Three days from now, January 20, will be a busy day: Donald Trump's inauguration  has been moved indoors , the Capitol rotunda, with viewers being sent to the Capital One Arena.  The last time this happened was in 1985 for Ronald Reagan, when the temperature reached 7F.  Not so bad this year at up to 19F, but the prominent factor was wind chill.  It is very uncomfortable in DC at this time of year. It was on  13January1982  when I was working for the U.S. Senate. This was a particularly cold period for the city, with temperatures dropping to below zero.  Chicago that day was -25F.  Citrus groves in Florida froze. It began snowing, all told, around 6 inches in a few hours.  A fire in the Metro train line made for a particularly traffic nightmare. When the snowfall seemed to be ending, the first plane to take off at National Airport ( later named Reagan International--he first got elected in 1981 ) when visibility was only a sixteenth of a mile...

Last week I indicated that all signs showed that the Japanese Yen to U.S. Dollar exchange rate would probably continue to favor the USA.  That is, for travelers to Japan to get more value for the $.  Well, it's beginning to happen, as the Yen dropped to its lowest level since 1986 against our dollar today, and  traded at 160.39 . About the topic of the day, I am a Japanese American, and rice has been my staple now for more than 80 years.  My family has cooked a large batch of rice so that the leftover can be stored, something that is not recommended today.  In those days, there were no rice cookers.  I always ate leftover rice left in the refrigerator, and still do.  I don't recall one incident of food poisoning, both myself and anyone I know.  Incidentally, keeping the rice for long periods in a cooker in the warm setting is not recommended. So while the  Cleveland Clinic  reports that there are 63,4000 annual cases of food poisoning, a...

  The  James Webb Space Telescope  ( JWST ) had a successful launch on Christmas day.  This $10 billion system is on a 29-day journey to Lagrange Point 2, around a million miles away.  Note, that our Earth blocks the Sun's rays from the JWST.  We won't know if it will work until after it gets there, and first sight might not be received for three months.  In the meantime,  there appears to be no way to correct any mistake  as we did for the Hubble Telescope.  The JWST has six times the collecting size of Hubble's, and is 100 times more sensitive. The  Canary Island's La Palma Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption  which began this past September, finally ended after 85 days, the longest on record for this island: 3000 buildings destroyed. $1 billion of damage. I've always wanted to visit La Palma because I have featured it several times in this blog and one of my books as the future potential site to create a  mega-tsunami , a po...