Skip to main content

JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

 

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had a successful launch on Christmas day.  This $10 billion system is on a 29-day journey to Lagrange Point 2, around a million miles away.  Note, that our Earth blocks the Sun's rays from the JWST.  We won't know if it will work until after it gets there, and first sight might not be received for three months.  In the meantime, there appears to be no way to correct any mistake as we did for the Hubble Telescope.  The JWST has six times the collecting size of Hubble's, and is 100 times more sensitive.

The Canary Island's La Palma Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption which began this past September, finally ended after 85 days, the longest on record for this island:

  • 3000 buildings destroyed.
  • $1 billion of damage.
I've always wanted to visit La Palma because I have featured it several times in this blog and one of my books as the future potential site to create a mega-tsunami, a possible analog of the Big Island of Hawaii sending monster waves to Seattle.  On my exploration adventure, I found out that city is too well protected, so I'm now back to Five Hours to Los Angeles.

From the American Energy Society:  

Who had the "best year" in energy?
Image
The global mining sector. Coal prices are up, exports are up, and prices for Rare Earth Metal's have achieved stratospheric heights, especially elements and metals necessary for batteries (i.e rhodium from $640 an ounce five years ago to $21,900 an ounce this year; lithium prices rose 11% to $10,000 per ton).
I can add that the value of coal stocks rose.  At one point last month, every coal mining company rose at least 145% in the stock market for the past 12 months!!

Incidentally, the Dow Jones Industrials Average rose to another all-time high, up 96 to 36,398.

And:

Finally, also from the American Energy Society:
  • President Joe Biden acknowledged that "it seems like an irony" that he is asking energy-rich nations to boost oil production as he implores the world to tackle climate change.
  • Norway, once the leader in the energy transition to renewables, is now producing record amounts of oil and gas.
Weather in Honolulu over the Christmas weekend?  Wonderful.  However, did you know that the western portion of the USA experienced as much as 16 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains (most in December, ever), with 100 MPH gusts and a temperature of 55 below zero in Montana?  There was a 20-car pileup on US 395 near Reno because of visibility.  Today, much of this region is still very cold.

Should you be on your way to Las Vegas, their McCarran Airport, named after Nevada's Senator Patrick McCarran 73 years ago, was changed to the Harry Reid International Airport, another senator who was President of the Senate when he retired.  Why?  McCarran reportedly advocated racism, xenophobia and antisemitism.  Part of the stipulation for the name change was that all funding for this effort needed to come from private donations.  The original McCarran Field sign at the Las Vegas Boulevard entrance will however be kept.  Sad to say, former Senator Reid passed away today.

Did you know that the Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing a new federal greenhouse gas emission standard to raise the corporate average fuel economy to 55 MPG from 2026?  The EPA calculates that motorists will save between $210 billion and $420 billion through 2050 on fuel costs.  Of course, the motivation factor is to curb global warming.  The result will be more electric vehicles.

How terrific is this?  Weep.  Here is a current comparison showing how far we are behind Europe and Japan (the MPG axis is to the right):

The White House has a new resident, Commander, a 3-month-old German Shepherd with large pointy ears.  On the Christmas call to the military, he embarrassingly kept licking a certain portion of his body.  The First Dog was a gift from James Biden, the president's brother.  A cat is soon to follow.

I was glancing through the sports section today and noticed that top ten professional tennis players are all from Europe, if you count Russia as being from that region.  #11 is a Canadian, and, finally at #23 is an American, Fritz Taylor.  He is 24 years old and has been a pro for six years.  His serve has been measured at 149 MPH, which sounds great.  The world record, though, is 163.4 MPH by Sam Groth of the UK.  American John Isner, seemingly a perpetual #24 in the world, is #3 at 157.2 MPH.

You might say our ranking is an improvement, as in July of this year, there were no American men in the top 30.  It was 18 years ago that Andy Roddick won the U.S.Open.  He was also the last American at #1.

A little better for females, as Sofia Kenin is #12.  Two years ago this article heralded the coming the next wave of women in tennis.  While Cori Gauff, only 17, made a sudden entry, she has fallen back and is now #22.  Serena Williams, who is 40 years old, is #41.

Ever use TikTok?  You're not keeping up if not, for it beat out Google to become the most popular website in 2021.  Top ten:

  1. TikTok.com
  2. Google.com
  3. Facebook.com
  4. Microsoft.com
  5. Apple.com
  6. Amazon.com
  7. Netflix.com
  8. YouTube.com
  9. Twitter.com
  10. WhatsApp.com

I reported on TikTok on October 29:

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service started in 2017 by Chinese company ByteDance.  The video performance tends to be short, from 15 seconds to three minutes.  After you watch this supposedly top ten from TikTok, you've got to wonder like me why it is popular.  Maybe you need to be young to appreciate the attraction.

Is TikTok a China's Trojan Horse?  Well, it came from China in 2017, and today remains a Chinese-owned entity headquartered in Beijing and run by Zhang Yiming.  He is worth $44.5 billion and little is known about his personal life.

No question that the company shares data with the Communist Party.  100 million Americans use TikTok.  Certainly something to watch.

Larry King passed away earlier this  year at the age of 87.  He had eight marriages, seven wives, six kids, two bankruptcies, a larceny arrest, a quintuple bypass and lung cancer.  Born in Brooklyn as Lawrence Harvey Zeiger, parents were Orthodox Jews who came from Belarus, conducted 60,000 interviews, was a Jewish agnostic, might have died from COVID-19 with a net worth of $144 million, and had a hell of a life.

I've watched cane fields being set aflame, and rats rushing out.  I've never seen corn being harvested:

-

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases.  Very few are aware that a new one,   BA.4.6,  is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples .  However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6.  Here is a  reference  as to what this means.  A series of two injections is involved.  Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab  co-packaged with  cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on  subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicious and troublesome.  This strain has also been spreading in
Post a Comment
Read more

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics.  Thursday was my pandemic day for years.  Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments.  All these  subvariants  derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms.  One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell.  From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant,  BA.2.86,  also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to  lose hair  for several months.  This is caused by stress more than anythi
Post a Comment
Read more

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota.  Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north.  Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge.  If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic.  Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing.  The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University.  Caught a bus. Was called the  Century 21 Exposition .  Also the Seattle World's Fair.  10 million joined me on a six-month run.  My first. These are held every five years, and there have only been
Post a Comment
Read more