A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HOW IMAGINATION LED TO WHAT I AM TODAY

First, from the Sunday New York Times: The Sunday Question: How long will McCarthy last as speaker? McCarthy's concession to win the job made it easier for hard-right lawmakers to oust him, so his tenure could be short. But Democrats looking to cut deals with McCarthy could supply votes to save him if conservatives revolt.

Also, tomorrow night, TCU vs Georgia for the NCAA football championship, and on Tuesday, the release of Prince Harry's memoir, Spare.

I yesterday watched on my local PBS channel, First Contact: An Alien Encounter, a British program dramatizing what would happen if we encountered an incoming alien signal and/or artifact. While this Guardian review did not take the effort too seriously, I did agree that it was mostly boring.

Yet, triggered was my posting of today on this subject, and the subject of the day...imagination. Oh, here is a list of 655 films featuring extraterrestrials, so my wild dabblings are sometimes popular.

Sunday is a spiritual day for many. Me? I like to imagine things. But I can't say I've always had much imagination. In fact, I was only an above average student until my junior year of high school, when something inexplicable happened, or maybe delusional is more accurate, and I decided that I wouldn't even bother to apply to the University of Hawaii, and only seek admission to Stanford and Cal Tech. Incredibly enough, I did get accepted to both and selected Stanford because they offered a lot more money. Click on this for just one story about how this happened, or another.

Filled with some enthusiasm and confidence after those years, my mind has wandered and wondered at will, and in the mid-1970s I segued into another direction fueled by my imagination to work for the NASA Ames Research Center on a subject dealing with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The hope was to extract from the sky The Encyclopedia Galactica providing clues on how humanity can attain world peace, and other useful hints from a civilization a billion years more mature.

Then a few years later, I joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to solve the enigma of laser fusion, as all stars use this process for energy. In 1979, straight from LLNL, I joined the staff of U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga and helped draft the first bill for hydrogen and OTEC. Someday, the Hydrogen Society will feature laser fusion and hydrogen-powered aircraft. The OTEC link led me to the Blue Revolution, where I'm with a group attempting to secure $150 million for the Pacific International Ocean Station, leading we hope to a $150 billion Ocean City to host the 2050 World Ocean Expo. Watch my recent TEDx talk.

There have been other forays, as best, perhaps, summarized in my MENSA talk of five years ago, where I went into my attempts at World Peace, Geoengineering Solutions for Global Warming, Rainbow Pearls International, Hawaiian Geo-Spas and the Ultimate Ocean Ranch. My imagination had no boundaries.

However, you ask, have I accomplished anything? Well, I'm a Johnny Appleseed planter of ideas, so, someday maybe one or more of the above could bloom into reality.

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 suspicio...

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...

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 a...

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