The whale tried to warn us (day 251)

Maybe the whale was warning us of the impending stock market bungee jump.  It's possible.  The word on the street is that someone typed billion, but meant million, in a sell order.  The risks of txt'ing your sell order can't be overstated.  What better image than the fail whale for such a warning.  Alas, we were all too mesmerized to listen.

And mesmerized is a good word for it.  Turns out that a big sell order like that, erroneous or not, triggers android traders to sell without thinking (not that they could).   Then the meat-based traders get in the action and boom goes the market.  Mesmerizing indeed.  We've created an unpredictable monster and someone kicked it accidentally.  So fragile we are.

The stock market is the biggest hive experiment we have.  I'm personally fascinated by the stories we project on the movements of our pet monster.  Oh he yawned!  It must mean that the crisis in Bolivia is not that important.  Uh oh, he burped.  It must mean that interest rates will rise.  From the inside of the cage, it must be the same with just a bit more nuance.  I want to know who really understood derivatives.  Was it like feeding our monster some re-processed waste?  I think we did that with the cows and it didn't turn out so well.

Will Friday be boring?  It's hard to beat the last two days.

A song for this post.

A grey in shallow waters (day 250)

A grey whale swam into False Creek this afternoon.  Never has this happened before.  I was in meetings all day and missed the real time announcement.  No doubt, twitter was overheating in the local geo.  By the time I found out, it had gone back to open sea.  I went down to the docks to talk with the Aquabus guys and they told me how amazing it was to see a big animal like that so close.  They say it was about 13 meters.  Here is the CBC report.

The big question is why this has happened.  Is the whale healthy?  Is this just random?  Was it a message (a la Douglas Adams)?  Is this related to the whale that washed up on shore, starved to death? Is it related to what is happening in the Gulf?  I have this notion that whales talk to each other over great distances.  I have no idea if an oil spill would be a topic of conversation but I'm guessing it might be?  Still that probably wouldn't have anything to do with False Creek.  The CBC report seems to imply this is a normal migration route and the whale was just curious or something.

Anyway, I'm sorry I missed the whale but I hope it's happily swimming with some stories to tell.

A song for this post.

Patiently getting better (day 156)

Bacterial update:  It was a good day for the scoby love.  Two things happened.  Steve and I went to the TenRen tea shop in Chinatown and I was able to taste a 10 year old Pu-Erh tea.  It was delicious, smooth, sweet, and interesting.  The woman serving us had asked if I wanted to taste the 10 or 20 year old tea.  I decided on the 10 year old because I didn't think I wanted to spend the money on the 20 year old tea which was more than twice as much.  But I became curious after tasting the 10 year old tea.  I asked her what the difference is and she said it's sweeter and more complex.  After some discussion I purchased the 20 year old tea and got the 10 year old for free.  Who knows if it was a good deal.  Bargaining is not a skill widely practiced in my usual circles.   I got home and immediately brewed a cup of the 20 year old tea.  It was as she described: a beautiful, smooth, complex taste of autumn in my mouth.  It may now be my favourite tea.
The second thing that happened is that I did a final pH test on the kombucha that had been brewing for  three weeks and it was at 3.3 which meant that it was ready for bottling - a minor miracle!   Sometimes delays are forced patience for the good things in life.  So I sterilized everything and bottled the kombucha.  I filled six of the Grolsch bottles.  They will now rest comfortably at room temperature for two days to promote carbonation.  I'm not sure how much carbonation I'll get since it doesn't taste very sweet at this point.  I thought about adding sugar but decided against it in the end. 
I brewed a gallon of the 20 year old Pu-Erh and added a cup and a quarter of sugar.  I'm just waiting for it to cool down before adding the scoby.  I separated the old scoby into two and I'm preserving one just in case things don't work out.
The Kefir grains are doing ok.  I had to remove some to bring the production down to something manageable.  So far I can't bring myself to eat the spare grains but soon the question will need to be called.  Either I eat them, give them, or flush them.

I came across a quite beautiful visualization of whale vocalization in the New Scientist.  I wondered if it would be something worthy of the label Smart Graphic.  The images are created through algorithmic means with an aim to clearer representation of the sounds.   I suppose the visualization could be labelled smart because a more precise tool was used to transform a sound into an image, but I think only if that transformation is useful for a particular aim.  Is beauty a sufficient aim?  Are the images more beautiful than the sounds?   Could the images provide a better way of classifying different types of whales like showing differences and similarities that would have been harder to identify with just the sound?  Perhaps if beauty is the only aim, the conversation stops short, and so does the Smart in Smart Graphic. 

A song for this post.