Having traveled far and wide in his youth, Richard has spent the past twenty years on the banks of the Hudson River, New York. After more than 25 years working in technology and life sciences companies, Richard helped found Iota Biosciences, focused on closed loop modulation of neural pathways. A member of the Finance Committee of OneAcreFund and OffAssigment, he is a Lecturer at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership at University of California, Berkeley, currently researching the impact of the declining cost of computation on problem definition. He has graduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles along with a graduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Email: r.pass00 [at] gmail.com
by R. Passov I learned from reading Terry Donahue’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times he became head coach of UCLA’s football team in the same year I became a Bruin freshman. And we spent our formative years as neighbors but since we were 14 years apart, we never met. Back then 14 years was…
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…
by R. Passov A little more than five years ago, in a nice home in Sugarland Texas not far from where he once worked, Jack Garman gave me several hours of his day. I had reached out from New York, saying that I was a random retiree interested in learning about his career. Something in…
by R. Passov I had hand-written a simple essay: My father is in prison, my mother works, welfare helps and I got a 1310 on my SATs. The letter of acceptance from UCLA was short – we’re happy to let you know…. The hill leading to the main quad of the UCLA campus is terraced…
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…
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…
by R. Passov In early 1970, after three years of fighting induction into the army, Muhammad Ali neared the end of his resources. In that same year, before he left for prison, my father gave me boxing lessons. I wasn’t going to be the type of fighter Ali was. According to my father, instead of…
by R. Passov During my third year as an undergrad — I took six+ years in all — I ran into an old friend (cocaine) and failed all of my classes. Failed by not taking my finals which proved a blessing. After recovering from the shock of having done something I had sworn many times I’d…
by R. Passov Modeling in finance is done through the lens of mathematics. To put something into a model where you are not guided by observable constants, such as the speed of light, requires assumptions. With so many models off the shelf a common understanding of assumptions is slipping by. If you go far enough…
by R. Passov Recently, I watched a YouTube of a talk given by Jennifer Doudna. This past May, in front of some her UC Berkeley colleagues, Doudna shared, “a story … about some research … that led in an unexpected direction … ” producing “ … some science that has profound implications going forward…but also…
by R. Passov The economics of health insurance is of particular importance today. Health insurance has become a major issue of public policy. Some form of national health insurance is very likely to be enacted within the next few years. —Martin Feldstein 1 Fifty years ago, when healthcare expenditures were a mere 6% of US GDP,…
by R. Passov The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBofC) provides a short history of boxing. It’s an ancient sport. The Romans fought each other wearing cestus, sometimes to the death. Before them so the Greeks. In the fourth century AD, tired of the violence, the Romans outlaw the sport. According to the BBBofC, fourteen…
by R. Passov When I arrived in California, when I was born, I joined 15 million inhabitants, including my parents. They were part of a long wave of predominately eastern European descendants who came in such numbers as to pull west much of post-WWII American culture. In the year I found California, 16 million people…
by R. Passov Johnny spoke softly in a voice just past the threshold of manhood. His smile, mistaken for charm, was longing. I could see the pentimento of the child still in him. One day I watched a conversation that confirmed my suspicions. Johnny had returned from somewhere Big Greg had sent him. He danced…
by R. Passov As the clouds of WWII darkened Austria, Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of modern times, at Einstein’s urging, brought his two magnificent proofs to Princeton. There he would remain for almost forty years, never mentoring a graduate student, rarely lecturing, adding only one substantial but incomplete proof to the cannon of math. Mildly…
by Richard Passov Stealing gave me currency with the older kids who hung in front of the apartments on weekend nights. Anything I got from our local supermarket was of value, especially cough syrup with codeine and flasks of rum or vodka. One of the older boys, who was soon to die in a train accident, showed…
by Richard Passov Milton Friedman, in his essay The Methodology of Positive Economics[1], first published in 1953, often reprinted, by arguing against burdening models with the need for realistic assumptions helped lay the foundation for mathematical economics. The virtue of a model, the essay argues, is a function of how much of reality it can ignore…
by Richard Passov Our uniform was a shirt tucked into jeans. Sandi stretched the smallest size over well-proportioned breasts, her black bra peeking through a run of buttons. Mine hung long in the sleeves and fell over my waist. I was trying to work my way through college in the kitchen of a teaching hospital on…
by R. Passov Tony: “Yeezy dropped.” Big Tony: “Naw…For Real.” “Yeah for real. But I’m not going there. Mass produced. For real, thirty-thousand in just New York alone.” “For real?” “I’m telling you. That’s how they did it.” Tony gives me the rundown. “Sometimes, Nike drops four or…
by Richard Passov Researching the history of a particular computer has taken me along an arc spanning George Boole to Claude Shannon. By some measures the works of these men combine to give us our modern, programmable computer. Shannon recast Boole’s Calculus of Thought into the modern symbolism for computer logic. And while that work has…