Regarding the stock market, why is everyone surprised that companies that make no money, have no plan to make money and have no idea how they could make money who are shoveling money into large flaming bonfires stock’s are getting hit. What is the big mystery here??

I was doing my best to not comment on this because it really is pretty silly. How many people have seen the billboard for Gazoontite.com on 101 North a little ways past SFO? For those of you that don’t have the fortune of leaving ’round here or for those of you that do have the fortune of not having to drive on 101 – the billboard has a big display that says: “Pollen count: XX%” where XX is always above 80. Now let me ask you, what the hell does that mean?? Pollen is typically measured in grains per cubic meter not as a percentage.

According to pollen.com “Pollen grains average between 20 to 40 micrometers in size”. Let’s take 30 micrometers as average. Assuming that pollen is cubical with 30 micrometers on each axis, this means that each grain of pollen is 27*10-15 m3 in volume. This means that you could fill one cubic meter with about 4*1013 grains of pollen, this is what they must mean by 100% pollen count. An 88% pollen count would then be 3.5*1013 grains/m3.

I did a little poking around on the web and found the AAAAI who is a semi-official pollen measurement authority. The nearest station they had was for San Jose. The measurements they had for today was: Trees: 479, Grasses:7, Weeds: 4, Molds: 1958. All numbers are given in grains per cubic meter. This gives us a pollen count of 2448 grains/m3 in San Jose.

This means that the pollen count in San Jose is 2448 grains per cubic meter and the count 35 miles to the north is 35 TRILLION grains cubic meter. Gazoontite.com is reporting a 14 MILLION percent increase in pollen over the course of 35 miles!

Before you say anything – yes, I realize that this is a stupid thing to get worked up over and I know that the board is not actually measuring the pollen count in the air…