HOW I BECAME WHAT I AM

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil   India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732         1185      246         82

           10       982    5163         1300      388         48
           11       904    4951         1261      394         74
           12       791    4603           843      389         70
           13       702    4229           890      309         69
           14       331    3263           598      321         57
           15       425    3415           729      395         88
           16       849    6592         1338        ?           57
           17       809    5264         1209      341         49
           18       747    5123         1204      342         63
           19       719    5066         1221      366         94
           20       573    4428           968      307         46
           21       267    3338           601      426         53
           22       363    3880           748      312         61
           23       863    5465         1364      468        111
           24       808    6071         1103      424        103
           25       649    5179         1180      401          87
           26       663    4893         1055      381         48
           27       512    4547           994      414         73
           28       285    3463           555      384         43
           29       346    3415           727      417         73
           30       764    5072         1271      506       128
July       1       676    4857        1057      438         92
             2       687    5155         1277      377         95
             3       616    5170         1264      444       108
             4       254    4494         1111       610         74
             5       251    3572          535       421       173
             6       378    3573          656       474       111
             7       993    5504        1312       479       192
             8       890    5507        1187       491       100
             9       960    5411        1199       479       118
           10       849    5416        1270       521       140
           11       731    4995          968       543       111
           12       380    4118          659       500       108
           13       465    3729          770       540         93

Summary:

• A month ago I predicted which countries would be worst hit with COVID-19.  I was right.  You should keep in mind that the populations are different (USA 328 million, World 7600 million, Brazil 210 million, India 1353 million and South Africa 58 million) Here is the comparison as of yesterday:
•                                       New Cases  Cases/million population
• #1  USA                 65,488                   10,510
• #2  India                 28,179                        657
• #3  Brazil               21,783                     8,880
• #4  South Africa    11,554                     4,851
• World                   195,926                    1,697
• Here is a generally unreported comparison:
•                                       Cases/million      Deaths/million
• #1  Qatar               37,045                          53
• #2  Bahrain             19,660                        64
• #3  Chile                 16,612                      367
• #4  Kuwait              12,992                        92
• #5  Oman                11,386                        51
• #8  USA                  10,510                      418
• Deaths/million
• #1  Belgium                                              844
• #2  UK                                                      660
• #3  Spain                                                  608
• #4  Italy                                                    578
• #5  Sweden                                               548
• #6  France                                                 460
• #7  USA                                                    418
• World                                                          74
• Yesterday 
• Florida shattered the all-time high for any state with 15,299 new cases.  The most New York had was 11,571.  Remember Trump shifting the Republican Convention from North Carolina to Florida?
• Oklahoma almost had 1000 new cases, its all time high.  Remember Trump's rally in Tulsa?
• Arizona experienced an all-time high in coronavirus hospitalizations.  Remember Trump's rally there?
• New York City had NO NEW CASES.  The last time Trump returned to New York was more than two months ago.  And that was after a 107-day absence.
• Do you detect a pattern?  Here is Trump's upcoming schedule.  Now you know where not to go.  Do you think maybe someone on his staff is...nah...
• My speculation:
• The U.S. Congress will pass its fifth rescue package before the month is over, now already up to $3 trillion, with an additional trillion to prevent many from falling over the financial cliff and resources to maximize student attendance in classrooms.
• New deaths for the U.S. will stabilize to between 500 and 1,000/day next month.  If you divide the total deaths of 138,247 by total cases, the result is a mortality rate of just under 3%.  This was 5% just two weeks ago.  More tests are the reason why.  At one time the USA and World both had a rate of 5%.  While the U.S. significantly dropped, the World also declined to now 4.3%.  Mind you, when those many unknowns become known next year, the actual mortality rate will drop to around 0.5%, or less.  The asymptomatic rate will be less than 50%, and maybe as low as 30%, so where are the cases making up the difference?  Today, that remains an unknown.  This could well be the superspreader source.
• A vaccine might show promise this year, but mass inoculations will not be available until next year.  
• Joe Biden will triumph over Donald Trump on November 3.
• The House will continue to be controlled by Democrats.  The Senate?  It will be close.

I recently met with two First Hawaiian Bank financial experts who talked me into placing some of my assets into an index fund, something I did not know even existed.  Effectively, if you today have money in these various bank accounts, you earn/year:

• checking           0.06%
• savings             0.09%
• money market  0.16%

The index fund I signed up for provides more than 4% annually.  Of course, this is only if  theS&P goes up 4% or more.  If the S&P drops below zero, I get no interest for the year, but I keep the principal intact.  I also can't take out these funds without penalty for five years.  But in that period, the odds are high that I will gain close to 4%/year.  So this investment will not double for another 18 years, when I'm no longer around.  However, something is better than almost nothing, say 6 years from today, when I hope to still be alive.

As an aside, did you know that mortgage interest rates are at their lowest rate ever?  The last time I checked, the 15-year fixed-rate was down to 2.56%, 3.07% for a 30-year loan.  Of course, this is because three months ago the Federal Reserve dropped its benchmark interest rate to zero.

What should you have done this year?  From Edward Jones:

• NASDAQ  +18.3%
• Bonds        +  6.8%
• S&P           -   1.4%
• Dow J        -   8.6%
• Oil              - 33.7%

Who could have predicted the above before the pandemic hit?  At least my index fund starts reasonably well.

All the above was merely background for my topic of the day.  Those bank executives seemed sincerely interested in my life.  Maybe that's their job to be friendly, but I thought perhaps there might be a similar appetite for this kind of personal information for those who visit this blog site.  Yesterday, I ended my traipse through history in 1940, indicating that was the year I was born.  So I'll now feature my life from that year to the present by highlighting points in my life that had the most influence in  making me what I am today.

• Growing up in Kakaako, Honolulu was nothing special.  This was noted to be a tough neighborhood, but grand compared to some of the slums of the world.  We were poor but not in poverty.  Most of my neighbors were of Japanese ancestry.  There was nothing exceptional about me or my circumstances, except maybe by the accident of birth, I was the only child in a large family where my mother was the oldest.  Thus, I was truly loved by everyone, and this no doubt later affected my personality. 

• In my sophomore year at McKinley my family and all our neighbors were evicted by the Bishop Estate to convert Kakaako into an industrial park.  We moved to Kalihi and I bused to school.  Lost close contact with my gang.  This was my first real transition, a stressful period that can mold a character.  I really don't know how this happened, but I gained a new vision, clearly hyperbolic and lacking in reality.  I had never left Hawaii, there was no financial resource, my school records were not exceptional and I had no important activities.  My brother was away at the University of Michigan, so no doubt that was a factor.  I arbitrarily decided that I would apply to the California Institute of Technology and Stanford, not bothering to even think about the University of Hawaii.  From mediocrity a miracle happened.  Some of my posts speculated what I had to do (running for office, making the tennis team...so on), and I actually did get accepted by both schools.  I learned that setting goals and persevering with action can actually work.  Incidentally, I noticed that the most popular posting during the past month, by a wide margin, is entitled (you can click on it to see what I said):

HOW I NOW THINK I REALLY GOT INTO STANFORD


• 1958, I was 18, and left Honolulu to attend college, where I was the only person in my freshman class who had roots in Japan. Also, not one Black person.  There were no African-Americans in those days. Intellectually, financially, sociologically and spiritually, I was totally out of my element.  Somehow I survived, and more so, thoroughly enjoyed nearly four years on campus, and earned a Chemical Engineering degree.   This second transition provided nothing else much more than confidence, enabling me to get along with an alien race.

• As many of my close friends joined the Peace Corps, I had to do something that was at least partially sacrificial, so I joined C. Brewer at the Hutchinson Sugar Company to help the industry back home.  Got married, which in itself was a kind of transition that was both remarkable and an important key to the future. We were sent to the Kilauea Sugar Company on the island of Kauai.  The backyard of our trainee cottage was the site of the slippery slide/pool scene from the movie South Pacific.  Honestly, Pearl looked like France Nuyen.  We had a dog named Pepper.  One day, an old man came up to me and said he knew my grandfather, who had worked in Kilauea a long time ago.  It's a long story, but, he found the gravestone of this ancestor, and it said Kenjiro Takahashi.  I did not know I was named after him. That later led me to a comprehensive search to Hokkaido.  I'm the only one I know in Hawaii who has roots from that region of Japan.

• From 1969 to 1972 we lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where we experienced a totally different kind of culture. You can imagine the racial relationships, although for all practical purposes, I was thought not to be Black.  Tiger football, Pete Maravich and the Mardi Gras.  My dissertation was on Tunable Organic Dye Laser Irradiation of Escherichia coli, and I graduated with a PhD in biochemical engineering.  You need to actually live in the South to gain a more accurate perspective.

• At Stanford I took as many art as chemical engineering courses.  For my PhD at LSU I minored in law, microbiology and business.  I had this desire to challenge my mind and to know as much as possible in as many areas as reasonable.  Not to be become a factual dilettante, but to better be able to make life decisions.

• Returned home to the University of Hawaii to teach Technology & Society, Environmental Engineering and computer courses.  I also did research for the Hawaii Geothermal Project and linked with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute when it was created in 1973 because of the first energy crisis.  The environment had by then gained priority, where air and water pollution laws were being enacted.  Read this site for why and what, but I was surprisingly thrust into two outlier fields:  hydrogen and wind energy, both unrelated to biochemical engineering.  Hawaii had (still does) a tourist-dominated economy in the middle-70's, so I led studies to develop strategies to enable tourists to come to Hawaii on jets fueled by cleaner and safer fuels (like hydrogen) and the local transport system to run on something aside from gasoline, like biomethanol from biomass to power a direct methanol fuel cell.  

• University professors essentially can do whatever they want during the summer, and most find some kind of temporary assignment related to their field that provided funding.  I did something totally different.  I managed to inveigle my way into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the NASA Ames Research Center, and spend two summers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion, where isotopes of hydrogen were the fuel.  I could dabble in my intellectual fantasies in ways few could.

• Those two bullet areas above then thrust me into a three-year assignment to work in the U.S. Senate in 1979 at the height of the second energy crisis, where I became involved in original legislation on ocean thermal energy conversion, hydrogen and wind energy.  Of course, just living in this part of the nation is a privilege, for DC was central to the rest of the East.  The contacts and experience I gained here were pivotal to future pursuits.

• Returning to the University of Hawaii in 1982, a new dean of engineering, Paul Yuen, and I created the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR) to bridge the gap between university research and the marketplace, which for this organization was the Pacific Basin.  We were able to secure international/national collaboration on two $25 million projects to build an open-cycle OTEC facility on the Big Island and produce biomethanol from biomass on Maui.

• The PICHTR role made me an international traveler, where I'm now approaching 3 million miles on Star Alliance and have completed a dozen around the world trips.  The Congressional experience and desire to find the ultimate sustainable resource for Hawaii leadership led to the Blue Revolution, which began thirty years ago, and only now is beginning to take any shape. 

• I took early retirement twenty years ago to do something else with the rest of my life.  Along the way, I thought that while basic research was important, how you apply this knowledge for the benefit of Planet Earth and Humanity became my purposeful mission.  This Mensa talk summarizes some of these activities.  I wrote three books and reported for The Huffington Post when they first began to publish.  The third one, Simple Solution Essays, is a compilation of these articles when I was up to 75 as a tribute to my wife, Pearl, who had just passed away.  I ended up writing more than 100 columns for HuffPo.

• I felt so dedicated to the Blue Revolution mission that I endowed my penthouse apartment to the University of Hawaii to initiate this program at Manoa.  All I now need to do is find an imaginative billionaire to fund the total effort.  Blue Revolution Hawaii is seeking $50,000 to host a summit to initiate the effort, $150 million to build the Pacific Ocean International Station and $150 billion to launch the first floating city, which will host the 2050 World Expo.

• Through all those various transitions, the prime learning experience was adapting to change. Each move better prepared me to interact with people.  Sure, brilliance, vision, creativity, perseverance, leadership and all that can lead to success.  However, the key factor was how you can get along and influence people.  Connections come through them.  Respect, integrity and attitude to build relationships far override accomplishments.

• While I've accomplished virtually nothing of any particular importance, I've planted hopeful seeds for the benefit of Humanity.  How many of the 107 billion who have ever lived on Planet Earth can say that, or cared.  I've lived an amazing life with incredible experiences.  Those dozen world trips and 2+ million miles with Star Alliance are just the means to interact with people and places.  It's not the getting there that is important, although flying first class is the way to go.  It's what you do.  I certainly would love to see if I had any influence on the World of 2100.  However, the reality is that a few years from now I will be no more.

• To recap:

• Kakaako is nothing like what it was 80 years ago.  Today, the Ward Complex and this fishing village has become the outdoor museum for the state.  There is a homeless problem, and the proposed tallest building of 650 feet with "my" elementary school on the first two floors is again delayed.  However, who could have imagined that today surrounding Kakaako, Honolulu ranks #4 in the nation for skyscrapers.  We have 470 of them, ranking behind only New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, but ahead of San Francisco.

• Stanford has become famous.  When I was there we had the worst athletic teams.  We are now #1 in college sports.  However, the recent announcement eliminating 11 teams will bring the campus back to mediocrity.  Academically and intellectually, considering lifestyle, weather and location, the best today in the world.

• LSU had the #1 football team in the country last year.  I haven't been back since I graduated in 1972, and would like to make it one of my stops in the final global adventure.  Still communicating with some classmates.

• The University of Hawaii is, like the Blue Revolution, awaiting a billionaire to make it supreme.  In two years I will have had an office there for half a century.

• In 2014 I moved into a seniors' community, 15 Craigside.  I'm back where the Japanese population must be 80%.  Three years ago, it occurred to me that I only had a short time to truly enjoy the rest of my life, for I don't believe in something like Heaven...or Hell.  So I set aside helping others as I was doing all my life to only focus on myself.  I don't give gifts anymore, I only do what I want, and I have been in virtually constant euphoria now for more than a year.  Mind you, I remain reasonably civil and accommodating.  

• A grand summary:

• How lucky and blessed can one be to have outlived my longevity (which in 1940 was to reach the age of 61) by two decades, where things just got better and better, even to today with the pandemic.

• Let me again say that luck played a prominent role in my success.  Perhaps just the name, Patrick, helped.  Sure, generally you make your own luck.  In my case, there was divine intervention at least half a dozen times in crucial situations.  Almost like my mother was watching from above and stepped in to help me.  Yet, my mind is unconvinced that there can be an afterlife.

• Would I like to relive my life again?  Nope.  There is absolutely no way I would get to where I am today.  I would never have met my wife, or write the original hydrogen bill that became law or plant the seed for the Blue Revolution  The odds of such a string of events, and these are just examples, occurring again are infinitesimal.

• But in afterthought, it would have been nice to have learned to play the ukulele before leaving Hawaii in 1958...that's about it.

• I still would like to take one more around the world trip, and that would begin late next year so that I can stop by Dubai for the World Expo.  After that, perhaps Switzerland.

Do you have heart?  One more.

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