Just another Sunday musing today, reflecting on my life full of miracles.  The greatest was being born on 6 September 1940.  What were the odds? The average male produces  2 trillion sperms  in a lifetime.   The average female produces 500 eggs in a lifetime. Multiplying the two, and you get one chance in a quadrillion for me to have been born. And that's just only because my mother and father got together. Incidentally, the longer odds of this happening can be viewed in a  TedX talk by Mel Robbins.   He says:  1 in 400 trillion. And another view .  Essentially, we're all miracles. There have been  117 billion miracles  since the beginning of us. My childhood was mundane and totally uneventful.  I lived just to the right of that tall building on the right, in a day when there were no tall buildings.  Nothing much happened until I got into high school.  As a sophomore at McKinley High School (p hoto to the left ) in Honolulu, the odds on my getting accepted by one of the better

My posting today is all about those three grand miracles that led to us,  Homo sapiens  today.   You either believe in religious creationism or science, for how we humans came to be.  This posting will focus on the latter. The history of guessing the age of Planet Earth and the Universe  goes back to the beginning of our species, and in the early 18th century, was only speculated to be on the order of millions of years old. The first scientific theories began to appear around the time of the U.S. Civil War. Until as recently as 1999, astronomers thought the age of our universe was between 7 and 20 billion years old In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was expanding.  So the thinking was, if space is expanding, what if we trace backwards to the beginning.   It was a Catholic priest and Belgian cosmologist,  Georges Lemaitre , who in 1931 published an original paper on this subject. But  Miracle #1, the Big Bang , was coined in 1949 by a British astrophysicist who in time beca

Before I get into miracles, something more on this pandemic: I regularly show two graphs produced by the World Bank about COVID-19.  Their number of cases look high because they somehow include asymptomatic cases, still a relative unknown about how many there are.  Turns out that whether it's the seasonal flu or venereal disease or this mutating coronavirus, seems like they all have around 50% asymptomatic cases. The number of world deaths from Worldometer is 1.85 million ( USA 0.36 million ).  From the World Bank ( WB ), 1.86 million ( USA 0.34 million ).  The WB shows deaths continuing to increase into April, no matter what happens: For both the World and U.S., universal ( 95% ) mask-wearing would make the most difference in reducing deaths.  This is not occurring.  The projected deaths are linked to rapid rollout of vaccination.  Easing of the economy significantly increases projected deaths ( in millions ):                                      USA          World Easing mandates