I YESTERDAY FORGOT TO POST MY SATURDAY BLOG. SHOULD WANT TO READ IT, CLICK ON THIS. The following is my Sunday posting.
There are no graphics today. I drafted this posting a month ago, but held it back. Since then, there have been issues with my health, and, after 17 years of daily articles, there could come a day in the near future when you will see nothing. It could be because I am temporarily incapacitated. Might be only a day, or a week, or...... As of this moment, we are still planning on a trip to San Diego and Paso Robles in October, followed by a very long journey of nearly two months from mid-November to mid-January. I hope to be alive and well, so return for those postings if a gap occurs. In any case, the following was written when I was a lot more optimistic about my well being.
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Most of you have an advantage over me. When you die, many will go to Heaven. When I pass away, it will be eternal gloom.
So, anyway, on this Sunday I was wondering how many years do I have left?
- According to the National Library of Medicine, the average male 84 years old has a life expectancy of 7.5 years. Thus, I'll go at 91.5. A white female in the U.S. has 9.1 years left if she is now 84.
- Northeastern Mutual has a Lifespan Calculator.
- Start with your age.
- Answer 13 questions.
- This calculator said I will die at the age of 101!!! Wow!!!
- However, I would live to 105 if I cut out alcohol. If it's only the final four years, I'd rather continue to better enjoy life.
- According to Google AI Overview, a male born in 1940 had a life expectancy of 60.8 years. As I will be 85 years old in two months, I have actually lived 24 years longer than expected. If that 101 figure happens, I, thus, will have lived 40 years longer than expected. Another wow!!!
- However, the Social Security Administration has something called Cohort Life Expectancy.
- That table is not easy to read, but I think it says if I was born in 1940, my life expectancy was 70.4.
- So I have already lived around 14 years longer than expected, and am still alive, so this can only get higher.
- InfoPlease has a table.
- Life expectancy for those born in 1940 was 60.8 for all races in the U.S., the same as Google AI Overview.
- For a white male, 62.1, and black male, 54.1.
- From Google AI Overview of U.S. life expectancy today.
- Asian 85.7, Latino 82.2, White 78.9 and black 75.3.
- Females 81.1 and males 75.8.
The thing with life is that you can expire at any time from a heart attack, stroke, car accident or asteroid impact. Further, simply extending lifespan is not good enough. The focus should be on living a healthy and productive life.
There are ways to look at the future. Will life continue as before, or, if you've had great luck in the past, will the odds even in the years to come? I worry a little bit about this because I've had more than my share of luck. Perhaps I'm writing my own eulogy.
- Born in Honolulu in 1940. Well, this was a year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, so not so good. There was an early concern about a follow-up land invasion, which never happened.
- Grew up in Kakaako, historically considered a rough neighborhood.
- Family, below average.
- Hawaii was not much different from the U.S., except for the ethnic mix.
- There were no serious civil rights issue, as African Americans suffered during those days, and I guess even today.
- However, there was a continuation of a sugar plantation mentality with Caucasians leading and all other races subservient.
- Did only okay in school from kindergarten to sophomore in high school, but not exceptional.
- The Bishop Estate (which runs Kamehameha schools) was the major landowner, including the Kakaako area.
- They had plans to modernize, and many living in what is now the Ward complex of condos and businesses next to the coastline near downtown Honolulu to now Ala Moana Shopping Center, were kicked out of their homes.
- I was at that time a sophomore at McKinley High School with a goal to attend the University of Hawaii.
- Bad luck can sometimes be good, for I was essentially cut-off from my "gang," which totally changed my life.
- A combination of circumstances, unrealistically inspired me to attempt to get a full scholarship to attend either the Californian Institute of Technology or Stanford University.
- To do that I needed to improve my grades, get involved with student activities and gain an athletic letter.
- The highest hurdle was to improve my verbal score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. If you grow up using Pigeon English in a place like Kakaako, and did not read much, this was an obvious problem.
- During this early period of thinking what I needed to accomplish, I took the practice College Boards, and did well in math, but scored under 300 in the verbal section, meaning I was in the lowest 10% of those taking this exam.
- Again, from bad to good, I broke my wrist playing basketball during the spring of my junior year, so I couldn't do what students my age did during the summer...work in the pineapple cannery. I decided to spend those three months memorizing the words in the Scholastic Aptitude Test book (I still remember the red, white and blue cover) and other publications. The verbal score in my senior year (the one that counted) jumped to around 650, which was in the 90th percentile. My math score was near 800, the maximum.
- Considering that I had never run for any kind of office in my life, not clubs nor classrooms even, I decided in my junior year to become a candidate for vice-president of my senior class.
- No one knew me.
- My photo showed the cast on my left arm.
- I won out of pity, plus the fact that the three other candidates were females.
- This might have been the greatest accomplishment of my life, or amazing good luck, this one gender-based.
- Activities? The vice-president of the class was automatically chairman of various committees, so I had student activities adequately covered.
- Never having played this sport before, I tried out for the school tennis team, wound up as third singles, and had the best record. The coach scheduled practice essentially every day, and for these two-years played around 690 of the 700 days. Interesting fact. in 1958 tennis balls cost $3 per can of 3. Today, 2025, tennis balls still cost $3 per can of 3. Amazing.
- I was somewhat creative at writing, with poor grammar, and did not understand poetry at all. However, during those days, there was national competition to publish essays and poems in two anthologies. Maybe this is still done today. My submitted essay and poem were both published in those books. I wish I had kept them.
- I won the school science fair and the Bausch and Lomb medal for best science student.
- Some schools like to see applicants do something out of the ordinary. Maybe something to do with charity or the environment.
- My Hi-Y club had a fund-raiser to sell pumpkin pies just before Thanksgiving.
- We miscounted, and that day ended up with 25 pies too many.
- Someone (not me) had the bright idea to give them to needy organizations.
- We did, and the local newspaper ran an article about our kindness.
- I might have exaggerated my role in my essay for the college applications.
- Perhaps competition to schools like Stanford and CalTech was not as overwhelming as it is today. I got accepted to both, and went to Stanford because it offered a full ride: room and board, waiver of tuition and even a 10-hr/week job to man the rare book room of the main library, which meant that I could study for those hours, as no one visited that area. CalTech would have gotten me into deep science, while a Stanford chemical engineering degree gave me different opportunities.
- My professional life was amazing.
- First, after a stint in the Hawaiian Sugar Industry, my company, the oldest in Hawaii then (it is around no longer), C. Brewer, paid my way to Louisiana State University because it had the only sugar master's degree program in the world. I talked them into allowing me to stay for a PhD in biochemical engineering, and ended up teaching at the University of Hawaii in the College of Engineering in 1972.
- The energy crisis came in 1973, making renewable energy a desirable focus of R&D.
- I helped form the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) in 1974 to coordinate clean energy research in the Pacific, and became director in 1984.
- During that 11-year period (from 1973-1984), I managed to spend two assignments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Laser Fusion, a summer at the NASA Ames Research Center on a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project and three years in Washington, D.C. working for U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga, where I helped draft and pass into law the original legislation for ocean thermal energy conversion, wind energy, hydrogen and seabed mining.
- During my 15 years of directorship over HNEI, we became the Department of Energy national center for hydrogen, Department of Interior national center for marine minerals and National Science Foundation Marine Bioproducts Engineering Center.
- Soon after I became director of HNEI in 1984, I helped form the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR), where my staff was awarded $25 million to build the first open cycle OTEC facility at the Hawaii Ocean Science Park on the Big Island and began another $25 million project to convert sugar cane bagasse into methanol on Maui. More than 40 years later, PICHTR continues to function as a leader in green energy and high technology.
- I worked at the University of Hawaii for 27 years, and am now in my 26th year of retirement.
- I retired from the University of Hawaii in 1999, but still maintain an office on the Manoa Campus, with free parking.
- In retirement, I published three books, spent a while reporting for the Huffington Post and began this blog site in 2008. My retirement years have by far been the most enjoyable of my life.
- I have had at least a dozen around the world trips and am nearing 3 million miles just on Star Alliance, although a dozen cruises have been part of our recent travels.
- One of the problems with my professional life is that the eventual benefits from my significant efforts are far in the future: World Peace, the Hydrogen Economy and the Blue Revolution. You can read and view my contributions in more than a hundred HuffPo articles, and the following You Tube videos.
- Talk on the Blue Revolution at a San Francisco Seasteading Conference.
- Podcast on clean, renewable energy.
- TEDx presentation titled, The Time for the Blue Revolution is Now.
This blog site does continue tomorrow.
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