This is my eighth consecutive year creating a video diary. Every day I recorded two-ish seconds complied here to this 13m:12s video.

This compilation is followed below with a detailed description of highlights, some of which are captured within the video.

Enjoy!

You might notice that this year I had only four missing entries! (In 2019 only one …)

Days without videos: April 9th, August 22nd, October 14th, December 20th.
These missed entries are filled by selected tweets from my lovely @HaKabuk.

For this project I used my Pixel 2XL phone, and compiled with iMovie on my Macbook.

Video diaries of all eight years: 2020, 2019, 2018+, 2017+, 2016, 2015+, 2014, 2013++

+upon request, otherwise not public
++partial year: started on March 16th.

If you are interested in further details of this ongoing video diary project
see this post.

Technical error in production:

  • Unfortunately when producing this video (and that of 2019) my iMovie and/or Macbook caused some annoying spurious high pitch audio hiccups.
  • My mother also picked up on a human error … I misspelled September throughout the whole month!

2020 Highlights

This post is mostly addressed to 95 year old me, but you are invited to listen in!

CoronaVirus plagued the world putting us in lockdown for most of the year. Michal and I, being on the conservative side, spent many weeks at a time in our cozy apartment. As most people, we did not travel this year, unfortunately. In particular my streak of visiting Israel at least once a year since leaving in 2004 came to an end.

Instead of travel I met my family online, normally on Sunday evenings, for KaZoom sessions. On November 26th we also conducted a special one for Grandma’s 95th birthday.

One highlight at home is that we converted our small secondary bedroom to an office and started purchasing things to keep us comfy and productive from tables to plants.

In the following I summarise this year’s work and then life experiences.


Work In 2020

Job Changes

This year started off for me on a sour note, as on January 20th, after nearly two years, I was let go by LabGenius, a biotech startup. My takeaway is that I can only be appreciative that I was given the opportunity to learn biology on the job. In particular, I gained a little experience in drug discovery and protein engineering, which serves me well in getting a sense for the amazing fine details of the development of the current pandemic.

Another anecdote is that, for a while, I got to say that

I work in a biscuit factory and live in a rice mill

(Both former, of course …)

A sweet aspect of the layoff, however, was that I was given two months pay (in lieu), which was a great opportunity for me to upskill while job hunting, and enjoying some funemployment. E.g, I dove a bit deeper into neural networks and returned to blogging for a bit.

Michal also searched for a new job and we both landed offers one day after another (March 25th, 26th). One fun fact is that we are customers of both companies which motivated our applications.
Realising how powerful our health care app is at providing effective services, I was very glad to join Babylon Health.

Another fun fact is that we timed it such that we started working on the same day, April 14th.
I believe that both of us were in the first wave of people to both be interviewed and start working completely remote.

((Picture of us starting together))

Remote interviewing is something that my generation has been getting more and more used to in the past few years, but full onboarding was a leap of faith, on both sides (I assume!).

It took a few months until I met my first colleagues. An ongoing joke was that I considered colleagues as

figments of my imagination …

My line manager, Tom Mayo, and I quipped that they became more real when the first paycheck cleared :-) . During this first year I visited the office, out of choice, three times.

One of the things that helped the most was that from day one I had a designated project that I took over from Tristan, who got promoted. I am part of the Business Insights department, which provides analytics services for many of the company’s functions.

I work with the developers of the Symptom Checker app. In it a patient inputs their symptoms and gets a disease diagnosis with a Triage which means how urgently they should seek treatment and where (e.g, pharmacy, general practitioner, hospital). This project has many interesting challenges and most of my work involves prototyping solutions that help clinicians communicate their medical knowledge to the Symptom Checker system.

In H1 I worked mostly on my own and part time with a project manager, Kush, who managed and promoted our results internally. For H2 he got more resources so we could work together full time along with two engineers, Carlos and Matei, making us a proper four person squad. This is quite inline with where I was hoping to take my career, a cordial environment where I can work on interesting challenges to create useful solutions and eventually put into production.


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Perhaps the biggest work highlight of this year was presenting at a major online conference called PyData Global.

With the help of my friends Natan and Alon, I proposed three talks for this annual conference, and on August 26th I got note of acceptance for one. The selected topic was a tutorial titled: A Gentle Introduction To Multi Objective Optimisation, for which I prepared a tutorial that was hosted in the program on Nov 11th - 25th.

A very nice aspect is that the organiser, NumFocus, a main sponsor of open source software, is hosting my tutorial, in edX MOOC* format. I preempted to provide all links on my github account (which enables access to individuals that cannot pay the $200 charge - I do not get commissions or any payment).

*MOOC - massive open online course

This is the intro video (5 minutes)

I enjoyed the recording sessions very much (for all videos I did three to four takes!), resulting in 30 minutes of content plus an additional 60 of explaining the tutorial notebooks. Overall I’m happy that I got to share a topic that I feel is under appreciated in my field and get some exposure while I was at it (and a free ticket to the conference!).

Open source, and Python in particular, has massive contributions to technology worldwide, so I am glad that I could have made a small contribution to the open source community, if not by lines of code then intuition behind a useful technique. My friends Natan Mish and Pedro Tizai were of great help in commenting on the drafts.



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Since 2013 I have been participating in the Adopt-a-Physicist program that sets up email correspondances between trained physicists and high school students. For a few weeks the students get to ask me about questions about life in physics or in general and I try my best to give them useful advice, or at least something anecdotal :-) .

This year one of the teachers, Matthew Anticole from Norwin High School Pennsylvania, was quite ambitious and had them write haikus about the physicists. Here are the ones written about me:

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Studies And Learning Material

Keeping up with my profession as a data scientist, my main focuses this year were neural networks (machine learning and reinforcement learning), information visualisation and of recent causal inference. In practice this meant either reading material or attending/auditing courses:

These are books that I found useful for these topics:

  • Hands On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & Tensorflow / Aurélien Géron
  • The Book Of Why / Judea Pearl
  • Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer / Pearl, Glymour, Jewell
  • D3 for the Impatient / Janert


Life In 2020

As mentioned above, outdoor life ended fairly early this year. We did not get to travel, but we still tried to keep life interesting by entertaining ourselves.

Hobbies

Michal was much more very creative than I was this year in terms of hobbies:
she developed the green thumb and grew a garden on our small balcony flourishing it in green with edibles like tomatoes and basil! She also practiced baking bread and making her own humus, as well as making beautiful physical diaries.

If that wasn’t enough, the talented Mrs. Zurda even learned how to cut my hair!

I guess that my main hobbies this year were dabbling with Bossa Nova on the guitar and trying to flex my muscles and bones on an elliptical and a bike as well as my neurons in chess.


Chess

I got addicted to chess, yet again (third time in my life). I managed to contain it, though.
Since I am not the competitive type, and do not like to make rash decisions, as required in rapid online chess, I found that the best approach for me is to play games with daily moves.

During the relapse week I did notice a positive attribute related to work.
I frequently think about my algorithms when I am away from the laptop (I try not to on the weekends …), and found that during this period I was developing them even more clearly.

I’m currently playing online at chess.com (eyalkazin) and lichess.org (zurdo-ajedrez).


Sports

I did some long distance running at the beginning of the year. That was replaced with bicycle riding. At first I used Michal’s small bike until I bought my own from a neighbor.

The funny thing is that we never met because, at the time, she was abroad, and our whole correspondence was via WhatsApp. She was kind enough to connect me with her friend that had the bicycle, and after deciding to buy it we negotiated the price.

I started cycling for hours, around our area, to the Babylon office and back (11km each direction) and even once to Richmond park and back.

Our apartment building happens to have access to both a pool and a gym, but this was limited during the lockdowns. One nice aspect was that the management setup a scheduling system for the gym, which got me to use the elliptical quite a lot to compensate for not running any more.

When the gym was shut down due to lockdown, I used work out videos created by Fitness Blender as well as my cousin David from Elevate.


Meditation

Also healthy for both the body and the brain I tried to meditate a bit.
I didn’t do as many Vipassana sessions as I would like, but I did practice it once in a while, normally between ten to, at most, and rarely 25-30 minutes.

I did, though, meditate nearly daily on passages from The Daily Stoic by Holiday, Hanselman.


Food

We tried to maintain a healthy kitchen, but also found ourselves indulging once in a while, to try to break the monotony of the lockdowns.

We are still (for the most part) vegetarian since late 2017, and I have done some intermediate fasting (600 calories per fasting day). Normally 6:1 (i.e, 1 day fasting per week), and at least once 5:2 (2 days fasting per week).

Big fans of anything ginger, Michal and I are still big on stir fry and shakshuka and very happy that there are a lot of plant based products emerging. Popcorn is always a fun snack, although we started stacking up on icecream, too. We also perfected the home meal experience of the veggie burger.

To add some flavour of Israel into the house, we also treated ourselves to some of its popular snacks in particular Bamba, Schokokuss (קרבו) and Soup Almonds (שקדי מרק).

At first we did all of our shopping across the street at Co-Op, but eventually we built a routine of ordering online from Ocado and then mostly Tesco.

One thing that we missed this year was Ethopian food. I jumped on the few opportunities that I could reach a street vendor, but unfortunately they don’t deliver to where we live. Oh, well! Something to look forward to next year …


Sleep

One last health topic, which I started to appreciate more from the end of 2019, very much thanks to the excellent book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

Learning a bit about the known science of sleep, I set an objective of going to bed earlier, in order to get my required seven to eight hours.

This made me an earlier riser, similar to my mom. When visiting her I recall her being up at around 6am. Those are my hours, now, too. I have gotten to appreciate the quiet and the stillness of the morning.

Matthew also got me to appreciate more the importance of short naps, which should be short and before 3pm.

Considering sleep takes up roughly one third of our day, I highly recommend this life changing book.


Technology

We are nearly at the most fun part of this post: entertainment in 2020!

Since most of our entertainment was streamed, I’ll say a few words about the technology used this year. We still do not have 5G internet connection, but 4G is still serving us well. Most of the year we were connected with HyperOptic, but in November converted to Community Fibre which have faster speeds for cheaper rates.

I’m still using the same MacBook Air laptop that I purchased in 2013, but I had to replace the battery in August, which considering it’s an Apple product, it was very straightforward to do.

My Pixel 2XL phone is still functioning, but tends to turn off when I connect to electricity (weirdly except for when the media is playing!…). And, I still managed to squeeze one more year out of my Fitbit Surge watch, which is functioning OK, but the literally irreplaceable band is constantly coming apart, so I have been applying super glue …

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Perhaps the most exciting technology of the year, (after finally replacing my electric toothbrush …), is that Michal pushed to buy us a Deebot (pictured, named ZurDeebot) that cleans our floor for us. It’s brilliant! The floors are much cleaner than we could do ourselves.



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I did some reading on and off, and for the first time, made use of the local library.

I have recently written a post about life changing books. Here I list a subset of them that I read this year.

  • The Daily Stoic / Holiday, Hanselman - I averaged one meditation of on wisdom a day
  • Why We Sleep / Matthew Walker - I adapted my sleeping habits to learnings from this book
  • In Cold Blood / Truman Capote
  • Behave / Robert Sopolsky
  • 12 Rules For Life / Jordan Peterson
  • Enlightenment Now / Steven Pinker - Talks about human progress and reasons we all should be proud of our species
  • Doughnut Economy
  • My Inventions / Nikola Tesla (Autobiography)
  • Letters from an Astrophysicist / Neil Degrasse Tyson


Theatre

We managed to squeeze in Hamilton (second time) and Tina at the beginning of the year before the lockdowns started.

We were also scheduled to attend Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill A Mockingbird in late July, but that got postponed to 2021.


Binge Listening

Whereas most people discuss binge watching (that will come next!) I also consider myself an avid radio listener, both of music and more recently podcasts

Radio, what’s new? Radio, someone still loves you … - Roger Taylor

Music

Music-wise there wasn’t anything new that really excited me this year. (I guess that I am starting to sound my age …)

One fresh surprise was Janelle Monáe. She is not new, but I discovered her only in July. Multi talented, she is an actor (Homecoming S02) and pop artist with a Prince like flair.

In the video I used two snippets from her song Make Me Feel.

This year $ave Dat Money was the song that we played by far the most in our house.
Released in 2014, Lil Dicky is a fresh funny Jewish twist on the rap scene. Since the song concept of saving money is relevant for lockdown mode, I used a snippet in this year’s video (in the 2016 video I have an entry of him performing this live in Camden). Check out the brilliant video on YouTube.

This year I also learned to better appreciate some more known artists:

  • Niki Minaj - A guilty pleasure of mine. She has great flow and is very creative.
  • Byoncé - I know that I’m late to the party, but I liked her stuff in the past, but started to really listen to her more carefully this year. Besides the obvious talent her lyrics are deep.
  • Eminem - my partner got me back to listening to him. Very talented and creative.

I have recently realised that it is easy to transfer my playlist from iTunes to Spotify, something that I look forward to developing and sharing soon.
For now I have shared my


Podcasts

I listened to a lot. For recommendations see my podcast post.


Binge Watching

Like most people, my lovely and I did not go to the movie theatres but we binged a lot.

TV Series

Here I mention series that we saw this year that really stood out. Some of these are new productions from 2020, but most of them are from previous years that we were made aware of recently.
I try to sort them by order of recommendation.

Israeli productions

Mostly USA and British productions

  • Succession
  • West Wing (second viewing even better than first!)
  • What We Do In The Shadows
  • The Queen’s Gambit
  • Kidding
  • The Last Dance
  • Homecoming
  • The Plot Against America
  • Better Called Saul
  • Ted Lasso
  • I Know This Much Is True

I also enjoyed keeping up to speed with current events Stephen Colbert through his anecdotal The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, as well as Tooning Out The News.

At the very bottom of the post I list all the TV series that I can recall seeing this year.


Movies

We didn’t see that many movies this year, as far as I recall we saw:

  • A Beautiful day in the neighborhood
  • On the Base of Sex
  • Bombshell
  • 1917
  • Parasite
  • Watchmen (movie)
  • Capote
  • The Gentlemen
  • Irresistible
  • Isn’t It Romantic
  • Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
  • The Trial Of The Seven
  • Hunting the Wilderpeople
  • Soul
  • The Sound of Metal

D/Mocumentaries

  • RBG
  • Kobe Bryant’s Muse
  • Becoming
  • Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals
  • Robin’s Wish
  • My Octopus Teacher
  • Death To 2020


All TV Series

Series that Michal and I binged together roughly ordered by viewing chronology (rather than by recommendation).

Israeli productions

  • Our Boys
  • הטבח
  • Unorthodox
  • לאבד את אליס
  • Tehran
  • מנייאכ
  • חזרות

Mostly American and British productions

  • Modern Love
  • Catastrophe
  • The Morning Show
  • The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst
  • Avenue 5
  • Kidding S02
  • Gangs Of London
  • Unreal S01
  • Mars
  • The Last Dance
  • Tiger King
  • Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates
  • Watchmen (series)
  • American Vandal S01
  • Raised By Wolves
  • Succession
  • Line Of Duty
  • The Killing
  • When They See Us
  • The Devil Next Door
  • Upload
  • Dead To Me
  • Filthy Rich
  • The Queen’s Gambit
  • Ted Lasso
  • The Boys
  • Home Coming
  • American Vandal S01
  • The Hour
  • This Is Us
  • The Crown S04
  • Mindhunter
  • Murder On Middle Beach
  • What We Do In The Shadows
  • Quiz

Series that I binged on my own roughly ordered by viewing chronology (rather than by recommendation order).

  • היהודים באים
  • נייעס
  • Las Casa De Papel
  • The Plot Against America
  • Better Called Saul S05
  • Genius S02
  • Fauda
  • Mrs. America
  • After Life.
  • El Chapo
  • I Know This Much Is True
  • Polishook S03
  • Dark S02
  • Killing Eve S03
  • West Wing S01-S03 (second viewing even better than first!)
  • West Wing stage presentation of the episode Hartsfield’s Landing
  • Nuremberg
  • Ozark S03