THE WINDMILLS OF KINDERDIJK AND CITY OF DORDRECHT

I'm doing well. The world seems also to be okay, with no weather calamities and the wars in Ukraine and Gasa Strip in some kind of stalemate. Will Iran take revenge? Will there be a truce and hostage exchange? The ship daily provides the USA Times.

On the Donald Trump front, nothing much. The hush money criminal trial will proceed in New York City on April 15, the Supreme Court will on April 25 hear oral arguments about his immunity request and Fani Willis is still on the Georgia RICO case. Who leads today, Trump or Biden? Who cares. These trials will make the difference on November 5.

In sports.

March Madness came and went, with Connecticut repeating as men's champs, and South Carolina returning to the top for women.

I haven't seen any Major League Baseball game this year on TV and I've missed making roster adjustments with regularity, but my three ESPN fantasy teams still lead their leagues at #1.

The Masters begins in a few hours. Tiger Woods is schedule to tee off at 1:24PM EDT with Jason Day and Max Homa.
Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs of boson fame passed away at the age of 94.
The total solar eclipse came and went. Best photos:

Top of Washington Monument by Chip Somodevilla.

By Bill Ingalls.

Kendall Rust.

Watch this video.

Okay, we're still in the Netherlands, or is it Holland? Well, the Dutch government from 2020 began to promote the Netherlands as its name. You can use Netherlands or The Netherlands.

Netherlands literally means "lower countries," in reference to its low elevation and flat topography, where 26% of the country is BELOW sea level. Land reclamation began in the 14th century.

So what is Dutch? This is the language spoken by 25 million in the Netherlands as a first language. You could say that Dutch is roughly in between English and German. Shares a root with the German deutch, which means belonging or relating to Germany.
Country has a population of 18 million. Capital is the Hague.
It's a parliamentary constitutional monarchy.
First country to legalize same-sex marriage, in the year 2001. The U.S. came around in 2015. There are now 30 countries.

There was a Dordrecht walking tour. Has a population of 120,000. This is the oldest city (founded around 1120) in Holland, rich in history and culture.

The 19 windmills of Kinderdijk were built around 1740 to remove water from land. Has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997. These devices generate between 7.5 and 20 kW of power, which is a small wind turbine by today's standards. The Goldwind rotor of China, for example, is rated at 16 MW, or 16,000 kW. At high wind conditions, this modern machine can generate energy to power 170,000 homes. However, the traditional Dutch windmill is only able to power a large home today.

We tonight will have a gala dinner and are asked to dressed formally.

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...

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...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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