Moscow Rules

Made it to the Holiday Inn Suchevsky (local partner recommendation) no problem, Sunday night in Moscow, beautiful evening 7:30 p.m. ... not sure I want to explore Moscow Metro on my first night, but we'll see what the neighborhood has to offer.

There's rich ... and then there's WEALTHY

Apple's board, led by sadly frail-looking chairman Steve Jobs, signaled its long-term confidence in Tim Cook as the company's new leader, disclosing in a regulatory filing that it's awarding the new CEO one million restricted stock units that will vest over the next decade. Apple shares closed at $383.53 Friday. From the SEC filing: 'In connection with Mr. Cook's appointment as Chief Executive Officer, the Board awarded Mr. Cook 1,000,000 restricted stock units. Fifty percent of the restricted stock units are scheduled to vest on each of August 24, 2016 and August 24, 2021, subject to Mr. Cook's continued employment with Apple through each such date.'"

Come on, China ...

Rhino horns? Really?

IPSWICH, England — The Ipswich Museum contains many alluring and potentially theft-worthy items, including a spectacular 2,000-year-old gold-leaf Egyptian death mask on loan from the British Museum and a rare Hawaiian cape featuring feathers from the extinct o’o bird. But when two thieves forced their way in after midnight on July 28, they were seeking something else entirely.

Never mind that their target, a large rhinoceros horn, was still attached to its owner, which had been standing blamelessly in the museum since 1907.

“They just snapped it off,” said Bryony Rudkin, the Ipswich Borough Council member in charge of culture. Grabbing a pair of additional horns (and the rhino skull they belonged to) from a shelf nearby, the thieves disappeared as quickly as they had come. “It was like ‘The Pink Panther,’ ” Ms. Rudkin said. “In and out.”

It might have seemed like a bizarre, anomalous incident, the act of someone with a perverse rhino fetish. But similar thefts, as many as 30 so far this year, have been reported in museums, galleries, antiques dealerships, auction houses and homes across Europe as criminals try to feed a growing demand in China and other Asian countries, where medicine made from ground rhino horns is believed to act as an aphrodisiac and to cure cancer and other diseases.

“I was quite surprised, I must admit,” said Ian Lawson, a detective in the art and antiques unit at the Metropolitan Police Service in London, describing his first realization that rhino-horn theft had become a serious law-enforcement issue. “It’s taken a bit of time for everyone to wake up to the fact that this is a cross-Europe offense, and that they will attack anywhere that has a rhino horn.”

9:30 Friday Morning

Is it just me, or does holding an umbrella up when the thunder is *immediately* after the lightning seem like a bad idea?

A little Bruce

Winterland 1978, from Wolfgang's Vault:

Listen to more Bruce Springsteen at Wolfgang's Vault.

Seafair 2011

I wasn't on Lake Washington this year, but the USN posted some nice pics from the show on its Facebook page:

Nummer Een

The Netherlands move up to being the top ranked national team in the world this week after Spain lost in a friendly to Italy.  Hup Holland Hup!

Big Cat Toys

Classic Billboard

On the drive into Sydney airport, Qantas ad for nonstop service to Dallas:

Kiwi firefighters remember 9/11 every year

Christchurch has its own disaster to recover from, but our friends in New Zealand still take time to remember the sacrifice of firefighters in NYC every year:

Next month, on September 11, Christchurch firefighter Steve Warner will do as he always does on that day.

He'll stop to remember his fellow firefighters in the United States, who died when they battled their way into New York's burning World Trade Center to rescue survivors from the terrorist attacks.

Warner says the death of 343 firefighters from the New York Fire Department is a tragedy that he and his colleagues still feel keenly.

Each year, the events of that terrible day nearly a decade ago are remembered at a ceremony at a Christchurch reserve. "After September 11, we approached the Americans and set up a firefighters' reserve," Warner says.

"We have a piece of steel girder [from the World Trade Centre] and it's been made into a sculpture."

Banished to the little boat

Excessive gas?

On The Beach

New bricked area is No Parking over the weekend so the street crew can finish on Monday ... reserved patio area for neighborhood on Singel canal!

Hope they are good at bailing

Even in a canal, that's not much freeboard.

"Wake Up, Time for a Sequel"

Word out of Hollywood is that Ridley Scott has signed on with Alcon Entertainment, holders of the rights to "Blade Runner," and will act as director in a sequel to his original film. Alcon's rights are only to make a prequel or sequel, but *not* a remake of the original classic.

Won't Get Fooled Again

Good column in the L.A. Times from Bill Plaschke about Michael Vick's recent interview for GQ.

"A lot of people got out of it after my situation, not because I went to prison but because it was sad for them to see me go through something so pointless, that could have been avoided," Vick told the magazine.

The only thing pointless, it seems, is continuing to think that Michael Vick’s renewal on the football field has led to a reinvention of his character. It hasn’t. It won’t. America needs to stop believing.

IBM Brains

Skynet takes another step forward ...

IBM has developed a microprocessor which it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain.

The system is capable of "rewiring" its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work.

Researchers believe that that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn.

Cognitive computers may eventually be used for understanding human behaviour as well as environmental monitoring.

Dharmendra Modha, IBM's project leader, explained that they were trying to recreate aspects of the mind such as emotion, perception, sensation and cognition by "reverse engineering the brain."

Parks Near Me

Around Amsterdam-West the last couple days ...

Party Boats Set Sail

Any fair evening in summer means the party boats are loading up and heading out after work.  Wednesday evening:

Anne Hathaway Songs You Never Pictured

Love Anne ...

Size Matters

In this case, apparently ...

Looking down on a meteor

Perseid meteor from the ISS:

Citi-brutes?

TANGERANG, Indonesia — Irzen Octa, a down-on-his-luck Indonesian businessman, suffered a torment familiar to millions of Americans struggling with debts racked up in better times: He feared losing his home.

In the end, he managed to keep the ramshackle two-story house where he and his wife raised their two now-teenage daughters. Instead, Octa, pursued by Citibank over a $5,700 debt on his platinum credit card, lost his life.

The 50-year-old businessman, invited to a Citibank office in Jakarta in late March, collapsed in a tiny room set aside by the U.S. bank for questioning of deadbeat debtors. He died shortly afterward — a casualty of a “harsh interrogation,” said Jakarta police spokesman Baharudin Djafar.

Citibank, Indonesia’s biggest foreign bank, said its internal investigation found no evidence of physical violence.

The tragedy — which came just days after police arrested a Citibank executive in a separate scandal over swindled clients — has tarnished the image of an American icon in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. It also cast a spotlight on a dark corner of international banking — the outsourcing of debt collection to unregulated agents in booming but unruly emerging markets.

The interview room where Octa met Citibank’s debt agents was sealed with yellow tape; police declared it a crime scene. Five people, none of them Citibank employees, have been arrested on suspicion of “group violence” and “mistreatment resulting in death.”

The Indonesian parliament and media have howled in protest at the arm’s-length use of outside debt collectors.

Tigor Siahaan, Citibank’s new boss in Indonesia, said the bank does not “condone, encourage or practice violence, or even harsh language.” Octa, he added, “could have died of natural causes.”

The dead man’s widow blames the bank. “He went into that room in good faith and good health — and ended up dead,” said Esi Ronaldi, who is suing Citibank for $350 million in damages.

Washington Post

7:30 Monday morning

Sidewalk work. That pile of bricks is in front of my front door.

In Flight Entertainment

Cathay Pacific may delay a global marketing campaign, after photographs of crew members allegedly engaging in a sexual act were published.

The airline was due to launch the campaign in September.

Its tagline was "meet the team who go the extra mile to make you feel special".

"We are thinking of holding the campaign back for a little while because the timing doesn't suit us at the moment," a spokeswoman said.

Rankings mean nothing

Still, nice to see that Forbes, in ranking America's educational institutions, made my alma mater Haverford College No. 7 overall, No. 4 in undergraduate programs.

Saving Yvonne

Animal rights activists in Germany have brought in a bull to try to recapture a runaway cow facing a hunter's bullet.

Yvonne has been roaming free in the Bavarian forest since escaping from a farm near the town of Muhldorf in May.

However, after she bolted in front of a police car, officials say she poses a danger to traffic and hunters have permission to shoot her.

Yvonne's supporters hope the appeal of Ernst the breeding bull will let them get hold of her before the hunters do.

"We'll keep trying until we're successful," a spokeswoman from the the Gut Aiderbichl Animal Sanctuary said.

The activists have been using an infrared camera to find the six-year-old dairy cow, who has been lying low during the day and grazing at night, like a deer.
Previous attempts at luring Yvonne back to captivity include bringing in Waltraud - a cow with whom she was "best friends" - as well as her own calf.

But she has only watched from a distance before running away again. Now they hope some sex appeal from Ernst may give the story a happy ending.

The cow's plight has become a popular topic in German newspapers and TV.
She has been dubbed "the cow that wants to be a deer" and "the heroine of the summer".

German newspaper Bild is offering a reward of 10,000 euros (£8,700) to anyone who can save Yvonne.

Parkour Dog

Five-O

Friday night downtown

To Westerpark

We got a brief sunbreak at 4:30 so I headed out for my exercise walk, since I've done basically nothing since coming hold with a cold on Monday morning, thought I'd try to help sweat it out.  The route from my apartment:

Up this street

Over that bridge and up that street

Over another bridge

Across that intersection

Westerpark

Very dog-friendly park, there's a big off-leash area

The dirt path leads to the off-leash section

Miles of trail through wetlands

I think I saw this in 'Logan's Run'

Little guy in red said 'hi' and then started following me, making mom retrieve him

Various waterfowl

On the way back home

Too Fast to Follow

The US military lost contact with an unmanned hypersonic test aircraft shortly after its launch, defence officials have said.

The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) - capable of reaching any target in the world in less than an hour - began a test flight from atop a rocket on Thursday.

Contact was also lost with a similar craft during the first mission.

The HTV-2 is designed to travel at 13,000mph (21,000km/h).

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is funding the HTV-2 programme and overseeing the tests, said the small craft was capable of reaching speeds of Mach 20.

The aircraft took off using a Minotaur IV rocket from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California early on Thursday.

Engineers programmed the HTV-2 to launch from the edge of space, separate from its rocket and crash into the ocean.

No information was available on whether the goals of the mission were achieved.

It's not sharks with frickin' laser beams, but ...

... pretty cool regardless:

Modern militaries depend on fuel. Nearly 80 percent of the supplies delivered to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan consist of fuel, and it's no surprise that those military convoys are frequently the targets of insurgents.

"Do you know how many people have died delivering gasoline?" said Tom Nugent, president and co-founder of LaserMotive, a Kent, Wash.-based company looking to replace fossil fuels with laser power.

The answer to Nugent's question? Nearly 1,000 soldiers in the last decade. And that's why Nugent wants to drastically reduce the need for delivering fossil fuels. His company's approach could save lives.

It starts with a machine able to emit a beam of laser light. The beam is different from the lasers used in pointers and industrial applications. It's wide -- about 8 inches wide as it leaves the transmitter -- and then spreads wider as it travels. The beam emitter is located at a ground-based unit and operated by a person, who could control it from the same location or remotely from an entirely different place altogether.

The operator uses the machine to fire the laser beam at a photovoltaic collector located on an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), small plane or helicopter. The current range of the system is about a kilometer.

By the time the beam reaches the collector on board the UAV, it's still about 10 times as intense as sunlight, although human eyes can't see it since its wavelength is deep red to near-infrared. The power levels are in the hundreds of watts to kilowatt range -- definitely hot, but not deadly at the range where it hits the plane.

When the laser hits the photovoltaic device, the photons in the light beam are converted to electricity in the same way that solar cells convert sunlight into electricity. But because the laser beam is comprised of a single wavelength of light, the conversion to electricity is much more efficient than converting multiple wavelengths of sunlight to energy.
The photons become electricity and the energy needed to fly the AUV.

Awww ...

3-week old Sand Cat (Felis margarita) near Tel Aviv, Israel.

Speed Bump Installation, Amsterdam Style

As documented in an earlier post, street work began beneath my window at 7 this morning, and it turns out that what they were installing was one of the large, gently sloped speed bumps you see on many streets in the historic center.  They got this done between 7 and noon ... I suspect this would take about two weeks in Seattle:

Interest from one of the neighbors

The other day they did brickwork on my corner, I think that's a car-sharing parking spot