Tomorrow’s News Today, from:
Tomorrow Never Dies is a 1997 spy film, the eighteenth in the James Bond series. It grossed $333 million on a budget of $110 million.
And, no, this is not about Heinz ketchup, although they had one of my favorite ads when I first arrived to the US in 1986:
The Best Things Come to Those Who Wait.
I admit that patience is not one of my virtues, as I prefer getting things rather quickly and hate to wait, but with supply chain woes, it looks like my Lucid will not be here anytime soon, and I must remain patient:
U.S. luxury electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors may hail from California’s Silicon Valley, but its future will be won or lost in the arid plains of Arizona. On Wednesday, chief executive Peter Rawlinson shocked investors with weak quarterly figures and a surprise cut to the vehicle production forecast in the face of severe problems at its Casa Grande factory near Phoenix. Rawlinson, former chief engineer of theTeslaModel S, placed blame primarily on the growing pains associated with ramping up production, where parts need to arrive just in time and in the right cadence depending on an individual’s customized order.
Do you, Peter?
The most recent email I received from Lucid was over a month back from a delivery manager:
I went ahead and placed you in queue. As I receive news from factory, I will be updating you. Our next milestone will be VIN Assignment!
Have a great day.
Queueing. JIT. Production. All Operations Management (OM) issues! Indeed, it reminded me of my paper in Queueing Systems (from September 1992, when I had just turned 27!):
Properties of serial kanban systems
Another one (from my PhD Thesis, Cornell 1990) was published in Management Science:
Structural Properties and a Heuristic for Kanban-Controlled Serial Lines
I am surprised at the Lucid factory issues. Why? They do not have too much variety—I know, as I went through their choices and designed one for myself. Furthermore, the variety that does exist can be managed through quite straightforward design for postponement, another really well-studied OM problem, as in this Management Science paper (with Jay Swaminathan, from his PhD thesis, CMU 1996):
Managing Broader Product Lines through Delayed Differentiation Using Vanilla Boxes
Herb Simon famously wrote:
Decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world.
I was disappointed at his Either/Or thinking!😏
As I have written before, most recently in Looking Back: August 1997, I find:
optimal solutions for a more realistic world!
What movies were playing in 1992?
Basic Instinct. A Few Good Men. The Last of the Mohicans. Scent of a Woman. Aladdin.
Basic Instinct is a 1992 neo-noir erotic thriller film. Basic Instinct was a box office success, grossing $352 million worldwide, on a budget of $49 million.
The Last of the Mohicans is a 1992 American epic historical drama film set in 1757 during the French and Indian War. It won the Academy Award for Best Sound, and grossed over $140 million on a budget of $40 million.
I remember enjoying the cannon booms on my sub-woofer in my apartment (in Woodhawk Club, and I was still single at that time). The next day, I was served with a warning, threatening eviction 😳.
Aladdin is a 1992 American animated musical fantasy comedy film. Aladdin garnered two Academy Awards, as well as other accolades for its soundtrack. It grossed over $500 million on a budget of $28 million.
A Few Good Men is a 1992 American legal drama film. It grossed more than $243 million on a budget of $40 million.
Scent of a Woman is a 1992 American drama film. Al Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance. The film grossed over $134 million on a budget of $31 million.
Easily one of the top five speeches in movie history:
Thirty years later, the Summer of ‘22 has been a Quantum Summer for me.
Summer of ’42 is a 1971 American coming-of-age film. It had a box office receipts of over $32 million on a budget of $1 million.
You recall my excitement in November 24: 1664 and 2021 where I recalled Feeling Good by Nina Simone. I received this email from the Royal Society a couple of weeks ago:
Dear Dr Tayur,
I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript entitled “Optimization with photonic wave based annealers” has been approved for publication in the upcoming theme issue of Philosophical Transactions A.
In June, you know that we had received this email (and I had written about this in Śrīdhara Brāhmaṇa: QSD via SDP):
Sridhar and Vikesh,
Thanks for making all the changes and supplying the files. All is in excellent shape and I will now forward along to INFORMS. This was a most informative and engaging chapter. Glad that we can include this in the TutORials this year.
Indeed, the tutorial scheduled for Sunday October 16th at INFORMS in Indianapolis. The full paper can be found here.
Earlier in May, you read in A Floquet Connection that DARPA found our grant proposal on Quantum Inspired Classical Computing worth selecting.
A few days ago, I received this email:
Dear Sridhar,
I hope you are doing well. I am writing to invite you a deliver a keynote talk at an international conference on quantum sciences and technologies.
The Mphasis Center for Quantum Information, Communication and Computation (Mphasis CQuICC) has recently been established at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras). The objective of the center is to develop various applications of quantum technologies including quantum communications, quantum sensing and quantum computing-related innovations (https://quantum.iitm.ac.in).
As part of the activities of the center, we are organizing a five-day international conference on quantum technologies entitled “Progress in Quantum Science and Technologies” from January 23rd to 27th 2023.
We sincerely hope that you will accept our invitation. Please let me know if you have any questions.
The timing may work out well also to announce the winners of the 2022 Tayur Prize (criteria finalized at the 2021 Tayur Prize announcement):
For innovative accommodation of noise in compiling or error correction towards the development of robust quantum algorithms.
Co-incidentally, our fall semester at CMU begins tomorrow, and the first class in Quantum Integer Programming and Machine Learning is in the afternoon. Looking forward to another year to enjoy the habits formed in the first half of my life (that I wrote about in When I was Young):
Movies. Physics. Cars.
