I YESTERDAY FORGOT TO POST MY SATURDAY BLOG.  SHOULD WANT TO READ IT, CLICK ON THIS.   The following is my Sunday posting. There are no graphics today.  I drafted this posting a month ago, but held it back.  Since then, there have been issues with my health, and, after 17 years of daily articles, there could come a day in the near future when you will see nothing.  It could be because I am temporarily incapacitated.  Might be only a day, or a week, or......  As of this moment, we are still planning on a trip to San Diego and Paso Robles in October, followed by a very long journey of nearly two months from mid-November to mid-January.  I hope to be alive and well, so return for those postings if a gap occurs.  In any case, the following was written when I was a lot more optimistic about my well being. ******************************************** Most of you have an advantage over me.  When you die, many will go to Heaven.  When I pas...

This blog site is into my 18th year.  Thought I'd glance at how many partly written articles were in storage and  spent yesterday discarding many of them.  There were around 450.  After a hundred or so I gave up, and still have around 350 drafts.  However, one was the basis for my posting today. I was born and grew up in Honolulu, but did not spend any school time at the University of Hawaii until August of 1972, when I was hired by the College of Engineering as an assistant professor.  So it's been 53 years since I first came to the main Manoa Campus. I originally taught Fortran IV Programming and a couple of other computer courses.  This is the textbook I used.  I knew the co-authors, Paul Murrill and Cecil Smith.  Murrill went on to become president of LSU. After a couple of years, I joined the Civil Engineering Department.  Environmental Engineering and Technology & Society were two courses where I had more than a hundred student...

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...