Any regular reader of this blog site knows that I'm old, for I live at 15 Craigside, a seniors' community in Honolulu.   For the past 15 years I've taken two lengthy trips/year, at least half a dozen being global, that is, around the world....usually about two months long.   More recently, cruises have encroached, as our most recent journey involved a Norwegian Encore 39-day sail from Seattle to Southampton (UK), plus a Viking Tir European Christmas cruise of 14 days from Amsterdam to Budapest.  Our next extravaganza in a month will involve flying to Kansai Airport, Japan, to participate in the Osaka World Expo, then an Oceania cruise from Yokohama to Vancouver. However, I've come to that point in life when I am beginning to enjoy life more at home than not.  Nothing fancy. Mostly writing this daily blog, something I have been daily doing for almost 17 years My first posting was on  29April2008 . You know how long this has been? Beginning with kinderga...

My life has been up and down, but mostly good.  In this blog I've actually said that my life has been in the 99.99th percentile.   But part of that is because, over the course of time,  Homo sapiens  have had 117 billion birth s.  As there are now only 8 billion of us, and life today surely must be a lot better than in the past, that already places me at a great advantage, and you too. I was born in  1940 , a dark period in history when Hitler was conquering Europe.  The #1 song in the USA was  I'll Never Smile Again , by Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers. But more than just that, after an acceptable youth growing up in Kakaako ( Honolulu ), not a slum, but definitely below average, I had a great final two years of high school and got accepted at Stanford University. Life was generally fine there.  I read today an entry in  Quora  entitled:   Is Caltech the most academically diffic...