letter 26, 2010

Dear everyone

Glee is on, Jasper is swimming, and Lucas is doing homework (I leave it to your imaginations, dear reader, on who is watching Glee). I can finally get on the computer since homework and college application work is temporarily in abeyance. Nicola has finished up her Brown application, and submitted the U of Chicago app last night. We had a terrible storm in our region today; subsequently, the high school cancelled all after school events, or we would be at a concert to hear Nicola’s (and others) choral groups sing. I know that later this year there will be some sort of Madrigal singing dinner.

As you all know by know, Roger, Andrew, Owen, Gary Holzman, and I got back from New York several days ago, after seeing many hedge fund managers, some old and some new. Gary and Roger filter who we see pretty extensively, so many of the managers have similar investment philosophies, at least on the surface. When you meet them you get a one-shot look at their personalities. I don’t know if this is a valid way of judging their worth as money makers. I also am pretty skeptical that these people justify their high fees over a multi-year period, as well as the time it takes to even partially vet them, observe their results, etc. Well, it is fun to be in New York in the autumn. The weather was nice; I bought some roasted chestnuts on the street, we saw some very interesting lobbies (a fit subject for a coffee table book), we had some very expensive meals. I was not a big fan of the Gramercy Tavern, and the food at the Japanese restaurant was a little too weird for me (some weird viscous material in a broth), but I liked cooking on the hot stones. We didn’t have time to go to the Tourneau store, though.

This weekend we were glad to enjoy some time with Sue Ellen and Len Ganz, friends of ours from Pittsburgh. Len is a cardiologist who specializes in electrophysiology. He burns some of the electrical circuitry of the heart to make it beat more regularly. Sue Ellen is an immigration lawyer. She used to work part time at a non-profit, but has stopped working for the last few months. Their oldest child, Rachel, is at Tufts, but is recovering from her 2nd ACL knee surgery. Their second, Alana, is Nicola’s age, which means the college thing. Cindy spent Friday with Sue Ellen at the Gold! Exhibit at the Field Museum. We joined them Saturday night (after fighting horrific traffic) at a restaurant called Vermillion http://www.thevermilionrestaurant.com/index.cfm on State and Hubbard. I was amazed at the amount of foot traffic as well. The restaurant was very interesting, a mix of Latin and Indian food, just as it says on the menu. The chef participated (and lost) on the Iron Chef, and is currently competing on the “Next Iron Chef” competition. Among dishes that I would recommend are the Bar BQ tamarind ribs and the duck vindaloo appetizer, but everything was pretty good (tellingly, they have a sister restaurant in New York).

At work we finally have some of the gross cameras and some of the microscope cameras up and running. Photography is so much easier. I was able to take a slew of preliminary photos for a project I had on hold with Jan Hoh at Hopkins. I have also finished a really interesting book about ants http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-among-Ants-Global-Trillions/dp/0520261992 . Mark Moffett, the author, has a very engaging style, so you don’t notice that you are getting major doses of science and entomology when you read his book. He is a fantastic photographer, also. It is very interesting to think about ant societies as metaphors for our own, but I think artificial intelligence researchers have probably also spent some fruitful time considering ant societies as large distributed computing systems.

Love, H.