Trip to Melbourne

[copied from notes I wrote on the trip]

Ten minutes before the cab was to arrive to take me to the airport, the cat comes limping into the room, obviously hurt. Now M needs to take him to the vet which costs money. I have no time to do or say much about it. I was late in packing my bags and probably forgot stuff. I left a totally blank signed check! I didn’t even have the name of the vet they would be going to.

On the way out, Hi or Ha (I forget which one it was) wished me to have a good cab ride, with an interesting cab driver. Cab drivers can certainly be smart, clever people, but there's no way a cab driver would have interests that are even remotely close to what I'm interested in. Certainly they can have interesting stories and provide new perspectives. But here it was 3:00 PM and I wouldn't get to the hotel in Melbourne until probably 9:00 PM the next day. I'm not the talkative type. For me, talking to people I don’t know usually burns up a lot of energy.

So I get in the cab and the guy starts talking. A sign in front of me says "Talk Loud: Hearing Impaired". So the cab driver starts talking immediately about where I'm going, what I do for a living, etc. I was absolutely stunned by this guy. We talked about the future of the semiconductor industry. We talked about software. I gave him my views of the future and he disagreed: instead he explained the flaw in my reasoning, and his point was extremely good. We talked about investments. I told him about my efforts on the Pink Sheets and the simple algorithm I gave the "Cantonese laborers" to sift through 7,000 companies. I was stunned when the cab driver said that it was probably ruling out companies with too little cash flow or too much debt.

Uh....

Actually, that's the perfectly distilled essence of what I wanted them to look for.

I mentioned that my stocks all seriously underwater, but I had put a lot of effort into finding these and had very high confidence in them. I said it was somewhat depressing. He suggests that the best thing to do is nothing.

Uh....

Actually, I totally agree. So I said that to have something to do, that I was learning Japanese. The cab driver reaches over, holds up a book, and says he's learning German. Says a few things in German and explains that he had been working on ancient Greek and Latin, but German is a lot more relevant to things.

We talked about the similarities among languages, even ones which diverged in pre-history such as between English and Japanese. I tend to think how we create our languages is universal due to universal logic and also the way the human brain is constructed.

I realize that in talking to lots of people, perhaps it's possible that this guy learned enough about lots of subjects to be able to say key points, but that really didn't seem to be the case. There were some things where he clearly demonstrated a true understanding in the back-and-forth discussion.

He dropped me off at the airport and I told him how amazed I was by his knowledge and interest in learning. I said very, very few people are at the level he's at.

You might observe a hundred cab drivers and never find someone like this, but you can never rule it out in the future, no matter how unlikely. A black swan.

Planes

On the flight from Boston to LA, I started reading the highly recommended Death Note manga I mentioned before. Wow! Of course there's the occasional pandering to various mild-fetish type things that always seems to show up in Japanese anime (actually Japanese anything). But after getting through volumes 1-4 and half of volume 5, I'm totally amazed at how well it's crafted. Sherlock Holmes level of cleverness and craft. Every now and then, it seems a bit forced and contrived, but it's still an amazing psychological suspense story.

M plans to dress up as "L" from the anime/manga for the upcoming anime convention. He's going to look exactly like the character.

Right now I'm two hours away from Australia, typing this into a file so I can post it later. This particular flight will be a total of 14 hours. The good news is that I ended up in business class for the whole trip instead of economy, which would have been awful.

After an hour or so, they dim the lights, people lean the seats back and pretend to sleep. The business class seats go almost horizontal, but they're not quite tall enough for me, so it's never very comfortable. Right off the bat, my seat broke. The feet part fell off. Makes me worry about the rest of the plane. So I moved to what is arguably a better seat away from the galley.

So I took Tylenol PM and melatonin and tried to sleep. I'd drift into a sleep and then immediately wake up startled. This repeats over and over. Slowly my arthritis starts to kick in and I really start worrying that this is going to be an agonizing flight: 14 hours of this. I can't really get up and walk around much, everyone else is trying to sleep. After a while, I sort of settle into a comprimise of shifting around constantly and just dealing with it somewhat; maybe it's the Tylenol kicking in. Or maybe the ether. No, that's Fear and Loathing. So I'm really worried now about what condition I'll be in when I arrive. At this point, I've resigned to not sleeping and try turning on the seat video. I'm feeling less tired, which I figure is due to natural clock rhythms: it's probably morning now in Boston. I switch in the channel that shows where the plane is. I figure that it's been about 4 hours, tops, and there's at least 10 more to go! I look at the screen and the estimated remaining duration is about 4 hours. Six hours just disppeared! Mercifully. That means that somewhere in all that tossing and turning I must have been fast asleep for 6 hours! Excellent.

I still don't know the status of the cat, although M had him at the vet when I called from Logan. I now realize the foolishness of leaving a blank check. I was in a hurry and didn't have time to think things through. I'm fairly confident that M will avoid paying, say, $5,000 for cat brain surgery or something like that if it comes up. Given how much I like the cat, I'd say my price limit is about $200. I really don't like the cat. It was foisted on me by L. Not the Death Note "L".

I just thought of something funny. The morning of the trip I was in the supermarket, doing last minute grocery shopping. I reached for something in the refrigerated section and was briefly startled by something in my peripheral vision. It was a mirror pointing sideways to make it look like there were more items. As if you'll reach into the mirror and try to grab that Sunny D reflection. Haha, management makes a funny joke.

So in a stressed out state, I was just thinking. I recalled a YouTube video of a cat completely freaked out at it's own reflection: attacking and then retreating from the attacking twin cat. What if a person did that in front of a mirror in a store? I mean loud hissing and spitting and holding up their arms to look bigger. Total fear and panic.

I'm still really amazed at how good Death Note is. Anyway, breakfast is about to be served.