About my posting yesterday on  MY LIFE , in the first month of this blog I also had a  MY LIFE .  Then on  26April2022 , dressed that first version up with some graphics.  Not much different from that of yesterday. However, I almost purposefully left out some of my life highlights, so rather than go back and add them to my posting yesterday,  here are some of them . My professional life, from first graduating, where I went into biomass engineering, to my academic career where I became a full professor of engineering and spent much of my years at the University Hawaii in the full spectrum of green energy, a satisfying honor came from the American Association of Civil Engineers, the Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. Energy award at their annual conference in 1999. Within the field of renewable energy, I was most active in ocean activities. Drafted the ocean thermal energy conversion bill that became law. Served as Secretary of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii and Director of the Hawaii Natur

While love and happiness prevail, my mind nevertheless wanders and wonders a lot.  I see homeless people and realize that with only a wrong decision or two, that could have been me.   I have been lucky,  Very lucky. I consider my life to be a success.  Of the  117 billion born , surely I rank in the top one-tenth of one percent.  In other words I am among the best 11.7 million  Homo sapiens  who ever lived.  I'm tempted to improve this by another order of magnitude to 1.17 million, for it has only been in the past century that life became tolerable for most, but all this analysis is meaningless, for what is success? In this thoughtful mood, I looked back on certain points in my life and wondered where I would be today if I made another decision.   A big one was, which college? As a junior at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was only an above-average student, with no athletic talent and little social skills. Then my life changed.  My blog describes this all. I did not bother to ap

Nearly a dozen years ago I wrote an article for  The Huffington Pos t on  Star Power for Humanit y.  The latest June issue of  Scientific American  featured  Star Power: What is the future of fusion energy?   You can click on that link for the full article.  I'll summarize: This past December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNR ) claimed a breakthrough in attaining net positive with their laser fusion system.  No one had ever done that before. As an aside, I worked there in the 1970's on that project, and left because I could not envision the laser that would accomplish this task.  Can you believe that was around half a century ago? The bad news is that net positive is a long way from commercialization.  And certainly, that intriguing ultimate laser has not yet been invented. Well anyway, this article was written by Philip Ball, a British science writer who is my same age.  He has a PhD in physics from Bristol University.  Easy to read  Sci Am  article with no eq