Jeff Kaufman's Writing

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…

If you ask the internet how to prepare pasta you'll hear two things: You must salt the water. You must serve it mixed with the sauce. I disagree on both. I've been cooking pasta since I was a kid, and I prepare it the way my mother (who grew up in Rome) did: Cook it way less than it says on the box, until it's no longer crunchy but not further. Time dinner so that the pasta is the last thing to be ready, where you're eating it within 5min of it coming out of the pot. Serve it in one bowl, with…

Google Maps thinks it takes half an hour to walk to from DCA to Crystal City, but you can actually do it in fifteen minutes. I really like leaving airports on foot. There's something about it that feels like it shouldn't be possible: between an airplane and your destination there should be some other kind of vehicle, no? It reminds me of the first time I boarded a plane without using a jetway, where walking out on the tarmac just felt wrong. I was in DC the past two days for meetings (my first…

I recently got a Venova and have been enjoying learning how to play it: It combines a saxophone mouthpiece with recorder fingering and a little nose to overblow an octave instead of a twelfth. It's somewhere between a real instrument and a toy, and one of its bigger problems is that while it's great in C it gets harder to play the more sharps or flats you want. Since I mostly play contra music, typically in 2-3 sharps, this isn't ideal. A Venova in D (two sharps) would be great, but I don't see…

This afternoon Cecilia and I played for Somerville Porchfest, with Harris calling and Danner running sound. There was rain, but not enough keep us from playing, or to keep folks from dancing: We were originally planning to be on Morrison Ave, where we've been for years. Two weeks out, though, I learned that it wouldn't be possible to close Morrison this year. [1] After lots of scrambling, talking to neighbors and the city, and some help from Lance Davis, we were able to get permission to close…

A week ago the Copy Fail vulnerability came out, and Hyunwoo Kim immediately realized that the fixes were insufficient, sharing a patch the same day. In doing this he followed standard procedure for Linux, especially within networking: share the security impact with a closed list of Linux security engineers, while fixing the bug quietly and efficiently in the open. His goal was that with only the raw fix public, the knowledge that a serious vulnerability existed could be "embargoed": the people…

Each morning I look over my work calendar and make a series of verbal requests: Set a timer for 9:59 Set a timer for 10:59 Set a timer for 11:29 Set a timer for 1:30 Set a timer for 2:30 Why? I do not want to miss any meetings. I will miss occasional meetings if I'm not notified. I want to keep my phone on silent. I don't reliably notice my phone vibrating. While I do notice a smartwatch vibrating, I can't wear one. This means I want my phone to make noise before each meeting, while otherwise…

When I pitch people on far-UVC they often ask about in-duct UV. How about putting UV inside your HVAC ducts, where you can safely blast the air with cheap toxic wavelengths. Unfortunately, it's rarely a good approach. The biggest issue is that most people don't have ducts. They're common in the US, though less so in older construction (radiators) or newer (mini-splits). Outside the US (and Canada, and Australia), however, ducted systems are mostly limited to large modern office buildings.…

While I was traveling Julia asked me: why is Anna saying her fiddle practice is only two minutes? In this case, two minutes was the right amount of time! Anna (10y) and I had been fighting a lot about practice. She'd complain, slump, stop repeatedly to make adjustments, and generally be miserable. I'd often have to pull out "if you want to keep taking fiddle lessons you have to practice": she loves her teacher and is very motivated by the prospect of being good at fiddle. Still, it would take…

Damon Binder recently wrote up an argument for prioritizing air filtration over far-UVC for pathogen control: UVC and filtration are close substitutes—both deliver effective air changes per hour, both reduce airborne pathogen concentrations by the same amount per eACH—and on current pricing, filtration is cheaper. There's a lot of good stuff in his analysis, but I see [1] three considerations that really change the bottom line: Cost is actually much lower. Noise is a serious issue. Performance…

A friend observed a pattern where contra dance events seem to be pairing older and younger callers. I looked over my notes for two-caller events in 2025 and saw [1]: Two older callers: 33 events One of each: 30 events Two younger callers: 4 events Seems pretty clear evidence of pairing, no? But this actually turns out to be what you'd expect to see if organizers ignored age. With 67 two-caller events there are 134 slots. Of these, 96 (72%) went to older callers and 38 (28%) went to younger…

When I write about things like storing food or medication in case of disaster, one common response I get is that it doesn't matter: society will break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff. This seemed plausible at first, but it's actually way off. Looking at past disasters, people mostly fall somewhere on a "kind and supportive" to "keep to themselves" spectrum. When there is looting it's typically directed at stores, not homes, and violence is mostly in the streets.…

Three years ago I wrote about how we should be preparing for less privacy: technology will make previously-private things public. I applied this by showing how I could deanonymize people on the EA Forum. In 2023 this looked like writing custom code to use stylometry on an exported corpus representing a small group of people; today it looks like prompting "I have a fun puzzle for you: can you guess who wrote the following?" Kelsey Piper writes about how Opus 4.7 could identify her writing from…

I made a new major mode for emacs: mixed-html-mode. Or, really, Claude Code made one at my direction. It does syntax highlighting in HTML files with inline CSS and JS. I had two goals, which weren't met by any mode I could find: Does not freeze, flash, or stutter, even on huge files on slow machines. Does not get confused about whether a portion of a file is HTML vs CSS vs JS. The initial insight was that how browsers decide what text is HTML vs CSS vs JS is super simple: scanning for literal…

I was so excited about the first BIDA dance that I arrived two weeks early. I biked over from Medford to the Park Av Church in Arlington and was really disappointed to find the hall was empty. But I came back when the dance was actually happening, and it was fantastic. It immediately became my favorite dance. I started volunteering, first out of frugality (volunteers get in free!) and then out of a sense of wanting to contribute, and in 2010 I joined the board. Over the past 16 years I've done…

About ten years ago I sat down in front of a camera and recorded eleven videos showing how I play mandolin for contra dances. I've now done something similar with piano, this time with thirteen videos. This is not a high quality effort: I didn't write any scripts or even plan what I was going to say. Think of it as if we spent half an hour together, with me showing you how I play. Also keep in mind that I'm self taught, and my particular style that isn't for everyone. And my keybo...

Last week the US president announced that: ... if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately "Open for Business," we will conclude our lovely "stay" in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet "touched." This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime's 47 year "Reign ...

Baking has traditionally made extensive use of egg whites, especially the way they can be beaten into a foam and then set with heat. While I eat eggs, I have a lot of people in my life who avoid them for ethical reasons, and this often limits what I can bake for them. I was very excited to learn, though, that you can now buy extremely realistic vegan egg whites! EVERY engineered yeast to convert sugar into ovalbumin, the main protein in egg whites and the one responsible for most of ...