Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. ...

Frog and Toad face the most modern of challenges

In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria. He gives an explor...

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up. After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, ...

When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect n...

We should end net metering, including for existing solar installations, and compensate people with a one-time subsidy for battery purchase. I'm going to give an argument from grid efficiency, which I ...

The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving ...

David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be ...

Like most houses with solar, our house is capable of generating a lot of power, and it's basically useless [1] in a disaster. If the grid is down, the panels shut down automatically. This is a lot of...

I'm pretty worried about how AI might change the world a lot very soon. In some of these cases things go very wrong very quickly, in others things go very right very quickly, but I'm increasingly (re...

My program that uses whistling to control a synthesizer is now available in the Mac App Store: It's free, no ads, and open source. If you have a mac and like to whistle, give it a try? You need a...

I've had several conversations with people over the last few weeks that have highlighted how far apart my view of the near future is from many people I talk to. Here are some things I might tweet if t...

The standard recommendation on time out duration is one minute per year of age, often capping out at 5min. In my experience (n=3, not independent) this is much longer than needed; I typically do abou...

For the last twenty years I haven't paid much attention to my State Senate race: Pat Jehlen hasn't had a close race since she won the seat in 2005. I think she's done a lot of good work: while allocat...

In May 2025 I met Yo Shavit, who was working on national security policy at OpenAI and was thinking about how to prepare for a future in which models could seriously assist attackers in creating pand...

In raising my three kids I think a lot about how to cultivate independence. I want them to grow into people who can handle unfamiliar situations, including interacting with strangers as needed, and I...

In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA: A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working. Back in those d...

A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park. It's the closest one to Boston, and while it's not a serious roller coaster park I don't actually like roller coasters (and the kids are...

When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site: Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly pu...

YouTube video by Rochus Keller

White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly...

Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Coun...

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: you...

Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] ...

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're mor...

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle: youtube Or guitar ...

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to reco...

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines faci...

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text. In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of e...

Two years ago I bought a pair of Gizmo watches for my kids ( review). There's a companion app for texting and configuration ("Gizmohub"), and Verizon is moving everyone over to a new one ("Verizon Fam...

draft post Choux pastry (the kind used in eclairs and creampuffs) is very picky, and depends heavily on the chemical properties of eggs. Five years ago I played around with trying to make it eggless...

I keep my recipies on my website, and like most of my website it grew over time instead of being designed. A couple years ago I added some progressive enhancement that puts checkboxes on the ingredie...

Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time ...

draft post I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food. And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a lar...

A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound. They were asking if they could use some ...

Daniel Drucker pointed me at a fun bug in Google's calculator: the parsec is wrong when you do math on it. As the earth travels around the sun, closer stars appear to shift back and forth against the...

If someone tells me a cake is vegan plant-based, I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment: I've had a lot of bad vegan baked goods. Some bakers are vegan for health reasons, and minimize all the ...

A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook, a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice. Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline, fol...

DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reduct...

I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline. It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot...

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone coul...

I've been thinking about DIY biohardening, to reduce risks from environment-to-human threats, and a lot of what's out there assumes the power grid stays up. This doesn't seem like a good assumption: ...

Most rooftop solar installs don't provide power when the grid is down. The primary goal is to avoid sending power out to the grid where it could injure people working to restore power, but more recent...

When Lily was about two she told me she wanted a song about "no". This was ten years ago, and I don't remember why she wanted this, but I made something up: This is a song about no. This is a song...

My older two kids (12y, 10y) like contra dancing, but but have been increasingly unhappy with the available opportunities: a family dance is "too boring", and BIDA is "not enough kids my age". What th...