So, I am now really having fun!
Those of you who are History of Science buffs would have recognized that I am riffing (Sadi Carnot, a founder of Thermodynamics, where the Second Law, as it is now called, was first introduced):
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire.
I decided to celebrate today with Hendrick’s as I received the hard copy of the special issue from the Royal Society (even Isaac Newton, who published his work there, would not have likely anticipated that light – you know I love his Opticks – could be used for computing) – recall November 24: 1664 and 2021 – with our paper:
Optimization with photonic wave-based annealers.
The last time I was this excited to see a paper in print was likely in 1993 – yes, 30 years back – when my Kanban paper (from my PhD thesis) appeared in Management Science. I still have the hard copy of that issue.😏
As you know from Surely You’re Joking, I have a talk scheduled at Princeton (on April 13, 2023) where I will mention this paper along with other material:
Quantum Operations Research: Applications, Hardware, Algorithms.
My original title for the post for this was easily one of the most moving pictures 😏 I have seen:
Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella, Italian pronunciation: [la ˈviːta ˈɛ bˈbɛlla]) is a 1997 Italian comedy drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. The movie won the Grand Prix at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor for Benigni, the first for a male non-English performance. It had box office revenues of over $230 million on a budget of $20 million.
In Hindi, this would translate to ज़िंदगी खूबसूरत है (Zindagi khubsurat hai).
Why did I think about this movie? As you know from my previous post, I was recently connected to folks active in improving Organ Transplantation in India, because of my work on OrganJet and Nudge Videos. We had a productive zoom discussion on Friday; one of the topics that came up was a movie, made by Dr. Anirban Bose, based on a real-life story of a liver transplant patient in India, whose trailer is linked here:
More on initiatives to improve transplantation in India in a future post.
I saw the trailer … it looks good. And yes, La Vita e Bella is beautiful.