Personal

 Good Podcasts

These podcasts are fun to listen to and very informative.

• Planet Money

• Radio Lab

• Intelligence Squared Debates

Good Quotes

• Robert F. Kennedy on what the Gross National Product means and more importantly what it does not mean (March 18, 1968) - abbreviated quote, full text

• Grace Hopper: "A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."

• Carl Sagan: “The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.”

• Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Recycling

I’m an environmentalist and encourage practices such as recycling. I once explored a potential research project to develop methods to automatically sort materials using computer vision. To learn more about the problem, I visited a recycling plant to see how it’s done by hand. See these videos: v1, v2, v3, v4, v5. It’s a tough problem!

Shameless Plugs

If you need talented software engineers, I know two of them!