If you graduated from a university, chances are that you receive some kind of regular publication from your school for free.  The reason is that the administration wants to keep in touch with you, for this publication is many times also read by others, leading to future students.  Plus, donations are always welcome.   Here are ten noteworthy examples. I read an article last year,  Alumni Magazines as a Key Part of Alumni Communications. Many alumni magazines are shifting from hard copy to digital platforms. This is much cheaper and also keeps up with the times. However, a surprise is that recent graduates sometimes complain that they want to receive something like this in the mail: “Oh, we love getting this! We get so few things in print anymore that this is really special to us, and we hang on to it, and it’s on our coffee table, and we flip immediately to alumni notes to see if our friends are there and see if their photos are in print, because they live in a ...

My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal.  About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions.    Part 1   dealt with an overview and my early youth, while  Part 15E  a couple months later was on the afterlife. Transitions  6  and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles.  This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition: I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California.  He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer ( and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the   little league baseball team   pla...

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...