Today I will write about life at Stanford University.  Much of this info comes from the monthly STANFORD for alumni, but I've also visited a bunch of times after graduating. One of the miracles of my life was that I even went there at all.  I was an average student most of my life.  Perhaps growing up in Kakaako, a lower-class portion of Honolulu, was partly responsible.  Maybe wanting to be like one of my gang was not personally productive.  Whatever, by the time I was a sophomore at McKinley High School, I was put in a lower level English-Social Studies group, as our school system placed students by performed capability. Around that time, Bishop Estate essentially kicked our neighborhood out of our homes to pave the way for all those tall buildings you now see in Ward Village.  Kalihi was not much of an improvement, plus I had to catch the bus to get to McKinley High School.  In most ways, I was sort of alone for the first time in my life.  Yes,...

I was  scanning back   to determine my nostalgic posting to focus on today, and saw:  WILL RARE EARTHS BECOME A PRODUCT OF THE BLUE REVOLUTION ?  I mentioned I had two previous experiences with this subject:   In the 1970's the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where I worked was trying to accomplish fusion using Neodymium YAG lasers.  YAG stands for Yttrium, Aluminum and Garnet, which is a silicate mineral mostly used as gemstones and abrasives.    Neodymium and Yttrium are rare earths. I then went on to work for the U.S. Senate and my first task in 1979 was to staff the effort of the  Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Act , whose chief sponsor was Senator Spark Matsunaga when the bill passed.  While deep ocean manganese nodules were then of particular attraction, turns out that among the wide variety of minerals found in these deposits, rare earths more recently have turned out to be the most important with  concentrations as hi...

                                         From  Worldometer  (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):          DAY    USA    WORLD     Brazil      India      South Africa June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82 July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572 Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130 Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82 Oct...