Life in a Village
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by R. Passov Summer of ‘22 In a coffee shop a short train ride north of Manhattan along the Hudson River, there’s a vigil. A group, drawn from neighboring villages, is watching a someone slide to their end. Though long in the making, the apparentness is recent – severely distending belly, shrunken arms, swollen legs,…
From My Block
When America was Great
The Goody Goody Diner
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by R. Passov Sometimes, you find yourself thinking about why something happened and get nowhere. For example, a year ago this October, my (ex)wife and daughter and I were visiting my son in his second year at a prestigious college where tuition exceeds the average income for a family of four. We had landed in…
Some thoughts on a School
Selling
Notes from Tavel – Summer, 2018
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by R. Passov We are on the train from Lisbon to Cascais. They, riding with their backs in the direction of the train, sit across from me. I am next to a middle-aged woman, smiling, well-coiffed, dressed in white. I fail to speculate on why she heads toward the wealthiest enclave in Portugal where, it has…
Excerpts from a travel diary, names have been changed
Thoughts on Disney
A small story about how porn found computers
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by R. Passov After Steve Jobs hit his VP of development on the forehead, called him a stupid fuck, then stormed out of a meeting that had been set up to see George’s invention, everything changed. The invention, George said, was on the motherboard. Dell and HP were buying 40 million so that no matter…
Critique of IBM Apollo Study Report – 1 Oct 1963 – Eldon Hall
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by R. Passov Eldon Hall spent the first seven years of his life climbing hills alongside Oregon’s Snake River, trailed by a faithful Shepard dog. He and his father “…went fishing in the mountains…” and “… slept outdoors while his mother, safely residing at home, worried about the poisonous snakes that might bite [them.]” In…
About Math Teachers
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by R. Passov When I was in the fourth grade I was held in a class through recess, most likely because letting me on the black top usually resulted in a fight. I was particularly thin-skinned and couldn’t cope with being in perhaps the only place in late-1960’s Los Angeles where children had a sense…
A Car Story
Thoughts on the passing of Terry Donahue
Rope Memory
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by R. Passov Over the course of the Apollo missions, two criteria governed the role of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC): 1) A program built into the AGC had to be absolutely necessary to the mission and; 2) it had to be without doubt that the computer bested humans in performing the task. One person…
Jack Garman
To Arecibo
Drug Development and the Cost of Failure
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by R. Passov This will be one of the most important compounds of our generation. —Jeff Kindler, former CEO, Pfizer, commenting on Torcetrapib Failure of a drug in development, especially in a late stage clinical trial, is shocking. Torcetrapib, for example, failed at the very end of its phase III trial. So many resources had been…
Forecasting Futures
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by R. Passov “In … economics we are faced with … a need for accurate forecasts, yet our ability to predict the future has been found wanting” —Systems Economics: D. Orrell and P. McSharry, International Journal of Forecasting, Vol 25 (2009) * * * * The Stanford Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Economics (2018) stabs…