I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard hold out would always say "This ain’t rain.  Back where I come from we have real rain and this ain’t it."  Well last night I feel confident there was a 100% chance of rain.  It was a full on  storm.  Things broke.

In one night we got a record 2.2" of rain with winds gusting to 74 mph.  Roads were closed everywhere.  Power flickered all night.  Things banged loudly.  My neighbor’s basement flooded because water was coming up through the drain!  By work I saw a manhole cover that looked like a beautiful fountain with jets of water squirting up through the holes.  My rug in my basement got fairly wet, as far as I can tell because of water coming down the chimney!!  It was a bad time to realize that the last time I pulled my fileserver out to work on it I didn’t plug it into a UPS.  Oops.

A couple friends and I wanted to experience the weather so we put on full snowboarding / mountaineering outfits and wandered out.  We ended up spending a good chunk of the evening standing on a rooftop patio with a great view of the city, watching the city be destroyed.  Explosions filled the night from lightning and transformers blowing.  We could always tell which ones were lightning because the flashes were white and brief.  Whenever a transformer would blow, there would be a pulsing glow that would linger for a second or two.  They were also typically bright green, although we did see one or two redding purple ones.  I’m pretty sure the green blasts were from large amounts of copper wire burning very quickly in a  giant short-circuit.  I’m not sure what metal they’d use in transformers that burns reddish purple.  Occasionally we saw what must have been a whole substation go because the glow would last 3 or 4 seconds.  For some reason we were cheering.  After one such explosion, we saw all of Bellevue go dark, only to light up again half a second later.

It was amazing.

At some point we realized that the street’s own transformer was at eye level less than 20′ from where we were standing.  When we finally connected the large explosions in the distance to the utility pole mounted bomb next to us, we decided to go inside.  Show’s over.  Don’t wanna die tonight.

The idea behind this saying is that times of rapid change are generally quite painful.  Historically interesting times are those involving wars and revolutions — things where lots of people die.  Growth and improvement have only come through very slow gradual change.  But in today’s China, this is anything but true.  Right now is one of the most interesting times in China’s long history, and for the majority of the country, it’s fantastic.  (If we all work hard, that kind of intersting time might be behind us.)

We read about how the Chinese economy is glowing red hot.  Their sustained GDP growth rate would make any head of a western central bank terrified.  In any established economy, a 9% annual growth rate would last maybe a couple years before it turned into inflation, recession or both.  But a very clever set of communist economists are managing to ride the bleeding edge of rapid growth far longer and further than I think anybody outside the country would have believed possible.  I’ve been reading these cold dry numbers in the same places you have.  But being here in China now, these numbers are very real.

Consider Shenzhen, just across the psuedo-international border with Hongkong.  Today Shenzhen’s greater metropolitan area has over 10 million people.  But just 28 years ago when Deng Xiaoping decided to start developing this city, it had but 25,000.  Imagine that — a city nearly the size of LA or NY that was consciously willed into existence in less then a generation.  It almost defies belief.

Having just left Shenzhen, I’m currently in Xiamen, which is the closest mainland city to Taiwan.  On a clear day like today, you can see outlying islands that are politically controlled by the Republic of China, the Taiwanese government.  There is a large and famous sign here pointed out towards Taiwan that reads "One Country, Two systems, Together One China."  The Taiwanese have a similar sign on the other side.

NPR recently aired a story about the northern border of North Korean.  There’s a theme park that is constantly empty and a small family whose job might be simply to picnic under an umbrella to demonstrate to the outside world how happy and successful the closed communist system in North Korea is.  Possibly for similar reasons, Xiamen also has a theme park on the coast facing Taiwan.  But its big roller coaster is occupied until 4:00 AM every night.  On weekends happy local families fill the beaches with their families.  I came here for a holiday 5.5 years ago during Spring Festival.  There are so many new buildings and bridges and tunnels and freeways that I hardly recognize it now.  Real estate prices boggle the mind in a way that only Manhattenites could imagine.  There is also a huge new "trourist ferry terminal" under construction here.  Its stated plans are for ferry service to Hong Kong and to host cruise ships.  The obvious long-term purpose of this project is in the fulfillment of that big red sign. 

Shenzhen is thriving as a psuedo-port for the reunification of Hong Kong.  I have no doubt that within 10 or 20 years, Xiamen will be doing the same with Taiwan.  All polluting factories have been ordered out of Xiamen in order to clean up the air.  The communists clearly want to make Xiamen attractive.  I used to buy in to the American political ideas that we must protect Taiwan from China’s oppressive government.  Taiwanese certainly used to look at it this way — a friend grew up there singing songs about how they would liberate the mainlanders from the communists.  But taking a longer term view of the situation, if I were a Taiwanese resident today, I would look forward to reunification with the world’s largest economy.

Again, talk about economics can easily obscure what’s really happening here.  Millions of people are graduating from poor subsistance lifestyles up to the comfort and safety of a working class life.  Or up to the relative luxury of a middle-class life.  Or even to the genuine luxury of being able to buy whatever they want — it’s not that uncommon here.  The difference in the quality of life of my friends and the other people I see here is obvious from just 5 years ago — be it having hot water in every room of the house, owning a car, or kite-surfing in their spare time.  These huge cities are physical manifestations of people’s lives being improved on a grand historic scale.  The excitement is palpable.  Positive energy infuses everything.  A note to Naomi Klein: this is what sweat-shops do to people’s lives.  These certainly are interesting times, and I feel priveledged to be able to experience them first-hand.

"Where is the Paramount Theater?"

"Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work.  It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off.  It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!" 

"Oh, I’m sorry.  It’s actually on Pine."

Personally, I’ve given up trying to keep them straight.  I just call them both Pinke.  (Pronounced with a long I sound.)  It’s much easier this way.  I don’t need to think about it.  When I get there I can generally figure it out.  Many people I talk to don’t even catch that I wasn’t specific and understand the general idea which is perfect.  Some people hear it and understand my intent instantly.  Some ask.

I think this generalization stresses out the people I’m talking with less.  I think that if I were to specify one of the two streets specifically, people would sit there and rack their brains trying to remember which one I had named.  Since they’d have probably a 30% chance of misidentifying the street in their heads, and I’d have about a 40% chance of having said the wrong one in the first place, the odds of successful communication would be just 54%.  That sounds no better than a coin-flip to me, especially considering that 12% of the time communication would have worked because we both got it wrong!  I think information is actually being conveyed more effectively by not specifying Pike or Pine, but instead just saying Pinke.

When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real "you-get-what-you-pay-for" situation here.  Premium services are highly accurate.  But free services like hostip.info are barely breaking 50% accuracy right now.  But even though it thought my IP address was in the middle of the San Francisco bay, that is at least in the correct timezone.

Hostip.info has the right goal of creating puclicly accessibly web services APIs.  In fact their API is beautiful.  So please, go contribute to their database and help improve the accuracy.  Then we’ll never need to tell the computers what timezone we’re in — they’ll just know.  And we all want the computers to get smarter, don’t we?

Hostip.info thinks you’re in this country:




Wrong?  Please correct it.

In Seattle, when the forecast says 80% chance of rain that means if you ask a random sampling of 100 people on the street “is it raining right now?” 80 of them will say “yeah, it’s raining” and 20 of them will say “no, this isn’t rain.”  For those of you who haven’t ever been in Seattle in the Winter, it’s never quite dry here.  And it rarely actually rains either — real rain with lots of big heavy drops.  We tend to have this persistent heavy fog that moves downward and gets things wet.  Sometimes it’s lighter and sometimes it’s heavier — it’s pretty arbitrary when you’d call it rain and when you wouldn’t.  Thus the consensus model.

Right now I’d actually say we’ve got about a 60% chance of rain.  80% is pretty darned heavy IMHO.  I don’t think it’s possible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some transplanted diehards from monsoon territory will always hold out and say “this ain’t real rain” as their goretex hats turn into buckets.  Likewise, in Winter I suspect the minimum chance of rain is about 5%, owing to the bitter so-cal transplants who whine that it’s always raining here, regardless of what’s happening in the sky.

So grab a double-tall skinny hazelnut latte and hunker down by the fireplace for a few months.  Here’s looking forward to snowboarding!

I’m leaving out places I only stopped for a couple of hours or visited before I could talk coherently.  This picture makes me want to visit Russia just to mark that whole big chunk of land as red.  ;)