Category Archives: Mathematics

Email Problems

I’ve got a problem, that my system administrator won’t help me with. My Trash folder on the server has grown to several gigabytes, and there is no way for me to empty it. It slows down getting and deleting mail, but Thunderbird crashes when I even try to load it. Here is the helpful email I got when I asked to simply delete it on the server (which I can’t do, because I don’t have root privileges–on my own hosted server).

“You’ll need to access your email accounts with a proper email client from your PC to clear them out. We can’t just delete the mail from the server, then the indexes are messed up. You need to be properly emptying your trash. 

You have multiple Gigs of mail in the trash folders on the Simberg account. “

Note that this is nothing I don’t know, except I don’t understand why it would mess up indexes to delete the trash. Is that true?

[Update a while later]

OK, Tbird crashes, but I seem to be able to access it from Evolution. But there is no obvious way to empty it, other than to Expunge, which seems a little drastic, but maybe that’s what I have to do. And it doesn’t load all of the headers; it gets stuck at 99%.

[Update a while later]

Well, I hit “Empty Trash” in Evolution, and it seems to have done the job (even though Evolution says it’s still working on it).

OK, Evolution thinks it’s finished now. My next problem is that it’s not properly displaying my inbox. But now my web interface is much more manageable.

Back To Basics

The military is being trained (for the first time in decades) how to manage without computers.

This is good, not just as a defense against cyber attacks, but because it will give them a lot more insight. Even when I started my career in aerospace, I worried that young people were being too confident in computer output, without understanding the fundamentals sufficiently to know whether or not it made sense.

Lesson For Trump From Media Attacks

Yes, continue to focus on the flawed climate science:

The CNN video ridicules Trump for saying that global warming is “an expensive hoax.” We should respond by outlining the costs involved. Over one billion dollars a day worldwide is now spent on “climate finance,” according to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, yet we see no impact on climate. In 2017, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, explained that if the UN Paris Agreement targets for 2030 were met and sustained through the rest of the century, there would be 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit less warming in 2100, if the models relied upon by the UN were correct. He explains that the cost of the Paris pact would be $1 – 2 trillion every year. So clearly, CNN’s criticism tells Trump that he should continue calling it “an expensive hoax,” and cite the cost estimates and forecast results to illustrate his point.

Yup.