The Bleeding Edge

We've been watching, not participating in, one of the technologies that's on the verge of exploding into public consciousness. 3-D printers priced in the range of $2,000-$3,000 have hit the market. These devices enable individuals to create products cheaply and quickly without sending the design to a fabrication facility. One example:

Many custom dental fittings are now 3-D printed—like the series of mouth guards, each slightly different from the last, that are used to change tooth alignment over months. After a dental technician scans the current position of the teeth, all positions intermediate to the desired end point are modeled by software and then printed out in plastic. Also, if you’re lucky enough to have a dentist who can replace a crown in a single sitting, it’s because models are 3-D printed and then the replacement teeth are milled right there in the office.

(SJMN graphic)

Another example, but potentially much more disruptive [bold added]:

Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student, has made it a personal crusade to use the technology for firearms. He aims to produce and publish online a completely printable plastic gun and then adapt the design for use on printers that are getting smaller and less expensive all the time.

Current gun laws ("the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 says you don't need a license to make a firearm for personal use") are completely inadequate to address a world of downloadable firearms. Imagine also a world of downloadable and customizable food, clothes, and household products, in other words a version-1 Star Trek replicator in every home. The disruption continues. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Sorry, Bambi

Rancho San Antonio Park, Los Altos

Our impressions about nature are shaped at an early age. For city dwellers who have no connection or experience with hunting, it's hard to shake the idyllic image of Bambi. Wild animals are friendly, anthropomorphized beings, and the placid creatures that are seen in zoos do nothing to contradict that childhood conception.

We whose daily existence is lived far from the forest, i.e, urbanites and suburbanites, dream of Walden though few would actually live there.

Cougar near San Jose (SJMN photo)

The deer that are encountered in suburban parks know from experience that they have nothing to fear from humans. However, other animals that have begun to appear near human habitation are not so friendly.

The mountain lion (cougar):

Chris Wilmers, a mountain lion expert at UC Santa Cruz, has radio-collared 33 lions since 2008 between Big Basin Redwoods State Park and Mount Madonna County Park near Gilroy. He estimated that 50 to 100 lions live in the Santa Cruz Mountains.....The lion photographed weighs more than 100 pounds. Wilmers said it is a male from 4- to 10-years-old, and it looks healthy.

The feral pig:

Twenty-five years ago, spotty wild pig pockets were found in fewer than 20 different states. Now, they’re in 47 states [including California], with Florida, Texas, and a few others approaching crisis levels.

Wild pigs destroy the landscape and breed incessantly. Most alarmingly, they're very intelligent.

Pigs have been known to scope out traps for days before sending in the group's lowest ranking members to test for danger. And if a trap isn't built just right, the pigs will find a way out, either by climbing over each other or squeezing under the fencing.....feral pigs are quite elusive. Rarely seen during the day, they have learned to avoid being taken down by rifles or suckered into traps. [snip]

pigs have learned to break the floats in stock tanks to keep water flowing for their mud baths.

A single cat can take down a pig, but the latter have the smarts and the numbers. Despite what stock market experts say, the triumph of the pigs looks inevitable. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Finding Their Place

Migrant Mother, Library of Congress Collection

Today's CBS Sunday Morning runs a piece on how the Library of Congress is adapting to the digital age. Among the millions of documents it could have selected, CBS included the 1936 photo Migrant Mother, described by the Library as "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."

42 years later, Florence Thompson was identified as the woman in the photo. Her difficult existence was captured in this Depression-era photo that depicted the face of "a 32-year-old parent who looks 50."

She and her family survived the Depression and the War and eventually settled in the farming community of Modesto. I was happy to hear how her story turned out. The Oklahoma migrants that John Steinbeck wrote about had very bleak prospects at the end of his Pulitzer-prize winning novel, but I like to think that they, too, managed to find their place in the golden land that was 20th-century California.

Florence Thompson (1903-1983) in 1979.

Parabolic Move Upward

Steph Curry meets some fans in Burlingame in 2012

After their All-Star forward David Lee suffered a season-ending injury, the Golden State Warriors' chance of upsetting the Denver Nuggets in the NBA playoffs went from slim to none, said the experts.

No one told Stephen Curry and the other members of the team, which now leads the Nuggets 2-1 in the best-of-seven series. 25-year-old Steph Curry is torching the opposition despite playing on a badly sprained ankle. Some have called him the best shooter in the league, on track to become the best shooter in NBA history (!). Wow, all that praise for a guy who's never been an All-Star or whose team has been out of the playoffs for six years.

Even if the Warriors make it past the Nuggets, it's highly unlikely that they can defeat more experienced and powerful Western Conference teams like the Spurs, Clippers, and Thunder. But it will be fun to watch them try, and for the first time in a long time Warriors fans are already looking forward to a bright future. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Perspectives on Unemployment

The Wall Street Journal:

Just 88,000 jobs were created last month, far below February's 268,000 gain. The unemployment rate, derived from a separate survey, dropped to a four-year low of 7.6%. But the decline was prompted by nearly a half-million workers leaving the job market, not job growth.

The Economist:

UNEMPLOYMENT in the euro area reached a record high in early 2013. According to Eurostat, the European Commission's statistical service, unemployment in the 17 member states stood at 12% in February (and in January after a revision), the highest in the euro area's history.

David Letterman:

Yesterday [was] take-your-son-or-daughter-to-work day. You know, that's how we got Kim Jong-Un!

You know, for a lot of people it's take-your-son-or-daughter-where-you-used-to work.

And in China, kids take their parents to work!

The business pubs make you think, but David Letterman makes me laugh. Right now I'd rather laugh.

Plastic Rapped

At last week's dinner the kitchen volunteer covered the vegetables with plastic wrap before she put it in the microwave oven.

"Are you sure that's okay? I always use waxed paper or parchment," I interrupted helpfully. She pointed to the "microwave safe" label that I hadn't seen on the box. Sheepishly, I nodded assent. Being perceived as a busybody is a necessary price when one is at least partially responsible for the welfare of others.

Which raises the question anyway---just how dangerous is heated plastic when preparing food? (I learned to avoid using plastic wrap and plastic containers before today's young adults were born. Perhaps that rule no longer applies.) Per Tuesday's WSJ:

Plastic is ubiquitous but there are two chemicals in it to watch out for when it comes to what your body ingests.

Phthalates, the chemicals that make a PVC container flexible, .....can leach into food, resulting in hormone imbalances and birth defects—although no one knows at what level those effects are triggered. [snip]

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is a potentially worse offender. Once tested for possible use as an estrogen replacement, BPA was found to be of better use in the mass production of polycarbonate plastic. It's used in everything from the lining of metal soup cans to receipt paper. The FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles in July 2012, because of growing consumer concerns over its link to developmental delays.

One big no-no:

reheating foods heavy in cream and butter in plastic is always a bad idea. "Fatty foods absorb more of these harmful chemicals when heated," [Dr. Rolf Halden of Arizona State University] says.

Despite assurances that plastics are now safe to be used in cooking, we'll be taking a few extra seconds to pour the leftovers into a glass or ceramic bowl and cover the same with parchment paper before reheating. Just because the wisdom is old doesn't mean it's not true. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Corpus from Corpses

I first came across the notion of a tontine (TON-teen) trust in an Agatha Christie murder mystery. The structure of a tontine ("an organization of individuals who enter into an agreement to pool sums of money or something of value other than money, permitting the last survivor of the group to take everything") was a magnet for mischief, as members received increasing shares of distributions---and ultimately the corpus itself--as other members died. Tontine arrangements are now outlawed in most jurisdictions.

Professor Moshe Milevsky suggests that it is time to resurrect tontines as a retirement planning device. Not only is it impossible to outlive the funds, a tontine is one of the rare investments whose returns are guaranteed to increase over time. The good professor is not blind to the drawbacks.

the objections include: moral hazard ("Do you want a bunch of old people running around killing each other?") regulatory concerns ("The insurance commissioner will never go for it.") and sale concerns ("People hate giving up principal. It wouldn't be profitable.")

He need not be so pessimistic about tontine's prospects. It's a fair bet that the financial wizards of Wall Street are transforming this 19th-century device to make it palatable to 21st-century suckers investors. After all, Ponzi schemes pop up every 20 years or so under different guises. There's a new generation to educate!

Apple: Dreams Die Hard

Over the past year Apple has fallen 27.51% while market averages have risen 10% or more.

There's no question that the past year has dissipated the aura of coolness that surrounded the ownership of Apple products or Apple stock. Last year's "new" product releases represented incremental improvements--some features were impressive, to be sure---but, alas, the revolutionary, industry-changing devices that were supposedly in the pipeline when Steve Jobs died appear to be a figment of the biographer's imagination.

Your humble observer is a long-time holder of AAPL and, like other investors, has been disturbed by the stock's 28% drop in price over the past year and 42%(!) fall from the $705 all-time high of last September. There are thousands of articles that have been written---and dozens since the 3/31/2013 quarterly earnings were released a few hours ago---about Apple's fall from grace, and I won't waste your time, dear reader, by rehashing points that have been made comprehensively and more eloquently elsewhere.

As for yours truly, it only took a few seconds to decide to hold on to my shares.

1) This quarter's dividend hike to $3.05 means that the stock is yielding 3% ($12.20 per year / $406 price per share), much higher than savings, money-market, or U.S. Treasury rates.

2) Of course the dividend is riskier than the aforementioned debt securities, but with a $145 billion cash balance (true, most of it is offshore, but it's still under Apple's control) the dividend is secure for years.

3) The dividend should appeal to the so-called "value" investors and/or "yield" investors, meaning the stock price has hit a bottom.

4) Underneath this hardened investor's carapace lurks the heart of the fanboy who hopes that there are shards of Steve's vision deep within Apple's labs. Yes, that may make me a bitter clinger, but the dividend makes the cost of holding on to the dream bearable, and dreams die hard. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

On Earth Day

....run your toes through the muck, breathe in the musk of decomposition, wallow in the rich soup of life.

Or perhaps you just want to look at pretty pictures of trees and flowers? To paraphrase noted philosopher C Brown: "I love the earth, it's dirt I can't stand."

Bags Be Gone

Tomorrow, Earth Day, is when plastic bags will disappear from checkout stands in Foster City and eleven other San Mateo County cities. Plastic bags, IMHO, are a marvelous invention: cheap, waterproof, lightweight, and strong. However, the argument that bags exact too-high-a-cost from the environment prevailed in council chambers, and beginning tomorrow we'll have to bring our own reusable containers or pay ten cents for each paper bag.

As compliant citizens we are careful to deposit all trash in their proper receptacles, but strict enforcement of litter laws wasn't good enough for antiplastic puritans. We'll now have to live with the higher probability of food-borne diseases from dirty recyclable bags and the inconvenience of spilt groceries, but at least we'll have the psychic benefit of pleasing the great goddess Gaia. SM County resident Rob Chapman complains:

What doesn't make sense is that there numerous eco friendly companies making biodegradable and/or compostable plastic bags that pose no harm to the environment. Yet, San Mateo Country has banned those as well, with no explanation. Furthermore, stores are required to charge 10 cents for bio-degradable recycled paper bags. This fee doesn't go to taxes. It doesn't go to any environmental program. It goes directly to the stores. Furthermore, for those of us that rely on public transit, attempting to carry 4 or 5 paper bags of groceries on a bus and then carry those same bags from the bus stop to our home is a major issue. What if it's raining. Are we supposed to carry a bunch of re-usable bags everywhere we go just in case we decide to go shopping. The above mentioned bio-degradable plastic bags, which as I mention have also been banned without explanation, would eliminate this problem, as they are just as strong and sturdy as the current (now banned) plastic bags. The bag ban is flawed and was approved by those who don't have to deal with its repercussions.

Sorry, Rob, to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs, which in your case will be all over the sidewalk.

Hopeful

The road curves around the bend, and the destination is unclear. At times we long to go back; we did not appreciate the beauty of the path we had walked or the companions who walked with us.

Ahead lies mystery. Is beauty there as well? Are there obstacles that will prove too daunting? Will we see our companions again? We don't know, of course, but we are hopeful. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Added to the Mix

The Boston Marathon bombings have sucked up the media oxygen this week. The explosions, the victims, the mystery of who was responsible, the citywide lockdown, the release of photos and identification of the perpetrators, the chase, the shootouts, and the final manhunt took turns being the lede over a dramatic five days.

Stories that took a back seat:

1) the West Texas explosion, which had more fatalities (14 so far) than the Marathon bombings; while the cause of that tragedy is officially unknown, the public and media appear to have concluded that it was a horrible accident perhaps exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols.

2) the gun control bill; it had weighty Constitutional matters at stake, but the motivations of the important players and the major talking points have been known for years.

But back to Boston: the Tsarnaev brothers fit no one's standard model of terrorists, whether they be foreign jihadists, native white supremacists, or solo sociopaths.

But should we think of the Tsarnaevs as a threat that was “homegrown”? Or “foreign”? Again, they are both...

Were the Tsarnaevs “suicide bombers”? Yes and no. Getting into shooting matches with police while wearing IEDs would seem to suggest the brothers knew they were dead. But after they murdered a child and two young women and maimed scores more on Monday, the brothers appear to have gone back to business as usual...

Lastly, were the Tsarnaevs ideologues, evil, or “just nuts”? This might be the most complicated question. As with all the others, the best answer again is “all of the above.”

The discomfiture of terrorism experts was matched by the questioning of new-media enthusiasm for crowdsourcing as a great leap forward in information gathering. On Wednesday night this humble, impatient observer turned off the TV and began following Twitter, which not only named the suspects but delved into their background and motivations. The only trouble is, Twitter said one of the bombers was a missing Brown University student and was completely wrong.

While we have a strong appreciation for the scientists, mathematicians, analysts, researchers, and public safety experts who are advancing knowledge in ways that we barely fathom, the Marathon bombings show that we should accept their assurances with skepticism. When it comes to our safety and that of our families, a healthy dose of plain old common sense should be added to the mix. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

[Update: The world is a dynamic place. And reality throws curve balls at us all the time. In the end the world is what it is whatever government and media say.]

Sad, But Inevitable

Lotta's Fountain on the 100th anniversary
of the 1906 earthquake

Although a few remain, no survivors of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 were able to attend the commemoration marking its 107th anniversary [bold added]:

There are at least three known 1906 quake survivors, and one of them, 107-year-old Winnie Hook of San Jose, was scheduled to show up Thursday morning. But at the last minute, it was decided she was too fragile to travel to the city, said event organizer Lee Houskeeper.

Fellow survivor 107-year-old Bill Del Monte of Greenbrae rode in a pre-celebration parade Wednesday, but couldn't muster the energy for Thursday.

The prospect that last year's fete - when Hook was present to call the celebration "awesome" - may have been the final one to host a witness to a defining moment in Bay Area history hung in the air.

Because of a bomb threat, this year's ceremony was moved to Union Square. The ability of a few people to disrupt entire cities is a sad fact of modern life. In the face of adversity we would do well to recall the deeds of our ancestors:

Yet, within the span of ten years the people had rebuilt San Francisco to the point where it could host the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915.

One domed building constructed during that era is testimony to the optimistic spirit of that age and constitutes one of the City’s famous landmarks.

In Palo Alto to the south, the first president of a fledgling university surveyed the wreckage and declined a post at the Smithsonian: "I am sure that my place is here”. [Update: today it just may be the number one university in the United States.]

A young San Mateo banker set up a makeshift office on the wharf and made loans based on a handshake; he later introduced branch banking to California and built one of the largest banks in the world.

Peanuts to China

Georgia peanut farm (WSJ photo)

Our fondness for peanuts ended abruptly when one of us developed a nut allergy. (The problem is severe enough to have required two emergency room visits in the past ten years.) At restaurants we're always inquiring about whether this salad or that dessert includes nuts.

The large chains are very informed about the problem, but we've found that small independent restaurants are sometimes not as careful. We have encountered "nut-free" dishes that were contaminated by utensils used throughout the kitchen. Another common error is overlooking the use of peanut oil in deep-frying, especially in Chinese restaurants. However, it was probably the consumption of roasted peanuts, including peanut butter, that led to the allergy.

Per the National Institutes of Health:

The methods of frying or boiling peanuts, as practiced in China, appear to reduce the allergenicity of peanuts compared with the method of dry roasting practiced widely in the United States. Roasting uses higher temperatures that apparently increase the allergenic property of peanut proteins and may help explain the difference in prevalence of peanut allergy observed in the 2 countries.

A record U.S. peanut crop has resulted in a steep price drop. Buyers from China are flocking to Georgia:

A stream of Chinese nationals began arriving in the peanut-farming region last winter, causing a frenzy in a $4 billion U.S. industry. With six-figure checks in hand, the Chinese are expected to scoop up 300,000 tons of peanuts this year—half of expected U.S. exports.

The influx of Chinese means Georgia's peanut-shelling companies have been on hiring sprees to staff up factories that are running 24 hours a day, some seven days a week, to keep up. There aren't enough trucks to ship all the peanuts to the port in Savannah, where containers sit full waiting for weeks to get onto vessels for Asia. U.S. exports are expected to double over last year.

China's appetite comes from a combination of cheap prices in the U.S. after a record crop last year—up 84% over 2011—and ravenous demand in China for peanut oil.

It's encouraging to read about an American commodity that the Chinese want to buy and all the jobs that are being created in Georgia. We'll visit China again soon to sample its sightseeing and culinary delights. We'll just have to remember to pack our EpiPen.

Just Before Dinner

Alma asked if I could accompany her outside to play with soap bubbles. Volunteers at Home and Hope are supposed to serve in other capacities besides providing basic food and lodging, so I gave her a smile (she was too young to notice that it was fake) and said, "Sure!"

Soon she and her baby sister Sheylia had me chasing bubbles all over the parking lot. It was a breezy day, so I didn't get all of them. Both girls laughed at my flailing and cheerfully proclaimed that I had "lost" according to rules that are still mysterious to me.

I evinced a sad expression. It was fake, too. © 2013 Stephen Yuen