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.

From Visual Capitalist via Ray Dalio.

Which Countries Are the Healthiest?

An interesting graph showing how batteries are extending solar power and eliminating the “duck curve”.

This Chart Shows How California Is Massively Extending Solar Use Into The Evening

This is pretty amazing. Did not know that this was happening. Regenerative braking saves about a third of the energy used by trains and also keeps the tunnels cooler. From Grist.

Barcelona is turning subway trains into power stations

My first job out of school involved working on military hardware. I came to decide that I didn’t want to work on weapons. When I told my boss this he sold me (for a while) on our project saying it had great commercial uses. It was Forward Looking InfraRed (FLIR) imaging used for military night vision. I’ve seen the old 512 x 512 black and white images from war zones many times over the years. I remember my boss telling me the company wanted to sell commercial versions to sherrifs departments to find “little children lost in the woods at night”. Yeah, ok. But I suppose it has happened. From BBC.

Drone captures rescue of girl, 10, who sleepwalked into woods

I like N+1. Need to make it a point to read more of these. The story of a young recruit and the effort to avoid the “Y2k” disaster. Has it already been a quarter century?

The Contingency Contingent