Another New Year spent in Las Vegas and I stayed away from downtown Fremont St as I knew it was going to get crazy over there and I decided to go to Rum Runner, a local bar on E Desert Inn Road where there was a live band and a kitchen with very decent food and my friend was bartending that night so it was actually enjoyable. Mostly local people go there and there was no traffic or any chaos and we watched fireworks during the count down just outside the bar. It was a good New Year’s eve spent while avoided the traffic jam, parking chaos and the drunks on the streets.
For the last 30 years, I have not spent Xmas and New Year in the bay area but the count down were in different countries spread throughout Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North Africa. Since the pandemic, I have been spending Xmas and New Year on US soil like Vegas, Oceanside and Hawaii but someday I might go back to international travelling during the winter and I need to go to places that are warm as I hate the cold weather. I must say the weather here in Vegas has been pretty good this time, sunny and not nearly as cold as in the past. In all these years that I have been coming to Vegas ( 26 years), this trip I actually visited places which I never did in the past such as Las Vegas Lake Resort in Henderson, down town Summerlin, the Red Rock Casino and Resort and some of the newer casinos on the strip like Conrad and Hilton. So I have done a bit of the touristy stuffs on this trip and it was great. I have been here since Dec 16 and I have 4 more nights to spend before coming home. I always spend at least 3 weeks on my winter vacation wherever I go and I often take an extra week off from work before the holidays so I could beat all the hectic holiday travel chaos and by the time I leave, holidays are well over so I don’t have to deal with the heavy traffic coming home as well. Yes, I have it all planned out as usual.
Most people tend to make a big deal about New Year as much as birthdays, but to me New Year simply means the Earth is going to make another orbit about the sun very much like the one in the past and that means we will experience one less orbit before our life ends and that goes for birthdays as well. I know it is not a pleasant way to think of it like that but it’s the reality. These days I don’t celebrate anymore birthdays and New Years don’t mean much to me as I will have one less year to live. Why all these celebrations? However, I still have New Year resolutions to make and that seems important to me because life span is so short and unpredictable, I want to accomplish as much as I possibly can before it all ends. These days most of my friends wonder when I will be retiring and what I plan to do when I retire. This is actually a good New Year resolution as I already know what I like to do and that is to make you tube videos lecturing on science focusing on quantum mechanics, cosmology and high energy physics with all the latest development in those areas. I also plan on continuing with writing blogs about science and even get into debates supporting science over religions. Yes, I made up my mind a while back this is what I will be doing in my retirement. Since I have been travelling in the past 30 years to almost 50 countries around the world, travelling isn’t what I will be focusing although I will continue to do so whenever I see fit, you tube videos and writing blogs can be done at home or travelling abroad. My goal is to promote science and provide accurate information about the objective truths of the world to the public and it is a way for me to contribute something good even after I retire because an educator work is never done. While some people have given me a lot of thumbs up, there are some wondering if there are better things for me to do such as buying lotto tickets and they asked me what I will do with all the money if I ever win a $25 million jackpot. Seriously will I be able to spend it all at my age? Should I buy big mansions everywhere around the world to show off how wealthy I am? At my age I don’t think I can spend all of the $25 million but should I ever win it, I would donate 99% to the following organizations: ACS ( America Cancer Society), St Jude Hospitals, and most definitely NSF ( National Science Foundation) for all the cutting edge science and medical technologies they can develop to make the world a better place to live for everyone. That to me is more meaningful than showing off with big luxury mansions and expensive sports cars. By donating my fortune to the less fortunate people where they can get help to cure their cancer is a way to leave fond memories for people to remember me by when someday I am no longer around. Looking at people like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and see how their contributions in science benefit the world we live in today. Composers like Mozart, Beethoven and the music they composed are still flourishing today. That to me is important as a way of contributing something good to the world rather than focusing on the materialistic part of life.. On the other hand if I ever win a 25 year time lottery where I can travel back to relive it all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat and I will be so selfish that I wouldn’t donate to or share even a second of that time with anyone but keeping it all to myself. Winning the 25 year time lottery is hell a lot more precious to me than $25 million and if I have a choice of selecting one of those lotteries to win, I would most definitely pick the time over money. The way I look at it is no matter how much money you have, there is no way you can buy back even a nano second of lost time but if I have another chance to relive the past 25 years, I could in theory find a way to become wealthy knowing what I know now. For example, I could have invested money in Apple stock and Microsoft stock and I could be doing even better financially these days, not that I am complaining now. Some people would say ” time is money”, but money don’t have the power to buy time, but given more time, there is certainly a good chance to make more money.
All in all life is good to me for I am very appreciative of what I do for work and the opportunity to travel the world in the last 30 years and still doing it. I don’t depend on anybody and as far as I know, there is nobody in this world has to depend on me and I sure hope this will remain the same til my last day on earth. As far as my New Year resolution, I mentioned earlier that I will be dedicating my retirement life to writing more blogs and making videos lecturing on science and promoting scientific ways of thinking while attacking those far right wing conservative religious fanatics fundamentalists because they are threats and dangerous in our society. My job as a scientist is to continue to provide accurate information to the younger generation for they are the future of the world we live in and they need to learn how to develop logical thinking, approach matters rationally and examine all the evidence before forming any definite conclusions which is the scientific attitude and these are the kind of qualities we need in this world to develop functional societies. After all, science is about unifying theories to becoming ONE where religions are about dividing humanities to create hatred, discrimination, conflicts and wars. Therefore my New Year resolution will be to focus on giving the best descriptions about the world we live in and not forcing the world to bend to our preconceptions.
Happy New Year to everyone from Las Vegas, the most glamorous city in the world to visit!!!!