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Our fourth Viking port of call was the country of Panama, at the port of its huge modern capital, Panama City.  Panama originally was part of its Southern neighbor Columbia.  But American “gunboat diplomacy” separated Panama early in the 20th century into an American “protectorate”.  This allowed the US to proceed with the ambitious project of constructing the Panama Canal, whose length of approximately fifty miles qualifies it as one of the greatest engineering projects in human history.

Writing this blog on the return flight from Spain to the US, my challenge in writing is to choose which aspects of the trip to highlight. There are more stories than I have the time or space to relate at length. Thus, my brief listing . . .

Columbus, Georgia, is the place I spent the first two decades of life, where I attended public school. But my real "ties to the land", my "roots", are actually to the forty-acre "country place" over the stateline in Alabama across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus. It's somewhat bittersweet to visit the place, since the memories of my departed parents are everywhere. But there's still a smell, a legacy, a longing to hold onto the past, that I feel every time I visit, which is only once or twice a year.

This is a blog for those readers with an interest in technology, specifically, the cutting edge of new technology in the development of alternative energy.

The first general session used as its starting point a book by Steven Johnson entitled: Where do good ideas come from: The Natural History of Innovation. I had not read or heard of the book previously. The discussion was conducted by a group of five or six Fielding professors and perhaps fifteen or so students seated in a circle and lasted three hours.

The Greeks affected the whole world with their ideas, foremost among them the concept of democratic rule.  Greece gave rise to philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Greek architecture was adopted first by the Romans, but later around the world, including the columns seen in US government buildings in Washington DC.  The Greek language gave rise to words in science, religion, and history that have been adopted by other countries’ languages around the world. 

When I took Latin in high school, I learned the acronym FRIPS for the five Romance languages, derived from Latin: French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. So here we are in Romania, and I can recognize half the written words. I didn’t know much about Romania before. In my five days here, I have learned a lot. My naïve preconception was that Romania was inhabited by gypsies and peasants. Wow, was I wrong! We traveled a bit in the province of Transylvania and saw some older traditional houses. But the residents had every modern convenience. So let me declare, Romania is a modern, sophisticated, highly developed, relatively affluent country, not at all like the outdated memories of its Communist decades. . .

Hiroshima is a beautiful city.  Its present beauty hides the hideous past, in which Hiroshima was the first target of a nuclear weapon.  Its Nuclear Memorial and Museum preserve the disturbing images which every current leader of a nuclear power should be obliged to visit.