What to do about the elderly is an age-old question, yes, a pun.  However, when Yale assistant professor,  Yusuke Narita , remarked that elderly Japanese residents should essentially commit seppuku ( the honorable method for dishonored samurai to commit suicide-- I had a dream  about this a long time ago which became a  Huffington Post  article ), he outraged the world. He is 37 years old with an economics PhD from MIT, previously taught at Stanford, and is obviously of Japanese ethnicity, so the issue has relevance and ire.  This euthanasia discussion actually had first occurred with a group of students two years ago about a scene from the Swedish film,  Midsommar , in which a cult sent out one of its oldest members to jump off a cliff.  He then said: Whether that's a good thing or not, that's a more difficult question to answer.  So if you think that's good, then maybe you can work hard creating a society like that. Narita in the past also suggested that the public might

This week will feature a lot more science, with a nostalgic entry tomorrow, but focusing on the latest issue of  Scientific American  from Wednesday: What was the worst day ever for Planet Earth?  Which could well have been the best for us, as mammals began to develop. What was the worst event for Humanity? World War II? 70,000 years ago when  Homo sapiens  almost became extinct . Our biggest killer, heart disease, explained. First contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. A cosmic mystery is a fast radio burst.  The brand new Chinese 500-meter Tianyan "Eye of Heaven" detected 1,652 independent bursts from just one source over a period of 47 days.  So what?  Well, in a few thousandths of a second ( this is a tiny period of time much shorter than one second ), one burst produces as much energy as our Sun does in a whole month. The Ukraine War, if we survive, will spur more serious talks about total nuclear disarmament. On to the stories of the day: This weekend 13 mass shoot

                                         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     21     1225      6849         571        703       85 Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118 Dec     30      3880    14748       1224       299      465 Jan      14       4142     15512        1151        189      712                  Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398 Mar     2        1989      9490        1726       110      194 April   6          906     11787         4211       631       37 May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59   June   1         287    10637         2346      3205       95  July   7