My life has been up and down, but mostly good.  In this blog I've actually said that my life has been in the 99.99th percentile.   But part of that is because, over the course of time,  Homo sapiens  have had 117 billion birth s.  As there are now only 8 billion of us, and life today surely must be a lot better than in the past, that already places me at a great advantage, and you too. I was born in  1940 , a dark period in history when Hitler was conquering Europe.  The #1 song in the USA was  I'll Never Smile Again , by Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers. But more than just that, after an acceptable youth growing up in Kakaako ( Honolulu ), not a slum, but definitely below average, I had a great final two years of high school and got accepted at Stanford University. Life was generally fine there.  I read today an entry in  Quora  entitled:   Is Caltech the most academically diffic...

I will be doing something today I've never before done in this blog.  Since my very first posting on 29April2008,   almost 16 years   ago, I have always attempted to only send out completed articles.  Today, I will do something different.  I will provide an information dump, sort of like a storyboard, and perhaps next Tuesday, or some other Tuesday in the future, post the officially finished version.  I will add more graphics, songs and videos.  It could be longer, or maybe shorter.  I at this point am not sure what this will look like.  After all, this is my life, and it has to be special.  Why am I doing this?  Well, I have a doctor's appointment coming up, followed by picking up a hearing aid at Costco, where I will be taught how to use it.  I mistakenly last month ordered two audio books, so now will be able to hear them, although I guess I could have done so with just bluetooth earbuds. Before I proceed, here is something ...