The past few days I had some weirdness going on with my site. Apparently it was a corrupted file someplace, but I got it straightened out. Unfortunately the glitch that prompted me to fix it was the loss of an entire blog entry that I spent a few hours writing.
The gist of it was that I read David Kushner's story in Wired 16.02 Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? and realized in the first sentence that I had known one of the subjects. This was the first I had heard that Chris had killed himself. We had corresponded over the years about various things in astronomy, (He was a telescope operator at the VLT in Chile) and I was aware of his "mindpixel" AI project, but didn't follow its development. This was the first I heard of his more colorful past.
I also related how Push Singh figured in a memorable lunch I had when I interviewed at MIT's Lincoln Labs. (He wasn't present, of course. It was about some recent things that he and Marvin Minsky had published, and nationalized healthcare, and a Texas politician named "Kinky Friedman".)
Bad news is the full story is gone. The good news is the site appears to be back to full operation.
Maybe this will encourage me to start posting more often again. And to save things more often while I'm writing them.