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Mountain Views-News Saturday November 1, 2025

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STUART TOLCHIN

RICH JOHNSON

RELATIVELY SPEAKING WITH 

ALBERT EINSTEIN


FEELINGS AND TIME

 How do you feel this 
morning? I am writing 
on Wednesday Morning, 
November 5 and 
after reading about the 
elections and balloting 
of yesterday I feel pretty 
good. How about you? 
I like feeling that everyone has the same 
feelings that I do even though I know 
that is nonsense, but feelings do not exist 
within the boundaries of what is sensible. 
Think about it. How did you feel during 
that final World Series game?

 Remember, the bases were loaded with 
nobody out and we could not score. We 
were bringing in a pitcher who had thrown 
96 pitches the day before and probably 
would not be very effective in this game. 
For all sorts of reasons, it looked like we 
would lose, but we didn’t. “We” won!! 
All right, who is this “we” I keep talking 
about. I know there are many of you who 
don't know, or don't care anything about 
the Dodgers. Well, feelings don’t care. I 
felt it was a victory for “all of us”.

 In the same nonsensical way, I feel that 
everyone “we” all feel the same way about 
Trump. Of course, this ain’t the way it is. 
Millions and millions of Americans were 
and probably still are Trump fans. Do you 
remember how you felt in 2008 after the 
election of Barack Obama? Didn’t you 
feel great to be an American feeling proud 
that we had elected a Black President. (I 
know we say African American now; but, 
to me, this is another kind of nonsense.) 
What I am talking about is how I felt then 
as opposed to how I have felt during this 
second Trump administration. I have not 
felt proud to be an American or proud to 
be myself.

 I have felt insecure and worried about the 
future. Whose future or what future have 
I been worrying about? Is it my future, or 
the future of my family and friends, or the 
future of Democracy, or the future of our 
species or the future of our planet? What 
sense does any of all that make—I don’t 
know, and now that I think about it, I am 
still worried. That is what I intend the 
point of this article to be. I need to live 
and act sensibly and realistically and not 
be dominated by momentary feelings. It 
is my hope that “we” are all able to do that 
and that will make everything better. At 
least, that’s how I feel

 Often, in the morning, I awake dominated 
by the feelings that surrounded me in 
a dream. Often, I feel that it is important 
that I do something, but I can’t remember 
what it is. Generally, to calm myself down 
and focus on the present time I begin to 
hunt around for my iPhone. So far, I have 
always managed to find it and begin to play 
the New York Times Spelling Bee Game. 
First, I check the game I played yesterday 
and always notice the words I couldn’t find 
and momentarily feel pretty stupid. But 
that was yesterday I tell myself; I will do 
better today. My hope is to reach Genius 
without looking at any of the hints. There 
is a level beyond Genius called Queen Bee, 
but I have always satisfied myself with the 
attain-ment of the Genius level recognizing 
that I do not have the time or the talent 
to reach Queen Bee without many hints.

 I forget yesterday and begin again today 
happily finding words and feel pretty good 
until I can think of no more. I fear that 
I am stupid but generally at that moment 
a new word pops into my head and that 
word leads to soon I reach the Genius level. 
I feel smart see, right in front of me it 
says Genius. I send that Genius message 
to my wife whom I know couldn’t care less 
but I feel the need to share my success, 
or limited success (don’t forget Queen 
Bee). Now it is generally near 7 AM and 
the Pasadena Star News probably has ar-
rived on our driveway. For quite a while, 
before getting the paper, I would turn on 
PBS and watch the program Democracy 
Now hosted by Amy Goodman. I have 
stopped doing that because the news presented 
on that program has been so consistently 
negative that it de-pressed me 
and I don’t want to feel that bad so early 
in the morning. 

 I bring in the newspaper and generally 
first look at the Sports Section to learn 
what sporting events will be on TV during 
the day. This gives me something to 
look forward to and I feel good and brave 
enough to look at the rest of the paper. 
Yes, I already fear for the worst, but I am 
ready. Today, the news was unexpectedly 
good, and I am filled with hope about the 
future. I want to hold on to that feeling no 
matter what else happens. I thought today 
of the Kipling Poem “If” the first line of 
which speaks to “keeping your head about 
you” no matter what else is happening. 
There is always the time to recognize what 
is good about the miracle of our lives and 
to focus on what positive steps we can take 
in the next moment. Remember, there 
have been other bad times and “we” have 
survived.

 It is my hope that you do not consider the 
time you spent reading this article to be a 
waste of your time and feel good about my 
opportunity to submit this article. Hooray, 
this is a time for all of| “us” to feel 
pretty good! 

(Please note: All of Professor Einstein’s quotes and references 
are historical information.)

I’m tackling this topic because I ran into Albert Einstein 
on a different plane of existence recently and, after much 
pushing and prodding, he told me his answer to a few 
important questions. Here is roughly how the conversation 
went:

Rich: Are you ready Professor?

Albert: Ya Kumpel!

Rich: Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Professor Einstein on 
the meaning of life.

Albert: “Well, relatively speaking Rich, we (meaning you and I) 
are sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the 
cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our 
bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”

Rich: “Thank you Professor. Now we will move...”

Albert: “Relatively speaking I have more quotes to enlighten your 
readers. May I?”

Rich: “Be my guest, oh, excuse me, my Mein Gast! (German for 
guest)”

Albert: “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my 
education.”

Albert: “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”

Rich: “Ain’t that true Professor?”

Albert: “Ya, Kumpel, may I keep going?”

Albert: “If A is a success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. 
Work is X; Y is play; and Z is keeping your mouth shut.”

Albert: “My dog is very smart, he feels sorry for me because I 
receive so much mail; that’s why he tries to bite the mailman. I have more 
Rich, may I continue?”

Rich: “Jawohl” (Yes, indeed in German)

Albert: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be 
called research, would it?”

Albert: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability 
to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert: “The difference between stupidity and genius is that 
genius has its limits.”

Albert: Do you want to know my favorite quote on relativity?

Rich: “Lernen Sie die Übersetzung für” (I can hardly wait in 
German)

Albert: “Rich, here is my favorite quote on relativity.” “I know not 
with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will 
be fought with sticks and stones.”

Albert: “Like that one Richie…may I call you Richie?”

Rich: “Ya, and Professor, what is your favorite quote?”

Albert: “The quote that most effectively defines relativity is this 
one:” “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an 
hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”

Rich: “Any regrets Professor.”

Albert: “Rich, please call me by my childhood nickname, ‘der 
depperte’. Our family maid gave me that name.” 

Rich: “What does the name mean Herr Professor?”

Albert: “It has become an endearing name to me. And, relatively 
speaking I have enjoyed our conversation so much, I would like to call 
you ‘der depperte’ if you don’t mind.”

Rich: “I’d be honored to go by your childhood name? What 
does it mean?”

Albert: “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. It means ‘Dopey One’.”

Rich: “This is ‘Dopey One 2” checking out.”

Crass commercial message: If you miss Corfu Restaurant and their 
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Finally, and speaking of wonderful cuisine, again I invite you to consider 
Nano Café in Sierra Madre and Moffett’s in Arcadia to not only eat 
in…but if you are looking to having someone else do all the traditional 
Thanksgiving Dinner preparations. They are offering to prepare 
everything. Moffett’s number is (626) 447-4670. Nano Café’s number is 
(626) 325-3334. 

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HOWARD Hays As I See It


“It shows we can become anything we want as long as we (have) faith 
and determination” – Ugandan student Chemthai Zamzam, on Ugandan-
born Zohran Mamdani becoming Mayor-elect of New York City

 I’ll be up late getting 
this column out by the 
deadline. At this point 
in the week, I’m usually 
fine-tuning but I was out all day Tuesday 
- serving as a volunteer observer at the 
polls.

 

Most of the day was spent in Temple City, 
then late-afternoon and evening here in 
Sierra Madre. There was a call for volunteers 
after President Trump’s Justice Department 
announced that federal monitors 
would be dispatched to New Jersey 
and five counties in California, including 
Los Angeles.

 

The hardest part of being a poll observer 
is not being allowed to do much of anything 
– other than, after having introduced 
oneself to the poll workers, staying 
in the background observing. I managed 
to check a few things off my list – like clear 
demarcations of a 100-foot border inside 
of which no campaigning or chatting with 
voters allowed, poll workers explaining to 
voters that no I.D. is required to vote in 
California, and nobody turned away who 
was waiting in line when the polls closed 
at 8:00 PM.

 

After 5:00 PM, I also started checking the 
news as election results started coming 
in. Once the direction became apparent, 
Trump offered his own explanation as to 
why his party was taking such a drubbing; 
it was because he himself “wasn’t 
on the ballot”. But with a closer look, it 
became clear that throughout the country, 
this election was indeed all about Donald 
Trump.

 

In the Virginia For Governor race, former 
Democratic congresswoman and CIA officer 
Abigail Spanberger beat out Lt. Gov. 
Winsome Earle-Sears. Spanberger campaigned 
on “pragmatism over partisanship”; 
dealing with the harm caused by 
Trump’s government shutdown and Elon 
Musk’s DOGE layoffs in a state heavily dependent 
on federal employment. She also 
vowed to protect abortion rights. Earle-
Sears made her positions known as anti-
trans, anti-choice, pro-cooperation with 
ICE and pro – Trump tariffs.

 

Taking over as Lt. Governor in Virginia 
will be Democrat Ghazala Hashmi. She’s 
a former state senator who says she was 
motivated to run for office back then by 
Trump’s ban on travelers from Muslim-
majority countries during his first term. 
She’s said a “focus” will be “to stand up to 
the bigotry and the kind of division that 
Trump initiated in 2016 and that he continues 
to promote now in his second term.”

 

The problem for Republicans is that while 
failure to align themselves with Trump 
will cost them support from the MAGA 
“base”, aligning themselves with Trump 
is likely to cost them the election. This 
happened with former Re-publican state 
assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, candidate 
for the governorship of New Jersey. When 
Trump ran in 2016, Ciattarelli described 
him as “a celebrity in his own political reality 
TV show”, “not fit to be President of 
the United States.”

 

Earlier in his race for governor against 
former Navy helicopter pilot, federal prosecutor 
and congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, 
the race looked like a toss-up, or at 
least very close. But then in a debate with 
Democrat Sherrill, Ciat-tarelli said Trump 
has “been right about everything that he’s 
doing”, and gave him an “A” for his job so 
far. Sherrill gave him an “F”, and went on 
to win the election by double-digits. She 
made her position towards Trump clear in 
her victory speech; “We take an oath to a 
constitution, not a king.”

 

Trump’s cancelling of the New Jersey – 
New York Gateway Tunnel Project didn’t 
help the prospects of his en-dorsed candidate, 
Ciattarelli, in New Jersey. Nor did 
his threats of funding cuts and National 
Guard troops target-ing Democratic-controlled 
cities help his endorsed candidate, 
former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in the race 
for mayor of New York City. It was state 
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s campaigning 
as the antithesis of everything 
MAGA that brought him victory with the 
largest turnout for a mayoral election the 
city had seen since 1969.

 

In his victory speech, Mamdani reminded, 
“We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism 
with the strength it fears, not the 
appeasement it craves.”

 

For Proposition 50 here in California, 
opponents based their campaign on the 
message they felt offered their only realistic 
chance for success; that it had nothing 
to do with Trump. California voters of 
course knew that, quite the contrary, it had 
everything to do with Trump – and passed 
it handily.

 

An editorial in the Charlotte Observer 
could have been about elections throughout 
the country, as it described local polling 
in North Carolina having become 
“fully nationalized, and the partisan label 
matters more than ever”, how they served 
as “an early referendum on Trump’s second 
term, and suburban disapproval was 
decisive.” It noted how “For years, we’ve 
told ourselves that city elections are about 
potholes and parks and transparency . . . 
But last night, voters in and around Charlotte 
used local levers to make a national 
statement.” Americans made that statement 
resoundingly from coast to coast.

 

While I was observing at the polls last 
Tuesday, one of the few exchanges I had 
with an election worker was when a lady 
came in accompanied by a tall young man 
in his high school gym attire. After they’d 
voted and left, I turned to the worker 
and asked, “Was that his first time?”. She 
smiled and said, “Yes” – and we both gave 
each other a thumbs-up.


1 MILLION LIKES by Paul the Cyberian

“The Big Brains of the Operation – Nvidia Datacenter GPUs”

Along with the likes of Amazon, Oracle, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and 
others, Nvidia is a participating member of what is frequently referred 
to as the Big Tech Group. The “smallest” of the bunch, Meta (Facebook), 
has a current market capitalization of $1.678T. Nvidia hit the $5 Trillion 
mark in late October 2025, and eventually settled at a respectable $4.57T 
as of market close November 6, 2025. 

Out of the group members, Nvidia is the main contributor that produces 
a physical product that can be delivered to a customer site, albeit a 
very specialized one. Their main contribution to the massive AI project 
currently gripping financial markets, and the tech world in general, are 
their specialized GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) which have become 
quite good at delivering the central component, Compute power, needed 
to deliver the AI product.

As a verb, the word compute means the act of performing calculations, 
particularly complex mathematical operations. This activity is central to 
doing what computers do in order to deliver useful output for the end-
user. As a noun, the word “Compute” denotes the physical hardware and 
computational resources needed to perform the highly technical calculations 
that power AI training and inference models. Compute power is 
measured in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second). 

For reference, the GPU most widely used in AI Datacenters is the 
Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU which can process up to 3,026 TFLOPS 
(3,026,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per seconds). A 2024 
iMac with an Apple M4 chip and 16GB of Unified RAM has a peak performance 
of 4.2 TFLOPS. GPUs in datacenters are configured in clusters, 
which work as a force-multiplier to get better performance than 
an individual GPU can deliver on its own. Coupled with specialized 
management software, these GPUs, and the supporting infrastructure 
deliver the product that we have come to know as AI. 

To date, Nvidia has shipped approximately 4 million of its Hopper-class 
GPUs (H100/H200), and 3 million of its Blackwell-class GPUs (GB100/
GB102/GB200) to datacenters around the globe. While the H100 is the 
most widely deployed, the Blackwell-class GPUs are the newest and 
most advanced. 

Just in case you were wondering you can get your hands on production-
grade H100 for the around $30,000 or the price of a luxury car. Just in 
time for Christmas. 


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