Jeff Kaufman's Writing

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 ...

I'm a huge fan of whipped cream. It's rich, smooth, and fluffy, which makes it a great contrast to a wide range of textures common in baked goods. And it's usually better without adding sugar. Desserts are usually too sweet. I want them to have enough sugar that they feel like a dessert, but it's common to have way more than that. Some of this is functional: in most cakes the sugar performs a specific role in the structure, where if you cut the sugar the texture will be much worse. ...

I've played a lot of dance weekends over the years [1] and if I could change one thing it would be no more challenging sessions. I see it happen every time: it's a great crowd of people, with a wide range of experience levels, and Saturday afternoon is going well. Then it's time for the challenging / advanced / experienced session. What happens? The dances are too hard for the crowd and it's not fun. The callers had already been selecting dances that worked well for the group, whic...

Open source components are getting compromised a lot more often. I did some counting, with a combination of searching, memory, and AI assistance, and we had two in 2026-Q1 ( trivy, axios), after four in 2025 ( shai-hulud, glassworm, nx, tj-actions), and very few historically [1]: Earlier attacks were generally compromises of single projects, but some time around Shai-Hulud in 2025-11 there started to be a lot more ecosystem propagation. Things like the Trivy compromise...

I always look at unit prices: how much do I get for my dollar? But that assumes I can use all of it. The manufacturer gets "12oz" whether I'll be able to get the full 12oz or only 6oz. L'Oreal was selling lotions where: these Liquid Cosmetic Product containers only dispense between as little as 43 percent to 81 percent of the container's advertised contents. — Critcher et al. v. L'Oreal Even though these containers would often dispense less than half of the advertised volum...

I've recently started using ChatGPT voice chat to practice Spanish, and it works surprisingly well. I don't know if I'll have the discipline to keep doing it after the novelty wears off, but I've already spoken more Spanish in the last week than in the last fifteen years combined. I started learning Spanish in middle school, and by the end of high school could make myself understood. I might need some circuitous phrasing to work around missing vocabulary, and I certainly abused perip...

There are a lot of great musicians who don't live near you, and if you hold your dance on a Saturday it's much harder to put together a tour that brings them to you. Consider a Friday evening or Sunday afternoon, or even a weekly evening slot? Looking at the 330 contra dances tracked by TryContra, which I think is just about all of them, there's a very clear scheduling pattern: There are more dances on Saturdays than the rest of the week put together. This makes sense: peo...

EDIT: this comparison is much less clean than I thought it was: the Union Sq building has 19 garage spaces reserved for affordable units. Combining these with the permits, it's 29% of parking-eligible units having a car instead of 8%. In 2017 I wrote: One of the major reasons existing residents often oppose adding more housing is that as more people move in it gets harder to find on-street parking. What if we added a new category of unit that didn't come with any rights to s...