Locator: 48684ARCHIVES.
Travel: for someone who no longer likes to travel, my plans for August, September, October have "exploded."
Paywalls: have become irrelevant. See a headline? Want to cut to the chase without ads. A chatbot. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what was going on with MKT and DPP in Taiwan. A chatbot sorted it out for me in mere seconds. I can now move on. No longer interested. Wikipedia is always good but it often takes a lot of reading to find out an answer to a specific question. A chatbot is poised to provide a specific answer to a specific question. The better the prompt, the better the reply.
For ChatGPT prompt, example: compare Marvel's / TSMC's 2-nm process with Intel's 14A. It's a long, long answer and I understand very little of the difference, but it appears that the 14A might be the better process/chip. But, it seems to be a close call, and there's no certainty Intel will go forward with the 14A. TSMC's 2-nm process has already ramped up and is now becoming available; Intel's 14A won't be available until 2027 / 2028.
From Beth, link here.
Investing: the biggest story last week, not well told by the mainstream media, the S&P 500 notched five record highs in as many trading days last week, capping off what's now a 28% rally since reaching this year's lows on April 8. This V-shaped recovery in the benchmark index marks the second-fastest rebound from a drawdown of at least 19% in the last 75 years. A massive move in the index from a low to Friday's closing price of 6,389 has formed a large V shape in the S&P 500 2025 chart. One wouldn't know it by watching "Fast Money" on CNBC.
From Beth, link here. Comparing five big tech companies (magnificent 7 --> fantastic 5), Oracle took the gold: Oracle went from spending the least capex-to-revenue at just 9% in early 2022, to now 37% of revenue in fiscal 2025. Well, I don't know, "took" the gold, or "spent" the gold. LOL.
***********************************
The Book Page
This will probably be short-lived but limiting one's library to just three best books on any one subject is one way to cull a library or improve one's understanding of a given subject.
For me, once I got the "bug" with regard to semiconductors, I have benefited greatly by reading these three books simultaneously:
- The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, Simo Winchester, c. 2018.
- The Innovators: How A Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson, c. 2015.
- The Story of Semiconductors, John Orton, Oxford Press, c. 2004.
It's going to be hard to cull my Virginia Woolf library to just three books. LOL.
Same with Anaïs Nin.
****************************
The Book Page -- A Bonus
Link here. So British. Think of the special gadgets introduced by Ian Fleming's James Bond.
During World War II, a few imaginative, skilled and very discreet printers, designers and executives turned a beloved board game into a get-out-of-jail device for prisoners of war. The idea was so good, and so well executed, that at the conclusion of the war almost all records of the plan were either shredded or buried by the various official-secrets acts in Britain and America. Only at the end of the 1980s, when the prospect of armed conflict with the Soviet Union disappeared (followed by the U.S.S.R. itself) did some aspects of the wartime scheme begin to be acknowledged publicly. In “Monopoly X,” Philip E. Orbanes, a former executive at Parker Bros. and an author of several books about Monopoly, has produced the fullest version of the role that a familiar board game played in the war.
Parker Bros. introduced Monopoly in the U.S. in 1935. But it was Waddingtons, the British licensee of the game, that turned the game into a wartime secret weapon. Waddingtons was a printing firm led by a man named Victor Watson, whose son, Norman, had convinced him to take on the Monopoly license the same year. A version of the game was produced that used London streets and proved very lucrative.
Waddingtons was already very involved in the war effort: It contributed cartridges needed for explosives production and quietly took to printing British and European banknotes when the better known printer, De La Rue, was bombed during the Blitz. And in a subbasement, “the room we never speak of,” a group of designers and printers doctored sets of Monopoly at the request of MI9, a wartime division dedicated to getting the POWs back home.
Waddingtons, clearly, wasn’t just a game maker but a game changer. The company produced specially adapted sets, indistinguishable from the standard ones, in which falsified documents and vital pieces of escape equipment were embedded. In Mr. Orbanes’s telling, Norman Watson’s meeting with his MI9 contact, “Clutty,” reads like a comic moment in a John le Carré novel: “I want you to alter a Monopoly game by hiding certain items inside its board. Include a map . . . and these .... a tiny compass, not more than a half inch in diameter, along with a flat saw blade six inches in length."
The doctored boards were sent to Allied prison camps in Germany, shipped alongside unaltered sets via charities like the Red Cross or by other, innocent-sounding organizations such as the Sussex Ladies Benevolent Society (which didn’t exist). A deliberately placed dot on the Free Parking square was the only clue that a board held secret items and needed to be handed over to the ranking intelligence officer among the POWs.
The first beneficiary of the Monopoly gambit was Airey Neave, who broke out of Oflag IV-C, better known as Colditz, thanks to a lock pick, local currency, a compass and a map. After his return to London he was recruited into MI9 so he could assist other escapees. In later life he became a Conservative member of Parliament and one of Margaret Thatcher’s most devoted supporters.
So much more at the link.
*****************************
The Movie Page
After watching a short segment on YouTube, Coppola's 15 favorite films, I tried to do the same. Not in any particular order (*: on Coppola's list):
- Citizen Kane*
- Pulp Fiction*
- Sunset Boulevard*
- Mulholland Drive
- [insert a Hitchcock movie here]
- [insert a Wes Anderson movie here]
- Casablanca/Maltese Falcon
- Apocalypse Now*
- Lawrence of Arabia*
- [insert a Coen Bros movie here]
- [insert The Third Man or something similar here]
- Dr Zhivago
- No Way Out
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
