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

Nothing much more to say today about our pandemic, I last week already reported on the slate of victories by Democrats, and the Ukraine War just drags on, so let me start by showing a graph from the  New York Times  this morning about murder rates in the USA. Seems that our national murder rate dropped from two decades ago, then picked up during the Trump administration, and is now declining again because of Joe Biden.  Well, the more cited reasons are a variety of repercussions from our pandemic.  There was also an uptick in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in 2020.  Not shown above is the simple fact that between the 1990's and 2014, crime in the U.S. fell by more than 50%!!!    The latest  Gallup poll on crime  showed one graph and a variety of tables. I report on crime, for, combined with gun rights, these related issues will impact on the mid-term elections.  That landmark funding package also inserted something about checking methane emissions at facilities.  While

   From  Worldometer  (new deaths yesterday):          DAY    USA    WORLD     Brazil      India      South Africa June     9     1093     4732       1185        246        82 July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120       572 Aug    12     1504     6556       1242       835       130 Sept     9      1208    6222        1136      1168        82 Oct     21     1225     6849         571       703         85 Nov     11     1479     10178         564       550        60            25     2304     12025       620       518       118            30     1238       8291        317       482        58 Dec       1      2611     11891          697      500       109              2     2833     12356        669      498        65              3     2918     12660        776       570        94              4     2718     12142         674       509      160              8     2913     11714         796       404      183 Summary:  Another terrible day, and it will get worse. But one piece