Holiday fruitcake

If yuletide fruitcake can be made of random ingredients, then we can play along, too, and consider some random insights and points today. Here we go:

1) The Pew Research Center has published some interesting information on technology use. While 74 percent of adults report that they own a desktop or laptop computer, 68 percent report owning smartphones. The narrow margin enjoyed by computers won’t be around for long, though. Among the younger folks (aged 18 to 29), fully 86 percent report owning smartphones while 78 percent have computers. I guess that we could consider computers as old technology in this sense, since smartphones seem destined to overtake them.

Tablet computers, incidentally, were broken out into a separate category, but they’re only at 50 percent for the younger people, 45 percent overall, and their growth rate has slowed substantially.

As for normal ol’ computers, the desktops and laptops, they hit a plateau a decade ago, despite the fact that they get cheaper all the time.

Anyway, it seems that smartphones are the wave of the future. My question is: What’s next?

2) Don’t tell Santa, but I got a gift for myself: The Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker. It is miniature indeed, on par with a 16-oz. bottle of soda if the bottle was lying down. Nothing that small is going to fill a concert hall, but it’s intended for offices and other small spaces.

Having tried it out, here’s what I think: The audio from this thing is utterly impressive.

It lists for $199, but someone found one for $159, so I decided to try it out. I think the reason for the discount is that this model has been supplanted with the SoundLink Mini Bluetooth II, which is also $199. One of the improvements in the newer model is the use of a generic USB charging port, as opposed to the proprietary plug used on the model I got.

As the name indicates, the speaker can be connected to your music player via Bluetooth, but you can also plug a player into it via a standard 3.5-mm audio cable (not included).

The Web, of course, has a lot of information for those who are interested, so the only thing I’ve really got to say is that the speaker’s sound is, to my ears, at least, worth the money.

I’m finally retiring the speakers I bought at Saipan’s ComputerLand 17 years ago.

3) According to the American Automobile Association, the upcoming holiday season will see a record number of motorists taking to the wheel, surpassing the 100 million mark for the first time ever. Over 91 percent of holiday travelers will drive, while fewer than 6 percent will fly. Rates for mid-tier hotels (“three diamond” hotels) will average $150 a night.

So, for this year, at least, I guess that gas is cheaper than sleep.

4) In the weird critter category, here’s a winner: the water bear, also known as the tardigrade.

From photos, it looks to me like an unholy cross of an armadillo and an ant, but it’s so weird that I guess one description is as good as any other description. It typically measures 0.5mm long and it has eight legs and at the ends of those legs are really big (in comparative terms) claws.

As strange as the looks are, it’s the biology of the things that are really freaky. Tardigrades evolve by absorbing much of their DNA from other beings, including fungus.

They are perhaps most hardy critters on earth, able to live in super-cold and in super-hot conditions. Since they live all over the place, including in moss and lichen, you can make a hobby out of collecting them.

If anyone in Saipan ever finds a tardigrade, I hope to hear about it.

5) “Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines.” Thus spoke Enzo Ferrari.

6) Speaking of speaking, if you’re one of my fellow students in Mandarin Chinese, I’ll mention a book that’s proven to be very useful. It’s Modern Chinese (Book 3), by Vivienne Zhang. It is one volume of a four-volume series.

I don’t know what’s in the other volumes, but Book 3 is comprised of phrases that are well-organized and geared toward life’s most common situations. This is practical, hands-on, useful-for-daily-life stuff, as opposed to the stilted textbook fare that never seems to fly outside of the classroom.

My copy cost $9.99 and it’s 225 pages. It’s the least expensive book in my Chinese collection, but the signal-to-noise ratio is the best of the bunch; it’s clean, unpretentious, and pragmatic.

I might write more about it next year, but I didn’t want to close out 2015 without bringing it to your attention.

* * * * *

Having thrown these random ingredients into the mix, I’ll drop this concoction into your Christmas stocking and I’ll wish you the best of the season.