My life has been up and down, but mostly good.  In this blog I've actually said that my life has been in the 99.99th percentile.   But part of that is because, over the course of time,  Homo sapiens  have had 117 billion birth s.  As there are now only 8 billion of us, and life today surely must be a lot better than in the past, that already places me at a great advantage, and you too. I was born in  1940 , a dark period in history when Hitler was conquering Europe.  The #1 song in the USA was  I'll Never Smile Again , by Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers. But more than just that, after an acceptable youth growing up in Kakaako ( Honolulu ), not a slum, but definitely below average, I had a great final two years of high school and got accepted at Stanford University. Life was generally fine there.  I read today an entry in  Quora  entitled:   Is Caltech the most academically diffic...

Last week for nostalgia Tuesday I presented a storyboard for   MY LIFE .  Today, I will complete it.  Note that the title has been adjusted, and will involuntarily someday need a finalization, as I have suggested. MY LIFE:  I'm not into anything like astrology, but the following sounds about right for me. I will be 84 this year.  I was born in 1940, and I have noticed that I had a challenging first half of my life, scrambling to keep up and lucky to attain what I accomplished.  Hmmm...how do I get rid of all those  I s?  Life got better from the age of 42, and has continued to improve to today. Started great, actually, for here is one calculation that the odds of me being born was 1 in 400,000,000,000,000, or 4 times 10 to the 14th power. But that was from Instagram, not a credible source.   Science Alert  uses that beginning analysis and goes on to say that the real odds of anyone being born is  1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th powe...