I'll start today with  who is Usha Vance , wife of J.D., the brand new Republican veep candidate. Met at Yale Law School. If the Trump-Vance ticket prevails on November 5, she will become the first Indian of parents from India, and Hindu, to serve as Second Lady. She was raised by  immigrant parents, a mother who is a biologist and provost of Sixth College, at the University of California, San Diego, and a father, who is an engineer. Usha received an undergraduate degree from Yale, and a Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Like J.D., she served in editorial positions at the Yale Law Journal while in law school. The couple earned their attorney degrees in 2013 and got married the following year.  They have three children. She clerked for Judge Kavanaugh in 2014/5 when he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals, then a year with Supreme Court Justice John Roberts in 2017/8. Became a trial lawyer in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Was a Democrat in 2014, but is ...

I watched on Netflix last night:   Einstein and the Bomb .   Rotten Tomatoes  reviewers gave it an 83 rating. What surprised me was that while I knew it was his letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that got the U.S. going on the Manhattan Project, security reasons did not allow him to participate in the effort.  The film  Oppenheimer  covers the building phase of the Atomic Bomb, and a portion of it shows  Oppie meeting with Einstein . So I thought this morning, what can go wrong today to instantly eliminate us.  It then occurred to me that a nuclear war between Russia and the Free World would probably be it.   One list  has climate change at #1, nuclear warfare #2, pandemics #3, social media #4, The Butterfly Effect #5, quantum computing #6, AI #7, the death of all bees #8, asteroid impact #9 and alien invasion #10. But climate change will take time to kill us, and there are reasons to believe that we will gain contr...

Our stay in Nara was, well, nearly perfect.  Yesterday, we did not see a cloud, so the sunlight enhanced the oranges and reds.  Today, it was cloudy all day, on our train rides from Nara to Kyoto to Shin-Yokohama to Yokohama Station.  But about Nara, we did not expect much, but it was the highlight of our Fall Colors visit.  While the cruise was fine, Hokkaido was a disappointment, which largely carried through in Tokyo and Nagoya.  Then everything got better and better. Need to show a couple more photos I missed enclosing yesterday.  First, we saw a persimmon tree where you couldn't count the number of fruits.  What is your estimate? That was in Nara Park.  Secondly, Nara has all that history and religiosity, but is today mostly a sprawling city.  While Nara Park is truly a national treasure, the city itself is nicely symbolized with this photo. You say, why?  See the middle of the above photo?  Then target that religious middle. I...