Talking about largest snakes, last week one of my postings was entitled,  A COMING TRUMP DICTATORSHIP?   Someone e-mailed me this link of  Senator Chris Murphy's speech on the Senate floor, also sounding an alarm about President Trump's coordinated effort to dismantle democracy.   Watch it!  The Florida Museum reports that the Titanoboa is the largest snake that ever lived.  Perhaps up to 50 feet long 2500 pounds and 3 feet wide, was the largest predator on the planet after the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  However, 23 million years ago came the  Megalodon .  Okay, a deviation, for this was not a snake. Several  films,  but there are so few remains, that there can only be estimates of size:  perhaps 47 feet to 80 feet long and at most, 200,000 pounds. However, this is about 10 times larger that an adult Great White Shark.  Here are two comparisons. Today, the  Green Anaconda  is the longest a...

For some, Memorial Day is the start of summer.  For many others, this is a national holiday to go shopping or rest or whatever.  For the nation, this a celebratory day established to honor those who gave their life to preserve freedom and liberty.   Call it a celebration of life.  This is also your special day for patriotism.   Specifically for me, observation began last night watching the  2025 National Memorial Day Concert  on the Mall, as I've been doing now for 36 years, except for 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic.  This show is also beamed to more than 175 countries and aboard more than 200 U.S. Navy ships at sea.  Up to half a million people watch in person. I especially revere this occasion because of another Mall event, A Capitol Fourth, the concert of the National Symphony Orchestra that began on July in 1979.  Went to the first one, and three more.  The 1980 concert was the first to be telecasted nationwide,...

Sundays are sometimes spiritual and occasionally reflective.  So today I'll look at my 84 years of life in that manner because it took 42 years of development to allow for the latter 42 years of progress. To begin; I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and was a little more than a year old when my mother held me in her arms and pointed to the smoke emanating from Pearl Harbor on 7December1941.  Of course I don't remember any of that, and not much about World War II either. Growing up in the "fishing village" of Kakaako, which is now at the edge of the expanding Ward complex of high rises, life was easy. After graduating from McKinley High School, I went to Stanford University, departing in 1962 with a degree in chemical engineering, to work for C. Brewer as a sugar trainee at the Hutchinson Sugar Company.   I made this "sacrifice" because most of my close friends chose to join the first year of the Peace Corps.  They went off to places in Africa and the South Pacif...

What are the largest companies in the world?   Nine of the top ten are from the USA.  We have long been the greatest. Note that #5 shows Google in parentheses next to Alphabet, and #7 has Facebook as part of Meta.  What happened? Google, as you know reinvented the way the world accesses information.   Why restructure? Without much warning in 2015, Google renamed itself Alphabet. This allowed the parent, Alphabet, to expand into domains outside of internet search and advertising. Google now runs a lesser risk of antitrust violations. You might get confused by GOOG and GOOGL, stock ticker symbols of Alphabet.  I won't try to explain it, but  you can click here for details . 52-year old  Sundar Pichai ( originally, Pichai Sundararajan ) is the CEO of Alphabet,  while founders Larry Page ( 52 ) and Sergey Brin ( 53 ) no longer are involved in daily operations.  Sundar's compensation last year was $10.72 million. Note that Alphabet is the 5th...