2024 Christmas Letter
2024 started with knee pain apparently from a meniscus tear that likely happened at age 20 when I got my foot stuck in my pajamas but pulled them on anyway, folding the knee to an unnatural angle. I soon forgot about it, but now 45 years later it came back to haunt me. But I still go hiking and swimming; this photo is from a nearby park, full of water from winter rains.
My father would have been 100 this year, so we thought it appropriate to inter his and my mother’s cremains in Woodlawn cemetery in Santa Monica. We always enjoyed going to Santa Monica but could never afford to reside there.
Keiko has been taking Yoga and Chinese Painting classes, and her painting of this blue Ajisai (hydrangea) was displayed in a local art show. Bellevue where we visited last year has these growing naturally everywhere, but I could not get them to grow in our backyard here.
Grace started teaching a class on Houdini software at Gnomon where she was a student just a few years ago, while also working at Blizzard Entertainment and at Disney on Moana 2. Look for her in the credits when it comes out later this month (I’m writing this the day after Halloween).
I’m still working part time at Metabob, where we are applying for an NSF grant to apply Retrieval-Augmented Generation to improve the relevance of our LLM-generated explanations of python code. Meanwhile I continue to attend the Stanford CCRMA Hearing Seminars on how the brain interprets audio. Recently heard a fascinating talk on a possible mechanism explaining how we get a more visceral reaction to music and the prosody of speech than to the words that are spoken, and how that can be used to bring patients out of a depressive state.
We hope that your holiday season is happy and comforting. Listen to some good music, and speak pleasantly to each other :)
Ben and Keiko Reaves b.reaves@ieee.org http://brss.us/xmas2024