Today is like the end of summer, for tomorrow begins September.   But you can enjoy life until Tuesday, for Monday is Labor Day, a national holiday. All things considered, the world at this very moment is doing fine: Internationally: The Hamas attacked Israel on 7October2023.  There will be a  three-day cease fire beginning tomorrow in the Gaza Strip to vaccinate 640,000 Palestinian children against polio , which has no cure.  The first case in 25 years was just reported, so maybe this is a possible first step to a larger truce to come. Two doses of two drops of a live virus to be taken orally.  2000 medical volunteers will do the job.  The world yet awaits that expected revenge response from Iran on Israel. Russian invaded the Ukraine in February 2022, and remains in control.  But the fact that Ukraine has lasted this long, and is  now into Russian territory , is a surprise.  The U.S. is approaching a  trillion dollars for the Afghanistan war   (still spending ).  $113 billion so far

  Next month,   Scientific American  will feature dinosaurs. Early in my youth, I made dinosaur figures using plaster of paris.   I then wanted to be a paleontologist.  I now know that this occupation forces you to spend ungodly time in horrible places with terrible weather. But about that above  Scientific American  article : Begins with the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Note some fluffiness, as explained in the end of this posting. Brain weighed less than a pound.   We have a 3-pound brain, while an elephant has an 11-pound brain.   Dinosaurs and elephants were similar in size: T-Rex had a length of 40 feet and height of 20 feet, but elephants weighed more, 12,000 lb vs 9,000 pounds. A human brain is 2% of our body weight.   Elephant = 0.1% and dinosaur = 0.01%. T-Rex had 3 billion neurons, while humans have 100 billion and a Nile crocodile around 0.8 million.  An emu has roughly 1.3 billion neurons.  Thus,  T-Rex was not capable of advanced planning or coordinated social hunting.  But it is s

A coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, China in December 2019.   We were on the Diamond Princess  in the Orient that month .  Came back to Hawaii.   However this same ship on 20January2020 boarded an 80-year old passenger from Hong Kong with a respiratory ailment, and started the international spread.   The Diamond Princess on 3February2020 returned to Yokohama, but had to anchor at sea, for a strange new disease seemed to be spreading. Unknowingly,  we flew from Honolulu to Bangkok, Thailand on 11February2020 . That day the World Health Organization announced the official name for this virus would be COVID-19, CO for corona, VI for virus, D for diseases and 19, the year (2019) it was first discovered. Ultimately, with 2,666 passengers and a crew of 1,045, 712 became infected, with 14 deaths.  Interestingly enough, 20% of the people on the ship were infected, and of those, 2% died.  So far, in the world, there have been 704,753,890 cases and 7,010,681 deaths, a mortality rate of 1%. Pa