When I learned that Mariel was recognized as an excellent orator, I invited her and the mother, Rhoda to our office. What a shame, they were early in the office, I came in from a meeting - late.

They visited us last June 2, 2006. After reciting, O Captain My Captain, her winning poem, we moved around the office and did a lot of photo-shoots.











Myself, Gabriel (my son) and Rhoda milled around my guest. Mariel's father, Romy was in Dubai till now. My brother is an architect engaged in one of the huge construction project.














She loves public speaking and mathematics. Having a happy and intelligent disposition - she will be an excellent leader.

 
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Thirty fours years ago, my father was sent to Japan by the Insurance Commission on scholarship for a training on insurance business. He should been sent to Switzerland but politics intervened - the slot was given to an "anointed" one.

It was one summer morning when I accompanied Tatay to the airport to catch a JAL flight to Tokyo, Japan.

As soon as he got out of the taxi, he handed to me all his loose coins and went straight to UP Diliman to attend my summer class.

He came back after three months with "pasalubong" - an ELSI MATE 6 EL-121 calculator and a red t-shirt "pasalubong". Plus of course his never ending stories of modern Japan as well as the honest, hardworking, sincere and disciplined Japanese people.

In some engineering calculations, the ELSI replaced my slide rule. I was still wearing the red-shirt in February 14, 1981 while conducting a COBOL AND RPG class.

The ELSI pictures were freshly taken by Glaizza, a GSI staff.

Labels: Insurance Commission, pasalubong

 
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Annie Fabre, our Finance Manager planned the gathering for the day that started at 5PM.









There were noodles and chicken from Savory - Annie's favorite dishes. On other occasions, Wilmer prepares lomi or spaghetti.









Thea, at the foreground - my daughter was invited. She was in the office spending her summer vacation. Of course she was not working.










Bess snapped Thea's portrait. Her camera, a lower res Olympus was better than the office's 10Mpixels digital camera.












Some candles were missing, I presume.

Labels: Annie Fabre, Savory

 
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Both my parents are from Aramuhan, Lemery, Batangas.

Travel from Pasay to Lemery was 2 hour ride in a BLTBCo bus coaches where all rows of seats are open on the right side. They were phased out in the 70s to give way to regular and air-con single door buses.

Lemery was originally accessible via Lipa. Now an alternate route through Tagaytay City , then
ride on the top of the ridges around Taal Ridge,
finally descending to the shore area of Lemery via
Payapa.

Last November 2007, I visited Tiya Angeles at her farm in Arumahan. It was harvest time - Wilmer and myself brought home several sacks of buco, banana, native chicken and other vegetables. That is candidate retirement place!

Maps of Lemery are usually available from NAMRIA. Today, they are everywhere - the first map on the upper right was source from wikipedia, the second one below from Google Earth.

Labels: Arumahan, Lemery, Payapa

 
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http://discovermagazine.com/topics/physics-math

At MaSci, The Special and General Theory of Relativity interested me when I was attending my Science and Physics classes under Ms Jarumayan and Ms Concepcion respectively. Four decades from that relativity theory initiation came an article from the online Discover Magazine.

2.25.2008
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Relativity
Galileo invented it, Einstein understood it, and Eddington saw it.
by Susan Kruglinski

1 Who invented relativity? Bzzzt—wrong. Galileo hit on the idea in 1639, when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.

2 And Einstein didn’t call it relativity. The word never appears in his original 1905 paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” and he hated the term, preferring “invariance theory” (because the laws of physics look the same to all observers—nothing “relative” about it).

3 Space-time continuum? Nope, that’s not Einstein either. The idea of time as the fourth dimension came from Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein’s professors, who once called him a “lazy dog.”
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4 But Einstein did reformulate Galileo’s relativity to deal with the bizarre things that happen at near-light speed, where time slows down and space gets compressed. That counts for something.

5 Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl published the basic equation E = mc2 a year before Einstein did.

6 Never heard of Hasenöhrl? That’s because he failed to connect the equation with the principle of relativity. Verdammt!

7 Einstein’s full-time job at the Swiss patent office meant he had to hash out relativity during hours when nobody was watching. He would cram his notes into his desk when a supervisor came by.

8 Although Einstein was a teetotaler, when he finally completed his theory of relativity, he and his wife, Mileva, drank themselves under the table—the old-fashioned way to mess with the space-time continuum.

9 Affection is relative. “I need my wife, she solves all the mathematical problems for me,” Einstein wrote while completing his theory in 1904. By 1914, he’d ordered her to “renounce all personal relations with me, as far as maintaining them is not absolutely required for social reasons.”

10 Rules are relative too. According to Einstein, nothing travels faster than light, but space itself has no such speed limit; immediately after the Big Bang, the runaway expansion of the universe apparently left light lagging way behind.

11 Oh, and there are two relativities. So far we’ve been talking about special relativity, which applies to objects moving at constant speed. General relativity, which covers accelerating things and explains how gravity works, came a decade later and is regarded as Einstein’s truly unique insight.

12 Pleasure doing business with you, chum(p): When Einstein was stumped by the math of general relativity, he relied on his old college pal Marcel Grossmann, whose notes he had studied after repeatedly cutting class years earlier.

13 Despite that, the early version of general relativity had a major error, a miscalculation of the amount a light beam would bend due to gravity.

14 Fortunately, plans to test the theory during a solar eclipse in 1914 were scuttled by World War I. Had the experiment been conducted then, the error would have been exposed and Einstein would have been proved wrong.

15 The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (you’re looking at it on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame and onto coffee mugs.

16 In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged the results, throwing out photos that showed the “wrong” outcome.

17 No wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einstein’s death in 1955, scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in action.

18 That changed dramatically in the 1960s, when astronomers began to discover extreme objects—neutron stars and black holes—that put severe dents in the shape of space-time.

19 Today general relativity is so well understood that it is used to weigh galaxies and locate distant planets by the way they bend light.

20 If you still don’t get Einstein’s ideas, try this explanation reportedly from The Man Himself: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Labels: Ms Concepcion, Ms Jarumayan, Theory of Relativity

 
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Water is everywhere, it seems.

A transferee from San Andres, Manila to La Paz, Makati, I experienced fetching water from a neighbors hand pumped well. That was difficult when you were only 7 years old.

The same situation in the 60s when I was visiting my father's hometown of Arumahan, Lemery, Batangas. Water in steel container was transported in horseback several kilometers downstream. Now, water is piped in.

I could imagine the dire condition of people from around Lake Mead in the USA when it dries up. They have to fetch water as I did. But fr om where? The area is mostly desert and mountainous.

An article from truthout.org - "Lake Mead Could Be Within Few Years of Going Dry, Study Finds" by Felicity Barringer of The New York Times shows declining water level of the lake.

The full text of the article could be found at
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021308EC.shtml.

Labels: la paz, San Andres

 
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As I walking to the Church of the Risen Lord in UP Diliman at noontime in March 7, 1995, rain drenched the onset of summer. It stopped till the next moonsoon and rainy season. The previous months was the cool weather usually experienced duirng and after the Christmas Season.

In 2006, we missed the cool days and nights of the Holiday Season - thanks to mega electric fans and occasional service of the aircon - we slept well.

Last year, the cool months of December and January are back but with a flavor - rains! The eastern part of the country is devastated with floods and landslides due continuous rain brought by La Nina. Now, PAGASA predicted a wet summer.

Analyzing a climate climate news from Truthout.org and relating it to my observations - are we experiencing the "tipping point" of climate change?

Scientist Identify "Tipping Points" of Climate Change
By Steve Connor
The Independent UK

Tuesday 05 February 2008

Nine ways in which the Earth could be tipped into a potentially dangerous state that could last for many centuries have been identified by scientists investigating how quickly global warming could run out of control.

A major international investigation by dozens of leading climate scientists has found that the "tipping points" for all nine scenarios - such as the melting of the Arctic sea ice or the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest - could occur within the next 100 years.

The scientists warn that climate change is likely to result in sudden and dramatic changes to some of the major geophysical elements of the Earth if global average temperatures continue to rise as a result of the predicted increase in emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.

Most and probably all of the nine scenarios are likely to be irreversible on a human timescale once they pass a certain threshold of change, and the widespread effects of the transition to the new state will be felt for generations to come, the scientists said.

The full text of the news item is at http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020508EA.shtml.

Labels: Church of the Risen Lord, Climate Change, La Nina, PAGASA, wet summer

 
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from : http://www.fotos.geschichtsthemen.de/iraq-war/iraq.htm

I have seen several DVDs, videos and pictures showing the destruction of Irag. Now, I chanced upon a news item from Truthout.org on the negative impact of the Iraq war to the US economy and perhaps including our country.

Here's an excerpt and the link on an Iraq war news article :

Sourced from http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022908T.shtml

Iraq War "Caused Slowdown in the US"
By Peter Wilson
The Australian

Thursday 28 February 2008

The Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US 3 trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US 50-$US 60 billion predicted in 2003 ....

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US 500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit ....

Labels: Iraq War, Professor Stiglitz

 
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