Higher Loyalty – James Comey

Bought James Comey‘s “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” the day it came out as a Kindle ebook and I’ve enjoyed reading it so far. And I got a chance to start reading the “James Comey’s memos” (PDF file) (via CNN).

Watched a whole bunch of Comey TV interviews and enjoyed all of them. Here are some samples.

And this BBC 22 minutes interview “James Comey on Donald Trump and the FBI”

26 Apr, 2018 update: James Comey gets real in CNN town hall

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Goodbye Beverley McLachlin

CBC News, Dec 18, 2017, “Beverley McLachlin reflects on Supreme Court career, dispute with PM Harper” (~13 minutes extensive interview)

CPAC, Dec 7, 2017, (~17 minutes video) “Beverley McLachlin Bids Farewell to Supreme Court”

December 14, 2017, CBC Radio, ‘We can do a lot better’: Retiring Beverley McLachlin on what’s wrong with our justice system

CBC Radio Ottawa, Dec 15, 2017 “Goodbye Beverley McLachlin – A retirement party fit for a Supreme Court Chief Justice.” (~10 minutes)

2017 Dec, “(video clips) CTV News Channel: McLachlin takes questions, pt. 1 (~12 minutes) pt. 2 (~9 mins)” – Beverley McLachlin’s farewell: Five quotes you need to know

Gala Dinner in Honour of Beverley McLachlin (full ~93 minutes video via CPAC)

~14:02 TRH former GG David Johnston (great speech, who is a legal scholar in his own right)
~21:02 TRH GG Julie Payette
~25:48 TRH Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
~36:01 TRH Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
~41:20 TRH Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (great speech)
~54:50 TRH former GG Adrienne Clarkson (great speech)
~1:14:50 Retired Chief Justice Beverley_McLachlin (LOVE this final address)

“Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin is honoured at an Ottawa dinner on the eve of her retirement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney, as well as former governors general David Johnston and Adrienne Clarkson pay tribute to Canada’s longest-serving chief justice. The event is organized by the National Judicial Institute. (December 14, 2017)”

Note: I’m looking forward CBC National’s Sunday December 17, 2017 in-depth interview by Rosie of the Chief. Will add a link when I see it. [update: Video interview has now been added!]

October random

* Phantom Thread is “reportedly Daniel Day-Lewis’s final performance in a film”. (Trailer)

* Iris Gaines: You know, I believe we have two lives.
Roy Hobbs: How… what do you mean?
Iris Gaines: The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.
– from The Natural (1984) (from my collection of Quotes I LOVE)

* Happy birthday Bill Gates! Future generations may remember you for your charitable work and your technical contributions as a footnote.

* A picture is worth 1.4 billion words. #china (Note: Trump craves absolute power so much that he sees no problem saying this: ‘He’s a powerful man… a very good person’)

* (with video) Lovely panel. Got me thinking of the old days of my friend Sarb (who has a Phd in neural networks (NN)) and I chatted about NN over our many lunch time walks in the late 90s. Cutting edge computer science remains fun for me.
//Overview
The Deep Learning Summit took place in Montreal on 10-11 October 2017 and brought together global AI pioneers including: Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton, as well as experts from companies including Intel, NVIDIA, Twenty Billion Neurons and Apple.
We’re currently working on the videos for the summit so please fill in the form below and we’ll email you when they’re ready.//

* Good interview/chat. 92nd Street Y Live chat (video) — with Whoopi Goldberg and Melissa Rivers.

* Highly recommended documentary viewing Abacus: Small Enough to Jail via @frontlinepbs #inspirational #國寶銀行

* Worth a watch. //It’s a fact: Supreme Court errors aren’t hard to find.//

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Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

“New York City to me is a readymade! The beauty about New York City is co-existence and tolerance and sharing.” “Fences can be solid as a wall. But many fences you can see through. You can have hatred or admiration about the other side.” – Ai Weiwei (Vimeo video @1:47 & @2:42) (ref Public Art Fund) (Adding this to my long list of Quotes I LOVE)

PAF40: Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (here is a Public Art Fund link to donate any amount small or big)

P.S. Thrilled to have made a tiny contribution to Public Art Fund for this project. “A small act is worth a thousand Facebook Likes.”  as I like to say.

2017 Nov 6 Update: TimesTalks | Ai Weiwei (2017/10/16)

This is a cool one because they knew each other for so long. 2014/10/29 Ai Weiwei talks with Evan Osnos – The New Yorker Festival (interview with Evan Osnos)

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Delta Air Lines Inc. v. Gábor Lukács – Supreme Court of Canada hearing webcast video archive

Supreme Court of Canada has made the hearing webcast video archive (all ~3 hours) of Delta Air Lines Inc. v. Gábor Lukács (summary, parties, factums) – available to watch online.

Also have a watch (with video) of my previous reports
* “Air Passenger Rights Advocate interview post “Delta Air Lines Inc. v. Gábor Lukács” Supreme Court case oral arguments”
* “Air Passenger Rights Advocate interview in advance of Supreme Court case with Delta Air Lines”

粉筆少女 The infamous Chalk Girl

This is NOT my documentary but I really enjoyed the newly released Guardian documentary “The Infamous Chalk Girl” by San San F Young (web, @ssfyoung) (Producer, Camera, Director) so I want to share it here. Have a watch!

The Infamous Chalk Girl

P.S. My favourite scene is at the 20:45 mark and I left this comment: “This is a very touching scene to me. Chalk girl was asked what would she draw now?“

2017 Princeton Valedictory Address “Our Unsung Heroes” by Ms. Jin Yun Chow

Princeton 2017 Valedictorian Ms. Jin Yun Chow

Before I quote an excerpt and link to the wonderful speech, here is an amazing story of Princeton 2017 Valedictorian Ms. Jin Yun Chow from Hong Kong. [HT Daisann]

“In other words: Valedictorian Chow finds connection, purpose in language and life at Princeton”

//“One day we were discussing the Old Irish word for mead (a drink made from fermented honey), which is ‘mid,’” she said. A classmate who is Australian and speaks Cantonese pointed out that “mid” was related to the Tocharian word — spoken in very old northwestern China — for honey, “mit.” Chow noted that in Cantonese, which preserves the oldest pronunciations of Chinese, the usual transliteration of the word for honey is “mat.”

“That one word’s journey — from Proto-Indo-European to the geographically distant languages Old Irish and Tocharian and from there into northwestern China and then Cantonese, which is spoken in southeastern China — was just so cool,” Chow said. “It confirmed that there are moments in esoteric academic study that aren’t so ‘ivory-tower-esque.’ If you’re open-minded enough you can make all these connections with everything else in your life experience.”//

Here is a link to the video of Ms. Chow’s 2017 Commencement Valedictorian Speech “Our Unsung Heroes”. And here is a few excerpts from the prepared written text (not quite a transcript).

“I would like to start by telling you a story about the most memorable moment I had with one of my own unsung heroes: Margaret Campbell at the Firestone café. A few weeks ago, I was waiting in line for coffee when I saw that she was holding a Kindle ebook. […] [K’s note: I LOVE this story but I don’t want to copy the whole thing here.] I walked away that afternoon with a tingling feeling in my stomach. I marveled at how easy it would have been to have walked away after getting my coffee, not stopping to chat and never learning about her amazing literary endeavors. I wondered how many interesting people I didn’t get to befriend over my four years here because I never gave them a chance to talk and never gave myself the chance to listen. […]

So what I want to say to you today, my friends, is this: slow down. Slow down and take the time to recognize your unsung heroes. […] adulthood will urge us to run faster, climb higher, become more successful; it will entice us to swim upstream through the river that is life itself, and it will tempt us to devote every free minute to advancing ourselves and our ambitions. I challenge us to be the salmon that swims downstream, taking the time to get to know and appreciate the people who surround us as we glide through the water. […]

One of my dearest friends put it best when he said that I am not generous enough with what he calls unscripted time. It is amorphous time that falls outside of the structural rigor of meetings, classes, meals and other obligations; it is unscheduled time that allows for organic, spontaneous and unscripted interactions. This is the time when instances of extraordinary candor crop up naturally, when episodes of exquisite tenderness surface unexpectedly, when heartfelt sincerity slips out spontaneously.“