Time  magazine this morning had this article:   What are the Five Strongest Earthquakes Ever Recorded? #6 was, of course, that massive Russian Kamchatka earthquake of 8.8 magnitude just experienced at 8:25AM local time on July 30.  Amazingly enough, there was only one death, but this was a woman in Japan while evacuating.  So there was none caused by the earthquake itself.   There was another 8.8 earthquake,  Chile in 2010 , which killed around 600, including 25 still missing.  So there is a tie for #6.  I happened to be in Amsterdam, Netherlands that day, but still wrote an article for the Huffington Post entitled  Hawaii Tsunami?   You can click on that link to read the whole article, but I will provide a beginning here: I'm on an around the world odyssey, which you can follow through my   HuffPost postings . Well, my most exciting day is happening right in front of me watching the 8.8 Chile earthquake cataclysm on ...

I stopped buying real books around a decade ago.  I have nevertheless continued reading, several of them/year, but to my iPhone, which also works on my iPad.  It is not the same.  Convenient, but different. Every so often, one enters a transition, as for example, leaving home to college, or retiring.  Recently, I finished  The Three Body Problem  ( a Chinese novel I'll report on soon ), and began reading  Eruption . ( a novel about a Hawaii volcano ).  Also during this period, I finished watching two Netflix series,  OA  and  Zero Day .   Next?  I have a problem, which I'll explain later. Michal Crichton passed away in 2008, but I noticed this  facebook comment by someone named Michael Crichton .  Another kind of transition? Crichton’s work often examines the dangers of advanced technology spiraling out of human control, a theme that aligns closely with Zero Day ’s premise. In Prey, Jurassic Park, Sphere, and The...

I was this week walking to the dining room at 15 Craigside, when one of the residents walked up to me and said something to the effect:   Crichton and Patterson stole your idea about an eruption on the Big Island .  So the next day I went to my computer and found that  Eruption , by Crichton and Patterson, was #1 on the  New York Times  fiction book list. How did their book come together? Michael Crichton  was a Harvard-trained doctor who went straight into writing, creating  Jurassic Park  and other adventures. His first book under his name was  The Andromeda Strain .  All told, his books sold over 200 million copies, with a dozen adapted into films. He is the only writer to have a number one book, movie and TV show in the same year. Born in 1942 and passed away in 2008 at the age of 66.   His wife Sherri found parts of an unfinished novel centered around a huge volcanic eruption in Hawaii, and thought this should be comp...