first mavic pro flight

A beautiful day in New England. First flight with new drone. Off the roof. At 1:36 you can see across the charles to MIT. To the west you can see the ocean.  Next flight, check out the bee hives on the roof of a local restaurant.

Lunch at the public market

Eataly has something for everyone...Including a mom and a little boy that just left the table next to us. 🍷🍕

Market day stroll

Winner

The winning way to reserve your parking spot this fall.

Art?

Right tool for the job

Beautiful charts

I love graphs and charts. Below is a beautiful depiction of states but their size has been altered to reflect their electoral college influence. Ignore the color, that changes every day. Thanks to fivethirtyeight.com for this chart.

Halloween is a serious holiday

Outdoor market

Every Tuesday and Friday at Copley Square. 70 degrees and bright blue skies.

56 and damp

Betty the boiler begins.

TedX Cambridge

What happens when you mix world renown Bostonians to talk about human issues at the Boston opera house?

A typical nights entertainment right around the corner.

It still blows me away to think these people are our neighbors. 

This was our second time to TedX, but our first time in this venue. This year was good but not as good as last years event. The speakers seemed to spend more time on their delivery than content. A few talks We were struggling to find the message.

The first talk exposed the ethical dilemma an autonomous car must process when faced with the possibility of a fatal crash. Does it swerve and potentially kill the driver or does it plow ahead and take out a group of pedestrians? As Spock said the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or as I often think about my interpretation of the Nash equilibrium, what is good for the group is good for you. Of course you want the car to kill as few people as possible. Unfortunately most people did not vote for that goal and would rather have the car save the driver at all costs, especially if they are the driver.

Other talks discussed how to properly wash your hands, you should sing happy birthday twice while scrubbing your hands.

Another talk about happiness, unfortunately I had to pee, and her talk was making me anything but happy...

Art ?

In the lobby of a customer. Mona Lisa constructed with different color electronic parts.

Not around the corner

Lunch at a customer's cafeteria. Rice bowl (with egg), pork, veggies. The star of the show was fresh squeezed passion fruit juice. All for $ 1.50

Listening to the game ⚾️

Hot off the presses

From the China Post.

Red Sox make the morning news.

#youcantaketheboyoutofboston

Some company for the geraniums that survived the summer heat on their own ...

Siena Farms South End

Another sunset

Ah homemade bread

Office view

Blue sky at night – – a Boston delight!

Just another day in the park...

There's a new sheriff in town!

Sunset walk with my best friend

Patriots Day 2016: Triumph and Joy

RIP Andy Grove

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/21/11280004/andy-grove-intel-ceo-dies

A great leader has left us.

Beautiful first day of spring

Sailboats in the water

Everything Is Just Fine

Warning this video could be good for your health. With our potential leaders telling us the world is a terrible place and everyone hates us, we found this refreshing. A young girl playing her violin on the street. We talked to her dad, and he said she was trying to raise money for a new violin. I was there 10 minutes, and unless she wants a Stradivarius, I think she will have a new one very soon.

People of all ethnic origins donated and watched. Yep America's best export is entertainment.

End of Work

It seems in the past few weeks there has been a flurry of drama-stories around automation taking away jobs. The first one I read was about how people who identify with the Republican party have jobs that are most likely to be eliminated because of automation. The title was catchy, and the article was educational to the reader on the difference between causality and correlation. Something everyone needs to learn. I think a robot takeover is the least of the GOPs problems.

The next article was about how the state of Massachusetts needs to prepare for an economic slow down. No, people are not going to buy less clam chowdah, but rather there is large section of the workforce that is entering the retirement age, and quite frankly there are not enough skilled candidates to replace the openings, thus a company can not make enough widgets.

The most thought provoking article was here.  Basically we must prepare for situation in which a large percentage of jobs will be removed because of automation. Capitalism encourages companies to be efficient, and a factory of robots certainly feels more profitable than a factory of humans. The premise of the article is best described in following paragraph. However I do highly recommend reading the entire article as it gives a layman's view of where we are with automation.

We must seriously start talking about decoupling income from work. Adopting a universal basic income, aside from immunizing against the negative effects of automation, also decreases the risks inherent in entrepreneurship, and the sizes of bureaucracies otherwise necessary to boost incomes. It’s for these reasons, it has cross-partisan support, and is even now in the beginning stages of implementation in countries like Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands.

Interesting that not all economist agree on this. The other side is that simply jobs will shift to other fields. The example is we did not loose jobs (e.g. making horseshoes) because of the advent of the automobile, true we need fewer horses and therefore horseshoes, but we needed people to make/market/sell cars.

As usual there is star trek episode that exemplifies the end game. We will lose our physical presence and become nothing but a mind, wandering through a universe asking why we are here. Actually in the star trek episode, the minds became compulsive gamblers and spent their time betting on various activities. I can see that happening too.

New England Lunch

To celebrate our 60 degrees and blue skies, we walked down to the public market to grab some weekly provisions. I was seduced by the local seafood stand. 4 oysters from Duxbury and a fried haddock sandwich.
Best oysters ever, and outstanding sandwich.

Hogar University

Beanpot

Just enough snow...

Can you keep a secret?

It turns out no you can't. Ever Since humanity has wanted to share a secret between two parties, encryption was the tool of choice. As we reported earlier these new quantum computers are real, and their first test is fast decryption of coded messages. Seems we may have opened up Pandora's box here. Check out the article below for more details. What does it mean for society if there are no more secrets? 

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600715/nsa-says-it-must-act-now-against-the-quantum-computing-threat/#/set/id/600713/

Calling in sick

No afternoon mtgs, 64 degrees, busting blue skies, February 1st. Boss, this is my spouse's watch , I working like a dog.

Mind Blown

There is a subtle restaurant competition between the intellectuals of Cambridge and the gentrified South End. In the spirit of "if you can't beat them, join them", the restaurant The Elephant Walk added a second restaurant just around the corner.

A very odd mix of 2 cuisines. The menu is divided into 3 main sections. 1) The chefs interpretation of Cambodian food (with a French accent), 2) traditional French cuisine with a Cambodian accent, and 3) Tradition Cambodian food.

C started with an avocado and raw tuna salad, I had fried spring rolls with basically the same stuffing as her salad. For dinner C choose the traditional Cambodian menu as there were no dairy allergy issues, she had braised short ribs, with homemade asian noodles. I had French with salmon on a leek, risotto, and mushroom cake.

I know we sound like a broken record, but the food was incredible. There is a wonderful story about the genesis of this restaurant here, but basically immigrants with few options decided to open up a restaurant featuring their home cuisine. It is worth the read.

That evening we both had vivid dreams, and intense memorable thoughts. Something with the asian spices we figured that brought on mental clarity. Unfortunately the chemistry did not last long and we will have to return.

For those of us who are geography challenged. Cambodia is not near France, although the common history can be found here.

Dirty Little Secret

I'm in the industry, and I am not sure what "hack" means. The closest definition is to do something quickly in order to see results before attempting perfection.
"I'm going to hack this out so the customer can get us feedback today"

Hack has connotations to break into something as well.
"Im going to hack into the user account using the NSA backdoor, they left wide open"

A "hackathon" is when a bunch of people of like esoteric interests get together and talk, do, and share, usually around some technical issue.

Last weekend there was a hackathon over at MIT on the subject of GPUs. Don't stop reading. A GPU is nothing more than a computer that has several (1000s) of smaller computers inside.

Here is the dirty little computer secret. We can't make a single computer much faster, but we can put more and more computers in the same area as one computer. Basically every 2 years, we can double the number of computers in the same area. This is why your smart phone is called quad-core, it has actually 4 computers inside, each can work on something concurrently with the others. For people still using a flip phone, this is why every 2 years more people tease you.

The new GPUs have several applications. The most popular is gaming. Here is another little secret, the gaming world made 3D medical imaging possible. Just like porn made made the internet faster (its true), gaming made 3D medical imaging possible.

You can also use these computers to do things like guess passwords, oh and do useful work like analyze the image coming from your car's front facing camera in order to avoid a pedestrian. Or perhaps analyze the rear view image to see if the car behind you is going to hit you, so it can have your lawyer on speed dial.

I see a big future in having 100,000s of computers work on problem. Like many things in life, we are influenced by the early leaders (Alan Turing for example) but time marches on and new solutions appear that we should embrace.

The picture above is from the hackathon, and is a GPU simulating the collision of 1000 balls. Each ball gets a computer. Its the same computer that is in a Tesla car.

Big shout out to JM for being snowed in and going to the hack with me, and of course MIT for providing people/room/food.

Another Great Year

Last year we did an informal review of some of our favorite things, we will continue the tradition this year.

• Favorite Restaurant Experience
• C - T's Birthday dinner at Banyan - Treated like royalty, left starstruck. We ate at the chef's table in full view of the kitchen. We watched every dish being created. The chef spent a lot of time talking about how each dish was prepared, and gave us small sample sizes of many of them.
• T - Ditto
• Best Book
• C - Atlas Shrugged
• T - Elon Musk or Wright Brothers
• Best Article
• C - Clinical Trial Tom Foolery
• T - End of Computing
• Best Drink
• C - PAPER CRANE.@ Banyan (on tap) whiskey, aperol, foro, lemon 
• T - THE SUPREME LEADER.@ Banyan thai chili infused vodka, coconut, lime
• Best Entertainment
• C - Ted Talks
• T - Talk by Atul Gawande @ Boston book festival 
• Best Thing About Boston
• C - Photogenic-acy
• T - Its like real easy to take pretty pictures here
• Best New Store
• C - Primark
• T - Blackbird Doughnuts
• Best Quote
• C - "Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." – Warren Buffett
• T - "As the area of our knowledge increases, so does the perimeter of our ignorance"
• Best Sporting Moment
• T/C Duh, the Pats winning the super bowl

Getting the line wet in the Charles

And glad there is a fish store just around the corner...

Happy New Year

190 years old and going strong