December 6, 2023

Dear Friend,

Merry Christmas!

Oct 27-29: My nephew Stephen visited. We stayed at Marriot Marquis in San Francisco. We saw the Dear San Francisco show at Club Fugazi, SFPH play Nollywood Dreams, and comedian Bo Johnson at the Punch Line Comedy Club. We visited the National Maritime Museum, Musée Mécanique, USS Pampanito, Pier 39 (including Sea Lions, Mirror Maze, The Flyer, and Carnival) on Friday. We visited the Japanese Tea Garden (with green tea, cookies, and breakfast raiding squirrel monster), Stow Lake, California Academy of Sciences, and lunched at Park Gyros on Saturday. On Sunday, we saw the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge before Stephen left on BART.

This year, I’ve attended many Caltech Alumni Lunch, Caltech Seminar Day, and Keck Institute Zoom conferences and in person events: Wild Science of Quantum Materials, Natural Language in fMRI, Breakdown of the Cortical Hierarchy (Macaque visual recognition monkey patches), JUICE - The Jupiter Icy Moons Explore, etc.

I subscribe to American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco Playhouse, and San Francisco Opera, so have seen many plays and some operas this year including: Hippest Trip - Soul Train Musical, Wizard of Oz, Poor Yella Rednecks: Vietgone 2, The Headlands, Nollywood Dreams, (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, etc. I saw BroadwaySF's Les Misérables at the Orpheum Theater, Rod Steward and Cheap Trick at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, and Jethro Tull at the Mountain Winery.

I've been reading books on type theory, theorem proving (Coq and HOL), higher order logic, and topoi (Pierce, Nederpelt, Nadathur, Bertot, Casteran, Nipkow, Klein, Goldblatt) in SF locales like GGP. This is my self-education program before I go back to work on improving and adding theorem proving elements to my Quantum CAS. For pleasure, I've read French books L’Anomalie (a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York flies into an Atlantic storm and somehow gets duplicated, including the people), Les Fiancés de l’Hiver (fantasy), and La Planète des Singes (Planet of the Apes).

I’ve chatted with (ChatGPT). We discussed jokes, movies (The Good the Bad and the Ugly, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Futureworld), the Koide formula, OSIRIS-REx mission, and origin of life. ChatGPT was unsure if Delos Corporation was evil. ChatGPT also made some math mistakes when pressed to predict the rest mass of the tau particle given the Koide formula and rest masses of the electron and muon.

Dr. Katalin Karikó shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 this year for her work developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. If you remember, I predicted this way back in my Dec 17, 2020 XMAS letter. You heard it here first, folks.

Merry Christmas to all my friends and family!

Kelly Roach