As I’ve been doing some #ThoughtExperiments for a “Covid19 global memorial”, I can’t helped but be inspired a lot by the amazing Maya Lin‘s design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial! After learning more about Maya Lin, I’m totally adding Maya to my long list of Great minds of our time Here in this post, I capture some great videos, etc that I’ve come across and try to learn from.
Thanks Sir Dyson for your inventive and entrepreneurial spirit in our WWIII against covid19! May your CoVent ventilators save thousands and thousands of lives in UK and around the world soon!
“Dyson has been working on a completely new model of ventilator with The Technology Partnership, a Cambridge-based group of science and innovation companies with expertise in medical equipment.
Work is going on at Dyson’s Hullavington laboratory in Wiltshire, where it was designing an electric car until the plan was abandoned last year. Dyson believes it can meet the government’s requirements by deploying knowledge in areas where there is some crossover between its products and ventilators. These include digital motors, battery packs, expertise in airflow, and HEPA filters, which block fine particles but not air.
Sources familiar with the two schemes said they were in a position to start work but have been waiting on the government to give its blessing to one or both of the projects. The government is expected to provide further details on Thursday.”
“As the world faces ventilator shortages in the growing COVID-19 pandemic, Dyson—the U.K. company known best for making vacuums, air purifiers, and hair dryers—is collaborating on a ventilator in coordination with The Technology Partnership (TTP). Dubbed CoVent, it’s a bed-mounted, portable ventilator that can run from battery power in field-hospital conditions.
Working under a grant from the U.K. government, with oversight from the U.K. National Health Service and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Dyson has agreed to produce 10,000 ventilators for the country. On top of that, it will produce another 5,000 ventilators for donation. One thousand of those will go to the U.K. The remaining 4,000 will go to other countries. CoVent will need to receive regulatory approval before receiving funding and going into production.”
Disclosure: Years ago I sold ads in a blog post featuring you, your biography and vacuum! I’ve yet to own any Dyson products myself. May be I should find something Dyson to buy to celebrate IF (a big if) and when our WWIII against covid19 is won. It is way too early to tell…
Here are two videos where you can watch Bill Gates foresight on Pandemic in 2015 & his views on #covid19 now. If his advices were heeded in 2015, thousands and thousands of lives could have been saved from #covid19.
And as a bonus video given by Dr. Bruce Aylward. Sadly, if his words from one month and one day ago were heeded by leaders of UK and UK, then they can certainly avoid many more daths
RIP I. M. Pei 貝聿銘 (2017 – 2019). I picked up my copy of “I.M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture” in the early 90s as I began my lifelong love of beautiful architectures. So thanks to Mr. Pei for your inspirations.
I like to remember the recently passed with their own words if I can, here he talked about the various challenges and ideas in redoing the Louvre.
Video description: //The GSD is proud to celebrate the 100th birthday of Ieoh Ming Pei, MArch ’46. Both I. M. and his wife Eileen Pei GSD ’44 studied at the GSD, as did their sons Chien Chung (Didi) Pei, MArch ’72, and Li Chung (Sandi) Pei, MArch ’76. Pei was also an assistant professor of architecture at the GSD. This event, with guests including Harry Cobb AB ’47 MArch ’49, moderated by Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard GSD and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, will focus on the formative years of I. M. Pei’s career as well as some of his special friendships, influences, and projects.//
P.S. There are some archival news footage of the building of Louvre in this clip.
“The wider world that perceives fashion as sometimes as frivolity that should be done away with in the face of social upheavals. The problems are enormous. The point is, in fact, fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you can do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization. Thats what I think.” – Bill Cunningham (1929-2016) from the documentary Bill Cunningham New York(low quality YouTube video excerpt)
3:05 Thanks to the filmmaker for his persistent in his 8 years effort to get Mr. Bill Cunningham to be featured in the doc. Bill is dearly dearly missed. The world is poorer without his special eyes in curating beauty for us and his charm and his insight.
6:01 “I basically stalked him [in 2001].” How cute! Again, so glad the filmmaker being creative to start the ball rolling. P.S. Thanks for another great and important interview.
Dec 2nd, 2017 update: I couldn’t get the song in the above Bill Cunningham New York clip out from my head so I ended up looking up the song. Have a listen. Enjoy!
“I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing Roman cavalry choirs are singing Be my mirror, my sword and shield My missionaries in a foreign field For some reason I can’t explain Once you’d gone there was never Never an honest word And that was when I ruled the world”
Insightful author Susan Cain (I wrote about Susan with videos here and here) posted some questions at the end of her Facebook post yesterday. She talked about her crazy love for Leonard Cohen as she recently flew to Montreal to attend a concert that marks the anniversary of Cohen‘s death (a Jewish tradition to mark the end of a year of mourning). Here are Susan‘s questions:
“Do you have a person like this [Leonard Cohen] in your life, who embodies things you want to say or do or be? Who is your person [Leonard Cohen]?“
I wrote and shared this entry in memory of Laurent Jean Philippe Ravalec, my late and awesomely unique French friend, where one of our last video chats (which I documented here) happened in November 2015 just a day after the horrible Paris attack.
I’m deeply saddened of the passing of Professor Ronald Coase . Quoting The Telegraph (emphasis & link added), “Professor Ronald Coase, who has died aged 102, won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics by injecting a note of reality into the world of market theories; in a 60-year career he wrote only about a dozen significant papers and used little or no mathematics, yet his impact on his discipline was profound.” The Verge is not too far off the truth when using the title, “Ronald Coase, the ‘father’ of the spectrum auction, dies at 102” as you can watch Coase explained how he first read the key idea from a student note and then adopt the idea of using prices to determine radio frequency spectrum use in this video clip.
Earlier this afternoon, in an exclusive video interview with Prof. Ning Wang, co-author of Prof. Coase’s last book “How China Became Capitalist” (published 2012), Wang talked about visiting Coase last week, working with Coase from 2008-2012 on “How China Became Capitalist“, Coase’s love of China, and more.
“new ideas are most likely to come from the young who are also the group who are most likely to recognize the significance of those ideas.” – from his 2003 lecture.
After all these years, I still remember the thrill in taking my first year UT Comp. Sci class in 1987 with prof. Cook! And it remains an honour (and bragging right) to have taken the famous third year CSC364 Computability and Complexity class with prof. Cook and seeing him proved to us 3-satisfiability and taught us P v. NP, etc. I am truly excited for prof. Cook!
Last week, I asked prof. Kelly Gotlieb “Father of Computing in Canada” for his thoughts about some giants in computer science, here is what Kelly has to say about Steve (video clip).
“What drew you to this field – and to this particular focus? I enrolled as a mathematics graduate student at Harvard in 1961, thinking I’d concentrate in algebra. Computer Science did not yet exist as a discipline. After taking a course in `logic and computation’ from Hao Wang, my future advisor, I switched fields. My PhD thesis was inspired by a question posed by a pioneer in the field named Alan Cobham: Is multiplication (of large numbers) intrinsically harder than addition? Part of the challenge was to formulate this as a precise mathematical question.
Why U of T? I joined the faculty of the computer science department at U of T in 1970. This was one of the world’s first CS departments, and Tom Hull, the department chair, had a powerful vision for its future. He already had recruited some aspiring young faculty, including my close colleague Allan Borodin, who continues to be a pillar of the department. It helped that Toronto is a good sailing venue on Lake Ontario, and sailing was (and is) a major hobby for my wife and me.
What advice would you give to a student just starting out in this field? You’ve made a good choice. The possibilities are boundless.“
Via this UT page, see more media coverage about the 2012 Herzberg Prize at these links below:
Happy belated 102nd Birthday to Nobel Economics Laureate Professor Ronald Coase. Wishing professor Coase good health and all the best in 2013!
In 2009, I took the initiative to spend a few days to download, process, upload, transcribe (small part of), and time-code professor Coase‘s 2003 Coase Lecture (a massive .mov file) to share on YouTube (6 clips in a playlist) to allow interested people from around the world to watch and learn as a way to celebrate professor Coase‘s 99th birthday.
For the last few birthdays of professor Coase, I mainly reshare the above video clips (with a new text interview in 2011). This time around, I’ve taken a new initiative to honour professor Coase‘s 102nd birthday. You see, a few years ago I went to the University of Calgary Law Library to conduct some US patent research for a client. As a bonus/treat for myself, I spent some time to download quite a few academic papers by professor Coase.
To celebrate professor Coase‘s 102nd birthday, I’ve uploaded the following three important papers plus a bonus paper as a special gift to readers of professor Coase‘s ideas.
“The only support I got was from my contemporaries. […] If this tale has any general significance, it is that new ideas are most likely to come from the young who are also the group most likely to recognize the significance of those ideas.”
For me personally, I received these important papers for free from the Law Library. And I see them (Firm, FCC, Lighthouse) deserve to be read by as many people as possible instead of under the messed up limited JSTOR manner. The bottom line, to me, by having these papers available by a single click here is that this save people’s physical travel time to go down to their local university libraries where these papers can be downloaded for free anyway!
It has not escaped my attention and noticed the paradox that The Lighthouse in Economics is a paper that disprove, with facts, the incorrect belief by many people (including my former MBA classmate who has a B.A. degree in Economics) that Lighthouse services cannot be charged thus has to be made freely available by the governments!
*** Concluding thoughts ***
I want to emphasize that I totally agree with the many academics in the #PDFtribute movement and Aaron that it is about time we in Canada and US require academic papers to be made publicly downloadable for FREE in perpetuity if any part (or whole) of their research funding come from any level of government (thus tax payers’ money, our money)!
Forty-two months! Thats how long I’ve been eagerly awaiting for Carol Loomis‘ new book “Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012: A Fortune Magazine Book” (368 pages, on sale Nov 26th and online amazon.com & indigo.ca). Carol is Fortune magazine senior editor-at-large and a long time (40+ years) close friend of Warren Buffett! I am thrilled to see Carol’s book published and in my hands as it feels like having an insightful person who knows Warren really well to guide me through some important and insightful articles. It will take me some time to read & review the book, please stay tune for my detailed review. Until then, my first impression of the book is it looks awesome!
Long time readers of Warren‘s news and insights will be familiar with some of key articles in this collection and also see many (for me) new articles that are important but less well known. Carol has added many insightful commentaries before the articles to give us context and share with us her views. For example, the article “The Inside Story of Warren Buffet” (April 11, 1988) is Fortune’s first profile of Warren and Carol’s preamble explains what lead her to finally wrote the first profile about Warren after knowing him for 20+ years at that point! And then the afterword for articles like “Buffett Hits $200 million Downdraft” (Nov 17, 1994) reminds readers that Warren actually made money on the USAir investment (which many people may have an impression of it being a money losing investment).
P.S. Now, let me explain my wait of almost forty-two months in this postscript. You see, in April 2009, shareholders of Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway NOT physically presented at the annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha were given opportunities to ask Warren & Charlie remotely in advance via email for the first time. And I jumped at the chance by emailing my question to Carol! Along with my question, I told Carol that,
“I am a big fan of your Fortune articles about Warren and BRK. (I have taken the time to look up some of your older articles and really enjoy reading them.)”
In Carol’s email reply was where I first read of the mention of a possible book (the book that I am finally holding in my hands)! So, yes, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the book since Apr 2009, and that is about forty-two months! :)
P.P.S. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed there is a stack of five books in the above picture. Can you guess the titles of the Warren related books in the stack? Find out how many you guess correctly by clicking here to see this picture.
This Malcolm Gladwellvideo interview may not have the best production quality but there are some interesting questions and answers in it. Check it out.
I’ve only “known” the great photographer Bill Cunningham (1929 – 2016) for a few days from watching the documentary “Bill Cunning New York”. From this one documentary alone and the testimonies from many people in the doc, I believe his visual contributions and the examples he set (ethics as a reporter and his work over the years) has taught me personally a lot. See also NYT “Bill on Bill” and also “The Picture Subjects Talk Back”.
Curious about How China Became Capitalist in general and not just the book or have an interesting question/puzzle related to the Chinese economy? Share it in the comment and I will see if I can work it into my interview with Ning Wang (co-author with Ronald Coase (Nobel Laureate in Economics)) about How China Became Capitalist tomorrow (Mar 28) morning.
March 28, 2012, 2pm Update: I had a most insightful 70+ minutes Skype interview with Ning Wang this morning. It will take me some time to edit & post the video and write the article. Stay tune.
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