I am always looking for good news sources, since I generally find the commercially supported news in the US (and elsewhere) lacking. BBC has been my go-to for a long time but like much of the UK it seems to have taken a bit of a slide, post-Brexit. I like Al Jazeera but it is very Mideast oriented. I never really warmed up to NPR in the US. I watch PBS News but it also seems to be spending more time on longer stories that are not that interesting to me. France24 is good, and maybe I should spend more time with it. I guess I am really looking for good international news that is to the point and not sensationalism / tabloid. Lately I have been enjoying the Spanish press outlet El Pais. It’s only been a few weeks but it is checking all my boxes for news. Give it a look.

El Pais English

A longish read from The Baffler about the rise and fall of Democratic Populism in Texas.

Who Lost Texas?

I have read a bit about this over the years and there is lots of evidence that Columbus was Jewish. 1492 is not only the year Columbus sailed to the New World, it was also the year that Ferninand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, evicted all non-Catholics, mostly Jews and Moors, from Spain. Non-Catholics were supposedly given the option of converting to Catholicism with the infamous Spanish Inquisition as enforcement.

This is interesting to me personally because my family left Spain at this time and settled in Sicily. Family lore says we are Moors but that never seemed likely to me. I suspect that like Columbus my family avoided any connection to being Jewish for fear of persecution. I suppose I could figure out how to take one of these DNA tests. From the BBC.

Columbus likely Spanish and Jewish, study suggests

I am a bit of a digital pack rat, perhaps even a hoarder. I have personal emails going back quite a few years, but yesterday I was doing some (very) long overdue file cleanup and ran across a trove of old emails from the 1980s and 1990s. I was mostly looking to delete stuff to make my backups easier. I had a vague recollection of stashing stuff like this in the old days, but figured now, a few decades later they wouldn’t be easily accessible.

But I was wrong. The Thunderbird email program I use has an import facility that worked pretty well, at least for my inboxes which all have standard headers. I’ll have to do a bit of fiddling to fake some headers on outgoing mails and there are some really old ones from a VAX circa 1987 that will also need some tweeking. But otherwise is is pretty fun to scroll around a look at email from the old days.

I took a graduate course in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s. The old school Expert Systems approach was quickly being supplanted by the newer Neural Networks approach. I believe I even gave a talk on the then-new backpropogation algorithm. Lots of good work in this field over the decades but these are certainly two key contributions. From the BBC.

‘Godfather of AI’ shares Nobel Physics Prize

A good film about a group of artists living in Key West in the 1970s.

All That Is Sacred

If you want to understand the far right political shift in Texas, read this. From Pro Publica.

A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.