IF I WERE TO DESIGN A BLUE REVOLUTION HEADQUARTERS

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil      India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732        1185      246         82

July       1       676    4857        1057      438         92

             5       251    3572          535       421       173

             7       993    5504        1312       479       192

           12       380    4118          659       500       108

           14       935    5414        1341       586       174

           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107

           19       412    4606          715       675         85

           21     1119    5669        1346       671        195

           22     1205    7128        1293     1120        572

           26       450    4307         556       715        114
           28    1266     5589         955       776        190
Aug      1    1462     6429       1191       765        193
            2     1123     5601       1048       852        148
            3       467     4430         514       514        213

            5     1362     6292       1394       849        345

          10       534     4813         593     1013        198
          11       569     4575         721       887        213
          12     1504     6556       1242       835        130
          13     1386     6816       1164       950        129
          14     1284     6653       1301     1006        260
          15     1071     5410         726       950        121
          16       522     4525         582       961        162
          17       589     4289         775       880        143
          18     1358     6312        1365    1089        282

Summary:  What the heck happened?  Every one of these new deaths figures is higher than those June 9 numbers at the top!  Just when many thought the pandemic was going away, we get this re-shock.  The same time period in the future will take us just about to November 3, the date of the presidential election.

The Democratic National Convention continues tonight with Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi and others, with the theme being A More Perfect Union.  Tonight's moderator will be Kerry Washington.

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post had an op-ed today about two Obama speeches.  The truly memorable one was at this convention in 2004 when Barack Obama made what might have been the best in history.  Watch him if you have 16 minutes to spare.  Then, of course, Monday night, when Michelle went high...for Trump's jugular.

Incidentally, ever wonder why, in this pandemic with a rotten economy, stocks are doing relatively well?  The S&P 500 hit an all-time high yesterday:

• The market is not geared for today, but 12 to 18 months in the future, 
• a vaccine for COVID-19 looks promising, 
• the Federal Reserve keeps saving the economy, 
• and investors expect some further help from the Congress.

Now on to further thoughts of the Blue Revolution.  In my junior year at Stanford I gained a vision of designing a tall skyscraper that rotated.  So I went to the Architecture Department and inquired about switching majors.  To meet the requirements I had to spend an extra year on campus.  So I passed and remained in Chemical Engineering.

Upon graduating, as I had taken as many art courses as those in my field, I gave some serious thought to going to Sophia University in Tokyo to study art.  But then my close friends all joined the first full year of the Peace Corps, and were preparing to head towards developing countries in the Pacific Islands and African continent, for $99/month.  So I had to reconsider.  With social conscience in mind too, I thought I would return home and save the sugar industry.  I got $500/month.  Doesn't sound like much, but this value in 2020 dollars ranges from $3,300 to $17,700, depending on what economic commodity you use as a comparison.  Further, the job provided a trainee cottage, then when I was hired by a company, as I was by the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu on the Big Island, a free home and jeep.  Most importantly, it turned out, they are the ones who sent me to graduate school to learn sugar engineering at LSU.

However, with their permission, I chose to stay on to gain a PhD in biochemical engineering, and owed them something when I returned, for they had paid my full salary during my first year of school.  Basically, all they asked me to do one summer was write an environmental report for their factories.  However, as a professor of engineering I went out of my way to look out for their future, and initiated a biomass program to convert sugar waste into biofuels.

This led to a $25 million project at HC&S on Maui in the early 1990's to produce biomethanol (same as methanol) from bagasse.  My dream was to use this fuel to power a fuel cell for transportation, as methanol is the ONLY LIQUID that can be directly processed by a fuel cell.  Today, hydrogen is mostly used, but this gas is very expensive to produce.

Methanol is cheaper than ethanol.  Sure, you can directly combust this liquid in an engine, as is used by drag racers, but a fuel cell is a lot more efficient.  This concept, which you can read in several of my Huffington Post articles, is awaiting development.  The downside is that if you drink even a small quantity of methanol you can go blind and die.  However, who drinks gasoline?    Oh, a second hurdle.  No one has yet developed a direct methanol fuel cell for transportation.  However, when accomplished, the only pollution product are water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is balanced to zero by the carbon dioxide that went into the making of the biomass.


Funny how things have a way of returning, but the recent thought, as reported in The New York Times, is for Hawaii to use biomass, again, to replace fossil fuels.  These biofuels range from ethanol, again, for transport, or jet biofuel for aviation.  I hope they give up on ethanol and go on to methanol (gasification and catalysis is a lot faster than fermentation, reducing equipment requirements), and hasten the development of a direct methanol fuel cell for vehicles.  About air travel, someday the industry will convert to hydrogen jetliners, to be re-fueled from the production of hydrogen using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) at floating cities and industrial parks, with quick-moving lighter than air aircraft picking up and running on hydrogen.  Thus, these future ocean metropolises will connect to the rest of the world through hydrogen-powered aircraft.

All this leads into the purpose of this posting today, which is the shape of the Blue Revolution headquarters.  Very recently I had this amazing dream of being in a super-colossal building that wrapped around a cliff over pounding seas.  In April I posted on Dreaming in Purgatory, where I saw myself walking forever in such a structure.  Picture this design covering the whole wall, but extending horizontally for half a mile, with 50 floors and extending out several hundred yards over the ocean.

So I've been collecting designs from the world-wide web to synthesize into my second dream structure (the first was that rotating skyscraper back in college):

What will this super-colossal building look like?  Don't know yet, but not really practical, yet definitely linked to the Blue Revolution.

Thus, inspired by those above designs, I initiated an effort to visualize the Blue Revolution headquarters.  If the Pacific International Ocean Station will be built in our Exclusive Economic Zone, we will need harbor facilities.  Four years ago, Hawaiian Electric Company closed down their power plant located on the fringe of downtown at Honolulu Harbor.  You know why it was sited here?  Whale oil was unloaded at this dock and used to power the facility.

That would be an excellent site to centralize operations.  Time is of the essence, as discussions are no doubt under way to convert this land into some kind of tourist attraction.  Hawaii Pacific University is right next door, so that too can somehow be incorporated into the operations, as perhaps, an international graduate school for ocean resource development.  They already operate Sea Life Park at Makapuu Point.  The BR building will be about as large as those combined power structures, but when seen from this angle, would look like a giant blue wave.  I googled to see if anything would closely resemble this building, but the best I could find was this colorized BMW design in Copenhagen:

Something closer to Hokusai's The Great Wave of Kanagawa would be more desirable:

Someday soon, I will fuse those two images using photoshop or some other mode of illustration.

As this is Wednesday, science day, let me add one more item.  A couple of days ago the thermometer at Death Valley's Furnace Creek, a place I once visited during the peak of summer, recorded a temperature of 130 F.  Global warming, you say?  Well, maybe not, for in 1913 the temperature there reached 134 F.  Certainly, these are the warmest ever for the USA.  But the World?  Yes, if you accept that 134 F reading, which is generally discredited.  The official planet high was 131 F in Tunisia in 1931, which itself has considerable credibility issues.  Weathermen previously felt that a 129.2 F measurement in Death Valley in 2013 was an accurate official high for Planet Earth.  Thus, someday you will read that the official high ever will be that 130 F reading mentioned above.

Finally, watch another example of Mother Nature's fury:

Hate to end so negatively, so here is one about nature's beauty:

Well, back to fury again, as Hurricane Genevieve is now a Category 4, but should weaken into a 3 has she approaches Baha:

You ever wonder why California never gets a hurricane?  Actually, one hit San Diego in 1858, and even this one might have been a maybe.  Why?  Something called the California current, coming down from Canada, keeps the coastline relatively cold.  Even Oxnard in the peak of summer, with Santa Paula, only 15 miles away at 120F, stays cool in the 60s.  I know, I lived there for three summers.  Oxnard gets foggy in July and August.  This is why citruses bear fruits the year around.

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