Anything With A Cello

I was Google-stalking some people I knew in high school out of curiosity, and it led to finding a new musical artist. I generally like anything with a cello in it. This is on the funky side, but I usually find music more interesting when I have known the artist to some degree in the past.

This guy used to play cello in my youth orchestra, and his mother was the piano accompanist for my violin teacher's more advanced students. I had a crush on his brother who was concertmaster, because he was an Asian guy with a pony tail and he could play the violin. My stand partner called the concertmaster a dork and crazy, and the assistant concertmaster scary, when they took turns on the podium to give us the tuning A. Just my luck that the next year, I ended up being set up on a blind date with the scary assistant concertmaster for a Screw Your Roommate dance at Stanford, because I walked by a fundraising table staffed by his roommate and bought a flower.

My last sighting of the guy was during my senior year in high school at the MTAC Certificate of Merit convention where he gave a recital of the Elgar Cello Concerto. When asked what was his favorite recording of the piece, his response was Jacqueline du Pre's. (documentary)

Here are some YouTube videos and music clips:

Dana Leong Leaving New York
"Special behind the scenes footage and interviews from the studio recording of Trombone Cello Man Dana Leong's debut album Leaving New York."

Rain by Dana Leong
Is that an electric cello? Half of the interest in cello music comes from watching the cellists' facial expressions and gestures.

Mother Nature Suite - Pt 1 Sunrise
My favorite music clip from the Leaving New York album at CDBaby.

Apparently I Chew Tobacco

And sometimes I'm left-handed, and sometimes I'm right-handed. And sometimes my right leg is my left leg.

These are just a few of the discoveries you might learn about yourself if you get the opportunity to read your medical records and letters that doctors have carefully and thoroughly written.

Yes, doctors are busy people and they must see dozens of patients in a day. But sometimes these can have grievous consequences.

What surprised me was that it wasn't a rare occurrence but almost all of the letters written by the dozen doctors I had seen had at least one incorrect recording of medical history, not just mixing up right and left (frequently), mixing up weeks and months, and the sequence of reported events, but also creating weird things out of the blue. I'm perplexed by my tobacco-chewing habit, and that my blood pressure can apparently be recorded for a visit when my blood pressure was not taken.

My first full-time job was full-time quality control statistical programmer. My entire job was to check another programmer's work to make sure we came up with the same and accurate results. Even the people who entered the data probably had to use double data entry. Seeing as other industries have hordes of quality assurance engineers, test engineers, proofreaders, editors, etc., and feedback, code reviews, document reviews, peer review processes, bug-tracking, bug-finding, and bug-fixing, maybe we need to add some to the medical industry.

Solar Power Plants, Coming Soon

I really wasn't exaggerating when I said in a previous post that the market for alternative energy is the entire energy market currently dominated by oil and coal, and that this would come about (much) faster than people think.

The Silicon Valley is still aptly named as it becomes a center for solar technology. Except that we are developing other solar technologies in addition to photovoltaic panels made from silicon.

Ausra, a solar power plant company, has moved to the Silicon Valley from Australia and is being funded by top investors. They say their price for solar electricity is already competitive with current electricity prices, and that the entire U.S. electricity consumption can be generated with a solar power plant 92 by 92 square miles, in the Mojave desert. And it sounds like there are also a few competing companies already.

The solar technology is solar thermal instead of photovoltaic, which is actually kind of simpler. It's less expensive to manufacture, although less efficient in converting solar energy, but less expensive per unit of electricity produced. This is probably the biggest threat to investing in solar photovoltaic companies, but those are probably still preferable where there is not a lot of land.

I wonder about the cost of land in that figure, but maybe desert land is cheap or owned by the government? Ah, they answer the question with this:

Solar is one the most land-efficient sources of clean power we have, using a fraction of the area needed by hydro or wind projects of comparable output. All of America's needs for electric power – the entire US grid, night and day – can be generated with Ausra's current technology using a square parcel of land 92 miles on a side. For comparison, this is less than 1% of America's deserts, less land than currently in use in the U.S. for coal mines, and a tiny fraction of the land currently in agricultural use.

Already competitive prices also leads to probable lower prices in the near future. In addition, it sounds much safer than coal mining and better for the earth than this alternative to coal mines, mountaintop removal.

I don't imagine a huge objection to sprawling the Mojave desert with a humongous solar power plant, relative to other ecological landscapes, but who knows.

Synthetic Food

Like I said, our "food" is scary.

Doctors Link a Man's Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit

"A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants."

Putting a Stanford Chemical Engineering Degree to Good Use

In 2002, I still thought organic milk and organic vegetables sounded weird. Were they like... dirty? Now I think food is kind of scary, because what we call "food" should be called "chemical, hormone, antibiotic, pesticide food" and what we call "organic food" should be called "food."

My mom points out for the less observant, do you notice you can often taste chlorine in your vegetables? Apparently, this has been getting worse over time. But if you have grown up eating chlorine vegetables for much of your life, you probably don't even notice it. We noticed that the vegetables in China tasted very good fifteen years ago, but we thought that was because of the natural fertilizer. So anyway, organic food has to include the washing, handling, storing, and packaging.

On the heels of organic food comes non-toxic and environmentally friendly cleaning products, still sort of weird-sounding, but it's time for a breakthrough.

Seventh Generation Free & Clear Dishwashing Liquid took second place in Cook's Country magazine dishwashing liquid tests. The top two winners were the two environmentally friendly brands. I hadn't heard of the magazine before, but according to the Seventh Generation blog, their product is also showing up in the kitchen scenery of cooking shows such as Rachael Ray. If I were in normal health, this would make me actually go out and buy some to try.

I had seen the products in Whole Foods Market and checked out their Web site several years ago but never bought any of their products, for lack of clear information on how surfactants produced from vegetable oil are better than surfactants produced from petroleum. Is it just the renewability of the source material? Obviously, "vegetable-based surfactants" are no longer actually vegetables. The Web pages sort of jumble the topics of toxic substances and renewable sources. Even though they say their products are less toxic, they don't actually say that it's from using vegetable oil instead of petroleum. It seems to be because of avoiding other ingredients that are in most cleaning products.

We are reversing many of the trends of the last fifty years. Shopping without plastic and paper bags, how does that work? But that was normal not that long ago. Organic food, yeah, that used to be normal. And they used to make soap out of animal fat and lye in Little House on the Prairie. Is this going back to the future, or forward to the past?

I'm just now reading about the first place winner of the dishwashing liquid tests, a brand I hadn't heard of before. It's rather new, and one of the founders is a Stanford alum. Method is hip. Even the bottles are beautiful. They list all of their ingredients. Go check it out.

The Solar Bubble and Non-Bubble

It is 2007, ten years after the Internet boom started becoming obvious, so it's time for another bubble.

It has been over two weeks without a blog post. I have been exploring how to invest my money. Investing in things that can be done completely on the Web with a few clicks provides the best financial return on energy with chronic fatigue syndrome. After selling the condo, I walked into the local First American Title Company office and the receptionist handed me the biggest check I've held since paying Stanford tuition each quarter (oh, except for when I made the down payment). Surprisingly to me, she didn't ask to check any identification. Recovering a small down payment for a condo in the Bay Area is a nice chunk of money.

I didn't actually make any money from owning the condo for only two years, and investing the down payment in stocks would have been a much better return. Having just started to earn money, I had just started to pay attention to the stock market. But each time I found myself thinking, I should buy that stock because the company is awesome (and most people don't know how awesome it is yet), I didn't have any cash or I needed it for the down payment. I was actually only interested in two stocks, GOOG at IPO, and SPWR. By my calculation, that would have been an average over 300% return in 3 years! Much better than zero return on real estate.

SPWR is currently trading at around 300 price/earnings ratio with market capitalization of 5 billion. By now, plenty of people have caught on to the solar energy market potential. China itself has had about a dozen IPOs for various solar equipment manufacturers in the last 3-6 months. The other day I saw one go up 10% in a day, and it was tempting to take a gamble and catch the wave. Chances are, this is only the beginning of the bubble. But I don't know enough about it.

I tend to think the opposite of what my dad thinks for investment choices, but one good advice he mentioned is, invest in what you know, from Peter Lynch, famous for managing a long-time very profitable Fidelity mutual fund in the past. One of his books, Beating the Street, was one of the first (and only) books on investing that I finished reading. It is in "English" and very readable. What I recall of the basic idea is, just take your favorite and best companies that you already frequent, from shoe stores to restaurant chains, and pick those stocks to research and invest in. (In our household, that might mean Nordstrom, Ross, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Apple, and Google.) Because if you like it and are buying from it, most likely a lot of other people are too. And you'll probably know more about the company and be interesting in following it.

Despite the dot-com boom level P/E ratio, I still think SPWR is a worthwhile long-term investment. Mathematically-speaking, as a young company is just turning from loss to profit, with financial statements showing multiplying revenue and profit, the P/E ratio is likely to go down fast. And regarding a market capitalization of 5 billion, if I think long-term, that's tiny. What's the market size potential for solar energy? And alternative energy? For alternative energy, I say it is eventually almost the entire energy market currently dominated by oil and coal, which is enormous. Of course, the time frame for reaching that potential needs to be accounted for. My guess is faster than people think. (Not unlike back in 2002 when people doubted that significant numbers of people would buy more expensive hybrid cars, which is now only a few years later the most popular car in the Silicon Valley.) Competing companies also need to be accounted for. Which is why I'd bet on SunPower which looks to me like the top company instead of the sprouting solar mushroom companies in China and elsewhere.

I had been reading about SunPower and its record-setting solar panel efficiencies with unique out-of-the-box design several years before and independently of thinking about investments. They also purchased PowerLight, a solar systems provider based in Berkeley that I had been reading about, not for investment purposes but because they were interesting and cool. They seem to have the best quality at many levels of the business chain. (And one time a few years ago, I took a wrong turn in Sunnyvale and ended up in their parking lot. That was a sign that I should take notice of the company. ;) )

Now to really go off on a tangent, back then if you searched for SunPower using Google, the first search result was this Sunpower company in Ohio. They also have the URL so I often ended up at this company's Web site reading about free-piston Stirling engines instead of solar cells. Although I still don't know what free-piston Stirling engines are, they did mention some indirect application to solar projects. Anyway, the tangent was that the last name of the inventor and founder is Beale, and around this time I joined Danse Libre and the name rang a bell. I had been curious to ask our friend if he has any relation to this since he had mentioned being from Ohio and is also an engineering stud, but have so far forgotten to.

Back to the sprouting solar companies. Reading a little tells me that most of them are manufacturing the lower efficiency, lower quality, and cheaper polycrystalline wafers, and most of them only produce at one level of the supply chain. Some have questionable management experience. And a few of them are already in trouble because of rising costs of polysilicon.

Anyway, the solar bubble is already underway. So it's time for me to look into lesser known alternative energy such as... poop. That might be another post topic after I research it.

The alternative energy bubble is scarier than the Internet bubble. With the Internet bubble, there might have been a lot of junk created but it mostly existed virtually inside computers. With the solar bubble, we could have companies producing tons of inefficient panels, making false claims, and end up covering large amounts of rooftops and land with junk material. Material that needs to be manufactured with people wearing space suits. With windmills for wind power, we can end up covering miles of pristine land with skyscraper windmills. As with bubble companies, what if they don't know what they're doing? Not to mention genetically altering our food supply for biofuels and claiming that seeds and pollen won't escape a field.

Anyways, stay tuned for more financial topics, including my experimentation with the new Web 2.0 peer-to-peer lending.