Today I received a book I ordered from Amazon. Principles of neural science is a 1,400+ pages book.

The book is heavy, so heavy that it is almost impossible to carry it in my backpack; I have no idea how many trees have been cut to print it, and how much energy has been used to ship it, but the point is: if a device based on e-ink technology allowed me to read decently on A4 format, I would be more than willing to download a PDF and store many of these "books" in the device.

I managed to install the Numenta framework on my Ubuntu PC. Had to work around a few problems and had to learn some simple Linux and Python commands, but now it works. Feels like 1984 :-)

BTW: I am back to Milan after a brief stop in Cagliari. The weather is not hot, there are very few people around, and many bicycles ... seems like a nice city today!

I finally got to NYC at 10:00 pm local time, 6 hours late on a 5 hours flight, not bad!

We left San Francisco at 8:00 am, but over Chicago, we started flying in circles, and after a few minutes the captain announced that the FAA was not allowing us to approach NYC for bad weather and lack of air slots.

We landed in Chicago, were not allowed out of the plane, because every 30 min we were waiting for the go ahead. Spent 4 hours sitting in a idle plane :-(

The last 2 weeks in the Bay Area have been really productive. The quality and quantity of people that I met is really impressive.

I like technology, so I guess that's the place where it makes sense to be for me. The reality, though, is that it is not just about technology, but also about vision and being able to discuss about the future without limits, either cultural, ideological, or you name it. Not everybody here is this way, but some are, and that's what counts in the end.

Yesterday Shel gave me the first lesson of "Silicon Valley 101" :-)

He was a great host taking me around Palo Alto and Stanford. As usual we had a great conversation about many subjects: cultural diversities, social media, the economy, life, etc ...

He also wrote an interesting post about how blogging and social media allowed him to get in touch with the world.

Yesterday I was invited at a dinner in San Francisco. The host is a very successful entrepreneur, who now spends most of his time finding money (millions) and setting the vision for the democratic party.

We had a great conversation about world politics, US politics, Italian politics (if it ever existed really :-) ), and compared our visions of the future.

I'll be there tomorrow in San Francisco.