rusty dinger

WFH today. The piles of books on the floor have been significantly reduced.

After work I went to the annual colloquium at the technical museum. There were three excellent talks. The first one was on the centenary of the Berlin S Bahn. Turns out the selection of 1924 is politically motivated. Although the first electric trains ran in 1904, 1924 was selected because it was the electrification of the line to Bernau which happens to be the East and allowed the GDR to have a celebration at the end of the war. I find it fascinating, although unsurprising on further thought, that the basic geometry of the electric trains hasn't changed since it was first designed. The second talk was on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The talk was surprisingly technical and I thought the speaker managed to explain the technical aspects quite well. He was maybe a little too optimistic about the technology. The third talk was on provenance. Even a technical museum has to deal with the origin of its collection. Turns out that figuring out the provenance of technical artefacts is much more difficult than for unique pieces of art. Items dating from the first half of 20th century are an issue. A bigger issue are items from the 2nd half from East Germany. Apparently the East German state sold off things to get some cash. Afterwards we got some beers and I had a nice chat with a fellow friend of the museum.