8-bit

You know what? I want to find an old-school 8-bit Nintendo and play the Super Mario Bros. suite.

I am now going to suppress this thought because I have neither the time nor the money to be thinking about it, let alone probe eBay for a cheap system and suite.

Forget value and forget financial gains; how awesome is it to be able to say that YOU created something that people will remember for the next 100 years? Something that defined culture? Something that the world looked at and appreciated? Who knows, maybe even something that is named after you? To be honest, I am not sure that even the iPod will have the same permanence in popular culture as Mario has acquired.

I would be thrilled to have that opportunity.

One of my heroes in medicine is Dr. David Ho (何大一), famous for his foundational work on the use of protease inhibitors in treating AIDS patients. His work completely changed the culture of AIDS from hopelessness to a vision for a future. Can you imagine the rush it must be to be able to give people back a sense of hope or to make them feel like humans again? Maybe people won't remember his name just as people do not associate Shigeru Miyamoto with Mario, but they will remember AIDS and they will remember finding a cure for it.

The group I knew at Emory that is working on an AIDS vaccine after having licensed an AIDS medication (emtrictabine) to Gilead Sciences in 2003 for $525M. They have the same ambitions, and I hope that they are able to successfully produce an AIDS vaccine soon.

I talk a lot about relative gains. The idea behind proper investment principles is that one manipulates short-term transitions in value by taking money out of commodities that will be decreasing in value and reallocating it into commodities that are to increase in value. It is sort of the chicken-shit way of accruing value. The greater way is to instill value, to create it, to fight for it, and to establish it.