The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota.  Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north.  Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge.  If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic.  Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing.  The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University.  Caught a bus. Was called the  Century 21 Exposition .  Also the Seattle World's Fair.  10 million joined me on a six-month run.  My first. These a...

I was this week walking to the dining room at 15 Craigside, when one of the residents walked up to me and said something to the effect:   Crichton and Patterson stole your idea about an eruption on the Big Island .  So the next day I went to my computer and found that  Eruption , by Crichton and Patterson, was #1 on the  New York Times  fiction book list. How did their book come together? Michael Crichton  was a Harvard-trained doctor who went straight into writing, creating  Jurassic Park  and other adventures. His first book under his name was  The Andromeda Strain .  All told, his books sold over 200 million copies, with a dozen adapted into films. He is the only writer to have a number one book, movie and TV show in the same year. Born in 1942 and passed away in 2008 at the age of 66.   His wife Sherri found parts of an unfinished novel centered around a huge volcanic eruption in Hawaii, and thought this should be comp...

 From the morning  New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing.  They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans.  What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...