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[please pardon this off-topic post]

Here's a photo of my friend David Collier with his airplane. 

Dave passed away last week --glioblastoma, deadly fast-acting brain cancer. I'm heading out to San Francisco tomorrow. He was nine days younger than me. Dave was extremely intelligent and "nerdy in a good way!" --a true amateur scientist. We had a lot in common, and, though we grew apart later, for many years we were best pals. Dave and I were both avid backyard astronomers. We both learned to code/develop software on our own, without teachers, in the early days of computer programming. We both liked Star Trek and other science fiction fare. We were both physics majors at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (I met him freshman week during a tour of Van Vleck Observatory). We liked animals, large and small, and both enjoyed finding exotic sea anemones and starfish and worms and crustaceans in tidepools, and I showed him and some other Wesleyan friends the tidepools of Block Island years ago... We were both "quants" or "quantitative analysts" in the options markets in Chicago ("quants" today, back then just "rocket scientists"). Living in Chicago, both fish out of water, we ate out together and with other friends a thousand times, hitting every ethnic restaurant we could find back then on the North Side.

Dave really understood money in a way that I never could manage. He moved on to other goals... became an M.D. and entered the thriving world of medical tech venture capital out in San Francisco, his home. He became a pilot and bought a share of a high-performance private plane. And most importantly he raised a family and eventually found happiness with his wife Nilou. So tragic to die at 59, but he lived a full and valuable life. 

Frank Reed

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