This blog site has been posting daily now for 18 years. Has been visited by 221 countries, and the reason why this is more than the 193 countries in the United Nations is that there are entities like Antarctica, and smaller territories that have their own domain. Not sure when I first reached 1 million total visitors, but I do know that for the first 15 years or so the average viewers/day was around 500, so I would guess that this site took around 7 years to hit one million.  Now up past 6 million total. However, during the past two days, the number of visitors reached 147,720 and 123,579, so for reasons I can't explain this site went viral.   For long-time readers, I have tended to focus on certain topics on a given week day. Sunday:  spiritual, religion, reflection on life, etc. Monday: global topics, with some thoughts about what is to come during this week. Tuesday:  nostalgic, linking with the past, etc. Wednesday:  sci-tech and the future. Thursday:...

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...

To begin: The year 1968 was a turbulent one, and   2001   was released right in the middle of that chaos.  The Vietnam War intensified, the US military stunned by the ferocity of the Tet Offensive earlier in the year.  Fervent opposition to the war led to widespread and often violent demonstrations and police responses across the country.  The Civil Rights movement was painfully gaining momentum through the 1960’s; Martin Luther King would be assassinated just two days after the world premiere of   2001 .  The Space Race was still very real.  The Apollo fire that killed three American astronauts occurred only a little more than a year before the film’s release and the US was still trying to recover from that loss and still meet President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.  No American had yet flown in an Apollo capsule, the giant Saturn 5 rocket had flown only once and without a crew (its second ...

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...