My blog of 21 June 2011 was entitled:   A WORLD POPULATION OF 7 BILLION .  I went on to say: If there has been any criticism of my books, it is that  I have ignored the most important parameter:  the world population .   I didn't have a full chapter dedicated to this topic in any of my publications, and not one of my 100+ Huffington Post articles treated this subject. Why? ... mostly because there was not much I could add to the subject than to say that population growth will reverse once the world becomes economically prosperous, for then, the central government will have something like Social Security in place and parents won't need to have many children to take care of them at old age . It took us from our beginnings in Africa, perhaps 300,000 years ago, to finally reach a population of 1 billion in 1804.  218 years later, we last year reached 8 billion.  However, the  good news is that the time it takes to double our population is finally increasing . What about the future?

According to the Sunday New York Times : Six to eight million people may have died   from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, compared with 3.4 million deaths recorded in countries’ official reporting. In the U.S.,   more than 400 colleges and universities are requiring students to be vaccinated for Covid-19.   Almost all are in states that voted for President Biden.   About that Eurovision Song Contest , Maneskin of Italy won, singing Zitti E Buono . I've regularly been featuring global adventures in anticipation of our world cruise beginning in January of 2022, with a stop in Dubai for the World Expo .  On this Sunday, it seemed ideal to take you around the world via Radio Garden.  The itinerary I will select might well be what we will do in 2023 to incorporate the Buenos Aires World Fair , with a theme of Science, Innovation, Art and Creativity for Human Development. As I live in Honolulu, the journey will begin with Hawaiian music .  Click on that and you can hear somethi

I was reminiscing recently about the great time I had on Mauritius a decade and a half ago, and whether I would want to include this island on my around the world trip.  This is where the Dodo became extinct.  Like how wrong we were in remembering the origin of Thanksgiving , my memory of how this bird got extinct apparently is faulty.  I recall something like sailors hunted them down because they were so easy to catch, with good meat and useful feathers.  More recent research indicates that the plump bird you see in drawings were those of well-fed pets.  The wild dodo was leaner with a terrible tasting flesh, and difficult to find because they lived  in impenetrable rainforests.  What happened was that humans brought rats and domesticated animals.  They killed this specie off. Anyone remember where you last saw this bird?  Turns out that the Dodo and and its remains disappeared several times.  First they became extinct in 1662.  Till today, even though at one time there were millions