The Great Energy Mystery As I have explained, my day job is building a company involved in scientific R&D to develop an efficient green hydrogen synthesis system using the latest in proton-conducting ceramics. I like joking that what “Plastics” was to The Graduate and what Silicon is to the Bay Area and electronics, ceramics will be to the new Millennium. Its quite flippant of me as a non-scientist to say this, but if something that…
As the World Turns Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, the highly respected organization and policy think tank, has held that position for the past dozen years. He has now written a book called The World: A Brief Introduction. This book is described as a primer on the global era we live in from COVID-19 to terrorism and gives us a basic understanding of the dynamics that have in the past…
Gigging I alternate in thinking that I am on overload one minute and on pause the next. As soon as I find myself thinking that my situation is unique and a direct outgrowth of my own choices and circumstances, I read something or see something on cable news that makes me see people talking about exactly the same syndrome. Let’s think for a moment about that all-important baseline. My baseline is that I am 66…
Conquering Paradise It’s Monday morning and another great day in Paradise. Yesterday I started watching the 1992 movie 1492: Conquest of Paradise with Gerard Depardieu. I was prompted in that direction by a National Geographic article on a great new Mayan (more likely Toltec) artifact find in Chichen Itza in the middle of the Yucatán jungle. That reminded me of the Mel Gibson directed film Apocalypto about a manhunt by tribal people though the jungle.…
Keeping Busy Yesterday, Kim and I made the trip from our home to Ventura, which, for those not familiar with California geography, is 175 miles north of here on the Pacific coast north of Los Angeles. I had ordered that new motorcycle seat for the new bike and I didn’t want to trust or suffer the over-burdened package delivery services since I had to both get my new seats and drop off my old seats…
Donut Holes I can tell that this quarantine has gone on too long or at least long enough. It’s been seven weeks by my count and any way you slice it, that’s a long time to be at home. The problem is, I can’t reasonably expect any sympathy for that since the entire world considers staying at home the least troubling of the three choices. The first choice is to be sick with COVID-19 and…
The Darkness Within This is no time for negativism. This is the time for us all to stay positive and optimistic that life will go on, that our species will persevere, and that the kindness of the human soul will prevail. When we saw Saudi Arabia rear up on its hind legs to push the oil production limits up at great expense to the price of their black crude, we were secretly encouraged. We all…
Handy Brad Now that we’ve moved in and mostly gotten our stuff placed and staged and generally winnowed down to manageable proportions, there are several small projects that need doing that seem either a bit beyond our capabilities and that we don’t want to bother brother-in-law Jeff to do. I would never undertake anything electronic in the house without first consulting Jeff, but I think it’s safe to say that he is perfectly content…
Fear and Greed The markets are all the talk of the town this week in this and every town. It is not about a a bunch of market participants going paranoid out of extreme forecasting anxiety. As I heard Rachel Maddow say this evening, the markets are merely acting as a window on the rather extreme impact that the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is starting to have on the world economy. Let’s take a quick survey. We…
A Century in Provence I recently stumbled upon a story about Jeanne Calment, the French woman who dies in 1997 at the extremely ripe old age of 122 years. That makes her the longest living human by almost three years compared to 119-year-old Sarah Knauss of Hollywood Pennsylvania (she died in 1999). That means that Calment has held that record worldwide for twenty-three years. That’s quite an amazing accomplishment in an age when longevity is…