The  Vera C. Rubin Observatory  atop Cerro Pachón in Chile recently experienced first light last night, and released the above photo. But before focusing on that new telescope, the latest summary of what is occurring in the Israel and USA vs Iran War, where controlled orchestration seems to be the mode of operation. Iran did "take revenge" at Trump's attack on its nuclear facilities by lobbing a few missiles into U.S.'s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar . However, Iran first alerted Qatar that this was coming, with a sense that we are not at war with you, but only hate America.  Sort of Trump saying we are not at war with Iran, but only its nuclear facilities.  There were no casualties at the U.S. base. Of course, Qatar informed the U.S., so the ten missiles were all intercepted and destroyed in the air. It seems that Iran had to satisfy it's people, so on TV exaggerated the magnitude of its attack. There are more than 50,000 American troops scattered throughout the Midd...

On this Sunday, in my 17th year of this blog, I thought, my life is now not as exciting as in the past.  While I did last month return from a nearly two-month long trip that took us from Honolulu to Seattle ( by air ); then a very long cruise through the Panama Canal to Southhampton, UK; another flight to Amsterdam, Netherlands; a European Christmas Cruise to Budapest; flight to Zurich for a couple of days; then a 27 hour return by plane to Honolulu; certainly more than virtually every one of you reading this has accomplished the past year, relatively, my earlier experiences were more memorable. So I thought, over the next few months, I would select a few of my past postings to re-share with you, utilizing mostly my nostalgia day, Tuesday, for this purpose.  But I'll begin today with a grand summary. My first blog was published on 29April2008.  How long ago is that? Go back to your first day of kindergarten. Imagine how long it took to get you to become a senior in colleg...

Twenty years ago today, the deadliest tsunami in recorded history inundated Asian countries and killed about 230,000 people.  The  Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake, also called the Boxing Day Earthquake  ( Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated after Christmas Day, mostly in Europe and Commonwealth nations ): Was caused by a subsea earthquake possibly as high as  9.3 magnitude  ( this was #2 to the largest, which was the 1960 Chile earthquake at 9.5 ) off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Waves were as high as  167 feet  in Aceh province, and two hours later, Sri Lanka saw 20 feet ( with run-ups as high as 41 feet--there is a difference in these two terms ), and  Thailand had run-ups of up to 64 feet.   At Phuket, Thailand, the second wave was the largest at 20 feet.  Also two hours after the earthquake, India saw heights as much as 33 feet.   3100 miles away in Somalia, there was a run-up of 30 feet. The maximum height above sea lev...