IF YOU live in California, Robert de Groot is the man to keep an eye on.
De Groot, yes.
He works there for the government, and he’s the man behind ShakeAlert. That’s an app that alerts you if a truly devastating earthquake is imminent. We’ll spare you the details, but look up Robert-Michael de Groot on Google, because that’s where you’ll find him with his ShakeAlert. It’s a phenomenal system, with sensors in the ground all along the West Coast.
On the other coast, East, is yet another De Groot, Dagomar. He’s a professor at Georgetown University. The expert on climate history, although economist Jan De Vries at Berkeley knows a thing or two about it as well. Dagomar Degroot specializes in the Little Ice Age (really, we complain about warming now, but the great cooling only happened a mere four centuries ago).
Oh, and then there are Anne (immunologist at the University of Rhode Island), Barbara (grand slam tennis star) and Bruce (Missouri politician) De Groot. Chad De Groot is a champion BMX racer, Jeff De Groot is a soccer pro, Roger DeGroat is a Ramapo Lanape native American in New Jersey, but the biggest De Groot is Hugo.
Hugo de Groot’s image hangs above the door in the House of Representatives, immediately to the right of the Speaker. He is known here as Grotius. The US recognizes him as the greatest jurist ever in the field of international law. To this day, America bases the right to have a military presence in faraway places such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan on Hugo de Groot’s laws.
