Yesterday I focused on Woodstock , that generation-defining rock concert held 57 years ago.  I opened with those wildfires in Southern California.  I should have also added another, more serious one, in Indonesia.  From Google AI: Indonesia is currently battling its worst season of toxic forest and peatland wildfires in over a decade , which have scorched nearly two million hectares of land and triggered severe health crises across Southeast Asia. Artificial intelligence is playing a major dual role in this crisis, serving as both a powerful tool for emergency detection and a vehicle for misinformation on social media . [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ] The Scale of the Havoc Unprecedented Destruction: Spurred by a severe, climate-change-fueled El Niño dry season , fires concentrated heavily in Borneo (Kalimantan) and Sumatra have generated massive plumes of dense smoke. Independent monitors like the Nusantara Atlas estimate the burned area at over 1.9 million hecta...

Whether it was America 250 or Freedom 250, this was truly a grand weekend for the USA. Sure, it was a bit too hot. And a lightning storm delayed the President Donald Trump's speech and the DC fireworks show.  However, the address was given and the show almost surely did break the Guinness World Record.  Officials are still reviewing the details. From New York City to Los Angeles to Hawaii, all went well. On the other hand, Super Typhoon Bavi did damage to American territories, the Northern Marianas Island and Guam, especially the island of Rota, with details later, and there were several shootings , killing 43 and wounding many others throughout the nation. A video of the 250th celebrations .  Two fireworks photos. The FIFA World Cup had a bunch of highlights.   You can watch the best here .  Today: Portugal vs Spain at 6PM in Dallas. USA vs Belgium at 11PM in Seattle. Belgium is screaming mad, but FIFA gave American striker Folarin Balogun, the USA's leadi...

   Some weekly   Worldometer   info on COVID-19: Deaths over the past 7 days. World  1913 #1    Brazil  243 #2    Germany 223 #3    USA  209 #4    Russia  183 #5    France  155 Deaths in the past 7 days per million population. World  0.24 #1    New Zealand  11 #2    Hong Kong  11 #3    Martinique  5 #4    Greece  4 #5    Denmark  4 #11  S. Korea  2 #17  Brazil  1 #23  USA  0.9 Worried about long covid?  At one time as high as one-third of people who got infected were suspected of suffering this symptomatic fallout.  However, a  recent study seems to show that only 10% now suffer from this ailment .  Part of the reason is that the subvariants from Omicron to the present are not as troublesome.  Now that the pandemic has been declared over,  what was the cos...

You by now must know that GOAT is the Greatest Of All Time.  But  BOAT:  The Brightest of All Time ? Last October telescopes spotted a gamma ray burst, which is caused by the collapse of a black hole.  These also occur when two black holes or neutron stars collide.  This phenomenon is focused along a narrow beam.  If you happen to be in the path, you could be in trouble. One of Humanity's most serious possible extinction evenf could well be a gamma ray burst. However, Planet Earth is so far away from such things that astronomers don't much worry about that, especially as the odds of this beam heading exactly our way are very low. Yet, astronomers detect about a burst a day, and these are only the ones heading in our general direction, which is a small percentage of all GRBs in the Universe. The calculation is that an extinction GRB happens once every five million years, but not on here. Possibly, a GRB with this potential could have occurred about 450 milli...