This blog site initially focused on renewable energy and the environment. But that was SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth. My next book, SS for Humanity, opened the subject area to everything else, including SETI, the afterlife, travel and cuisine. However, I still provide, now and then, SIMPLE SOLUTIONS.
Total Pageviews
Saturday, January 17, 2026
DAY 2 IN SEOUL: Ice Skating Near City Hall
Had a good night of rest and maybe my best breakfast of this trip so far. The buffet breakfast at Aria in the Westin Chosun is wonderful. For me, soup dumplings and udon.
See that thermos bottle? It contains scotch, which, for me is a required ingredient in the consumption of Shanghai Soup Dumplings.
Second course of Udon and kim chi.
Noticed that tree trunks are protected from the cold. How cold? Looks nice, and the temperature hovers around freezing, 32F. Lows at night will approach 20F. High winds are expected in a couple of days, lowering the wind chill to 0 F, or 32 degrees below freezing. Best to go out today and tomorrow.
So off we went to walk around our hotel block,
My Blue-bar Pigeon greeted us.
Street clothes and food stalls, Note the next one sells clothes for dogs. Dog Face, not North Face.
Lotte Hotel and Department Store.
Hangungu Shrine. Note: Westin Chosun in background,
Below, this same shrine, view from our hotel.
By the way, there is snow on the ground.
Some outdoor art.
Ice skating rink next to City Hall, Note that earlier in the day there was a protest against the government,
Ice skating in Seoul
Hwacheon Sangheoneo Ice Festival sign.
Seoul City Hall.
Inside City Hall.
We finally found a way to enter the underground shopping area through the basement of the Lotte Hotel. We had dinner of pho and ribs, with a can of Cass Beer.
Adjacent was a small shopping mall, which I remembered had a stairs up to our hotel, Looking one way,
Then the other.
Up the stairs to the outside of the lit up Westin Josun, once spelled Chosun, pronounced jo-sun.
Inside the hotel,
Very simple meal in the Executive Lounge of chicken, chips, cheese, salami and grapes , with bourbon on rocks, champagne and cabernet sauvignon.
Walked a lot today....8737 steps, more than 4 miles.
To close, something on the Republic of Korea's, also known as South Korea's, political roller coaster ride. Five individuals have led the country over the past decade.
Park Geun-hye(right, 2013–2017, impeached): she is the only female president of the nation. Daughter of former Dictator Park Chung-hee. She was jailed for five years and was pardoned at the end of 2021.
Hwang Kyo-ahn(Acting President, Dec 2016 – May 2017)
Moon Jae-in(2017–2022)
Yoon Suk Yeol(right, 2022–April 2025, impeached): he is serving a five-year prison sentence and is currently incarcerated,
RADIO GARDEN is a fascinating link. You might need to activate the page, by clicking on it. Then click on any green dot to hear a radio from that location. In that lower-left box, click on EXPLORE or SEARCH to open up a whole new world of choices. Find San Francisco, for example, and you can click your way to 89 different stations from that area, or New York City for 202 stations. There is a feature where you click on the heart symbol to save that station and form your own list of favorites. There is a London station (under Weird Stations, find Birdsong Radio) that only plays a bird singing, or one from Switzerland (also under Weird Stations for Ambi Nature Radio) that plays ambient nature to put you to sleep. You'll bookmark this page and play with it for the rest of your life.
Most Popular Posts
For the longest time, the day when the most visitors (3,356) clicked on this blog site was 27February2010 on THE CHILE EARTHQUAKE. Why? Probably because this posting was linked to my Huffington Post article of that day reporting on HAWAII TSUNAMI. Natural disasters tend to increase readership. However, on 6March2017THE WONDERS OF ALCOHOL drew 6498. Further, too, on 6June2017, the one-month tally of visitors was 70,219, or 2340/day. However, on 18December2018 a record 27,775 people read that posting. On 22April2019, after 13,000 and 19,000 pings the previous days, a second all-time high of 27,318 was reached. The daily average has been about 500/day.
Interesting to note that not one of the top 20 postings reports on natural disasters (not sure what those numbers stand for, but they indicate a kind of relativity), the newest of this list goes back five years, and the highest rated this year is just over 300. Clearly, people are reading my older postings, but there is no sense to which subject areas are popular.
2024 surpassed 2023 as the highest global temperature on record. Global sea level also rose to a new high, 4 inches higher than in 1993, when record-keeping began. Tropical cyclones were 25% higher than the average. The Arctic is melting, severely.
Go to:
https://www.covers.com/editorial/HowToBet/OddsConverter
to access a betting odds converter for
- Moneyline/Amercan Odds
- Decimal/European Odds
- Fractional/UK Odds
- Implied Probability
CALCULATE THE CURRENT VALUE OF MONEY
Measuring Worth - Relative Value of US Dollars
....One ballpark estimate of what it cost the U.S. for World War II was $288 billion (in 1940 dollars). If you had inserted 1940 / 288 / 2016 into those boxes, the equivalent value today would be $4,870 billion, or close to $5 trillion.
CONSUMER PRICE INDEX AND THE INFLATION RATE
The CPI is based on 1984 at 100. Thus, 241 means a 241% inflation since 1984.
There are various ways to look at this, but one is to subtract 100 from 241, getting 141, so the effective inflation today, nearly a third of a century later, is 141% higher. Another comparison is that the CPI in 1916 was 10.9, and is at 240.853 today, a hundred years later. Thus, the average commodity that sold for a buck then, today goes for $22.
WHAT WILL BE THE FUTURE PRICE OF OIL?
Click on:
FUTURE PRICE OF OIL
to gain a sense of what the financial community thinks will be the future price of crude oil. When I last viewed this Chicago Board of Trade (a NYMEX company) future contracts page on 110March2014, the futures price of oil in December 2022 was $78.59. This makes no sense to me.
I more recently (10July2019) checked the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where they quoted the price of petroleum for February 2030: $55.33. Note the price/barrel above for today.
I am Director Emeritus of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii and co-founder of the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research.
I have published three SIMPLE SOLUTION books and have written more than 100 articles for the HUFFINGTON POST. I am working with an enlightened team to pioneer the BLUE REVOLUTION (http://bluerevolutionhawaii.blogspot.com/),
beginning with the development of the Pacific International Ocean Station.
No comments:
Post a Comment