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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 put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental --enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I wrote a post about how I love side tabs and switched back to Firefox: I did end up switching back to Chrome as my…
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 switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the fan clean the air. Instead of spinning a fan in free air to make noise, you can have it pull air through a filter. A small purifier sounds a lot like a classic noise machine, is…
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 Country Dance Orchestra. They quickly became one of the leading bands of the contra dance revival, and in 1972 released a self-titled album (F-72-FW-3). I found a picture of the liner notes: I couldn't find the text of these anywhere, so I had an LLM convert them to text and manually cleaned up the…
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: youtube Here's another one: youtube Additional, audio-only, examples: 1, 2. I find this fascinating. The physical feel of organ pedals is very different from the kick drum pedals I play, much more keyboard-like, which means the technique is totally different. But it clearly works well, and Keller is able…
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] I attended one of the "Wind in the Timothy" dances that he and his wife Jacqueline would host at their house in NH on fifth Saturdays, and it was clear he really enjoyed what he was doing. As part of my project on understanding attitudes towards live music I thought I would read some of his own…
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 more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and they have a major artist conflation problem. When you first show up it asks you to pick some artists to seed your experience with. I put in the first few…
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 + foot bass + singing: youtube Or piano + foot drums + talkbox: youtube People often hear what I'm doing with Kingfisher and ask how it works, but when I show them they say they couldn't do it because they're not good enough at multitasking. But I didn't start off being able to do this either, and it's a…
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 recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three letters (1985, 1988, 1992) from Enid Cocke, President of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation, tracing the evolution in her attitude towards this question. Lloyd Shaw was the superintendent of the Cheyenne Mountain School in…
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 facing each other, each person across from their partner, but your role doesn't matter and you're not grouped into hands-fours ("minor sets"). I want to be able to teach it in a single fast-paced walkthrough, match it tightly to the musical phrase, and be able to drop out after a few times through. This…
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 each and read through them, interested in both what he thought, and what he thought to change. I read the whole 1992 first edition, then skimmed the 2010 second edition with the older one open at the same time, looking for changes. My notes: I'm mostly interested in it for what it tells us about the…
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 Family"). But the new app doesn't work for watch-only accounts like ours yet, and they're still saying they're going to turn off the old app on July 6th. Without the app we won't be able to text back and forth, see where they are, or add new contacts (the watch blocks calls except to/from contacts). I…
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 with aquafaba and xanthan gum. It didn't work, but now that we have vegan egg white protein, can we do this for real? Nope. I gave it several tries over vacation, and wasn't able to get it to puff properly. Here's the closest I got: Panade 1/2 C water 1/4 C milk 5T butter 1t sugar 14T flour Egg replacement 9T…
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 ingredients, and today I added a rescaler: Here's tripling it: This is another project, like adding transposition to my solstice songbook, where I wouldn't have put in the time if I couldn't delegate to an LLM. It went very quickly, and the code seems reasonable. Implementation notes: As you go up and down…
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 I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses. In this case it's a father saying a boy isn't good enough for his daughter (verses 1 and 2) until his wife reminds him that her own father said the same thing about him (verse…
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 large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but heat and water gelatinize the starch and make it bioavailable. [1] This means you need some way to heat…
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 of my recorded music for the dance. Here's a lightly edited and linkified copy of what I sent them: This is a tricky situation, and I'm sorry you've ended up here. This is probably not what you want to hear, but I would not hold a dance with recorded music. Instead I'd: Have musicians play…
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 far-distant background stars. The closer the star is the bigger this effect is. Think of how when you switch which eye you're looking through you notice near things shifting relative to farther ones. For example, holding up my finger I see this out of my right eye: But this out of my left eye: If a…
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 other things that make food worth eating, but even a fully hedonistic vegan baker is at a serious disadvantage. But much less now that there are precision-fermented egg whites! I made an eggless cake last weekend that was indistinguishable from the summer cakes we'd eat growing up. Julia and I host…
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, following up from an informal one the year before, and I noticed several annoying things with its chord handling: Despite being digital, it didn't support transposition. Some songs didn't repeat the chord if they were unchanged, which meant that when scrolling new lyrics into view you'd lose the…
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 reductions. I've done a lot of DIY testing over the years ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The goal is generally to understand how well something removes particles from the air. A professional particle counter (example) costs thousands of dollars, and they're amazing devices, but what you're paying for is convenience,…
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 of conversations about biosecurity and may have accidentally done some fundraising. Lots of good parts, but my favorite was calling and playing for a contra dance: youtube This was similar to the house party dances I've called a few times. Two sets, which was very tight (cozy!) but it was a good…
Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum. A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific reservations I do remember not being convinced initially. After a lot of
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 could engineer a pathogen to spread widely before detection is going up. We've made great progress and we're now running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network, but there's still a huge amount that needs doing: we're hiring! We're processing >50B read pairs of wastewater and nasal swab…
Running an air purifier on a battery could be really useful in an emergency that combined a biological or nuclear threat with a power outage. Getting one that can run on 12V DC and attaching it to a LiFePO4 battery is about $188 (plus $164 for the purifier) for something that will give you 141 CFM for over a week. I've been thinking about DIY biohardening, primarily 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…
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 recently it's been expanded to avoid energized lines extending out from the panel where they could injure a firefighter on the roof. When we installed solar in 2018 we selected an inverter which offers an outlet that provides best-effort power during grid outages when the sun is shining. I'd try to sell…
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 about no. This is a song about no, no, no. This is a song about no. The song goes... No no no no no no no no no. The song goes... No no no no no no no no no. The song goes... No no no no no no no no no, no, no. This is a song about no. It's useful anytime the kids want a song about something I don't…
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 they wanted was a regular dance, but just kids. So we had one! Ghiblified for privacy We invited people ages 9-13: I really wanted to keep the age range narrow so the kids got the feeling of dancing with people their own age. I set up a spot for parents to hang out in another room, or they were…
I like my far-UVC Aerolamp a lot, but haven't been using it much: each time I wanted to get it out I needed to put it up on a tall stand, and ensure it wasn't going to get knocked over. This evening I attached it to the wall, which is great: It's very light and uses a 1/4" photo mount, so I used these simple cheap tiltable ones. The goal is to get it as high as possible for safety, and angled down so you're not wasting half the output on the ceiling. They were $9 for four, so if you are in…
Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: table... Category pre-tax post-tax total Donations $0 $142,488 $142,488 Taxes $0 $35,808 $35,808 Housing $0 $2
Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel economy regulations were partly to blame. Looking into it, it's hard to say how much is regulations vs people wanting to buy vehicles that look rugged, but the regulations really aren't helping. This chart is the core of it: This is what manufacturers were looking at when they decided to build today's cars. To figure out the target fuel economy for a vehicle you first calculate its "footprint", which is the area between the…
