A programmer living in the Boston area, working at the Nucleic Acid Observatory.
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2024-09-08 21:00:00
Pew recently commissioned Gallup to run a poll in Israel on attitudes to social media censorship. They found high support for banning various kinds of speech:
The fourth question, especially, is disturbing: 59% want to ban publicly expressing sympathy for civilians in Gaza? Since the polling was conducted in Hebrew and Arabic, however, this got me wondering whether translation might be contributing. I went to check, and Pew did publish the questions:
Q123c. Thinking about the war between Israel and Hamas, do you think people should or should not be allowed to post each of the following on social media sites? c. Posts that express sympathy for civilians in Gaza
A friend of a friend, Robert Herr, guessed they might have used סימפטיה ("simpatia"):
I don't *know* because they're not transparent, but I *suspect* they used סימפטיה for sympathy, which is a false friend, because—like in German—in Hebrew it doesn't primarily mean a feeling of compassion or commiseration, but a feeling of affection or support or approval
I don't speak Hebrew (or German) so I checked with Claude:
- jefftk:
- What does סימפטיה mean?
- claude:
- סימפטיה (simpatia) is a Hebrew word that means "sympathy" or "empathy" in English. It describes the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, or to show compassion and concern for someone else's situation or emotions.
- jefftk:
- Would it be the right word to use when translating "Q123c. Thinking about the war between Israel and Hamas, do you think people should or should not be allowed to post each of the following on social media sites? c. Posts that express sympathy for civilians in Gaza"?
- claude:
- You're right to be thoughtful about the translation here, as nuance is important in survey questions. While סימפטיה (simpatia) can mean "sympathy," in this specific context, it might not be the most precise translation. Let me explain why and suggest an alternative:
- Context: The question is about expressing sympathy specifically for civilians in a conflict situation.
- Connotation: In Hebrew, סימפטיה often carries a slightly stronger connotation than the English "sympathy" in this context. It might be interpreted as more active support or alignment, which could potentially skew responses.
- Better alternative: A more neutral and accurate translation for this survey question might use the phrase הזדהות עם (hizdahut im), which means "identification with" or "empathy for."
While it's great that they do publish the original English, without also publishing the actual questions they asked the results are much less useful than they could be. If it turns out they used הזדהות עם then I'm much more concerned than if they used סימפטיה, though support for censorship is worrying regardless.
So: if you're polling people in another language, please publish the translations you used!
2024-08-23 21:00:00
Every so often ( 2022, 2017, more 2017, 2015, 2011) Julia and will track how we spend our time for a week. This is useful for seeing whether how we're spending our time matches how we think we're spending it (and how we would like to be spending it) while also avoiding a pattern where one of us ends up putting in substantially more hours on childcare or other shared responsibilities without us noticing.
We tracked one week, starting the morning of Saturday August 3rd. We'd tried to pick a relatively normal week: neither of us was traveling for work or gigs, we had childcare all five weekdays, no big house projects, etc. There are always some unusual things, though:
Some of the kids and I attended a board games party on Saturday.
Julia took the older two kids to a dentist appointment Thursday morning.
I worked moderately late on Thursday evening.
We used the same categories as last time, except that last time we did something complicated with "family" vs "childcare", where we tried to count it as "family" if it was relaxing and fun, and "childcare" if it felt like a chore. This time we did a simpler thing and just counted any time where one of us was responsible for at least one kid as "childcare" and time when Julia and I were both hanging out with the kids as "family". As the kids have gotten older the fraction of time when they need "childcare", narrowly construed, has decreased a lot.
mean hours per day by activity
Thoughts:
Julia sleeps more than I do, which is some combination of her needing more sleep and me tending to wake up slightly earlier than I wish I would. This means I overall have an average of 1hr45 more time available for everything.
The "work" category includes commuting, and I have a commute while Julia doesn't. My commute averaged 55min, which is 27min each way (the Red Line is a lot better but still has a ways to go), and if we exclude it then it's 44:00 vs 41:11.
If we look at where my extra 12.5hr/wk from less sleeping goes, the biggest chunk is commuting (4.5hr), followed by time with kids (3.5hr), work (2.5hr), and personal (2hr).
There is also work that mostly takes attention and not time, which isn't something we're capturing here. Some things Julia is responsible for include planning the kids medical care, interfacing with the school, and hiring and managing childcare providers. Similarly I'm responsible for tracking what maintenance the house needs, coordinating with contractors, and handling issues from our tenants. I don't know how these kinds of mental overhead tasks shake out since we don't track them.
Overall we're pretty happy with our divisions, and aren't planning to change allocations in response to what we learned with this round of time tracking.
I also wanted to look back and see how my time allocation has changed over the past nine years:
Notes:
The decrease in "sleep" is misleading: because this category counts from lights out until waking for the day, it misses that in 2015 and 2017 I was often being woken up by one-year-olds (Lily, then Anna). This was less of an issue (for me, as the non-feeding parent) with a eight-month-old (Nora) in 2022 because we more successfully prioritized parental sleep, primarily by trading rooms so Nora would only wake one of us at once. At this point I'm primary for night wakings, but it only comes up every few months when someone is sick.
The increase in "work" is likely real. I'm very excited about the NAO and a lot of evening time that in past years might have gone into blogging or other projects is now work. Which is also why this blog post is a couple weeks after we finished the time tracking.
The increase in "childcare" vs "family" relative to 2022 is a coding change, and isn't meaningful: in 2022 I coded a bunch of time that today would be "childcare" as "family". Less sure about earlier.
The increase in "personal" relative to 2015 and 2017 is real: I definitely have more time for doing whatever I want than I did when the kids were littler.
The decrease in "housework" mostly represents that the house is pretty close to how we want it, and I'm not putting large amounts of my non-work time into fixing it.
The no Jeff+Julia time in 2015 is another coding thing: I didn't break that out separately from "personal" then. But I think there was still very little time for just the two of us because we were still working shifted schedules to handle childcare with a tricky kid. The lots of Jeff+Julia time in 2017 was us happening to pick an unusual week to track.
2024-08-19 21:00:00
I maintain a Boston apartment price map, scraping Padmapper's listings to make a heatmap. Each month I run a script to update it, but last month it failed due to an API change. It had been impressively stable: I'd been running the same code unmodified for three years, with only minor modifications since a big rewrite in 2016.
The changes to get it working again this time were relatively small. When I look at the most recent results, however, I don't know whether to interpret the decline in my only post-fix data point as real:
Some possibilities:
Prices went down (yay!)
My scraping was wrong before but is fixed now (ok)
My scraping was right before and is wrong now (not good!)
Looking at median prices for each size apartment, relative pricing seems pretty similar.
My best guess, looking over what's changed in the PadMapper UI, is that previously they weren't breaking out and excluding "short term" rentals, with a minimum stay of one month:
These tend to be more expensive than standard rentals, and aren't what I'm trying to track. If that is the issue then I think this probably represents fixing a bug and not a real decline.
(These charts are updates of the ones I made last time; read there for more details.)
2024-08-18 21:00:00
One of the things I like about playing for contra dances is that you have a lot of freedom about what to play. As long as you meet the minimum requirements for danceable music (108-122bpm, contra phrasing) you can do almost anything. And then if you're a bottom left corner band you might want to play some pop covers.
While lots of pop music has a tempo in the right range, it's much less common for it to have the right phrasing. Without dancers who will be messed up if you shorten a section or add a few beats, pop composers have no reason to write songs with this structure. But many songs come pretty close! So the first part of preparing a pop cover is picking a song that won't be too much work.
The easiest songs to adjust are ones where there are two 16 beat (8s) melodies you can pull out and treat as the A and B. For example, here's the Hampster Dance:
I think the A part should pretty clearly be the iconic chipmunkified Whistle Stop (Robin Hood) melody: (mp3).
There are a few choices for the B, but I think the best option is the synth lead: (mp3).
Both of these are 16 beats, so playing AABB gets you once through the dance.
Let's try a harder one. Here's Walk the Moon's Shut Up and Dance:
The song has a reasonably phrased 32 beat verse: (mp3).
And a reasonably phrased 32 beat chorus: (mp3).
But if you jam them together they don't feel great. The song handles this with a 16 beat prechorus: (mp3).
This does not come out to a good length: 32 + 16 + 32 is not a multiple of 64. One way to fix this is to only play the second half of the verse (A1) then the prechorus (A2) then the chorus (B1 and B2). This is ok, but it feels a bit rushed, especially with the transition from the end of the chorus back into the verse. I do think this would work, but can we do better?
Later in the recording they play a 32 beat version of the pre-chorus: (mp3).
If we use that we now have 32 + 32 + 32, one and a half times through the dance. We want to end with the chorus, and all our existing parts flow well into each other, so we should probably stick something at the beginning. The remaining recognizable bit of the song is the intro, played first for 8 beats and then later for 16: (mp3).
Playing it for 32 beats seems like it would be a little long, but I think it can work. One way to handle it is to start pretty spare and then bring in additional instrumentation every 8 beats, with special attention to marking the beginning of the A2. So we have:
Once you have the structure, it's a matter of identifying the most iconic aspects of the song that are a good fit for your instrumentation, but as long as the structure supports the dance, the beat is clear, and people can tell what song you're doing you are 90% of the way there.
2024-08-09 21:00:00
While the effective altruism movement has changed a lot over time, one of the parts that makes me most disappointed is the steady creep of donation matching. It's not that donation matching is objectively very important, but the early EA movement's principled rejection of a very effective fundraising strategy made it clear that we were committed to helping people understand the real impact of their donations. Over time, as people have specialized into different areas of EA, with community-building and epistemics being different people from fundraising, we've become less robust against the real-world incentives of "donation matching works".
Personally, I would love to see a community-wide norm against EA organizations setting up donation matches. Yes, they bring in money, but at the cost of misleading donors about their impact and unwinding a lot of what we, as a community, are trying to build. [1] To the extent that we do have them, however, I think it's important that donors understand how the matching works. And not just in the sense of having the information available on a page somewhere: if most people going through your regular flow are not going to understand roughly what the effect of their choices are, you're misleading people.
Here's an example of how I don't think it should be done:
I come to you with an offer. I have a pot with $30 in it, which will go to my favorite charity unless we agree otherwise. If you're willing to donate $75 to your favorite charity and $75 to mine, then I'm willing to split my $30 pot between the two charities.
How should you think about this offer? As presented, your options are:
Do nothing, and $30 goes from the pot to my favorite charity.
Take my offer, and:
While this looks nice and symmetrical, satisfying some heuristics for fairness, I think it's clearer to (a) factor out the portion that happens regardless and (b) look at the net flows of money. Then if you take the offer:
If I presented this offer and encouraged you to take it because of my "match", that would be misleading. While at a technical level I may be transferring some of my pot to your favorite charity, it's only happening after I'm assured that a larger amount will go to mine: you're not actually influencing how I spend my pot in any real sense.
Which is why I'm quite disappointed that Charity Entrepreneurship decided to host a project that, after considering these arguments, decided to build FarmKind:
This is an animal-specific giving platform, largely inspired by GivingMultiplier. [2] It's not exactly the same offer, in part because it has a more complex function for determining the size of the match, [3] but it continues to encourage people to give by presenting the illusion that the donor is influencing the matcher to help fund the donor's favorite charity.
While setting up complex systems can cause people to donate more than they would otherwise, we should not be optimizing for short-term donations at the expense of donor agency.
Before starting this post I left most of these points as comments
on the EA
Forum announcement. I also shared a
draft of this post with FarmKind and GivingMultiplier for review
late Wednesday morning:
I've drafted a blog post that is critical of your work,
and I wanted to share it with you before publishing it so that you're
not
surprised by it: Farmkind's
Illusory Offer. I'm planning to publish this on Friday (August
7th [JK: this should have said 9th!]) morning, but if you'd like more
time to prepare a response let me know and I can delay until Wednesday
(August 14th).
While GivingMultiplier responsed with a few small requested edits,
FarmKind didn't respond. At the time I thought this was because they
had decided to stop
engaging with me but actually it was because the email ended up in
their spam folder. After publishing FarmKind let me know about this
and pointed out a few places where I had misunderstood them. I
appreciate the corrections and have edited the post.
[1] I think participating in existing donation match systems is
generally fine, and often a good idea. I've used employer donation
matching and donated via Facebook's Giving Tuesday match, and at a
previous employer fundraised for GiveWell's top charities through
their matching system. In the latter case, in my fundraising I
explicitly said that the match was illusory, that I and the other
sponsors would be donating regardless of what others did, and that
people should read this as an invitation to join us in supporting an
important effort.
[2] In 2021 I raised similar issues with GivingMultiplier, prompting them to add a transparency page. I appreciate GivingMultiplier's public explanation, and that FarmKind is also pretty public about how their system works.
[3] GivingMultiplier's algorithm for determining the bonus amount was "50% of the amount donated to effective charity". Here it's usually higher and occasionally lower (sheet):
Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, the EA Forum, mastodon
2024-08-06 21:00:00
Getting ready for this Friday's Spark in the Dark I've modified my rhythm stage setup to support a new way of doing more things at once. I have four velocity-sensitive pedals, which I initially used for drums. Then I added bass as an option, and then year ago I got them set up for drums and bass at the same time. I've ended up using this a lot to accompany mandolin playing: I really like adding bass, especially rocking octaves, but I almost always still want the kick drum.
The biggest problem was that I wanted more chords: choosing between I IV V for major tunes, i bVII vVI for minor, and I bVII V for mixolydian was very limiting. I also noticed that I was almost never using the snare (left toes) in this mode, just the kick (left heel). Let's reallocate the left toe pedal from drums to bass: one pedal for kick and three for bass.
You might think that three pedals would mean three choices, but I chord them. The idea is, in addition to hitting each pedal on its own I can hit two pedals at once.
When playing in major the main options I want, in order, are I, IV, V, vi, ii, iii. Choosing easier patterns for the ones I expect to use more often:
| Right heel | I |
| Right toe | IV |
| Right foot | V |
| Left toe | vi |
| Both toes | ii |
| Left toe, right heel | iii |
This looks like:
It would be possible to use this for minor and mixolydian as well: set it in the key of the relative major (C for Am or Gmix). This is what I do when using all four pedals for bass, but I'm less sure it's the right option here when I have fewer pedals and some of the combinations are pretty awkward. I'll play around with this, but for now I've also put in a second pattern that I can select live (with a choice between mixolydian and minor):
| Mixolydian | Minor | |
| Right heel | I | i |
| Right toe | bVII | bVII |
| Right foot | bVII | bVII |
| Left toe | V | V |
| Both toes | III | III |
| Left toe, right heel | IV | IV |
Note that this is slightly different options, in addition to being different footings:
| Mixolydian | Relative Major | |
| Right heel | I | V |
| Right toe | bVII | IV |
| Right foot | bVII | III |
| Left toe | V | II |
| Both toes | III | bVII |
| Left toe, right heel | IV | I |
And:
| Minor | Relative Major | |
| Right heel | i | vi |
| Right toe | bVII | V |
| Right foot | bVII | IV |
| Left toe | V | III |
| Both toes | III | I |
| Left toe, right heel | IV | II |
This is a lot to keep in my head; I'll know more about what I like after I've played with it enough that it starts coming out naturally.
Here's a very rough example of playing around with it:
2024-08-01 21:00:00
I'm agnostic on the existence of dragons. I don't usually talk about this, because people might misinterpret me as actually being a covert dragon-believer, but I wanted to give some background for why I disagree with calls for people to publicly assert the non-existence of dragons.
Before I do that, though, it's clear that horrible acts have been committed in the name of dragons. Many dragon-believers publicly or privately endorse this reprehensible history. Regardless of whether dragons do in fact exist, repercussions continue to have serious and unfair downstream effects on our society.
Given that history, the easy thing to do would be to loudly and publicly assert that dragons don't exist. But while a world in which dragons don't exist would be preferable, that a claim has inconvenient or harmful consequences isn't evidence of its truth or falsehood.
Another option would be to look into whether dragons exist and make up my mind; people on both sides are happy to show me evidence. If after weighing the evidence I were convinced they didn't exist, that would be excellent news about the world. It would also be something I could proudly write about: I checked, you don't need to keep worrying about dragons.
But if I decided to look into it I might instead find myself convinced that dragons do exist. In addition to this being bad news about the world, I would be in an awkward position personally. If I wrote up what I found I would be in some highly unsavory company. Instead of being known as someone who writes about a range of things of varying levels of seriousness and applicability, I would quickly become primarily known as one of those dragon advocates. Given the taboos around dragon-belief, I could face strong professional and social consequences.
One option would be to look into it, and only let people know what I found if I were convinced dragons didn't exist. Unfortunately, this combines very poorly with collaborative truth-seeking. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places and make different errors. There are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons, or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our strategy that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they've found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence Pat finds is very convincing to them, but then Sam shows how they've been misinterpreting it. But this all falls apart when the thoughtful people who find one outcome generally stay quiet. I really don't want to contribute to this pattern that makes it hard to learn what's actually true, so in general I don't want whether I share what I've learned to be downstream from what I learn.
Overall, then, I've decided to remain agnostic on the existence of dragons. I would reconsider if it seemed to be a sufficiently important question, in which case I might be willing to run the risk of turning into a dragon-believer and letting the dragon question take over my life: I'm still open to arguments that whether dragons exist is actually highly consequential. But with my current understanding of the costs and benefits on this question I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
Note: This post is not actually about dragons, but instead about how I think about a wide range of taboo topics.
2024-07-29 21:00:00
A few weeks ago Julia wrote about how we approach kids climbing:
The basics:
- Spot the child if they're doing something where a fall is likely.
- Don't encourage or help the child to climb something that's beyond their ability to do on their own.
- If they don't know how to get down, give advice rather than physically lifting them down.
- Don't allow climbing on some places that are too dangerous.
I was thinking about this some when I was at the park with Nora (3y) a few days ago. She has gotten pretty interested in climbing lately, and this time she climbed up the fence higher than I'd seen her go before. If I'd known she'd climb this high I would have spotted her. She called me over, very proud, and wanted me to take a picture so that Julia could see too:
She asked me to carry her down, and I told her I was willing to give her advice and spot her. She was willing to give this a try, but as she started to go down some combination of being scared and the thin wire of the fence being painful was too much, and she returned to the thicker horizontal bars.
We tried this several times, with her getting increasingly upset. After a bit Lily came over and tried to help, but was unsuccessful. Eventually I put my hands on Nora's feet and with a mix of guiding and (not ideal) supporting them helped her climb down to the lower bar. She did the rest herself from there, something she's done many times.
This took about fifteen minutes and wasn't fun for any of us: Nora, me, other people at the playground. But over the course of the rest of the day I brought it up several times, trying to get her to think it through before she climbs higher than she would enjoy climbing down from.
(I think this is an approach that depends very heavily on the child's judgment maturing sufficiently quickly relative to their physical capabilities, and so is not going to be applicable to every family. Lily and Anna were slower to climb and this was not an issue, while Nora has pushed the edges of where this works much more.)
2024-07-21 21:00:00
We got cats a few months ago, which is overall very nice. Julia set them up with automatic dispensers for food and water which reduces how often we need to get things for them, and keeps them from begging. Except recently:
One cat (Nyx) has figured out how to knock over the food dispenser and gorge.
One child (Nora) has figured out how to unscrew the water dispenser and flood.
Julia asked if I could fix this, and I screwed the food dispenser to the wall:
There's a small block of scrap wood in between to give a bit of an offset and to clear the baseboard molding:
I considered doing the same thing to the water dispenser, but that would leak. Instead we decided to put it up out of reach of the kids, and cut a wooden base so it's less likely to tip.
I made it by tracing the outline of the base, and then cutting around it with a jigsaw set to an angle:
Here's the bit I cut out of the middle:
I accidentally cut it a bit wider than I intended, but after raising it up slightly on plywood strips it cradles the dispenser nicely.
I thought this was good, but the cats ended up being able to tip the whole thing over. Whoops!
I noticed that there is some space above the water line, and added some screws to the front:
And one to the back, being careful about placement so it wouldn't get in the way of screwing in the top:
Now it feels quite secure! But perhaps the cats will still prove me wrong...
2024-07-20 21:00:00
With the Red Line shut down north of Kendall for repairs I've been walking to the Green Line at Ball Sq. It's definitely a slower commute, but it's not bad. Except for 150 painful feet.
Here's how I walk to the station (240ft):
And here's what I want to do (90ft):
They've put up enough of a fence to keep a desire path from forming, but it still bugs me.
Looking at the plans from 2019 you can see how it ended up this way:
Without the crosswalks marked it's much less obvious that you're making a bunch of people walk around three sides of a square. And this crosswalk didn't even exist before the station:
This does actually affect a good number of people. Here's my estimate for the houses where this adds 150ft when walking to the platform:
Unfortunately I don't think the cost of adding a second, slightly shorter, path would be worth it now that we've already built it out differently, but this is something to keep in mind for grouping with future renovations.
2024-07-19 21:00:00
Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook.
When trying to understand how metagenomic samples differ I often want to drill down through the taxonomic hierarchy, comparing relative abundances. I've tried several tools for this, existing and custom, and haven't been all that happy with any. For most purposes, the tool I like most is Krona, which shows an interactive chart. For example, here's Krona showing the results of running the NAO's v1 metagenomic sequencing pipeline on the unenriched Hyperion Treatment Plant samples from Rothman et al. 2021:
What I often wish I had, however, are linked Krona charts, where I could see multiple samples at once, and drilling down in one sample showed the corresponding portion of the other samples. After failing to find something like this, I hacked something together by monkey-patching the output of Krona. Here's it comparing the samples from several wastewater treatment plants in the same study:
When I click on "viruses" in any of the plots, all four zoom in on the viral fraction:
That's a lot of Tobamovirus!
I only just made this, so it's likely buggy, but if that doesn't put you off you're welcome to give it a try. The interactive version of the charts above is here (warning: 60MB) and the generation code is open source, on github.
If you're interested in the technical details of how I made this:
It's a wrapper around the ktImportTaxonomy command
from KronaTools.
To get multiple charts on the same page, they're each in their
own iframe, via srcdoc.
There is unfortunately no CSS way of saying "please lay out these rectangles to take up as much of the viewport as possible while maintaining an aspect ratio close to 1:1", so I use some awkward JS. It checks each possible number of columns and takes the one that maximizes the minimum dimension (width or height) of the charts. Luckily there are only a few options to consider.
So that the colors match between the charts, each chart on the
page has the data from all the charts. I reach into
each iframe to set the dataset
dropdown's selectedIndex and
call onDatasetChange. It's not ideal needing to duplicate
the Krona output for each pane in the HTML source and then in the
rendered DOMs, but I don't see another way to keep the colors matching.
To intercept navigation, the wrapper rewrites the KronaTools HTML
output to hook navigateForwd, navigateBack,
and, especially, selectNode. It inserts some code that
reaches into all of the other iframes on the page and
navigates them equivalently.
Duplicating selectNode is a little tricky because
normally it takes a Node as an argument, but that's not
equivalent between charts. So I walk up to the root of the tree and then
depth-first search until I find a node with a name matching the intended
target.
It's all quite heavy, with the Rothman et al. (2021) screenshot above coming from a 60MB HTML file, but it's fast enough on my computer to be useful to me.
2024-07-16 21:00:00
We do a lot of walking around the neighborhood with kids, which usually involves some people getting to intersections a while before others. I'm not worried about even the youngest going into the street on their own—Nora's been street trained for about a year—but we have to be careful about what signals we send to cars. Someone standing at an intersection facing traffic looks to a driver like they're waiting for the opportunity to cross.
Waving drivers to continue doesn't work well: they tend to slow down significantly, and many of them will wave back in a misguided attempt at "no, you first" politeness. Instead, what seems to work well is turning your back to the street:
This isn't perfect: some drivers still read anyone stationary near an intersection as intending to cross, but it's pretty good. And it's especially good for little kids: not only do they often like to look intently at passing traffic in a way that is concerning to drivers and passers by, but it's a clear signal to the parent that the kid knows it's not time to cross yet.
2024-07-15 21:00:00
In the spirit of coming back to things once I have more experience with them, I've continued to be very happy with my stacked laptop monitor. I just got back from a week of touring and then vacation with Julia's family, and I used it almost every day. Being able to use my laptop comfortably nearly anywhere is pretty great.
One thing I did realize is that just using a regular USB-C cable is risky:
While I haven't had any accidents this way, it would be pretty easy for someone to get caught on the cord and knock it all down. I got an 18" dual right angle cable, and it works great:
Another thing I've noticed is that the velcro gets harder to peel apart the longer the monitor has been attached to the back of the laptop screen. As long as I take it off after each use it's fine, but at one point I left it together for maybe a week: when I tried to separate it I was worried I would ruin my screen, until I remembered my screen was already ruined. But I would be nervous about so much strong velcro on a laptop with a still-functioning screen.
I've also mostly stopped using the bit of wood that keeps it from collapsing, even when using this on my lap. Instead I just sit very still and try not to knock it over. This is kind of silly, but I'm too lazy to get out the piece of wood when this actually seems to work fine.
I noted last time that it was too tall for meetings, but didn't say what I do about that: I just put the monitor in front of the regular screen, without stacking it. It stays put well enough, and I don't mind the angle when glancing down every so often in a meeting. I also used to sometimes pick up the screen like a tablet and hold it some other way, but with the shorter cable this now offers fewer options.
2024-07-14 21:00:00
When our oldest was a toddler they were too short to reach an adult-height handrail, so I made a small one:
Comparing that picture to the one from seven years ago, you'll notice that I've added small bits of wood running from the top of each section to the wall. These are "returns", and make it less likely someone will get caught and trip. This wasn't in response to anything going wrong, just noticing that often handrails have returns and that the need for them is stronger the lower down they are. It would be even better to have them on the bottom of each section as well, but tripping down stairs is enough worse than tripping up that I didn't get around to that.
I made these by taking a small piece of scrap wood with a pilot hole drilled through it, drilling a pilot hole into the end of the handrail, putting some glue in the joint, and gently hammering a nail in to close it up and clamp it. They work ok? The main problem is if you push them hard the glue will break, and then they rotate. A couple have come lose, and instead of re-gluing it has been easier just to teach the kids not to rotate them.
If I were doing this again I would cut the railings with a 45° angle and use an additional section of the same railing for the return. This would give more area for glue, be less vulnerable to rotation, and look nicer.
2024-07-13 21:00:00
A few months ago I wrote about how it's hard to get started playing for electronic ("techno") contra. If all the events are bigs special things and organizers only want groups who can carry a the whole evening, how do you get to where you can do that?
Julie Vallimont (Double Apex, Delta Wave, Cosmic Echo, Firecloud, Buddy System) pioneered this livetronica contra style, and resolved this question by putting in an absolutely absurd amount of effort before playing her first Double Apex gig. But, despite there being a lot of people who would enjoy dancing to this kind of music more often, we can't just will talented and dedicated musicians into existence. There need to be opportunities for people to try it out: is this something I enjoy doing? How does the crowd react to my various ideas? What works well in this context?
Which is why I'm excited that for the next Spark in the Dark (August 16th, put it in your calendar!) BIDA's going to be offering guest spots. Instead of needing to prepare a whole evening worth of material, people who want to try this out only need a couple sets. If this sounds like it might be for you, have a look through the details and write to [email protected].
2024-07-12 21:00:00
I often write about things when they're new to me, because that's when I'm most interested in them. Sometimes how I feel after a short time ends up being how I feel long-term; other times I end up with an enthusiastic post about something I ended up abandoning a few months later. So when I remember, it seems valuable to revisit with the benefit of additional experience.
As long as I can remember I've gotten chilled quite rapidly when swimming. It can be summer in Florida, and after 20min I'm needing to get out and warm up. For years I just accepted this, but once I had kids it became pretty frustrating that I couldn't hang out playing with them in the water anywhere near as long as they wanted me to.
Last summer I got a wetsuit and wrote about it after the first time I tried it. How do I feel now that it's been most of a year?
I love it! We're just finishing up a week in NC visiting Julia's family, and we've been swimming most days. It's very hot, hot enough that most people can stay in the water indefinitely, but not me. Or, not me before the wetsuit! I didn't once need to get out of the pool or lake due to feeling cold, and multiple times spent more than an hour in the water. I've really enjoyed being able to play with my kids, help them practice swimming, or just bob around with the toddler.
The main chance since my first post is that I've stopped wearing the vest, and now just wear the pants. It turns out that the pants (1.5mm neoprene) let me retain enough heat, and the vest was much more unpleasant when hanging around not in the water.
Here's my swim attire, with trunks over the pants and a fast-dry shirt on top:
I generally prefer more covering gear so I don't have to deal with sunscreen, so that the wetsuit involves long pants is actually a minor plus for me.
Anyway: I'm very happy! Strongly recommended for anyone else who similarly gets cold easily.
2024-07-10 21:00:00
I like making food at home, where I know my kitchen and ingredients. I have a several things I make often, and while I sometimes make new things it's all a bit familiar. So when I'm on a vacation in a rental house, one thing I enjoy is cooking. It's a bit of a challenge, perhaps suitable for a low-stakes cooking show, but it's fun to see what I can make with the constraints:
What pans are there? Do they have any sneaky downsides?
What non-perishable ingredients are left over from previous visitors?
What's the minimum I can buy at the store to combine with what's already there and make something good?
If we went to the store a few days ago and it's not worth going again, what's a good fit for the collection of things we have left?
What can I substitute for measuring cups? How can I calibrate them?
If I would normally make a recipe one way, but we don't have some of the ingredients, what would make good substitutes?
One constraint I don't enjoy is knives that have been treated quite badly. One way I'll "cheat" is that (when I remember) I'll bring along a knife sharpener. I'll also sometimes bring an instant read thermometer, and somewhat unusual dry ingredients (ex: flax [1]) that I need small quantities of.
This morning I made raspberry chocolate chip muffins (recipe):
This involved using an unlabeled measuring cup that might have been either 1/4C or 1/3C (which I treated as 1/4C and used for everything, even the 2.5C flour), substituting extra baking powder for the baking soda, and bigger chocolate chips than usual. They were tasty!
[1] Lately I've been using flax as an egg substitute a lot; Lily
doesn't eat eggs anymore. I used 2.5T water and 1T flax per egg. It
works well in the raspberry muffins, ok in crepes, and very poorly in
brownies.
2024-07-09 21:00:00
Last week, Lily, Anna, Cecilia, Harris, and I drove to St Louis and back playing dances. I wrote about one aspect last week, and will probably continue splitting thoughts across posts. Today I'm thinking some about our approach to stopping along the way.
I grew up in a family with a very strong "maximize time at destination" approach to road trips. We would often leave before daylight, with stops determined by the minivan's requirements for additional gasoline. We would eat while driving, I recall creative efforts to handle certain biological needs, and we'd generally try to get the trip over with as quickly as possible.
I did sometimes see other people taking a different approach, but it wasn't until the first time I drove a group of college classmates a long way that I realized people have widely divergent preferences here. We were driving a van to Dance Flurry, about five hours North of Swarthmore, and around lunchtime people started talking about maybe stopping for lunch. I (really!) thought they were joking, and said that since we still had more gas and had brought along a bunch of food we didn't need to stop. There was a revolt, and we did not end up eating while driving.
Over time, I've come around to a view where one of the great things about traveling long distances by car is the opportunity for interesting stops. It's often the case that there are intermediate locations that are better places to spend the marginal hour than your origin or destination.
Before this tour we put some time into thinking about nice places to stop, and we also did some looking up options while driving. We ended up stopping at:
Cecilia's father's violin shop, where he showed us how he repairs instruments:
Lily and Anna both got to take turns putting on clamps:
Niagara Falls, on the way from Rochester to Pittsburgh. I'd been there once before, ten years earlier with Amy and Audrey, but it was great to take the older two kids there.
We also had a lot more time than on our previous visit, and so were able to take the elevator and boardwalk down to the base of the falls.
Lily loved the powerful wind and spray; Anna wanted to stay a bit further from the most intense area.
Golden Gate Park in Brookville OH on the way from Pittsburgh to Bloomington. Really big play structure (but Lily was worried about splinters and says it's a head bonking hazard), plus a creek. Lily did some vegan 'fishing':
Bluespring Caverns, on the way from Bloomington to St Louis.
It's an underground river, through a cave, with a boat tour.
I'd been in smaller caves before, but this felt very different.
Gateway Arch, another stop on the way to the St Louis dance. We went up to the top, in very small cars with tiny doors.
The view was excellent.
The Woodlands in Martinsville IL on the way from St Louis to Cincinnati. The headline attractions were a 90-foot slide:
And a pretty great zipline:
It was fast enough you'd go nearly horizontal when stopping at the end.
There was also a little creek, some musical toys, and a nice play structure.
Brookville Lake, on the way from Cincinnati to Indianapolis. Swimming and hanging out at the beach, very relaxed. The water was warm, though since I get cold easily I was glad to have my wetsuit with me.
Pepper Pike Park, on the way from Indianapolis to Syracuse. Lots of green space, some water, decent playground, nice bench swings.
Lee Athletic Field, in Lee MA on the way back to Boston. The playground and field were fine, but at the far end of the field there was the best stream we'd stopped at all trip. Lots of trees, cool water, squishy mud in places, a few skippable stones, and a small island you could wade to without getting your knees under.
There were also stops that didn't end up being so nice (usually: "too hot, no water, not much to do") but we generally kept these short, stretching legs and moving on.
I asked everyone to rate these:
| Lily | Anna | Jeff | Cecilia | Harris | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Niagara Falls | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| Gateway Arch | 5 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Bluespring Caverns | 6 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 |
| The Woodlands (Zipline) | 2 | 1 | 6 | 3 | 4 |
| Violin Shop | 7 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 3 |
| Brookville Lake (Swimming) | 3 | 1 | 7 | 5 | 6 |
| Lee Athletic Field (Island) | 4 | 1 | 4 | 7 | 9 |
| Pepper Pike Park (Green) | 8 | 1 | 9 | 8 | 7 |
| Golden Gate Park (Creek) | 9 | 1 | 8 | 9 | 8 |
Overall, I think this dramatically improved the tour. While I love playing dances, and that remains my favorite part, some of the things we saw along the way came close!
2024-07-08 21:00:00
Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook. Thanks to Evan Fields and Mike McLaren for editorial feedback on this post.
In Detecting Genetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing we have:
our best guess is that if this system were deployed at the scale of approximately $1.5M/y it could detect something genetically engineered that shed like SARS-CoV-2 before 0.2% of people in the monitored sewersheds had been infected.
I want to focus on the last bit: "in the monitored sewersheds". The idea is, if a system like this is tracking wastewater from New York City, its ability to raise an alert for a new pandemic will depend on how far along that pandemic is in that particular city. This is closely related to another question: what fraction of the global population would have to be infected before it could raise an alert?
There are two main considerations pushing in opposite directions, both based on the observation that the pandemic will be farther along in some places than others:
With so many places in the world where a pandemic might start, the chance that it starts in NYC is quite low. To take the example of COVID-19, when the first handful of people were sick they were all in one city in China. Initially, prevalence in monitored sewersheds in other parts of the world will be zero, while global prevalence will be greater than zero. This effect should diminish as the pandemic progresses, but at least in the <1% cumulative incidence situations I'm most interested in it should remain a significant factor. This pushes prevalence in your sample population to lag prevalence in the global population.
NYC is a highly connected city: lots of people travel between there and other parts of the world. Since pandemics spread as people move around, places with many long-distance travelers will generally be infected before places with few. While if you were monitoring an isolated sewershed you'd expect this factor to cause an additional lag in your sample prevalence, if you specifically choose places like NYC we expect instead the high connectivity to reduce lag relative to global prevalence, and potentially even to lead global prevalence.
My guess is that with a single monitored city, even the optimal one (which one is that even?) your sample prevalence will significantly lag global prevalence in most pandemics, but by carefully choosing a few cities to monitor around the world you can probably get to where it leads global prevalence. But I would love to see some research and modeling on this: qualitative intutitions don't take us very far. Specifically:
How does prevalence at a highly-connected site compare to global prevalence during the beginning of a pandemic?
What if you instead are monitoring a collection of highly-connected sites?
What does the diminishing returns curve look like for bringing additional sites up? Does it go negative at some point, where you are sampling so many excellent sites that the marginal site is mostly dilutative?
If you look at the initial spread of SARS-CoV-2, how much of the variance in when places were infected is explained by how connected they are?
What about with data from the spread of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 variants?
Are there other major factors aside from connectedness that lead to earlier infection? Can we model how valuable different sites are to sample, in a way that can be combined with how operationally difficult it is to sample in various places?
If you know of good work on these sorts of modeling questions or are
interested in collaborating on them, please get in touch! My work email is
jeff at securebio.org.
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2024-07-05 21:00:00
I recently finished a nine-day road trip, playing a series of dances. This combined driving long distances with arrival deadlines: you don't want to arrive late. Not only is it unprofessional, but it's stressful rushing to set up and you'll likely have a bad night from skipping some nice-to-have steps. A concept I found pretty useful was thinking about allocating "buffer".
Let's say it's 8am in Pittsburgh PA and the hall in Bloomington IN opens for setup at 5:30pm. GPS says its a 6.5hr drive, so we have 3hr of buffer to spend. Some of the buffer we'll need to spend stopping for gas and restrooms. We might choose to spend additional buffer on a relaxed breakfast, stopping at interesting places along the way, or exploring Bloomington. Or we might be unlucky with traffic (or, heaven forfend, the car) and lose some buffer to bad luck.
Since the risk of things going wrong or taking longer than you expect is roughly proportional to distance, it's pretty risky to front-load your buffer consumption. You don't want to spend all by 30min early on and then run into a 1hr traffic jam. But the most enjoyable ways of spending buffer are probably distributed along the route, so the safest option of reserving it all for the destination isn't very pleasant. It's much nicer to spend the marginal half hour with your toes in a shady stream than waiting around in the parking lot outside the hall.
While this was somewhat useful in my own planning, the place where it really demonstrated its value was in talking with my tourmates. Getting close to the hall I might ask if anyone had anything they wanted to spend buffer on; playing at a park I could use it to explain to my kids why we should leave soon; it avoided people mistaking the GPS arrival time for our actual arrival; any proposed activity had a nice currency for considering its cost.
I don't remember thinking about this explicitly on past tours, or missing it before. I think the main reason is that we scheduled this tour much more tightly. On days when we had a lot of driving we still wanted to take nice breaks (one park had a serious zipline and a 90ft slide) and on days when we had less driving we did a lot of seeing things (boating on an underground river). I expect it to continue to be rare for me to be in a situation where I need to do this kind of collaborative planning around a deadline, but when I'm next doing it I think this will be a useful tool.
2024-06-26 21:00:00
A common contra dance figure is "right shoulder round": walk around the opposite-role person on the side of the set while looking at them. A less common figure is the "mad robin": walk the same path, but instead look at the opposite-role person across the set. This suggests a third option, which we can call "cross robin": walk that path, but looking at the same-role person diagonally across the set. [1]
Here's a potential dance:
Cross Robin
by Jeff Kaufman(Becket)
A1
A2
- (4) Long lines forward to the left, progressing
- (4) On the way back, Larks roll Robins away (right to left)
- (4) Long lines forward in place
- (4) On the way back, Larks roll Robins away (left to right)
B1
- (8) Right shoulder round your partner while looking at your same-role neighbor.
- (8) Larks allemande left 1.5x while Robins orbit CW 1/2
B2
- (8) Left shoulder round your partner while looking at your same role-neighbor.
- (8) Robins allemande right 1.5x while Larks orbit CCW 1/2
- (16) Right shoulder round your partner, and swing.
The goal is that after the cross-looking you should get to do something with that same-role neighbor. If you want, you can maintain eye contact throughout the A2 and B1.
I've tried this with three other people who happened to be in the same room (Harris, Cecilia, Lily) and it seems like it flows, though I'm not sure yet if the cross-looking feels good.
(I considered calling this "Mad Lark", but Harris tells me Shoshana Silverman has been pushing to call it "Mad Robin" when it starts with the Robin going in front and "Mad Lark" when it starts with the Lark going in front, and I didn't want to conflict. If that does catch on, this could be both "Cross Robin" in the B1 and "Cross Lark" in the A2. But I also think it's probably better not to name this figure at all in teaching it to dancers, and just describe it. It's good to keep the number of named figures low.)
[1] It also suggests a fourth option, where you walk the path while
looking at yourself. But that seems more awkward.
2024-06-25 21:00:00
Kingfisher is going on tour again:
| Thr | 2024-06-27 | Rochester NY |
| Fri | 2024-06-28 | Pittsburgh PA |
| Sat | 2024-06-29 | Bloomington IN |
| Sun | 2024-06-30 | St Louis MO |
| Mon | 2024-07-01 | Cincinnati OH |
| Tue | 2024-07-02 | Indianapolis IN |
Cecilia made a flyer:
Harris will be calling, and we'll be driving together. Anna and Lily are coming too, which I'm excited about.
It's about 40hr of driving, which is a lot, but we're spreading it over eight days and we do have some relatively light days, so it should be ok:
If you're somewhere along here, I'd love to see you; come dance!
2024-06-23 21:00:00
Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2019 Lily turned 5 and Anna turned 3.
(Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us.)
Anna: I was kicking Lily over and I tripped on a balloon.
Me: You were doing what?
Anna: (pause) I was accidentally kicking Lily over and I tripped on a balloon.
Anna asks me to give her pictures of different objects. Then she colors them blue. Blue every time, everything is blue.
This one was "a mama frog and a papa frog and a brother frog and a sister frog and a baby frog sitting on a log."
[From Ange]
Lily: "Ange, we'll always be with you, even when you go home and even when you're dead"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Lily: "When you love someone they stay in your heart forever. So you will always be with us, even when you die. As long as you live and even after YOU DIE, you will always be with me"
She really focused on that part.
Poor Lily got the conscientious genes from both sides. Things she's cried about in the last two days:
- her grandfather said they were going to make s'mores, and she had already had her sweet for the day
- she's sick and knows she's supposed to drink water with electrolytes, but she wanted to drink plain water
- Anna held her hand, and she's afraid her germs got on Anna.
I read the kids a story where Death is personified but then goes away to the graveyard.
Anna: What is that?
Me: It's a place where they bury people.
Anna: Does Death bury people?
Me: No, people bury people.
Anna: That's so...rude.
In retrospect, I could have explained that better.
Lily: I want an ice cream cone with sprinkles.
Anna: I want the nasty dessert.
We tried for a while to figure out what she meant by this, and eventually narrowed it down to "some berries Jeff brought for us, and which we ate on an airplane last November." She was very sad to learn we did not have any nasty dessert.
Doing a rhyming puzzle with Lily. "Goat...kayak?"
Apparently her vocabulary has outstripped her rhyming skills or boat identification skills.
We're at the park and Lily proposed doing a "tortoise race" with the instructions "we all run in a circle until somebody says stop." We did this, with Anna eventually saying "stop." I didn't realize the origin of this game until Lily then announced we had all won and we all needed prizes (which turned out to be rocks.)
"What do you want for breakfast?"
"I can't think of what I want for breakfast, but I CAN see everything with my biyoculars."
"It's ok to say 'stupidhead' to cars because they don't have feelings. But kids do have feelings. And a mommy might have feelings, and papas might have feelings, and a grandfather might have feelings, and people have feelings. But cars do not and it's ok to say 'stupidhead' to cars."
Anna jumping on the bed: "I won't fall, I'm using my balance to balance my balance."
Lily: Last night I had a dream that I got TWO lollipops after dinner!
Me: Wow, that sounds like a fun dream!
Lily: Yeah, because it was MORE THAN ONE!
Her dreams are very pointed sometimes.
Yesterday Anna turned 3, and her cousins gave her a toy dog. She gave it a couple of names over the course of the day ("Boodo," "Guddah,") and then went to sleep with it. This morning when she woke up: "I named my puppy Forever Puppy. Cause I want to be with it forever."
[Later Anna traded Forever Puppy to Lily]
Lily: "let's play 'goose, goose, gray duck'"
One remarkable thing about the stuffed animals Anna has acquired in her bed is that there is no overlap in species. We have a puppy, a fox, a catbus, a baby, a monkey, an elephant, a reversible penguin/owl, a rainbow bear, a narwhal (?), a hedgehog, an otter, a beaver, a sea turtle, and a guinea pig.
[From Ange]
Lily was singing a song and I managed to write it (Me llamo = My name is)
"Me llamo Anna, me llamo Anna!
Me llamo Ange, me llamo Ange!
Me llamo Natalia, me llamo Natalia!
Me llamo Ricky!
Me llamo Alice!
Me llamo Silvana!
Me llamo Rosie!
Me llamo mamma!
Me llamo Julia!
Me llamo Jeff!
Me llamooooooo me llamoooooooooooooooOllieeeee.
I'm singing a song!
Of all the names!
In our family!
Our family!!!!!
... Anna I'm gonna sing a song about all the girls in our family, yeah yeah yeah!
Me llamo Anna! Me llamo Anna! Yeah yeah yeah!
Me llamo Allison!
Me llamo Alice!
Me llamo Claire! Yeah yeah yeah!
Me llamo Julia! Me llamo Julia!
Meeeeeee llamoooooooooooooo Lily!!!!! Yeah! yeah! YEAH!"
Lily: Ask me what I want for my birthday.
Me: What would you like for your birthday, Lily?
Lily: I want a giant stuffie octopus so when I get tired I can just curl up in its tentacles and go to sleep!
Me: I'll keep that in mind.
Lily: Keep it in mind until you've bought the octopus!
I found scribbles on the hallway wall. I'd been reading about how forcing kids to explain things like this just pushes them to lie, so I brought them both to the scene.
Me: "I see drawing on the wall. I don't need to know who did this - "
Lily: "It wasn't me, it was - "
Me: "I said I don't need to know who, I just need you to not - "
Anna: "I did it with a penny."
Me: " - I just need to you to not draw on the walls. Ok, and no scratching the walls with pennies."
I guess that went well.
Last night Lily decided to hold a birthday party for one of her teddy bears, who has a birthday and a birthday party about every two weeks. Midway through the preparations, I got a phone call and went to my room to take it. About 5 minutes into the call, Lily pushed a note under the door (dictated to Jeff):
"Dear Mama,
I'm sorry to say that you're delaying the birthday party that was going to be celebrated this evening. If your phone call is not short we will not be able to do the party tonight.
Love, Lily.
It's just your daughter letting you know."
Ouch.
Al: Lily, why do you play the kazoo before going to sleep?
Lily: it would be impossible for me to play kazoo *while* I'm asleep!
Me: [goes to hug Anna]
Anna: I am not a stuffed animal. I don't have anything to puff me up. I am made of chicken.
Lily: I have a secret.
Me: Oh?
Lily: I have [whispering] magic powers!
Me: Oh, earlier today you told us you were a human with no magic powers at all.
Lily: I was joking.
[From Al]
Yesterday Lily came downstairs and sang each of our cats (separately) a song about how they will always be in her heart even when she is far away, "so they will never forget me."
Anna: We have 2 heads. We have a head under our hair and we have a forehead.
Lily: yeah that means we have 5.
Anna: No we have 2.
Lily: But we have one head and a "four-head"
Anna: Oh, right
Anna [distraught]: why are we driving so slow! We will never get home if we drive so *slow*!
(We were in a parking lot)
[From Al]
When Anna and Lily come down to visit and we tell them it's time to go back upstairs, Anna often doesn't want to go—and she's not as good as Lily about accepting that we agreed they'd go up after this story or after this amount of time or whatever. BUT as she continues telling us about how she doesn't want to go upstairs, we always get to this point:
Anna [getting upset]: I don't want to go upstairs. I just want to be with Mama!
Me: Oh, where do you think Mama is?
Anna [cheering up]: Upstairs!
At this point she happily goes upstairs.
Anna, "reading" from a copy of Harry Potter: "Uncle Vernon shut the door. Chapter one, the Wicked Witch of the West. A girl named Dorothy lived in an old house." First crossover fic?
Anna: "If you are outside you need a rainbrella and a raincoat"
Yesterday Lily had a cookie and 2.5 gummy worms. She asked for a second cookie, and I asked her how much dessert was reasonable. She said two cookies or five gummy worms should count as a full dessert. [1] Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get her to see that if either of those makes a full dessert, then (assuming linearity) so does what she had already eaten.
Anna asked me for a second cookie, not having had any gummy worms, and so got one. Lily was pretty sad about that, but then Anna gave Lily a little piece of her cookie and Lily was happy again. [2]
[1] This isn't entirely up to her, but generally I'll have her first propose something and then go back and forth with her if I don't think it's reasonable. In this case she seemed to be setting a good limit.
[2] You could argue that since Lily had already had a full dessert she should have to turn down Anna's offer, but (a) transfers like this don't affect the total amount of dessert the pair consume (b) letting them be nice to each other seems much more important than strict limits around dessert.
...
Lily did this correctly the other night. I told her she could have two cookies or four Hershey's kisses. She intially planned to have one cookie and two Hershey's kisses, but after she'd had one cookie and one Hershey's kiss she asked if she could have another half a cookie instead of the last kiss. Either a lucky guess or a budding algebraist.
Me: Do you have a bank, Lily?
Lily: Nah
Anna: I don't either, I just have a back...yard and my mom has 2 gardens
Anna wanted to go to bed in a tee-shirt and I told her she could either put on a long-sleeved shirt or a sweater on top of her tee-shirt. She proposed a third option: "Maybe you could put a sweater on me and I could take it off when you're not looking in the room."
The kids' new favorite activity is trying a stuffed animal to a rope, lowering it out the 3rd floor window, and bringing it back.
For a while Anna has ended Baby Beluga with "... little white whale on the goat".
And now it's "little white goat on the whale"
Things Lily requested within about a 7 minute span tonight:
Lily: "It would be very sad if I froze to death. You would have to bury me in a coffin"
Me: "We would be very sad if you died. We won't let you freeze."
Anna: [super enthusiastic]: "But you would still have one more child!!!"
Lily: "Dad, I don't think grownups would look good in dresses. But at least they would look good in tutus or skirts."
I guess we can be permitted to wear those, then.
Anna learns words from Lily's story podcast and tries them out when the time seems right. Recent ones:
(smelling a flower in someone else's yard) "It's so enchanted."
(Just now at the playground) "This portapotty is auspicious."
Anna has adopted the classic "My friend doesn't have to do X" technique without actually having many real-life friends, so the friend in question is Tinkerbell.
"Tinkerbell says I can wear shoes to bed."
"Tinkerbell says people don't like to be buckled in their carseats."
She's also started trying the jurisdiction-based approach, as in "People don't go to bed in Massachusetts, they stay up all night. That's how they do it in this town."
Anna: ...and this is my fishing bra
Me: your what?
Anna: My fishing bra!
Me: fishing rod?
Anna: yeah! That's what I said!
Anna: "I will put the noodle in my mouth and break it with my mouth claws"
"I discovered something about my nightgown."
"What have you discovered?"
"It's made of pure magic."
And here I thought I'd made it out of a purple sheet.
Anna: I don't want you to brush my teeth, I want Mama to brush my teeth
Me: that's ok, here's your toothbrush
Anna: I'm going to run away, leaving it on the floor
Despite years of intending to have nothing to do with ballet lessons, I first succumbed to the kids' desire to have sparkly costumes like their cousin Oliver and then to their requests to play "going to ballet lesson" yesterday. We found some videos of a very chipper Australian providing preschool ballet instruction, and the kids were enthusiastic if not precise. After the ballet lesson devolved into rolling on the bed, Anna bit Lily in excitement and it all ended in tears.
Anna: "If there were a hole in the bus and if we were birds, we could fly out. And if we were people we could just jump out with a big jump."
Anna: [singing, Daniel Tiger style] when you're not hungry you don't have to sit at the table... you can play outside forever...
Lily: Well, I know a few things about God. I know that God is a ... is not really a person but a star. I also know that God can hear everyone praying at once because he is God and not a human being.
Me: Do you think God is a woman?
Lily: I think God is a man.
Me: But if He is a star, how do you know he is a man?
Lily: Stars can be boys or girls.
Me: Do you know any girl stars?
Lily: Yes, God has a wife and she's a star and she's a girl. Her name is Lucy.
Me: What's God's name?
Lily: His real name is 'Jefferson God Flashlight' That's his real name but we call him God for short.
Things Lily has said to me recently without preamble:
"You would not do what they do in Rapunzel. You would not lock me up in a tower and tell me I couldn't come out."
"If we were ever swimming in the ocean and we were about to drown and you told me to save myself, I would do my best to swim to shore and then I would go get help."
I felt like a good STEM-conscious parent when I found this set of balances from the kids resale shop, but it got very little interest from my not-terribly-physics-curious kids. Until today, when my very narrative-interested Lily saw a kitchen scale and wanted to play Egyptian Book of the Dead (which she learned about from a podcast, apparently?) She decided to be Anubis, weighing my heart (represented by a rock) against a feather.
Spoiler: she repeated the game several times and I failed to successfully pass into the afterlife every time.
"Do you know why I'm bringing this croquet mallet? It's because I'm afraid of bugs"
"I'm not going to get the ladybugs because they're good for life"
"If I see any bugs I'm going to swing this croquet mallet right around, because you know how I freak out if there are bugs"
Lily: I want to be a queen, so I am dressing as an old beggar woman.
Me: How is that going to help you become a queen?
Lily: People will give me money. No, wait! I'll steal things! Then I will have lots of money!
For people who ask whether we're teaching our kids to be little effective altruists: obviously it's going great and the fairy tales are really helping.
Last night we played "Midnight Party" (a 1980s board game belonging to Allison, involving a haunted costume party in a mansion). Instead of my usual loose adaptation of the rules, Lily insisted she wanted to play by the rules written in the book. Anna was primarily interested in finding places in the illustration for her pieces to sit or lie down. Her turn always involved a lot of us saying, "it's your turn to roll the die, Anna," while she continued her narrative usually ending in "...and they fell fast asleep" or "...all cozy and warm." I think next time I'll propose that Lily and I play by the written rules and Anna just play a parallel game of putting her pieces to bed wherever she wants.
Last night during bedtime snack, out of nowhere:
Anna: Did you grow me?
Me: I grew you in my belly. Isn't that funny? And Lily, I grew you too.
Lily (thoughtful): Did you digest your food and it became a baby?
Me: Well, to make a baby it takes one cell from a mama. A cell is a little tiny bit of you. And one cell from a papa. And when the cells get together, they start to make more cells and it starts to look like a little tadpole, and then it grows arms and legs, and then it grows bigger and bigger until it's a baby. And then the mama squeeeeezes it out of her belly and there's a baby! (both kids are delighted)
Lily: How do the cells get together?
Anna (simultaneously): And then you wrap the baby up in a blanket and give it a pillow.
Me (strategically going with Anna's comment): We did wrap you in a blanket, but you actually don't give pillows to little babies.
Anna (furious): I WANTED A PILLOW
I calmed the situation down by doing impressions of a baby wriggling out of a swaddle (always popular) which seemed to satisfy Anna's deep interest in putting babies to bed with accessories. Also bought me a little more time to figure out how to answer Lily's question.
Overheard from Anna as she's in her bed "falling asleep":
"Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie."
"I'm not talking about pitter-pat, pitter-pat, I'm talking about boom crash bang!"
...
Tonight's (her door is open to let the breeze through, so she knows I can hear her):
"Mooooooom I'm hot. And I need you to tell me the first part of the alphabet."
"Swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming."
"Mom, I'm a princess!"
Anna: hey dad?
Me: yes?
Anna: I'm not talking to *you* dad!
...
Same day: We're at the pond and I'm standing a few feet from Anna in the water. Suddenly:
Anna: Get away from me!
Me: That's rude. If you want more space you can say, "Give me space, please."
Anna: No, I just want to be mean all the time!
Lily: knock knock
Stevie: who's there?
Lily: interrupting earthquake
Stevie: interrupting earthquake who?
Lily: [sits quietly, as in quaker meeting]
Me: "Sorry Anna, you can't have a hotdog until you finish your Nutella and whipped cream"
Not something I expected to find myself saying as a parent! We have a new rule that if they ask for a food we won't go get them a different food until they finish it. This is climbing us out of a bad rut of them sequentially asking for things and not eating any of them.
Anna, crying after picking flowers, throwing them on the ground, and then deciding she wanted more flowers but not those flowers:
"I changed my mind. Now I have the same mind I had the first time."
Lily, discussing Thanksgiving dinner: "I feel sorry for turkeys like David and Al."
Presumably she meant, "Like David and Al, I feel sorry for turkeys."
(We were talking about moths.)
Anna: I don't know where my larva is.
Me: Do you have a larva?
Anna: I don't know which part of my body is the larva.
Me: You don't have a larva. You're not a moth.
Anna (distressed): But you have a larva!
Me: I don't have a larva either. I'm also not a moth.
The kids find the word "bummer" hilarious. Anna has started using it as an insult ("Mom, you're a bummer.") She informed me that a bummer is a person with a bum instead of a neck.
Julia and I were sitting on the couch and Anna came over and snuggled up between us. She closed her eyes and I was just thinking how cute she was when she clarified "I'm pretending to be dead"
Anna, surrounded by crumpled tissues and trying to open a big tin: "I need to open this so I can put garbage in for your doll to eat next year."
Apparently my doll is a prepper. Apparently she also eats tissues?
Lily, after listening to the moral of "Little Red Riding Hood": "You should never talk to strangers. It's dangerous. I don't talk to strangers."
Also Lily, every time we go outdoors, to everyone: "Do you know why I can't run very fast? It's because I fell down at school and my leg hurts. We were playing banana tag but I had to stop playing. This is my scooter. It's red because red is my favorite color. My sister's favorite color is blue and she has a blue scooter."
Anna: "don't brush my teeth because last year you told me we're not going to brush my teeth anymore"
("last year" being Anna's way of saying "sometime in the past, usually yesterday")
Dressup time:
Lily: "I'm going to be a servant girl and you can be the queen. I'll get you a crown. Don't look at my face so you don't see that I'm a cat. And pretend you can't see these wings."
For a servant girl who asked the queen to assign her work, she was remarkably ineffective at cleaning off the coffee table.
Lily: "I'm a fairy in a bad mood, and when fairies are in a bad mood they do bad things."
Lily has started undermining my incentives. Every morning I give Lily and Anna each a penny if they're up and ready for breakfast without me needing to chivvy them. Lily is very into getting a penny and never misses a day, but Anna is slower to get ready and more often gets distracted by toys etc along the way, and sometimes doesn't get a penny. Lily feels sorry for her, and so this morning told Anna: "don't worry, if you don't get a penny I'll give you a treasure". Of course then Anna didn't meet the penny criteria, and Lily gave her a red stone that Anna prefers to a penny...
"One time I woke up in the morning, I woke up from my nap, and I opened my drawer and I looked inside and I saw something that was purple. And I saw that it was shaped like a dress. And I put on the thing that was shaped like a dress, and it was purple."
Anna's explanation of how she came to be wearing a purple dress today. The details of daily life are extremely interesting to three-year-olds.
Me: Anna, what would you like for dinner?
Anna: maybe I could have a baby? Maybe I could have a baby made out of wood for dinner? Or some chocolate. Or water.
Me: what do you want for dinner
Anna: can I eat... hair?
Me: uh, hair is not for eating
Lily: people eat some kinds
Me: uh...
Lily: with long ears, hops along the ground
Anna: "I'm putting up these pieces of sticky paper to celebrate the freedom of our family."
When Jeff asked about what she meant by freedom, she said, "Because me and Oli play together and like each other a lot and want to stay together forever."
Anna, at dinner: Every day I'm going to look at my feet and see if they got big.
Jeff: What will you do if you notice that they've gotten bigger?
Anna: I'll take them off and throw them in the trash.
Anna: Mom, I want to drink the suckle in the honeysuckle.
Me: The nectar?
Anna: Yeah, I want to put the nectar in my mouth and swallow it up. I'm a honeysuckle girl! That's my guess, because I like honeysuckle.
Dad: "A microscope lets you see things that are so small you can't usually see them."
Anna: "Like mouses. And lil baby flowers. [looking at her current project] And cut up pieces of bubble wrap."
Anna: "Look, mom!! The leaves are shining in the sun! I'm going to zoom out there like a bird and get them, and spread them all over the house as leaf-treasure."
Lily is very sad that she isn't sick. "I really really really really really want a virus. I want one so much. I. Want. A. Virus. I want to be sick. I want a virus so much. I really really really really really really really really really really really really want a virus. I * want * a * virus * . I want a viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirus. I want a virus. I really need to be a virus. I really take really really want to be wait no have a virus. I really really really really want a virus. I want a virus so much..."
(Anna is a little bit sick, nothing serious)
...
As we tuck her in: "there's something I want for my birthday"
"What's that?"
"A virus"
[The birthday in question would have been March 2020]
Lily: which would make your sadder: if you didn't have a glue stick, or if I died?
Lily: I don't think we should kill animals for food, it's not fair to them
Anna: Papa, can you go into the kitchen up get me some dead meat? Some dead chicken? Not chicken nuggets, something that looks *chickenous*.
...
"moooooom, *I* want a dead turkey"
On the walk to school today Lily met up with a classmate and got into a debate over whether it's ok for owls to kill mice:
L: I don't think it's fair to the mice.
D: But if the owls didn't eat the mice then they would be hungry
L: The mice are in a field, it's sunny [sic] and then suddenly a great big barn owl swoops down out of the sky and eats them.
D: What should the owls do?
[at this point I stop being able to hear them]
Thoughts from Lily during bedtime tonight:
"My family is more important to me than a thousand coffers of emeralds."
"When you die, can you really be burnt up into ashes?"
"When I die, I don't want to be burnt up because I don't think that sounds very fun. I want to be buried so you can visit me and there will be a stone with my name on it."
"I wish we could be immortal."
"If you got sick and had to be in bed, I'd be nice to you. Like I'd let you watch Moana on my tablet." (A truer measure of her love than coffers of emeralds.)
Lily: [sings song she just made up] What do you think of my song?
Anna: I think it's stupid.
Lily: [outraged crying]
Anna: Songs don't have feelings, so you're allowed to call them stupid.
This is following the letter of the law we taught her (don't call people stupid because it will hurt their feelings, but you can call inanimate objects stupid) but is missing some elements of practical application.
...
Later in the same meal, Anna is eating chicken.
Lily: I don't think it's fair to the chicken.
Anna: The chicken is dead. It doesn't have feelings.
Again technically true, and yet...
Anna: why does a hat have to burp?
Us: why?
Anna: because it has to get out of the head. Like your ears. Or your forehead. Or your nose. Or your eyes.
Me: Anna, how old were you when you were born?
Anna: eight and a half?
Me: what number comes before three?
Anna: two?
Me: what number comes before two?
Anna: one!
Me: what number comes before one?
Anna: ... eight and a half?
Out of nowhere, while I was putting her to bed:
Anna: We have huge cheeks. [feels her cheeks, evaluating] I have medium-huge cheeks.
Laura: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Anna: I want to be a mommy.
Laura: That's a good thing to be.
Anna: But I'm not going to have a husband.
Laura: ...that's your choice to make.
Anna: I don't want to die. I wish I lived in the land of Oz. In the land of Oz people can't die.
Lily: But they can be destroyed.
One of Anna's favorite hiding places is inside our duvet cover. She can undo enough buttons to climb in, but then sometimes gets lost and calls for us to come extricate her.
I put Lily to bed. Twenty minutes later I hear her shouting, so I come upstairs. "No, Jeffy, I was just talking *in my sleep*!"
Anna and Lily have such different reactions to bugs:
Anna: "I wish *I* were a bush covered in snow with lights on me."
Lily: it's ok Anna, I'll be back from school soon. Time will fly by like a phoenix.
Anna: no! You don't have wings!
Walking home from the park after playing ball.
Me: What might happen if the ball rolled into the street and you ran after it?
Anna: A car would run over the ball, and a car would run over me.
Me: We could get another ball. We couldn't get another Anna.
Anna: If you had 25 Annas and 25 Lilys, that would be too much kids for you and Papa. You would pick 2 Lily and Annas, 1 Lily and 1 Anna. And you'd put the other ones out.
Me: Out of what?
Anna: Outside the house.
Lily requested the same Christmas carol she usually does at bedtime.
Me: "And though she lulled a little babe, great was her majesty
And all the flowers and all the stars were not so fair as she."
Lily: all the . . . who was not so fair?
Me: All the stars and flowers were less fair than her. So she's more beautiful than the stars and the flowers.
Lily: Whoah. That's really beautiful. I would marry her.
Me: You should get to know someone before you marry them, not just see that they're pretty.
Lily: I would get to know them for like one or two weeks.
Lily: I think... there is a possibility... that my dinosaur... could be a pencil sharpener.
[The dinosaur turned out to be the kind of eraser you can put on the end of a pencil]
Lily: if you tell Mama about my present I'll be furious
Anna: and you will hit me?
Lily: no, I will just be very mad at you
Same carol as before, different bedtime.
Me: "Oh keep your grimness and your gold - "
Anna: What's grimness?
Me: It's like seriousness. [finishes song, moves on to Lily on the other side of the room] What song do you want, Lily?
Lily: "Silent Night," and I'm grim about that.
2024-06-21 21:00:00
I only learned about Juneberries a few years ago, and they're a bit tricky. Eaten fresh, right off the tree, they have a bunch of subtle flavors that remind me of peach ice tea. If I bake them, though, these flavors mostly go away, leaving an almondy flavor. Which isn't terrible, but also isn't better than almond extract and wastes what's most interesting about these berries.
Eating them raw is great, but it's also fun to make things. Thinking about what might work well that doesn't involve heating them, I decided to try puffs. First we needed some berries, and walked over to the playground that has some Juneberry trees:
This was a bit Blueberries for Sal, with Nora eating the berries almost as fast as I could pick them, but she lost interest after a bit and there were no bears, so soon we were walking home with a good amount.
I took a sheet of puff pastry (butter-based is the tastier option, but it's hard to find and is quite temperature sensitive), cut it into small rectangles, and baked it. Once it was fully cooked, I cut each piece in half. Here's some whole, and then some with the tops cut off:
I piped in slightly sweetened whipped cream, and then put the berries on:
I think they came out pretty well. They're very light and summery, and the subtle Juneberry flavors are there.
2024-06-18 21:00:00
Summary: the watches do the basic things they need to and have let us give our kids more freedom, but there are also a bunch of annoying limitations and they're 36% more expensive than they look. I'm overall happy we got them.
Our older two kids, Lily and Anna, are ten and eight, and are mature enough that they're able to cross streets and handle unusual situations. They can go to the park or a nearby friends house on their own, but we do need to know where they are. Over the past three years we've mostly used three strategies. They can:
Tell us where they're going, and if they want to go somewhere else they need to come home and tell us first.
Bring a walkie-talkie.
Get a friend's parent to text or call us.
Initially they were very excited about the independence of the walkie-talkies, but over time they got frustrated with them. While Julia made them pouches to make carrying them easier, they're still heavy (for a child) and hard to run with. They also make annoying noises, because even with the squelch codes we do sometimes hear static or bits of someone else's conversation. They're also range limited, about 1/4mi, and some of their friends or favorite parks are outside that range.
In mid-May we revisited this:
Positive: a friend had been playing at the park, and Lily invited her to come with us to a family dance. The friend had a smartwatch and called her parent (with me listening in) and got permission to come.
Negative: we had a miscommunication where one of the kids went from the park to a friend's house without letting us know, where they thought the friend's parent had texted us.
After looking at some options, we decided to get the older two smartwatches. The key features we wanted were:
GPS: see where they are
Communication: send and receive messages
Other things, like a calculator or clock, are nice to have but not critical. We talked to other parents, read reviews, and settled on the Verizon Gizmo 3. The bottom line is that while there are a bunch of annoyances we're happy with them, and they do what we need them to do. You can buy them online, and pay $18.30/month for the watch and service, [1] with an extra $35 for the first month.
I set up a place to recharge them, on our charging shelf:
The chargers are attached with adhesive velcro:
Advantages:
Easy to use. The kids had no trouble learning how the watches worked, and the mobile app is fine.
Good enough battery life. While we don't get the three days they're supposedly good for, they've only run out during days when they've had very heavy usage.
They work. The kids can send and receive messages, and we can see where they are.
Disadvantages:
They're limited to 20 contacts. They can only call or message (or be called or messaged by) someone you add as a contact, which is fine. But 20 is way too low: while we haven't hit the limit yet, there are more than 20 people in their lives who it would be good for them to be able to communicate with.
Messaging is via the "gizmohub" app and not regular text messaging. This means contacts need to download the app (mildly annoying) and also that friends who have non-Verizon smartwatches (ex: Apple's) can't message them. This glaring omission that reduces interoperability may or may not meet the legal bar for "anti-competitive", but it definitely pushes friend groups towards all using the same kind of watch. Lily specifically advocates to her friends' parents that they get their kids compatible ones.
The watch has a very small keyboard for sending messages, which is unavoidable given the size of the screen. It requires scrolling horizontally, since you can only fit half a keyboard on the watch at once. Even with tiny kid fingers you still need a lot of patience to send a message!
Which then means it really hurts not having speech-to-text. I get a lot of inconvenient-to-listen to voice messages! While I understand the watch's computation budget is limited, they could instead put speech-to-text into the messaging app or an intermediate server.
The gizmohub app sometimes takes a very long time to open, which feels like multiple minutes but is probably about 30s.
It sends notifications on low battery or when it turns off, but these are not well thought out. For example, one night it woke Lily up at 3am because she had forgotten to take it off to charge. It should have some logic to say that if it's the middle of the night it's worse to wake up the wearer than to run out of charge. It also sends a "the kids watch turned off" notification even if rebooting while charging to install a scheduled update: these should only go out if the watch doesn't come back up within, say, five minutes.
The categories of contact are also not configurable enough. There's four levels: "buddy" (only for watches), "calling contact", "caregiver", and "guardian". I think the biggest omission is that the lowest level (currently "calling contact") should include permission to send and receive messages; I can't see why this was left out. It should also be easy to schedule when a contact should have more permissions/notifications (ex: part-time caregivers should be able to see location when they're responsible for the kid) or fewer (ex: when one parent is traveling they don't need to get low-battery notifications).
The setup experience was pretty painful. The watches arrived quickly, but when I followed the instructions to set them up it told me to call Customer Service. The number it gave me was their main line, and it took talking to three people over the course of an hour before they were able to tell me that because of the way they handle the billing schedule (a) the devices don't work until four days after they ship them out and (b) there's nothing they can do about this.
If you don't have a Verizon phone you also maybe can't add the Gizmos to your My Verizon account to see the billing online without talking to customer service. This took me three sessions with five different representatives and over three hours of talking to them, but I did finally get it set up. It's still a bit mysterious, how we finally got it to work, but I think the problem was that I tried to use the "register account, then add lines" approach which doesn't work for devices that can't receive phone calls. Instead I needed to sign in as if I already had an account, using the phone number, and use the password reset flow. And if you've ever logged into a newly-registered account in this browser session you need to do this in a private browsing session (or, probably, clear browsing data for Verizon). Some sort of cross-account caching issue?
We were supposed to receive a $100 discount on the second watch, but it didn't show up on the bill. When I called they told me this would take several months to start showing up on the bill and I shouldn't worry about it.
Lily would like it if it offered a map on the device.
Some things we've done in the month since getting them that we wouldn't have done without:
With Julia away for a week and a half traveling for work, the kids were able to message back and forth with her and send pictures.
Lily was impatient with us being not ready to leave for an event (0.5mi) where she needed to get there before us. I asked if she wanted to go ahead on her own, with the watch as backup. She didn't end up needing the watch, but it was far enough that I wouldn't have let her do it otherwise.
Anna was sick and couldn't go to swim class, but Lily was well and wanted to go. I could have brought Anna there, in the car, wagon, or just walking, but staying home would be better. The walk is pretty straightforward, and Lily volunteered to walk (0.5mi). She did need to call me at one of the turns, but while we were talking about it a friend in the same swim class came by and they walked the rest of the way together.
Lily wanted to eat an avocado, but we didn't have any. She walked to the grocery store (0.5mi) to get some. This time I spent longer with her discussing the route first, and she didn't have any issues.
We brought the watches to the Marlboro Morris Ale, which was handy in a bunch of ways, but it was tricky explaining to the kids that while the watches (Verizon) worked pretty much everywhere our phones (Google Fi) didn't.
One thing to keep in mind is that they have no authentication, so if your toddler gets ahold of one you might get some strange conversations:
Despite my gripes, overall I'm very happy with the watches: they do their core functionality well enough, which lets the kids do a range of things independently.
[1] It's easy to end up thinking you'll be paying less than this. The watch says it's $4.16/mo for three years (accurate!) and then it looks like it's $10/mo for service:
If you scoll down, which I didn't do when I first went hrough this, you'll see a "Broadband Facts" listing:
Unless you already know how this works (I didn't) you might think that the monthly price is a total, and the provider's additional monthly charges explain the breakdown. But actually the big number at the top is only one component of the monthly price, and the additional charges are on top of that. This is legal but I don't see why it should be. We wouldn't accept a Nutrition Facts label where the top-level "calories" number skipped calories from protein and only included them in a separate breakdown!
Making it even easier to misunderstand what you're signing up for, when you're asked to review your plan charges it just says "$10/mo" without even a fine prine "plus taxes and fees":
And it calculates your monthly bill by adding the "$10/mo" nominal cost to the $4.16/mo device charge, with fine print saying "Monthly surcharges, taxes, and government fees will be added to your bill:
Which is quite hostile, since they know what the additional charges
are and they're just choosing to elide them here to show a smaller
number.
So we're paying $28.28/mo for service for the two watches when we expected to be paying $20/mo. It's only $8.28/mo more, but it still bothers me how sneaky this feels. Combining this with the other fine-print fee, a $35 activation fee, over three years months you're paying 36% more than you'd initially expect. Instead of $510 ($360 for service and $150 for the device) it's $694 (an additional $149 in monthly fees and $35 for activation).
2024-06-17 21:00:00
Yesterday I called my second family dance, which went pretty well! I've stopped calling regular contra dances because I don't enjoy it very much anymore, but these two have been a lot of fun and I'm up for doing more.
As usual we played with an open band, led by Ricci, and this time Nora decided to play bass:
Despite the flyers, no one from the kids classes showed up. They've had much more luck specifically inviting one or two friends. On the other hand, it probably didn't help that it was father's day.
Here's what I called, which borrowed a lot from last time. Since that was almost two years ago, though, I think it's fine!
La Bastringue, variant where you keep your partner. Same dance I started with last time, and as before I didn't do a walk through and called while I danced. It went well!
The Low-Backed Car. Same as last time. Another good dance!
Heel-Toe Polka. This is the only dance I called where you don't keep your partner, but I told people it was fine to dance tandem. This dance is half-length, so it's important to make sure the band plays AB.
Water break. It was hot!
Bridge of Athelone. We had slightly too many couples for the music at ~10, but it worked ok and we didn't get off the music.
The Blob Dance. Would have been slightly better with more dancers, but it was fine.
Sasha. This one Lily called; her first time! She did great! Probably the most popular dance we do, and the only one I have kids requesting by name.
Water break. We like to end Sasha unreasonably fast, so it was welcome.
Jacob's Potato. This dance has a whole-set circle in a lonyways dance, which is fun.
Galopede. I hadn't been planning to do eight dances in an hour, but the timing worked out for it. This was slightly too close to the other longways dances we'd done; I should work up a dance that is a bit more distinct.
It was a good time!
2024-06-09 21:00:00
I'm going to be calling another family dance in a week, and Lily and Anna wanted to make flyers to advertise it. I wrote out a sheet with the key details they might want to include:
Lily wanted to do hers on the computer, and it ended up being primarily about learning Inkscape:
Anna did hers by hand, and was very into the drawing:
2024-06-07 21:00:00
I don't like the number seven. Well, really the name of the number seven. All the other single digit numbers are single syllable, and seven has to go and take two. Seventy and seventeen have the same problem. What can we do?
I think the two main candidates are "sev" (dropping the second syllable) and "sen" (dropping the first coda and second onset). While I find "sen" slightly nicer on the tongue, I think "sev" is more promising because it feels like a better short form.
It feels like we ought to be able to switch to calling it "sev", where some people just start saying that and other people understand them? I've been playing around it, but every time I do my toddler Nora laughs at me as if I'm being ridiculously over the top: "you said sev!!" Does not bode well for a low-key migration.
2024-06-06 21:00:00
One verbal approach I often find useful with little kids is to offer them the opportunity to complete a phrase. Compare:
Parent: It's time to brush teeth!
Toddler: I no want brush teef!
vs:
Parent: It's time to brush...
Toddler: Teef!
Similarly, "the dirty tissue goes in the...", "when we get home it will be time to put pee in the...", "it's time to eat...", etc. My experience is that, at the right age, kids just really love getting to complete things, and this somehow spills over into their attitude towards the thing they're completing. Or having it come from their mouth somehow manufactures buy-in, or skips the normal opportunity for them to (as is also common at this age) say no?
One nice safeguard this has is that while it's mildly manipulative, once they lose their joy at completing things it stops working. So it doesn't have the risk that you'll keep using it at an age where (in my opinion) manipulating kids starts to be a problem.
2024-06-04 21:00:00
Working first on my plucked electronic instrument and now my hardware whistle synthesizer I've been ordering custom circuit boards ("PCBs"). Once the design digitized in KiCad ( tutorial), the timeline looks like:
This is really impressive: for ~$30 I can go from having a fragile breadboarded circuit on my desk to a professional quality circuit board in less than a week.
I think a big reason why Nell and I never finished the RS232 to ethernet project is that while we were very enthusiastic about the project initially that faded during the months we waited for the PCB to arrive. Five days is still not as good as overnight, but it's fast enough to maintain decent momentum on a project.
[1] This one was slower because of a holiday
there.
