectively an embargo against imports from America.
Railway parcel stamps were used in South Africa for many decades: in the four colonies before they became the Union of South Africa in 1910, and all the way through to the early 1980s. (By the mid-1980s, commercial courier services had stepped into the parcel delivery market).
These stamps were used to record the cost of the conveyance of a letter or parcel by rail. They are only documented in specialized stamp catalogues and information about them is hard to find online. I thought I should see what the AI chatbot from Chat GPT could help me with.
The results were interesting, and shows that one should not just accept results presented by Chat GPT as fact.
Let’s start with a scan of a railway parcel stamp that I submitted to Chat GPT, and go from there.
Impressive, all of the information provided by the AI chat bot, just by looking at the scan of the stamp. So far so good.So now! I thought: let’s explicitly ask about the abbreviations overprinted onto the stamps— abbreviations for the railway station name*, at which the package was accepted and paid for. Chat GPT does come up with the railway station names (above) for the abbreviations that I had submitted, but there is a problem .. *This was a test for Chat GPT, or for confirming what knew for most of the abbreviations already. It took a lot of legwork to arrive at the railway station names for the abbreviations. For example, one can look at railway station maps and name lists, or look at the cancellation marks on the stamp (which could be extremely faint, and offer only tantalizing clues as to the railway station name since only a few letters or parts of letters would be visible on the stamp).Here I am chiding the Chat GPT bot, and providing the information that I had arrived at. The chatbot is eating a little humble pie, apologizing for presenting the first run of results with such confidence and not indicating that some of the first results were pure speculation on its part.
I also attempted to have Chat GPT read and list all the station names from this high-resolution scan of a 1900s hand-drawn map of railway lines and station names, but it could not do it. (Said the text was too small and not legible).Part of another map of the railway station infrastructure in South Africa (in the 1920s).Even modern maps and diagrams of the South African railway network are hard to come by, but I did find schematics like these. The problem is that many of the smaller railway stations from the 1970s and 1980s had been closed down, and do not even appear on these newer maps.This is a railway parcel stamp with the abbreviation BO that took me several hours to decipher. The key is the upside down cancellation in purple ink, offering clues to the railway station name at the very edges of the stamp. I am sure the letters stand for BRANDFORT, a railway station for a tiny little town in the Free State. The train station is no longer in use.Here is my collection of South African railway parcel stamps, so far.
Here are a few (very ordinary) pictures of Westlake station in downtown Seattle.
I was waiting for the northbound train bound for Capitol Hill.
The southbound train bound for the airport and Angle Lake arrived first.
Then just a few minutes later, another single southbound train car arrived.
It stopped, but it seemed that passengers were not allowed to board.
Then as that car departed, my northbound train was just arriving.
Here’s a tangerine Tesla Model 3 from the Whole Foods parking lot. I love the giraffe in the space helmet.
100% ELECTRIC, ZERO EMISSIONS, says the lettering on the back of the car.
This is a 2024/ 2025 Tesla Model 3— an upgrade to the original Model 3, and which has been available for a little over a year now. There is a new Model Y as well, codename ‘Juniper’, for which deliveries are imminent (available March 2025, says Tesla’s website). Cybertrucks are still a very rare sight here on the streets as well.
It was time to take my nifty blue car to the Brown Bear carwash today.
I bought the car in 2021, but now, in 2025, I see that some people like to call my car a swasticar.
(Why? On Jan. 20, while speaking at a rally celebrating U.S. president Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Tesla CEO Elon Musk twice made a salute interpreted by some as a Nazi or the fascist Roman salute.
As a result, flyers in San Francisco, and memes on X— by the so-called Tesla Takedown movement— now refer to Teslas as swasticars.)
Not a welcome situation for Tesla owners. Really not welcome at all— and as I was driving to the car wash, I told myself to just flatly ignore anyone yelling at me, or showing me a middle finger.
At Brown Bear Carwash off Leary Way in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. The wash went without a hitch, and nobody yelled at me. I had just dried the carwash droplets from the car though, when it started raining. No sweat. Not a problem.
I spotted this eye-catching powder blue Ford Bronco Sport on my walk today.
It’s a fossil-fuel vehicle, but it made me wonder how the sales numbers of Ford’s all-electric* F-150 Lightning trucks are looking.
The answer: not great.
According to Google Search Labs | AI Overview: “As of the third quarter of 2024, Ford has sold 22,807 F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks. This marks a significant increase from the same period in 2023, when 12,260 Lightnings were sold. However, demand remains lower than expected, and Ford has temporarily paused production.”
*Ford also offers a hybrid truck. According to the company, “the F-150 PowerBoost Hybrid is the best-selling full-size, full-hybrid pickup in the United States.” That statement certainly packs in the adjectives!
It’s a rainy weekend here in the city, with about 0.3 inches recorded as of 7 pm tonight. We may reach an inch or so by Monday morning.
Cybertruck spotting— one wrapped in dark gray, parked on 15th Avenue East here on Capitol Hill on Friday. “Does Elon Musk Still Care About Selling Cars? Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive. Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. .. Tesla sales fell 12 percent last year in California, which accounts for nearly one-third of the electric cars sold in the United States.” – Jack Ewing writing for the New York Times
Reporting from observer.com Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned the three states of matter that we know on Earth (solid, liquid, and gas) while talking about the quantum chip Majorana 1. There is a fourth one that is ubiquitous in the universe: plasma.
For a field that many have long considered decades away, quantum computing sure is getting a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley. Yesterday (Feb. 19), Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled a quantum chip known as Majorana 1, created with an entirely new state of matter that’s beyond solid, liquid and gas. “Most of us grew up learning there are three main types of matter that matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Today, that changed,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X yesterday. “We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.”
… Microsoft isn’t the only Big Tech company attempting to crack the quantum computing. Decades of research from companies like IBM, Intel and Google (GOOGL) has seemingly begun to pay off. Most recently, Google sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley when it unveiled a new quantum chip called Willow. In less than five minutes, the computer was able to perform a standard benchmark computation that would take today’s supercomputers 10 septillion years—a number that surpasses the age of the universe—to complete.
But not everyone is convinced that true breakthroughs are just around the corner. Tech leaders like Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang have raised red flags about the technology’s timeline. In January, Huang sent quantum stocks tumbling after declaring that “very useful quantum computers are still a few decades away.” Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg echoed these concerns a few days later while speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “My understanding is that’s still quite a ways off from being a very useful paradigm,” Zuckerberg said.
-Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writing on observer.com
Plasma is considered the fourth state of matter, following solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas where electrons are separated from the nuclei of atoms, creating a soup of positively and negatively charged particles.
Plasma is considered the most common state of matter in the universe, making up nearly all visible matter.
The Sun’s corona, solar wind, magnetospheres of planets, comet tails, and interstellar gas clouds are all composed of plasma.
[Source: Search Labs | AI Overview]
Scientists from Caltech have developed ‘a new type of matter,’ which they are calling polycatenated architected materials, or PAMs. This new matter doesn’t occur naturally, and uses chainmail-like design with entangled rings in place of fixed particles typically found in a crystalline structure.
[Source: Popular Mechanics, Feb. 4, 2025]
There are many other states of matter, some of which are listed below. – Superconductive material
Superconductivity is when matter is in a state with no electrical resistance – that is, its electrical conductivity is greatly increased. A superconducting material has a critical temperature below which this change happens; this point is usually close to absolute zero. – Bose-Einstein condensate
Bosons are a type of particle that include photons, gluons and the Higgs boson. When bosons are cooled to incredibly low temperatures at low density, they start to show quantum mechanical effects at large scales. – Time crystals
An ordinary crystalline solid has its molecules arranged in repeating patterns in space. The molecules of a time crystal, however, follow a repeating pattern in time. The particles are in constant motion, following the same repetitive movements without losing any energy.
[Source: sciencefocus.com, Feb. 4, 2022]
Here’s a quick example of how to use an AI app such as Chat GPT make easy pickings of grunt work.
I wanted to know what the total cost of a long list of items for sale on a scrollable web page, would add up to.
This web store sells stamps, and I have everything I am considering to buy in my Watchlist. Well, what does everything in my Watchlist add up to? I wondered. The web page does not provide a total number. (To illustrate, I just selected the first 6 items of the 40 on my Watchlist.) Step 1: Highlight everything on the web page and paste it into a text editor. I used Notepad on Windows. Step 2: Ask ChatGPT to look at the text, pick out the prices, and add them all up. My instruction to ChatGPT at the top says: “Find all the numbers in this block of text that have two decimal places and that are immediately preceded by the letter R*, and then add them up: ‘[and then I pasted the text from Notepad in here] *The currency, it stands for South African RandStep 3: Do a quick check if the instruction was good enough for ChatGPT, and voila! There is the result.
Tesla is famously owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who was once admired by liberals for helping to popularize the electric vehicle. But in the last few years — in particular since he purchased the social media platform Twitter (now X) in October 2022 — Musk has become something of a villain among the left. He’s often expressed conservative views and backed Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid last year.
And that’s put some Tesla owners in the Seattle area, where most people tend to vote Democrat, in an awkward position, especially since the car is so closely associated with Musk himself.
Even so, it doesn’t seem to have hurt Tesla ownership rates here — or if it has, it’s too soon to be reflected in the data. And there’s been a significant increase in Tesla households in the Seattle market over the past few years. For example, in Nielsen surveys conducted from December 2020 to April 2022, only around 22,400 Seattle-area households owned a Tesla.
(My note: by the end of 2024 that number had increased threefold, to 66,700).
– Seattle Times columnist Gene Balk
‘You can tell South Africa they can have Elon Musk back‘, quipped my neighbor, after I had told him of my recent trip to South Africa.’ Yeah, I know. Some days I think he can have my car back’, said I.
(.. but thinking afterwards: I really did not buy my Tesla because I was an Elon Musk fan. It’s an electric vehicle— with zero emissions, as a reminder— and a lot of fun to drive. So why should I not drive it?)
What is meant by overrepresented? From the report in the Seattle Times: In the Seattle market area, a projected 311,000 households had at least one Subaru. That pencils out to 16.8% of the 1.86 million households that had at least one vehicle. The nationwide Subaru ownership rate was just 7.8% of households. A projected 66,700 Seattle-area households had at least one Tesla, which represented 3.6% of local households. The national average was only 1.6%.
A perfin is a stamp that has a name or initials perforated into it.
The word “perfin” is short for “perforated initials” or “perforated insignia”.
Perfins are used to prevent theft and control how the stamp is used for mail.
How are perfins created?
Individuals, organizations, or government agencies add perfins to stamps after the production process.
The holes are punched into the stamp’s design to create a pattern.
Source: Google Search Labs/ AI Overview
These are the only perfins I have found so far (among the thousands of stamps I have amassed for my collection and for my philatelic ‘research’ ). The U.S. stamp bottom left is also pre-cancelled. Pre-cancelled stamps were used for mass-mailings, making it unnecessary for the post office to cancel them, and expediting their processing.
1961 First Definitive Issue (New Design), South Africa Issued Jan. 20, 1969 Perf. 13½x14 |Phosphor frame |Wmk. RSA tête-bêche SACC282 |1c |Rose-red & sepia |Coral Tree Flowers (Erythina lysistemon) Perfin initials “D.C.”
1982 Fourth Definitive Issue (Architecture), South Africa Issued Jul. 15, 1982 Perf. 14 |Design: A.H. Barrett |Engraving: Arthur Howard Barrett |Litho. |Phosphorized paper |No Wmk SACC524 |10c |Carmine brown |Pietermaritzburg Town Hall Perfin insignia “C C C” (or possibly “V V V”)
1923 United States of America (U.S. Presidents and prominent Americans) Issued Jan. 15, 1923 Perf. 11×10½ |No Wmk Scott 562 A165|10c |Orange |James Monroe (5th U.S. President) Perfin insignia “WFH” Pre-cancelled “Chicago IL” [Sources: stampworld, South African Colour Catalogue 2023-25, Scott 2003 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue Vol. 1]
There was mail today, with a new Year Of The Snake forever stamp on, issued by the US Postal Service.
2025 Lunar New Year—Year of the Snake Issued Jan. 14, 2025 Perf. 11 Serpentine Die-cut | Self-adhesive | Design: Camille Chew | Engraving: Banknote Corporation of America | Issued in sheets of 20 6376 FOREVER (73c) Multicolored | Lunar New Year – Year Of The Snake [Sources: stampworld.com, USPS]
Advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts rattled U.S. markets on Monday, with the threat of greater competition prompting a slide in shares of the biggest technology companies.
The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek has said it can match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies rely on. That’s prompted investors to rethink the heady valuations of companies like Nvidia, whose equipment powers the most advanced A.I. systems, as well as the enormous investments that companies like Alphabet, Meta and OpenAI are making to build their businesses.
On Monday, the S&P 500 index fell 1.5 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 3.1 percent. Nvidia was hit hard, plunging 16.9 percent and losing roughly $600 billion in market value. Falling tech stocks also dented market indexes in Europe and Japan.
-Jason Karaian and Joe Rennison writing for the New York Times
Laura Bratton writes for Yahoo Finance: Nvidia (NVDA) stock dropped nearly 17% Monday, leading a sell-off across chip stocks and the broader market after a new AI model from China’s DeepSeek raised questions about AI investment and the rise of more cost-efficient artificial intelligence agents. Nvidia’s decline shaved $589 billion off the AI chipmaker’s market cap, the largest single-day loss in stock market history. My comments: It is an eye-popping decline in market cap for the day, but this stock has rocketed up twentyfold (that would be 2,000 %) over the last five years— and then some. It was at $6 in Jan. 2020 and at $149.43 (let’s say $150) Jan 6, 2025.
Uh-oh.
I started playing one of the games that Neflix offers: Underwatermelon.
I like it. (It reminds me a little bit of Tetris from wayy-back when I first started working).
I hope I don’t get too addicted to it .. but what if I do?
A random sequence of little fruit (strawberry, plum, lemon, apple or orange) appears below, and you can move it from left to right before you let go. Two of the same fruit combine and make the bigger fruit, up to a watermelon (see the sequence on the left in the C-shaped line). The space will fill up if you don’t let the fruit combine, and if any fruit floats below the red line, it is GAME OVER. The levels of the game are indicated by Gate numbers. This is Gate 4 and I still have to earn 35 points (by combining fruit), before the gate will open up, and the fruit float up to a new gate. The nice thing about going to a new gate (a new level), is that the biggest fruit floats to the top quickly, collide and combine into one bigger fruit, and leave a little more space to work withe in the new gate.I did get a watermelon .. the watermelon is big and takes up a lot of space, but still less than two pineapples or four melons. I read online if you do get two watermelons, and you can make them collide, they will cancel each other out and disappear, leaving you with a lot of new space to work with.
I left my camera behind in my hotel room in Cape Town on Monday of last week. I had it picked up at the hotel, and shipped back to me.
(Thanks for the help, Chris!)
I think this was the last straw: this camera stays home next time I go on an overseas trip.
I need a light, compact travel camera that can go into my backpack.
Here it is, the big camera with a big, heavy lens on, to boot. (Not shown in the picture is the padded camera bag that the camera was shipped in, bubble-wrapped inside the bag. I checked the route that the camera took to get to me from Cape Town, and it looks like this: Picked up in Cape Town, South Africa. Arrived at DHL Sort Facility in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Arrived at DHL Sort Facility in Leipzig, Germany. Arrived at DHL Facility East Midlands, UK. Arrived at DHL Facility, London-Heathrow, UK. Arrived at DHL Sort Facility, Los Angeles Gateway, CA. Arrived at DHL Sort Facility, Seattle, WA. Landed on Willem’s porch. (Landed in my hands, that is. I had to sign for it).
Departure at Munich International Airport. We were bused out to the Airbus 350-900 sitting on the tarmac, so that we could clamber aboard with the stairs. Let me just stipulate that the guys wearing t-shirts may create the impression that we had summer weather out there. We did not— it was freezing!A last look at the fuselage before I step into the warm airplane.Making the turn onto the runway for take-off.Halfway into the 10-hour flight, and we are over the north of the giant slab of ice called Greenland.Somewhere over Canada, with about two hours to go to Seattle.Arrival at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. We were international arrivals, and so we walked across the skybridge to the baggage claim and passport control, which is where I stopped to take this picture. Our flight waited a little bit for our luggage, and then found it on the baggage claim carousel next to ours, for the flight from Frankfurt that arrived about the same time as ours. Then it was on to the Global Entry kiosk for me. There the was no line, and it took literally a few seconds for the face-recognition system to greenlight my entry into the United States. This way out, said an official, and that was it. So no passport stamp needed, no passport, no nothing. (Registering for Global Entry does cost $120 for a five-year membership.)
It started snowing at around 8 am this morning here in Munich, but it could not have been more than an inch an or so, from what I could tell.
I used the Line 19 streetcar again to get Hauptbahnhof (the main train station), and from there, ran out to Odeonsplatz and a comic book store on Fraunhoferstrasse.
The view from my hotel room (using my phone’s 5x zoom to zoom in on the Deutsche Bahn train maintenance station) at 8 this morning.Here comes the Line 18 streetcar, at Am Lok-schuppen station.At Sendlinger Tor station, I stepped off the streetcar and went underground to the U-bahn. (The sidewalk surfaces were treacherous with the snow and ice, and there were no pedestrian crossings to speak of. Then I realized that is the other use of any U-bahn station: it’s an under passage for pedestrians to get from one side of an intersection to the other).Here is Odeonsplatz, named for the former concert hall, the Odeon, on its northwestern side. The church is the Theatine Church of St. Cajetan and Adelaide (German: Theatinerkirche St. Kajetan und Adelheid)— a Roman Catholic church. It was consecrated 11 July, 1675.Taking a closer look at the heraldic elements in the center (the lions and the white-and-blue checkered pattern is taken from the coat of arms of Bavaria).Here is the nearby Hofgarten (Eng. ‘Courtyard garden’), established in 1613.Back inside the Sendlinger Tor U-bahn station. I love the giant white saucer-shaped light fixtures.This is a comic book store called Comic Company near Fraunhoferstrasse station. I bought used three comic books for all of Є8.40. More books to weigh down my luggage but hey, I was still 10+ pounds under the weight limit with both my suitcases when I checked them in at Cape Town.By the time I hopped off the Line 18 streetcar close to my hotel, the snow had started to melt.
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