I've now resided at 15 Craigside, a retirement community, for 11 years.   I lived in an adjacent tower ( the brown one in the bac k) for 32 years, and saw my present building coming up.   A few years after it opened, one Saturday morning, I dropped by to investigate my neighbor.   They gave me a tour, and at one point mentioned that an apartment that had long been reserved and never moved into had suddenly been made available.   There are two tall towers on the sea side of 15 Craigside.  That tiny building in-between is 15 Craigside.  However, the apartment shown to me was in between them, the conformation of those buildings was such that they couldn't see my apartment.   Most important to me, I could view the Pacific Ocean. There are graveyards on the mountain side, which I can't see from my apartment.   Most determining of all, if at the beginning, there was a sign-up list to reserve an apartment, this is the one I ...

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...