Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

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As I sit at my desk writing this, Hugh is sailing around the world.

Like many of his friends, I follow his travels with no small degree of admiration, satiating my own twitching wanderlust vicariously through his seaborne adventures from South Africa, to New York, to Cuba, and on to the Panama Canal.

I smiled along with his legions of fans as he sent out a call via Facebook for a potential crew member—someone to help out as he crosses the Pacific:

Unsurprisingly, there were literally hundreds of eager and willing sea dogs of every stripe volunteering for that daunting (and potentially dangerous) leg of his journey.

As I read the comments, I couldn’t help but stare out the window at a snow-covered field here in Montana, where the temperature was just inching up to zero. I remembered Hawaii, where I’d once lived for six years. I recalled countless weekends spent aboard a friend’s boat, on the leeward side of Oahu, diving with reef sharks, sea turtles, and schools of wrasse and butterfly fish.

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