Chad Dickerson, formerly an executive at Yahoo and later CTO/CEO of Etsy, in a powerful piece shares his story and elaborates why flat data in online databases doesn’t truly define us — something i have argued about in the past. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when I nod my head in agreement when I read:

Maybe if we all gave each other the space to be complex people — not reduced to public perception, our professional bios, our LinkedIn profiles, others’ narratives of who we are — we might understand each other better and give ourselves the room to be messy but wondrous human beings

Rollable Television. Foldable Television. MicroLED TVs. Modular TV. Big TV. Bigger and Bigger TV. It is CES time, and it doesn’t surprise me that all the major consumer electronics players are talking about televisions (amongst other things.) I mean what can bring more oohs-and-aahs than television screens with high definition video in a dark room filled with media needing to file something — anything. But the question is for how long we will need this big screen? And what will Apple do about it?

It is an astonishing story about how China is playing a villainous role in the non-Chinese Internet.  The writers point to a new tool called the Great Cannon and how it helped “channeling the flow of data out of China” and “selectively insert malicious JavaScript code into search queries and advertisements served by Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine.”  It is an excerpt from James Griffiths’s new book The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet

One of the hard realities of having a major medical event in your life is that you are never out of its shadow. Almost a dozen years since doctors took care of my heart problems, I have to go in every January and get myself checked out. Today was that day — and what that meant was meeting my favorite doctor (my amazing cardiologist) and then going in for a battery of tests.

As usual, I got an electrocardiograph done — cables that attached to my body and then into a big machine that spits out a printout. That test reminded me of the amazingness of the Apple Watch and its ability to measure the performance of my heart, no cables required. I don’t think if it as conclusive evidence, but I do think it is a technological marvel. Apple team has pulled off something special there!

The possibility of these personal devices and their ability to measure biological data is a powerful idea — and when combined with gains in machine learnings and algorithmic intelligence, it will have a substantial impact on the lives of those with health challenges.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, the good doctor says that I have most of my medical challenges well under control. However, being firmly on the other side of fifty, I need to get some more tests done, just to be sure. So off to another campus — and by the way, this is my excuse for not writing today!

January 11, 2019. San Francisco

Image of the view from UCSF Parnassus Campus made by yours truly with a loaner Leica CL and a 28mm equivalent lens. JPG right out of the camera as a B&W.