The Texas flooding catastrophe is up to 119 dead and 160 still missing. Both the Texas storm and the July 7 North Carolina flood caused by Tropical Storm Chantal were 1000-year events.  And President Donald Trump is encouraging greater use of fossil fuels, while cutting back on global warming research. A 100-year flood means that there is a 1% chance that this will happen at your home's location in any given year. A 1000-year flood means there is a 0.1% chance of this occurring. Read details here. Now, on to the topic of today.  My field of knowledge primarily spans from energy to the environment and into ocean resources.  I drafted when working in the U.S. Senate the original hydrogen bill which became law, and same for ocean thermal energy conversion.  My first job was in biomass engineering, and I later did research in geothermal energy, wind energy and grew marine microalgae in a raceway fed by the waste gases from a small powerplant to someday remediate gl...

This is the third and final part of our trip to France in 2019.  Part 1 was to  champagne country , Part 2  Bordeaux , and this Part 3 to Cognac, which is both a town ( 250 miles southwest of Paris ) and the highest form of brandy.  All bottles labeled Cognac are produced from grapes grown in this location.  The population of Cognac is around 19,000, but was as high at 22,000 in 1975. We only stayed two nights in Cognac, at what was then a new  Chais Monnet , one of the very finest hotels we have ever experienced.  Virtually adjacent are the grand four cognac companies, Martel, Hennessey, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin.  I picked this hotel because Rémy Martin is just across the street, where we had made a special appointment to get a private tour.  These four make 93% of all the cognac drunk.   We arrived by train.  Every major train station has a taxi stand, right?  Nope.  We waited for 15 minutes, and finally got some...

 I reached a milestone today, hitting 4 million viewers: Since my first blog on 29April2008, there have been 6792 postings.  Thus, an average of close to 600 readers/day.  221 countries have visited this site. Actually, in October of 2020 I reached the limit of how many labels I could use, so in parallel I initiated a  different location , which began accumulating another set of viewers, and this blog is up to 172,000 viewers.  So you have an option to read this second site, which has the same content, but looks different.  One of the photos I used in that initial  10October2020 posting  was of Phil Spector.  Why?  My #80 favorite song was featured,  To Know Him is to Love Him , and he started performing by writing that song and is one of the three Teddy Bears.  Then he later developed his wall of sound background music for which he is famous, married Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes and became mad, as in crazy.  Incidentall...