What I Did Last Week
By Paul VanRaden
In 2025,
HR@opm.gov required me (and all other US government employees) to report each
Monday what I did the previous week and I continued reporting after retiring. I
schedule what to do in future weeks and then transfer what I got done into this
report. The current page will be updated again in 2026 each Sunday, usually by
noon eastern U.S. time. Make it a favorite and click the reload button every 7
days. This page, similar pages, and the weekly reports I posted in 2025 are now
stored in:
Solutions To Personal Problems
March 8, 2026
During the 7 days of March 2-8, I:
Reviewed maternal-fetal incompatibility
caused by Rh factor after blood tests revealed that my daughter is Rh- but my future
grandson is Rh+. Karl Landsteiner from Vienna, Austria discovered the ABO blood groups in 1901, a laboratory
test for Syphilis in 1906, the virus that causes polio in 1909, moved to New
York in 1923, and discovered the Rh factor in 1940. Decades ago, many babies from
Rh- mothers were born with anemia or died, so some couples stopped
having babies after their first affected child was born. The Rh- mother is never
affected but any later babies that are Rh+ could be. That genetic condition is very safe now because 2 immunoglobulin shots of RhoGAM
before and after delivery can easily prevent Rh- mothers from making antibodies
against their baby’s Rh+ blood. About 15% of people have Rh- blood type which is recessive, meaning that in gene RHD located at
25.3 million bases from the left side of human chromosome 1, Angel got that
less frequent allele from both Cheryl and me. About 20 years ago I studied Rh
factor as a possible explanation for a bull whose daughters had 10% stillborn
calves whereas his mates had only 4% stillborn calves, but we did not find a factor
such as Rh in cattle.
Discovered that many of my nuclear
orbit ideas make sense because similar theories have been published and are in use,
indicating I should have done more literature review earlier. Previous nuclear orbit models also assigned orbits in the nucleus matching the periodic table. Heavier
elements seem to be built around the Helium 4 nucleus, as I modeled. Helium has a hole for the 2nd electron orbit to pass. Heavier elements also have
a density gap at the center, and some pictures of atoms show that linear up-and-down orbit, but quantum
mechanics does not yet model the electron’s linear orbit thru the center. The general
term nucleon is often used instead of protons and neutrons. Nucleons are paired
with opposite spin, like electrons and as I modeled. Computation of stable nuclear
orbits is difficult, as reported in this summary. If all bodies return to their
initial positions, speeds, and angles after 1 full cycle (orbit) of the system,
that could demonstrate nuclear stability with much less computation.
Graphed the helium orbits, updated my
nuclear orbit presentation to include those, and updated its flow a little.
Found another nice talk about the non-existence of God while watching videos on the science
of nuclear physics.
Learned from Rachel Maddow why the U.S. president declared war
on Iran. Negotiator Jared Kushner, with no formal title except son-in-law, pretends
to speak for the U.S. after personally taking $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, another $1.5 billion from Qatar and United Arab Emirates, and receiving hundreds of millions
in ‘management fees’ from Arab leaders while using our tax dollars to please those countries, not us. The president received a
$400 million airplane gift from Qatar. His family and his other negotiator
Steve Witkoff also receive huge cryptocurrency income from those Gulf states. Kushner’s father Charles was convicted of several crimes and went to prison but later got pardoned by Trump and then appointed
U.S. ambassador to France. The Gulf states do not need to fight a war. Instead,
they can pay our president and his family to make the U.S. military fight Iran for them. I asked former Iranian Hossein
Jorjani, “Will historians look back on this week as a good or a bad U.S.
decision?” He replied that he is very pessimistic about the situation in Iran: “What
we have there is a fanatic, doomsday religious sect that has taken a nation
hostage. Based on my understanding, they have a habit of turning every ‘difference’
into a ‘confrontation’. Unfortunately, they do not act ‘rationally’ by our
standards. And of course, war does not solve this problem. It just accelerates
destruction.”
March 1, 2026
During the 7 days of February 23-March
1, I:
Advanced from simulating 2 orbits and
4 bodies (protons plus neutrons) in helium’s nucleus to 4 orbits and 12 bodies
in carbon’s nucleus, then to 20 bodies in neon’s nucleus and 36 bodies in argon.
Orbits 1 and 2 each contained 2 bodies (like helium) whereas orbits 3 and 4
each can contain 8 bodies to get neon or 8 more in 5 and 6 to get argon. Time
required per orbit always had ratios of 1 : -2 : 4 : -4 : 8 : -8 for orbits 1
to 6. Positive spins for orbits 4 and 6 were slightly more stable and easier to
imagine being formed than the negative spins, but electron pairs have opposite
spins, so I simulated opposite spins within the nucleus also. All bodies were in
the X-Y plane, like our solar system, but all elements above hydrogen have an
open center, like binary stars, to let the second electron pass up and down in the
Z direction. Unfortunately, stable orbits require launching all bodies with speeds
and angles differing slightly from perfect circles to account for forces from all
the other orbiting bodies. The program needs to optimize those because trying
to perfectly juggle many bodies by hand will take too long, even if they are
very small and move very fast. The Fortran code is now 350 lines including 100
comment lines, but choosing better starting options will need much more automation.
Learned that small asteroids
in positive harmony with Jupiter (2:1, 3:1, 4:1) get moved out of those orbits in the
asteroid belt. Bodies of similar size may find stable harmonic orbits while
those of very different size are unstable because the smaller body gives very little
feedback to the larger or may be disturbed more by the other planets in motion.
I also found a very nice picture from the Brookhaven particle accelerator of a gold atom’s orbits. See: This is the most accurate image of an atom. That picture also shows electron
orbits matching the shapes of the nuclear orbits I am simulating. I did not yet
try simulating electrons, but electron orbits could be in harmony with nuclear
orbits with both having no net spin, matching current quantum theory. Real
bodies in real orbits may obey 1 simple force of attraction among protons,
neutrons, and electrons much easier to understand than quantum theory which says
that particles move magically from one place to another instead of in simple orbits.
Helped cleanup and reorganize the
house to make part-time room for a baby in 6 months. In 1997, Angel’s Mommy convinced
me to build and move into a 20% bigger townhouse (208 vs. 174 square meters, or
2,244 vs. 1,870 square feet) only 2 months before Angel was born. Our cleanup this
week was less work than that move 3 blocks away into the new 1997 townhouse that Cheryl and I had built for $154,000 and out of our previous 1994 townhouse we built for $124,000. After 30 years, estimated values of those houses have
more than tripled to $470,000 and $410,000, while inflation has only doubled the
prices of most U.S. goods. The stock market (Dow) is now 6 times higher than in
1997 and 12 times higher than in 1994, so maybe we should have invested in
stocks instead of houses.
Showed my 4 siblings during our
weekly zoom meeting the family pictures I converted from slides. They enjoyed
seeing sights they remembered but had not seen for about 60 years. Those pictures
included about 10 from the farm in Forreston, IL where we grew up. I added those
to the end of Desegregation on the Farm and others into various photo displays. I also added about 25 pictures of Cheryl from the 1980s and 1990s to her photo display.
Decided not to watch the State of the
Union speech last Tuesday. A Nobel Peace Prize winner would remind us of these
facts: Congress must declare war, not a president. After Osama bin Laden’s 2001
direct attack, the U.S. began 20 years of Afghanistan war and killed him 10 years later, but the Taliban (our enemies) now control
all of Afghanistan, all women there, and last week began a new war with Pakistan. In 2003, the U.S. quickly and easily removed Saddam Hussein followed by
8 years of Iraq war. In 2011, the UN asked NATO to remove Muammar Gadaffi, followed by 14 years of failed state and anarchy in Libya, with Russia now taking it over. In
2015, Congress did not approve a U.S. president’s request for war, and instead Syrian people rose up
and finally replaced their leader after 13 years of Syrian
civil war. In 2025 while working for Trump, I watched his March 4 speech to
Congress and was very upset by his vicious lies about the Social Security
Administration because a complete review in 2023 by his own appointee had already
disproved his lies. The Social Security database uses methods like those we developed
for measuring cow longevity, so last year I compared and presented those
methods in Births, Deaths,
and Presidential Lies. Some people poison their brains with Trump’s words, but since 2017, I
block his lies and hate from entering my ears and instead fill my brain with
truth and kindness. Keep your mind healthy by keeping his lies out of your
brain.
February 22, 2026
During the 7 days of February 16-22,
I:
Found out along with 27 other people
in Miami and about 15 more on livestream that the grandbaby will be a grandson.
He does not know his gender yet, but someday we will explain that many people
think learning new information is fun whether you inherited 2 X’s, 1 X and 1 Y,
or other unusual chromosome combinations.
Remembered that the infinitesimal
universe was why I got started on nuclear physics. Everyone believes that
stars, galaxies, and large-scale objects all differ in size, but current models
of physics imagine that small particles such as protons, neutrons, and
electrons are each identical to all other “fundamental particles” across the
whole universe. Those theories are likely wrong, but my current calculations
preserve that part of nuclear theory which makes the math easier to do and
explain. Fundamental particles may not all be created equal, and I would be
pleased if future scientists prove that soon rather than hundreds of years
after I retired. We cannot know what happens infinitely far away or understand
exactly what happens inside the smallest detectable particles, but we can
improve the lives of other bodies that we meet or that we create without
knowing everything about everybody. We each started when a microscopic sperm
met a microscopic egg and each combined their 3 billion letters of DNA to form
a new body like ours but each a little different. Understanding tiny processes
is useful even if the tiny bodies all differ slightly.
Made the computer simulation of
helium’s nucleus twice as stable simply by using more digits of pi when
converting X-Y coordinates to angles and back again. At first, I used the 9
decimal digits of pi that my calculator provided, then typed in 20 digits found
on the internet, but Fortran double precision only stores 14 and used 5 extra
digits. Those instantly allowed 16 complete orbits instead of 8 previously. For
each time increment, the simulation now uses an average of the previous and new
positions of each other particle instead of computing the attraction force and
direction only from their previous positions. I also revised the Fortran
program to automatically calculate starting positions for heavier elements with
more protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Instead of using only trial and error
to find input options that create stable orbits I derived better methods using
derivatives but have not programmed those yet.
Converted 3 old VHS cassettes from
1994-2002 to videos and converted 20 old slides from 1950-1995 to photos for a
total cost of $144. The files were restored onto DVDs, so I also had to buy DVD
reader for $31. The 2-inch by 2-inch slides were mostly family pictures and are
now loaded into the online photo displays. The VHS tapes were videos of Angel’s sonogram from 1997, her dance
recital from 2002 when she was 4 years old, and my 1994 speech at USDA on Greater Employment Opportunity. In October I posted my slides from
that 55-minute talk and now the video is posted in 3 parts. The
ideas I shared at USDA in 1994 are all still correct today, explaining how all
of us on earth can and should have equal rights. You may want to give this
speech a standing ovation even if nobody will hear your hands clapping or see
you smile at the idea that we should all have equal rights.
Noticed that U.S. taxpayers will
contribute $10 billion to a Gaza fund even after the U.S. president decided we are too poor to pay our $2
billion share of United Nations’ expenses for the whole world. In 1948, 85% of the Arab families were deported to Gaza from the land and homes they
had owned for generations before Israel took their land. Over the last 3 years,
the U.S. gave Israel more than $10 billion for bombs and military equipment
used to destroy Gaza. In November 2025, the UN security
council approved the new fund because every leader knew that Trump would veto any other action the UN tried to do or he would raise
their country’s tariff rate if they voted against him. At least the Supreme
Court finally read the U.S. Constitution and realized that Congress is
supposed to vote on tariff rates after taking a year to decide. Unfortunately,
the U.S. leader can still break laws 10 times faster than the courts can stop
him.
February 15, 2026
During the 7 days of February 9-15,
I:
Continued refining the code to
simulate nuclear orbits. Numerical stability is a problem with repeated
recalculation of positions accounting for the new position of all other
orbiting bodies. Even with double precision for all variables, rounding errors accumulate
after several rotations of recomputing at each degree of rotation or smaller
intervals. The starting positions are always symmetrical, equally spaced, with
identical speeds and angles but become asymmetrical across orbits due to
rounding. Instead, the correct orbit can be verified after only 120 degrees of
the inner orbit and negative 60 degrees of the outer orbit with opposite spin
if the 4 bodies (protons and neutrons) line up again with the same speeds and
angles of direction that should recur every 60 degrees of the outer orbit. NASA
already has shown that harmonic orbits spinning in the same direction are
stable and self-correct back to harmony after small disturbances of any body.
Harmonic orbits with opposite spins may also be stable or even more stable. For
example, noise canceling headphones generate a pattern of negative pressure
waves to match and cancel the positive pressure waves detected. My search for
stable starting speeds and directions has used only trial and error, but due to
rounding errors I may need to derive exact formulas for those using methods
(such as arcsine) that I last used in 1979 college calculus, but I threw that
textbook away last May before moving to Florida. The helium orbits are not easy
to simulate but I am getting better at them.
Filed my Federal and my final
Maryland part-year income tax returns. Of the $32,000 federal tax withheld,
$7,000 should be refunded, so sometimes it pays to file early. I needed several
extra hours to read the rules for all my changes that happened in 2025, but the
extra calculations were not complex. The state of Florida does not tax income
but gets most of their income from property tax, such as $3,400 per year on our
house recently purchased for $369,000. Avoiding Maryland’s 8% state plus county
income tax in one benefit of retiring here.
Watched an excellent 26-minute video Why the Rich Don’t Pay Taxes and 14-minute video The “Borrow Until You Die” strategy
the IRS does NOT want you to know. U.S. tax law now almost ensures that the rich will get richer and the
poor get poorer. Rich people give large campaign donations to and become
friends with politicians who then reward the rich with tax breaks. People can
now insert cash directly into the crypto wallet of the U.S. president to get
even better treatment. Life is excellent for the rich, while our government
uses tax dollars it gets from us middle-income people to deport poorer people
back to the poorest places to make their lives much worse. Deportation is a
horrible way for our government to spend our taxes.
Added 25 more early pictures of
Elexys, Samira, and Angel into the online displays including a sonogram of Elexys from May 1999 a month before she was
born. The back of that picture said “Hi Grandma” just like the “Hi Grandpa”
sonogram I got from Angel last month.
Rode with Angel and Cesar to Miami
for their gender reveal party with his family, Charlee, and 3 grandkids also
here. I gave them the baby pictures that Cheryl had from decades ago. Previous
generations learned the gender when the baby was born. My mom Katie wrote this gender reveal
and family planning poem after her final delivery in 1962: “We’re as proud as we can be, with
number 6 of our family. Since we don’t plan for any more, we’re glad this guy
has evened the score – 3 girls, 3 boys.”
February 8, 2026
During the 7 days of February 2-8,
I:
Wrote a computer program to examine
orbits in the nucleus of atoms. A few years ago I started with SAS language to
compute and graph the moon’s path around the sun for calendar research and to show that pretty sounding harmonic music frequencies also look pretty when graphed. To
make nuclear orbit calculations more efficient and portable, I converted the
SAS code and expanded it to 210 lines of Fortran code (including 70 comment
lines) after generalizing it for any number of objects in any number of orbits,
but the results and code are not ready to share yet.
Received and added a third review to
my nuclear orbit theory page. Since last week 20 people clicked on it, which already seems more
popular than the Copernicus theory of planetary orbits was during his whole
life. I wrote to a planetary scientist at NASA in Greenbelt, MD and a student
who proved that a figure 8 orbit with 3 bodies could be stable, but I have not
heard from them yet.
Made a printable pdf of my Supreme Court poem and mailed it to the Supreme Court for a cost of one 78-cent postage
stamp, asking the mailroom employee to give 1 copy to each of the 9 Justices.
No Justice may ever see my poem, but mailing a hard copy into their building
could raise that chance from near 0 up to 0.1%. They now let our president
break almost any law, national or international. If this has badly affected you
or your country, mail them a letter or a poem and ask the Justices to enforce
U.S. laws again.
Learned that the U.S. government decided not to pay the $2.2 billion it owes to the United Nations for
2025 and 2026. I paid 16% ($28,964) of my salary as federal income tax, and the
U.N. got just 0.01% ($23) of my salary in 2022 when U.S. paid its dues. Each
nation pays just 0.00002 of its gross domestic product. The U.S. economy
generated $27 trillion or 22% of the world’s gross income so the U.S.
government should pay 22% of the $3 billion U.N. budget. If the U.S. refuses to
pay its membership dues, the U.N. in New York should expel the diplomats from Washington. Then
Trump could not veto their plans and later take credit for doing the same thing. The U.N. now seems as useless as
the League of Nations was when it closed in 1946. It should be replaced with a democratic United Earth instead of a Board of Peace fully chosen and controlled by a chairman for life. What could go wrong?
The same things that went wrong when Trump let Elon Musk ruin the U.S.
government so that billionaires could rule the world.
Found another ~120 old family photos
in a plastic bag, sorted those by person, time, and subject, converted about 80
of Charlee to electronic, and added those to her powerpoint picture display. Many other photos are yet to process.
February 1, 2026
During the 7 days of January
26-February 1, I:
Discovered that the atomic nucleus is
made of paired harmonic orbits of opposite spin in helium and all larger atoms.
The innermost orbit takes exactly half the time as the second orbit. Larger
elements have outer orbits in that same x-y plane also in harmony with the
first two. “Protons” and “neutrons” are really the same thing, analogous to a
binary star pair, and pass each other at 6 equidistant points per orbit, making
the orbits hexagon shaped around the nucleus’s empty center. Numbers of bodies
in each nuclear orbit explain the periodic table of elements. Atoms bond
together as molecules by sharing electron orbits that hold 2 nucleuses at a
stable distance. One electron has a linear up-down orbit thru the central hole
in the nucleus. This model of nuclear orbits is much more sensible than quantum
mechanics theory and explains the chemical bonds among elements such as carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, and even DNA. Seeing the orbits and shapes is easier than
reading about them. You can now see the orbits within each nucleus at:
Explained the slides above on nuclear
orbits to my brother and 3 sisters at our weekly meeting and got comments back
from external 2 reviewers. Notes generated by AI from our family Zoom meeting
and the comments from reviewers are posted here.
Watched Richard Feynman’s 1973
lecture Story of Particle Physics. I was 90% sure that the paired harmonic orbits of opposite spin really
explain the nucleus before watching his lecture. At minute 7:17 my jaw dropped
and I became 99.99% sure that the orbital math is correct because his 1973
photo of a nucleus showed the paired orbital rings with hexagon shape that
matched the theory and graphs that I had drawn by hand a few days earlier. But
I still wonder why scientists in particle physics never bothered to derive
those simple nuclear orbits that explain the pretty picture of the orbits that
Feynman showed in 1973.
Remembered the 1981 song Too Much Time On My Hands by STYX: “I’ve got nothing to do and
all day to do it. I can solve all the world’s problems without even trying.”
World problems can be solved, but it takes many hours of work. I work harder
now than I did while fully employed and getting paid for 40-hour weeks but
working many hours of unpaid overtime and using only a small fraction of my
vacation time. In retirement, I now average about 70 hours per week because
working on new topics is more fun, and I waste fewer hours fighting with
anonymous reviewers. This week’s research on nuclear orbits is correct and very
useful, but I might not find a journal to publish it or even a physics
conference that will add it to their program. Nicolaus Copernicus had that same problem for 30 years after correctly proving that the
earth orbits the sun.
Went to a Rock and Roll concert /
laser light show only 5 km (3 miles) away. The stage and the excellent band FireFly were under a full moon with Neptune shining brightly a few degrees away
to the south, just as Copernicus and Newton’s math had predicted. A 49-second
video of my grand finale drum roll using colorful, lighted drumsticks is posted here.
January 25, 2026
During the 7 days of January 19-25,
I:
Watched lecture Understanding Gravity by Richard
Feynman recorded in about 1962 and then read the 180 short pages of Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein in 1920. Most of
that book was easier to understand than I expected until Einstein applied his
math to cosmology. He rejected an infinite universe because gravity’s pull becomes infinite from all directions if nothing stops
it. If gravity is a push from all directions except where partially blocked by
masses such as earth or the sun, that push gets slightly weaker after traveling
thru many masses and does not become infinite. Since 2002 I believe that
gravity is a difference in push instead of a pull and since 1984 I believe in
the infinite universe. Those ideas both still make sense after studying Feynman’s and
Einstein’s well-explained research. I added their references and more text into
my 2024 updated explanation of the direction of gravity. Those topics are not so important.
When you step on the scales, your weight will be the same whether the earth
pulls you down, the sky pushes you down, or space curves you down. And I will
not visit the whole universe whether it is large or is infinite.
Spent many hours on nuclear physics
and a new theory of why snowflakes have 6 sides and why many molecules have hexagon shapes. I plan to reveal that theory
in future weeks.
Calculated progress in milk yield due
to better genes or better management in two ways after discussions with Mike
Vandehaar. Means of milk yield per lactation were 14,209 pounds for cows born
in 1970 and 26,328 in 2020. The published genetic progress is 9,119 pounds and
implies 75% of progress was genetic, calculated as 9,119 / (26,328 – 14,209).
But the genetic evaluation math includes variance adjustments. Those “predict”
that today's genetic differences would be only 66% as large in the 1970 environment.
Thus, cows with modern genes might have given only 20,228 if milked in 1970,
calculated as 14,209 + 9,119 * 0.66. That implies only 50% of the progress was
genetic, calculated as 9,119 * 0.66 / (26,328 – 14,209). Higher means can
increase variance, causing better genes and better management to combine with
some multiplicative rather than simply additive effects on cow productivity.
Also on the topic of cows, I sent comments on a nice paper about redefining
fertility traits to my previous employee Jason Graham, consulted with my
previous research leader John Cole about selection index updates, and commented
on data collection for the two new calf health traits.
Watched 27-minute video How are Microchips Made? CPU
Manufacturing Process Steps. For anyone who computes, this video explains how computer designs have
increased chip speeds so quickly. They are evolving faster than human brains.
Cesar and I both agreed that watching this video was very good for our brains.
Got an eye exam and ordered new
lenses for my reading and distance glasses. For about 20 years, both eyes had
stable sphere measurements near -1.75 but my right eye worsened to -2.50 in 2023, -5.25 in 2024,
and then cataract surgery in 2025. The artificial lens is working fine, as
expected, but my left eye worsened from -3.00 in 2025 to -4.00 in 2026 so it
may need surgery soon also.
January 18, 2026
During the 7 days of January 12-18,
I:
Filled the gap years 2001-2011 that
were missing in my Annual Report file. I may have emailed Annual Reports in
those years, but AOL deleted my “Sent” mail before 2012. I had paper copies
from 1994-2000 when I mailed my reports and found the 2005 report in a sister’s
reply. To list events in the gap years, I used my annual planning calendars on
paper that I have saved since 1988 and my records of Angel’s activities but
labeled those as Summaries since they do not show what I was thinking about at
the time. Remembering our past events is fun and may help us predict our
futures better.
Updated my daughter Angel’s life
story with the latest 3 years of events and started documenting events for the
baby she is expecting. That could give us 3 generations of fully documented
lives. “Undocumented” people are being deported even if they act like model
citizens and contribute much to our communities. People who are documented to
be from places where nobody would want to live are forced to return there. Many
American citizens have become evil people following an evil leader, as in 1938
when German citizens followed their leader. But the Germans only wanted
Austria, Czechoslovakia, and half of Poland, and never officially claimed “This is Our Hemisphere.” Babies with documents proving they were born in the USA are no longer
safe here because the President ended the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and the
Supreme Court will decide this spring if they agree. Many things to document
these days.
Added to my picture
biography photos of me at the United Nations building and the Statue of Liberty in
1994, at the Berlin Wall in 2014, and the piece of the Berlin Wall that I
carried with me for 20 years. The final slide of my 2014 Interbull / ICAR talk in Berlin quoted Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech but
instead I showed our Texas-Mexico border. You can believe in immigration and
international law even if the U.S. government now hates those ideas.
Watched documentary Why is there no B# or E# note on the
piano? directly connected to my music and keyboard research which was more
advanced in 2002 than youtube videos are in 2026. In October, my Experiments with Standard Piano audio did not play when accidentally
posted in .pdf but it plays now in .pptx or .mp4 formats. Files in .mp4 allow
autoplay instead of controlling the slide advance manually and are now posted
at Music and Math in Harmony.
Finally hiked the full nature trail
that begins a mile away from our house and walked 8.4 miles (13 km) to see what
our neighborhood looked like before houses were built. A few circular clearings
in the forest had grown some trees again, as if settlers tried to farm some land but then gave up. The only other
hikers were a group of 3 ladies with 4 dogs, 1 biker pedaling with his dog, and
1 motorized biker pulling a sled with deer hunting equipment and his tree
stand. Very peaceful day, except possibly for the deer.
January 11, 2026
During the 7 days of January 5-11,
I:
Heard that daughter Angel and
son-in-law Cesar are expecting a baby! An online app predicted Angel’s due date
of August 17, and we joked that the doctor probably uses the same app, but
their prediction based on ultrasound measurement of fetal length is August 24. For cows we predict
due dates very accurately using 25.4 million gestation length records, 152 million insemination records, and DNA genotypes of both parents.
Gestation length (duration) has 44% heritability in cows and 25% in humans because exact conception dates are known for most cows but not for most
humans.
Noticed that when we reported Angel’s
news to my sisters and brother, Zoom’s Artificial Intelligence got confused
because Angel shared my camera and microphone to announce her news. The AI
notes for our weekly meeting generated these sentences: “Paul shared his excitement about his first
ultrasound appointment on Friday, revealing he is 6 weeks pregnant… Paul shared
that he is experiencing fatigue as a symptom of his pregnancy, and discussed
his diet changes to support the health of his unborn child… The group discussed
Paul's experience with an AI-generated book gift from his wife, Angel…”
Zoom’s disclaimer said “AI can make mistakes. Review for accuracy. Please rate
the accuracy of this summary” and then asked for feedback. So, I explained the
facts of life to AI.
Read my 241-page biography book that
AI generated as a Christmas present from Angel. Reading it took about 8 hours
while taking notes on the content and quality of the text. The book was
interesting but did not use other information about me available on the
internet. AI had trouble keeping track of
family relationships and trouble with timelines, but a few of its best
sentences seemed better than any similar sentences I could find on the
internet. I added a more detailed summary of its problems and benefits in the
Artificial Intelligence section of Thinking, Computing, and Improving Both.
Noticed that MS Copilot AI can get confused by Trump. After
visiting New York City, I asked Copilot: “Is the UN building or Trump Tower NYC
taller?” and it replied “Trump
Tower. Trump Tower in NYC is taller than the United Nations building. Trump
Tower stands at 664 feet (202 meters), while the United Nations building
is 861 feet (262 meters) tall.” But 861 feet is the height of Trump World
Tower across the street from the 510 feet (155 meters) United Nations building built in 1952. Trump World Tower is 72 stories tall, but the top floor
is numbered floor 90. The penthouse suite in Trump Tower is on the top 3 floors 57-58 that are numbered 67-68. It occupies 11,000
square feet (1,000 m2), but Trump lied and officially claimed it was 30,000 square feet to get better bank loans and then
lost his resulting business fraud case. Copilot probably gave the wrong height because both buildings are at
United Nations Plaza. The purpose of Trump’s World Tower built in 2001 was to
prove that he can physically overshadow the UN and international law. He now
can veto the UN, veto US congress bills, commit any crime on Government time, and pardon any criminal who breaks Federal laws for him. What could go
wrong? Long ago, the whole world was united, speaking the same language, until
a developer built a tall tower in Babel and got the whole world confused (Genesis 11:1-9, Holy Bible). Copilot gets confused by Trump’s towers, but I do
not.
Gave my Supreme Court poem its own page. I wrote and posted it while still working for Donald Trump
but made it less searchable, and that explains the mystery of why I hid it in Holiday History. But I have no fear this year of
getting fired while retired.
January 4, 2026
During the 7 days of December 29,
2025-January 4, 2026, I:
Moved my
weekly reports from 2025 to a new location (see link above or below) and
restarted this What I Did Last Week page to only include news reported in 2026.
Emailed my
2025 Annual Report to
family on December 31 wishing them a happy 2026. Several of my relatives have
mailed me their annual greetings and stories for many years. I save their paper
reports and got to use those in 2023 when visiting my niece Andrea. Her kids took
turns reading the 15 holiday reports my sister Judy sent from 1988-2002 plus a
few letters that Andrea had signed and sent me as a child. The kids had not
heard or seen their Mom’s and her sisters’ and her parents’ life stories
before. In 2024 my sister Miriam also reread the letters and reports she had
sent me since 1986. In those days we often wrote letters without making copies
whereas typed letters and reports now usually get stored. My annual reports
going back to 1994 now include my 2025 news in:
Summarized
my website’s visits, visitors, most popular reports, and costs in 2025,
compared those to previous years, and described how and why I manage my own
pages instead of posting on social media sites. I added suggestions from
Hossein Jorjani into my draft report. In 2025, many more people (12,791)
visited my web pages and they viewed 34,747 reports in total, 3.7 times more
than in 2024. Further statistics and advice on managing websites from 27 years
of experience are posted in:
Reorganized
my main pages to display fewer items, fixed some broken links, and added some
files that the awstats web management software reported missing.
Celebrated the new year with Angel and Cesar at a party and
fireworks that also celebrated 25 years since this very pretty, peaceful
retirement community Solivita first opened. This planned community took 23 years to build the ~4,000
houses including our house which is 10 years old. A similar sized development Westview one mile away opened 2 years ago and those houses are being built very
rapidly. I watch them build every week while biking on their brand-new streets.
Both communities were previously pine forests, not farmland. More news from
Angel and Cesar next week.
The previous reports from 2025 telling what I did each week
are now stored at: