Thomas journals

We spend the month of October in Portugal, and learned a few things that were not quite clear in the guidebooks.  I share them here:   Discounts:  Most subways, trains, museums, offer senior (65+) discount up to 50% -- sometimes requiring i.d. (drivers license okay); or Student or Child discounts as well. SIMcards for phones: evidently only Vodafone maintains an official shop at the Lisbon airport: I bought 2 cards @20euros each, providing 100minutes of talk and 5gb data in Europe, for 30 days...perfect timing for us!  Lycamobile offers cheaper deals on Portugal-only cards: they have card-tables set up at busy metro stations (if I had known, I would have bought their deal). Duty-Free On Arrival:  Lisbon airport duty-free sells within the arrival area (contrary to internet statements), so you can wait and buy duty-free in the Lisbon airport, where it’s cheaper than the US.  In any case, the customs officials seemed quite loose though watchful.  And in-E...

 After reading Paul Krugman' s newsletter recently about technology and productivity gains, I had some thoughts about the topic. He repeats his skepticism about cryptocurrency -- and I agree with his skepticism -- then muses on past predictions about the wonders of technology.  One powerful example is the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even twenty years after the promised date, none of the fantastic futuristic features have actually happened, except for widespread video calls.   He even includes a link to a list of 100 innovations predicted by futuris t Herman Kahn in 1967, of which only one-fourth have been realized.   I have long considered the futuristic promises, and the changes that effect modern life, ever since sitting through GE's Wonderful World of Tomorrow at the 1965 World's Fair.  My impressionable 11-year-old mind soaked it in, considering what sort of changes really change the way we live, noting that the major seismic shifts took pl...

  My assessment:  TB & Measles are much more communicable, and coronavirus is like the flu, but coronavirus is randomly more deadly than any of them.  Also, coronavirus, if allowed to fester, may well mutate into even more deadly forms.  Thus we have a public-health incentive to vaccinate and prevent its spread.  And just like grandma said, fresh air is important! Following quote is from a recent detailed article  in Wired magazine, by Megan Mo lteni, mostly about the curious specification of droplet vs. airborne transmission, and the 1940s era of scientific progressivism not wanting to credit miasma!  It turns out that miasma -- in the form of tiny airborne pollutants -- is really a thing. ...airborne transmission is both more complicated and less scary than once believed. SARS-CoV-2, like many respiratory diseases, is airborne, but not wildly so. It isn’t like measles, which is so contagious it infects 90 percent of susceptible people exposed to ...

  Sat. May 1, 2021 - Jeff planned brilliantly so that we left before rush hour (thanks, Tori, for driving us) and had time in the United Lounge before leaving at 7pm for a late night flight. Going to the lounge felt like the old international travel days. We got to enjoy watching the Kentucky Derby over complimentary mint juleps with Medina Spirit winning. Then two movies later, we were in San Francisco. Alas, no shuttle to the Hilton Garden Inn Burlingame, so we got a taxi and collapsed with a bit of jet lag.  Sun. May 2 - Our cute convertible Mini Cooper was delivered to the hotel by a Turo participant, and after resolving an issue with the top-down machinery, we were on our way south to visit a former teaching colleague and friend, Meg Porter. We stayed at the Continental Inn - clean and comfy, but dated and in a questionable area with homeless shouting at night, near the boardwalk amusement park of days gone by. Brunched at Crow’s Nest with a fab view of a waterway f...

One way in which other countries have leapfrogged the U.S. technology adoption curve is in the use of mobile phones to move money around.  For example, WeChat and AliPay are huge in China. Kids These Days now talk about Venmoing money to each other -- Venmo was a startup inspired by other countries' use of phones, then eventually the whole company was bought by Paypal so as to integrate the webservices with the mobile phoen services. Venmo tries to be a social network as well, flaunting (that is, sharing) information about your purchases and discussing them online...strange to me, but evidently rather popular.  Two other similar services are vying for popular attention in the U.S. now, with intriguing distinct characteristics: Zelle and Cashapp.  Zelle seems to represent an effort by the Big Banks to obviate the need for Venmo: Zelle is actually more efficient -- transferring immediately and directly from one bank account to another without need to expose any bank info...

CoronaVirus came to Morocco.  We felt pretty safe for a while.  Life went on normally, with the news about this virus in China, spreading to South Korea and Japan, then Italy. On February 2nd, Barb and I were returning by taxi from Meknes, when we saw speeding towards us a motorcade.  Was it the king?  No.  The police were escorting two large white buses, each with two guys in hazmat suits in the front!   Then I remember reading in the newspaper that the King had ordered the repatriation of the several hundred Moroccan students who had been studying in Wuhan!  The article noted that they would fly in to Rabat airport and then be quarantined at the Military Hospital in Rabat and the Sidi Sa'id Hospital in Meknes!  We saw them! Also, as we drove by the airport I saw a huge white 747 plane there -- it's a small airport. So that was our first  direct exposure, as it were, to the CoronaVirus. Two weeks later, as I retold this story in one...

Just around the corner from our apartment here in Rabat is an old neighborhood with lots of traditional shops, including a chicken-and-egg man.  I often walk by there, always see lots of eggs on the counter, and often see a few chickens clucking on the back shelf (live, usually white).  I have never heard or seen any evidence of the abattoir, not even people walking out with a bag of whole raw chicken, but it must happen.  Today he had a special set, pictured here -- I noticed because I heard a rooster crow as I was approaching the shop.  hmm: do roosters taste different from hens? One of these days I will get a local informant to help me talk to the guy, maybe buy a fresh-killed (plucked and cleaned, of course!) chicken for a special occasion!