ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Oh, how I wish I could sleep as easily as this Indonesian Becak (Rickshaw) man. And how I wish I could be as healthy looking as him on his 50 cents meal of fried compressed soya bean cake and rice.  " Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound." Julius Caesar (2.1.248-251)

Above: my 2008 Nash 52 Telecaster. Weighing under 7 lbs because the wood is dry, and fitted with Lollar pickups, it is extremely easy to play. Even without an amplifier, the guitar rings loud and clear and with sustain- a testament to the quality of the wood and the build.  I am a fan of relic (artificially aged) guitars, especially Fender Telecasters, and I love how some of the makers of Telecaster type guitars describe the degree of relic-ing . Nash Guitars  www.nashguitars.com  calls them 'Distressed Guitars' And describe their degree of distress thus: Light Distress= Church Gig- as in when you only use it to play for your church. Medium Distress= Working Man; a working musician's tool . Can't be new and shiny but has to be in good playing condition. Heavy Distress= Louisiana Roadhouse'- Look like it probably has smell of stale beer and cigarettes on it and spent nights playing the Blues in some Deep South joint. Extreme Heavy Distress* ...

INSIGHTS FROM WARREN BUFFET'S INDICATOR OF THE STOCK MARKET. * This chart is taken from Bloomberg but with my annotations added. Warren Buffet has a long-term stock market Indicator that has proved to be very prescient. Basically it plots t he total stock market capitalization as a percentage of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (adjusted for inflation) . This chart is from 1949-2014. When the value of the stock market is a high percentage of the U.S. GDP, stocks are deemed to be overvalued. ( I should add, high means high as compared with the preceding decade or so). On my chart, you can see this happening and the sudden drop in those years, and the events in those years. What interests me are these points: 1. It seems that from 1995 onwards,the swings get more and more violent. Personally I attribute this to the wide-spread adoption of IT viz the Internet, global communication, and online financial transactions which really began around this date. By compressing the time frame in w...

RARE METALS. Recently,in the course of work I came to be acquainted with rare metals with names that I never heard of: Antimony is not a spice, Yttrium is not a Swedish word, Dysprosium is not a medical condition, Germanium is not a flower, These are all a class of metals known as Rare Metals. Few are aware that these metals are strategic to the modern economy, as they are essential components of many modern industrial processes. This is because these metals have properties such as high electrical conductivity, hardness, corrosion resistance, high refractive index, high melting point, strength and light weight. All these properties are required for many products of the modern industrial economy: Electronic capacitors, missile parts, jet engine fan blades, machine tools and drills, semi-conductor etching, surgical instruments, nuclear reactors, chemical processing plants, LEDs and LCDS, X-rays, fibre optics, hard glass and ceramics... the list is endless. These materials are so i...

THE TRANSFORMERS NOT AS FAR-FETCHED AS YOU THINK (Self-Assembly, the science of things that put themselves together.) Self-Assembly is a sub-field of Nanotechnology, as it is about inducing change at the molecular level to produce desired  structures. Things that put themselves together are already a reality on a small scale. In the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, there are fascinating examples of self-assembly. Here is a link to a set of videos from Ted.com http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/04/see-self-assembly-and-4d-printing-in-action/ featuring Skylar Tibbits of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. Like many of Mankind's inventions, Self-Assembly was inspired by Mother Nature. The engineered self-assembling systems we have, were constructed based on the same principles and forces that drive self-assembly in Nature. There is nothing magical about self-assembly. When the right conditions exist, molecules can self-assemble.Self-assembly is when molecules form bonds according to a set ...

I am re-posting these photos from my Facebook. One set shows some of the weird things you find in Chinese Medical Shops in Singapore. The other shows some of the very colorful cakes you can get here in Singapore. ASIAN CAKES LAYERED MULTI-COLORED RAINBOW CAKE FOR CHINESE NEW YEAR PATTERNED CAKES FROM SARAWAK, MALAYSIA  ASSORTED PERANAKAN# CAKES 1 ASSORTED PERANAKAN# CAKES What are Peranakans? See http://www.fu-lu-shou.net/2009/02/my-peranakan-heritage-discovering.html  DRIED STUFF USED IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE Flying Lizards Giant Wood Mushrooms Pipefish Skin of some reptile Clumps of earth containing some minerals. Cuttlefish tentacles

Juust as wine-tasters use words such as full-bodied, flowery, earthy, fruity etc to describe wines, so electric guitar players use words to describe their guitar's tone: Bite- what the tone of a good Fe nder Telecaster's bridge pickup should have. Glassy- the kind of tone you get in a Fender Stratocaster when the pick-up selector is between neck and middle pickup. Creamy- when high notes are played with a thick round-end pick like a V-Pick. Fat- Thick tone, not necessarily mellow, favored by jazz guitarists. Muddy- Mellow but not clear tone. Singing- the tone of an old Les Paul, or any guitar with long sustain. Woody- the acoustic tone of a hollow body jazz archtop. Snap- when a little bit of fret buzz sounds nice. Honky- Like the tone of P-90's or an out-of-phase pickup Woman tone- a tone first attributed to Eric Clapton's '68 Gibson SG through a Marshall amp, and typical of British Blues in the sixties. Bell-like- a Rickenbacker used as rhythm guitar Big Bo...