First of all, there is no connection between Sea Asparagus and Death.  These are two different subjects.  The first has to do with an alert about one of my postings that failed to be published, but is now available.  Secondly, maybe President Donald Trump's various threats are working.  From the  New York Times  this morning: Since taking office, Trump has told several nations he would tax imports from their countries if they didn’t do what he wants. He said he would put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on products from China  unless those countries stopped flows of drugs and migrants into the United States . He has also said he would put tariffs on Russia for waging war in Ukraine and on Denmark if it refused to cede the territory of Greenland. Colombia’s quick capitulation ( about accepting back illegal migrants)  this weekend may embolden Trump, raising questions for the rest of the world abo...

For some reason, this posting was not published on January 19.  Made an adjustment, so perhaps this will occur today. Well, that  Gaza Strip ceasefire deal began  at 8:30AM local time, and three hours later the Hamas delivered the first three hostages. They were in captivity for 471 days. By now Israel should have released 90 Palestinian prisoners. TikTok went dark Saturday night.   However this afternoon, TikTok announced that it would begin restoring service to U.S. users.  They thanked President-elect Trump for his save.   There are three with more than a hundred million followers . #1 is Khabane  Lame (right), an influencer from Italy and Senegal.  He has 162.4 million following him. Khaby Lame is incredibly popular on TikTok because he creates silent, comedic reaction videos that mock overly complicated "life hacks" by showing simple, obvious solutions with exaggerated facial expressions, making his content universally relatable and...

I arrived on the Stanford University campus in September of 1958.  The first two years there all engineering students pretty much took the same courses.   According to this historic view  of the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department, in 1960, Professor David Mason got a Ford Foundation grant to begin the program.  Those below have served as department chair: Mason was chairman of the department when in our junior year he rushed into one of our ChE classes and proudly announced that we had gained accreditation.  First, I did not know that I was in the very first class, and second, I always thought we were already accredited.  Same for the rest of my classmates.  Informally, there were 75 or so of us who had selected chemical engineering as their major in our freshman year.  When I graduated in 1962, there were only 8 of us.  Ten years later, Stanford ranked #1 in all the chemical engineering departments of the country.  For the re...