How Do We Know?

13:44 Saturday, 23 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 45.14°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 18.41mph
Words: 466

I guess one of the virtues of getting old is that I no longer worry very much about questions like the ones posed in this post in The Marginalian. There was a time in my life when these were urgent questions. Not so much anymore.

And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise — a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us, in the sublime words of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “ill-prepared for the privilege of living.” All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become. “Our lived lives,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his magnificent manifesto for missing out, “might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.” We perform this existential dance of yeses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to want?

Much of the course of our lives is set at the moment of our conception. None of us got to choose our parents, their genes, their culture, the culture of the society they were a part of, which may not have been the culture they were born into, but is the one that will forever shape you.

Our consciousness, our experience of being, is shaped by things beyond our control. It is that experience of being that shapes our desires, and that is imposed or imprinted on us in our growing-up years. Discovering that this is all artifice, not something fixed in stone, can be liberating; but it remains present. It will always be there. It will always exist as a form of gravity, which takes effort to overcome.

So we often don't.

All that is to say Kierkegaard was correct, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

If you don't have the virtue of being old, it may be useful to consider that desire is the source of much suffering, when suffering is experienced as the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be.

So then, what is the utility of desire? Much of it is instilled in us by culture, for the purposes of culture and society and economics. How does it serve you?

Do your best.

The rest is not up to you. It's challenging enough to discover what your "best" might be.

And don't be attached to results, attachment being a form of desire.

Just try to do your best. That's all anyone can do. All anyone can ask.

It'll all be in the wake soon enough anyway.

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Opinionated

08:59 Saturday, 23 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 47.55°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 15.05mph
Words: 393

MacOSX Guru (alternatively macosxguru, they go by both appellations) has some thoughts about BBEdit 16.

This is the kind of "review" post I enjoy reading. I have BBEdit. I can't say I use it extensively. I think the Shortcuts piece might be intriguing.

For a guy who may seem to write a lot, I don't have very strong opinions about text editors these days. I did have opinions about "word processors," but I can't recall what they were anymore. Except we all hated Word.

Most of what I write is in Tinderbox. Second most is probably in Mail. Third is probably Messages. I'll occasionally use TextEdit.

I have no appreciation for markdown, and I fail to grasp the appeal it seems to have for so many people. I grew up with "plain text," beginning with a teletype for chrissakes. I like styled text. I'm not big on headings. Should I add headings to blog posts? I don't think so. Maybe I'd feel differently if I did.

And tables. Maybe if I used a lot of tables in the marmot.

And in the era of Unicode, what the hell is "plain text" anyway?

Keybindings? The only ones I remember are for cut, copy and paste; italics, bold and underline. That's about it. Keyboard navigation? Arrow keys or the trackpad. And I can command-tab with the best of them. For whatever reason, my mind doesn't adapt well to keybindings. It's not like I haven't tried.

Maybe it's a tactile thing? Or maybe the keyboard maestros (not to be confused with the app) are all frustrated pianists? Maybe there's a reward pathway in the brain for manipulating keys that I lack.

I do seem to have some facility for spatial interactions. Whenever Apple moves something, or changes its appearance, it pisses me off to no end.

And if I do something that requires a menu interaction a lot, I'll try to figure out a way to do it differently. Like making a web link in a Tinderbox note. I don't know if it ships with it, or it's something I created, but control-option-command-L will invoke that dialog; but it was easier to use PopClip, which is probably a spatial bias. I know where it'll appear, and where the button I'm looking for will be.

Different (key)strokes for different folks, I guess.

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It's a Journey

07:24 Saturday, 23 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 49.78°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 9.26mph
Words: 508

I feel as though I've been neglecting the marmot. The new house is consuming much of my attention, and it's a bit exhausting.

We're learning a lot of lessons that we will almost certainly never need to know again, so I'll pass a few along here in case anyone reading the marmot wants to design and build a house.

Here's a tip: If you're using a designer to draw plans, and an engineer or architect to sign them, make sure they use the same CAD software. Or plan to add about $1K to the cost of the review when the architect redraws the plans.

It's a long story. I'll spare you.

AKMA posted a wonderful story the other day.

The weather today is remarkably similar to the weather reported on this day a year ago. Wet and rainy. The weather data in the current posts is correct for this location.

It was nice yesterday, so I spent a lot of time outside with the weed-whacker, cleaning up here and there. The construction driveway has created a couple of islands where the mower can't reach, so we'll need to get those with the weed-eater. The county came by and mowed the side of the ditch nearest the road, so I went down into the ditch and cut down the growth in the center and the side nearest the lawn. I only did the right half of the property, divided by the driveway. I'll do the other half when it stops raining.

I'll miss The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I never stayed up to watch it at night. We don't have cable here, and our over the air reception is minimal, but I watched it nearly every morning, at least his opening monologue.

I'll never watch whatever it is CBS is replacing it with.

I got an email yesterday from Amazon that my Prime subscription would expire tomorrow. That made me happy. I haven't bought anything from Amazon since February when they started that little mini-boycott. Screw Bezos.

Again, I'll encourage anyone who hasn't already done so to remove all retail apps from your phone. Sure it makes it convenient to shop, but they're gathering so much more data about you just from having the app on your phone. You can always visit the web site using your browser and shop that way.

I went to my first Sustainable Hector meeting the other night. Starting to stretch my volunteer muscles around here, get to know some people. They had a Watershed Forum presentation the next night, talking about hazardous algal blooms. Can't seem to get away from those. There's a dumpster day/swap meet coming up in June that I'll volunteer at.

We got our permit from the watershed protection department. Had the septic tank pumped out, peered into it and decided it was functioning properly (I should hope so!), so now we get to put another one in for the new house and tie it into the existing sand filter.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

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Busy

07:01 Friday, 22 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 40.23°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 2.53mph
Words: 463

Been a busy week. Heavy on the HVAC. The "conventional wisdom" is that I shouldn't run the air-to-water heat pump in reverse to cool the floors because of condensation. Everyone thinks a fan coil would be better, because it's built to handle condensation. But it's something that's blowing air, which means it's something to clean and you can't sit near it.

I've got two contractors that are going to try to put together quotes for a solution that doesn't involve a fan coil. The key is going to be the dehumidifier, and managing the dew point. I think that the worst risk is opening the sliding glass doors on a hot humid day when we've been actively cooling and having a bunch of moist air come in. Might get some condensation on the floor by the door, which would be a potential slip hazard. Maybe. Warm air rises. How quickly does it rise when it enters through the door?

In an effort to talk me out of it, one contractor was posing the scenario of having the windows open during the summer. I said that if the windows are open, it's nice out and we're not cooling the floor.

We have three months out of the year when we're, potentially, actively cooling; and a few days here and there that are outliers, like the other day when it was over 90*F here. In May. A week or so after it snowed. But with the thermal mass of an ICF house, we're not going to be cooling during those brief spikes of hot weather. The house just won't get that hot.

When it's more consistently hot, we're keeping the doors and windows closed, we'll cool the floor and manage the dew point.

People love their ducts and their blowing air. We'll have some of that of course, with the ERV and the dehumidifier. But those aren't the kind of high-velocity, high volume airflows that an air handler puts out.

It'd be a no-brainer in the southwest where the air is normally dry.

One contractor I called, who came highly recommended, told me air-to-water heat pumps don''t work in winter. He said he'd installed three and he replaced all of them with boilers. I asked him who the manufacturer was and he couldn't tell me. That told me all I needed to know. He said if I wasn't putting a propane boiler, he wasn't interested.

Well, neither was I.

It's troubling when everyone says you're making a mistake. But there's just not a lot of experience with hydronic cooling in an ICF home. Everybody is going on their experience with stick-framed houses with no thermal mass.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll change my mind.

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The Fifth Fundamental Force of the Universe

07:21 Tuesday, 19 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 66.56°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 6.53mph
Words: 611

Is irony.

While I was eating my breakfast, I tried to catch up on the blogs I follow. I didn't get far, because one of the first ones was this one from Charlie Stross. It was another one of those record-scratch moments when you just can't go on because of the discontinuity.

Possibly my worst miss is that I completely discounted the profound social impact of LLMs (or so-called "AI"), not simply as a massive technology sector investment bubble and happy hunting ground for snake oil salesmen and grifters, but as a corrosive influence on population-level critical thinking. I should have seen it coming--I read Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason back in the 1980s--but I didn't recognize just how unable to see past the ELIZA illusion most people would prove to be.

I'm ok with the AI/LLM bias, he's an author and I'm pretty sure they all feel as though they've been victimized/violated by the AI companies; and they probably have a point of some kind, though I don't think it's of the magnitude they all seem to think it is.

No, it was the "corrosive influence on population-level critical thinking," that made me drop my fork.

What the fuck is "population-level critical thinking"? Is it just an inarticulate, unfortunate construction? Does he believe that "populations" possess "critical thinking" abilities? Does he think everyone in a population possesses critical thinking abilities? Really?

If populations had critical thinking abilities of some kind, would we even be where we are today?

This kind of sweeping assertion makes me question the "critical thinking" abilities of the author!

Ironic, ain't it?

Didn't the study of economics rely on the idea of the "rational man," or "rational actor"? Is that still a thing? I hope not.

I was listening to a podcast about hydronic heating and cooling on my trip down to Pennsylvania. One of the speakers made a point that I hadn't really thought about before, though it's similar to one made in other contexts.

He offered something to the effect that people will "do their research," intensely study all the specifications of their prospective car purchase (or any consumer purchase that probably has some identity significance), but when it comes to the equipment and features of a home that maintain the indoor environment, the place where they live, eat, sleep and breathe, they know nothing. All they know is that they want to be warm, or they want to be cool.

Rational actors. Critical thinkers.

Whatever cognitive abilities they possessed were hijacked by cultural cues and marketing messages at birth.

This notion of "critical thinking" as an ability inherent in any individual is a fantasy. A conceit.

It's bullshit.

It's a skill. Like playing the piano. (I hasten to add that you can be very skilled in any number of disciplines, and still lack critical thinking ability.) It takes training. It takes practice. It requires resources. It's demanding. It's hard.

And almost nobody does it.

All this pearl-clutching about our diminishing "critical thinking abilities" in the wake of AI/LLMs is baseless.

Let's make "critical thinking" a skill that we want everyone to master at some level, like literacy, and then we can talk. It's not even a social or cultural priority. Most people, like Charlie, just seem to assume everyone has it! They don't. Maybe it would be nice if they did, because maybe then we wouldn't have elected Donald Trump the first time.

Anyway, become the change you wish to see in the world.

Or something.

The beat that can be counted is not the beat, but it goes on...

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Change the World?

08:33 Monday, 18 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.17°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 7.05mph
Words: 659

At yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, something came up about the nature of our present circumstances, and the necessity to "change the world."

In recent years, I've had little cause to reflect much here on "the world" and our role in it. That may seem incongruous, given the number of posts I've written about "the world." But few of those, that I can recall anyway, had anything to do with "our role" in particular.

And we do have a role. It's just not what most people probably think of when they think about it, which is why most people think about "changing the world."

The epiphany that came to me many years ago, grappling with my own "existential crisis," is this:

We are not here to change the world. The world is here that we may learn to change ourselves.

This realization came as a consequence of shedding the illusions of "magical thinking." That external factors were responsible for my suffering or happiness. For much of my first marriage, I was profoundly unhappy. But I would cling to the idea that "it'll get better when..." (Some change of circumstances.)

I learned that "it" never "gets better" until you get better.

We have responsibilities to "the world," but our main responsibility is to ourselves. It's hard to live up to that responsibility if you focus all of your attention outward. This is why I say that Marc Andreeson is a fool when he says that he doesn't "believe" in introspection. Or he's simply declaring his abdication of any responsibility for his own actions. Possibly both.

Much of how we regard technology is also a form of magical thinking. The internet triumphalists, "small pieces, loosely joined," the Cluetrain™ crowd, and all of the folks that have come after them, who believed and believe that "this changes everything" promoted magical thinking for the attention rewards. The prophets of a new "golden age."

Bullshit.

Technology changes how we do things. In general, it compresses them in time and expands them in space. It does not change what we do. Our problems lie in the areas of human behavior. Human nature. What we do. Technology does not alter that.

We recently witnessed the Supreme Court of the United States dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Nullify it. They have legitimized racial gerrymandering to disenfranchise minority voters and to secure the power of white supremacists.

Why? Because laws (a form of technology) can't change the human heart. They can mitigate some of its worst defects, but they can't change it. And when you have a majority of members on the highest court in the land harboring those defects, then the law is meaningless.

Bigotry, hatred and ignorance persist in the world, because the people harboring those toxic, misguided notions have little reason to interrogate them. Our culture hasn't found a way to instill the values of tolerance and understanding that isn't perceived as some form of scolding, or self-righteousness.

Anyway, you may have heard the aphorism, "Become the change you wish to see in the world." It's often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. Because we have the Internet and we're a cynical, skeptical lot, we have a web site devoted to investigating the origin of quotations.

There you will find this quotation from Gandhi, which captures everything if not as succinctly:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

You're not responsible for "the world." You're responsible for yourself. If everyone lived up to their own responsibilities, the world would likely be a much better place.

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Sunset 5-16-26

16:52 Sunday, 17 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 80.51°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 49% Wind: 5.82mph
Words: 305

Pretty sunset last night.

We had breakfast this morning at the Burdett volunteer fire department's firehouse. It was a fundraiser for the department, so we wanted to participate.

Arriving about an hour after it opened, it was a pretty full venue. We paid at the door and were told to seat ourselves and someone would be around to take our orders. We found a couple of seats and waited to make our order.

We didn't have long to wait when a firefighter came by and asked us how we'd like our eggs. Apparently, you didn't have to order the French toast, pancakes, sausage and bacon, you got it all whether you wanted it or not! For $12!

After he left, I reached into my pocket to pull out my phone, which prompted me to look around and see how many people were on their phones.

No one.

It was almost shocking. I didn't see anyone staring at a screen. Everyone was talking to their neighbors.

Mitzi recognized a couple of folks when we came in, so she stood up and went over to chat with them. The groups on either side of us were pretty engaged in their own conversations. After our food arrived, Mitzi engaged one of the gentlemen seated across from us. He was wearing an Air Force baseball cap and she asked if he'd served.

Well, that was all it took. We got most of his life story after that! Nice guy. Interesting guy. But he obviously enjoyed getting to tell his story. We eventually were introduced to his wife.

We excused ourselves and on the way out I supported a local church with a contribution. They were having a bake sale, but the last thing I needed was another cake or pastry! (Though I really wanted one.)

I love it here.

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Now With Reduced Bandwidth!

06:07 Friday, 15 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 44.44°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 7.43mph
Words: 936

I spent the last few days at what my friends and I call a "Beer Summit." This was the third such gathering in the past several years, the most recent one before this one was three years ago, which was the first one I attended.

We had more guys last time, just four of us this time. We get together at an RV and cabin campground in Barnesville, PA. Last time I was there I contracted Lyme disease (not at the campground, probably during a hike at a state park).

I made an error when I was reviewing my route choices from Apple Maps. I thought I was selecting the same route that brought me to Barnesville. It avoided Route 81 and kept me on mostly divided highways. But apparently my fat fingertip selected the "shortest" route, which, to my dismay, kept me on back country roads for the entire route.

It might have been a pleasant drive, except for the state of my bladder about 90 minutes into it. I was in a wooded area with no real shoulder on the road, with a 55mph speed limit. I asked Siri to find me a gas station, she told me to find a cell connection. Sometime after I passed the highest point on my route, 2490 feet according to the sign I passed, I spotted a kind of turnout not far up ahead. As luck, or lack thereof, would have it, there was a car right on my bumper. I signaled and braked hard, he or she swerved to pass me and I pulled off onto the dirt.

I wasn't going to wade into the weeds to go find a tree, conscious as I am of ticks, so I stood there next to the truck and relieved myself. No cars passed for what felt like interminable minutes. Comfort restored, I resumed my journey. I was still cursing myself for picking the wrong route.

All three routes were about the same amount of time, three hours and a few minutes. The shortest route must have been significantly shorter, because much of it was in towns and villages with speed limits of 25, 35 and 40 mph. (None of which were in the section of the route where my bladder began to complain.) The benefit, though, was the fuel economy. When I got home and shut off the truck, it reported 46mpg! That was since the stop to pee, which was shortly after passing the highest point on the route. So presumably it was all downhill from there as well. I didn't note the fuel economy when I stopped the first time because I had other things on my mind. That was presumably all uphill, so that fuel economy was likely not as impressive.

When I got home there were two excavators and a bulldozer in the yard. Not long after that, Brad arrived with a dump truck and a load of stone he was placing in a French drain he'd extended. He mentioned that his partner with the shale pit would be arriving soon, and they'd begin building the driveway.

We'd altered the route of the driveway to allow for a more gradual approach. Brad had spoken with a guy who drives one of those cement pump trucks and he took a look at the proposed driveway and said it wouldn't work. So we're routing it around and behind the garage and taking a wider, less steep approach.

Not long after they began removing the soil, the internet went out. Brad thought the fiber went under the driveway farther back. It was only buried about six inches deep anyway. They're supposed to be out here sometime today to fix it.

While we were in Barnesville, we watched the plebes climb Herndon Monument in a ceremony that's been taking place since 1950 on YouTube. I was using my laptop, linked to my phone's wifi hotspot. So I managed to use all of my hotspot data in Barnesville. Awesome. I'm running on about 500kbps "reduced bandwidth" now. Good enough for text, I guess.

On the drive down and back, I listened to a couple of podcasts about hydronic heating and cooling, and I'm now persuaded it's really the best solution for maintaining comfort in the house. It's pretty much standard practice in much of Europe, and though it was invented in America, it's hardly used here in residential construction anymore.

The epiphany was decoupling. I'm not an expert (yet), but the use of a buffer tank, allows you to make your hot or cold water when it's most efficient (least costly), store it, and then use it when it's required. This is ideal for people with time of use pricing, and for people with rooftop (or yard mounted) solar arrays. Even without those considerations, you can simply cool or heat the water during the time of day when it's most efficient to do so based on the outdoor temperature.

Similarly, moving heat is more efficient with small circulator pumps rather than large fans.

And then there are the climate implications, as current refrigerants have three orders of magnitude global warming potential over CO2. A mono block air to water heat pump uses a fraction of the refrigerant that a mini-split uses, which must pump refrigerant long distances into the house.

It does come at a price premium, partly because we lack the economies of scale in America with few qualified installers.

I told I was back onboard with Team Radiant, and he's excited. Now I just have to figure out how to do this without busting the budget.

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Lifebox

20:16 Monday, 11 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 45.16°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 5.57mph
Words: 295

Jacob Evans linked to the Apple Blossom post, and mentioned that he has his own Tinderbox everything bucket, called Lifebox. (Which auto-correct insists is lifeboat.)

Lifebook would be a good name too, I think. But I get the Tinderbox connection.

I suspect my "Apple Blossom" title was rather too subtle for most people. Apple's Advanced Technology Group planted a seed...

If you have to explain it, it's definitely too subtle.

The marmot is my more "personal" journal, though much of it is missing because of the years I spent in the "social media" void. And, frankly, I think on the platforms, I was never as open as I am here in the marmot. On the platforms, I always had the sense of having an audience I had to please. In the marmot, I'm largely unaware of the audience. I know there is one, but I have no idea how large it is, so it never really intrudes into what I choose to write about.

In the previous post, I deliberately omitted mentioning the name of the design firm and the architect, just because it's probably not the kind of thing that is important in the context of the story, and because it's perhaps not especially flattering to either party. Everyone is trying to do their best, so a little grace is appropriate.

If, as I'm very confident, everything works out and we're happy with our build and our experience, we'll share all the names. This has been a learning curve for many of us. Brad has never gone through an entire design process, usually just receiving a set of plans and then building to them. So it's been a worthwhile experience for him as well.

Late night for blogging. I've got to get packing.

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Busy Day

19:34 Monday, 11 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 46.63°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 5.57mph
Words: 896

Mitzi's off on a five-day excursion (a perfectly usable word, needlessly sullied by our moronic monarch) to Maine. I took her to the place where they were meeting the bus at 7:00 a.m. this morning.

After that, I texted our builder to see if he planned to work on the driveway today, and did I need to move the Maverick.

No need to move the Mav, he was here this morning with the electrician to see if they could pull up the power cable from the pump. He wants to bury it in conduit before they dump several tons of shale over it. They couldn't pull it up, so he went home and came back with his excavator.

While he was working on the pump power, I replied to the design firm on a couple of issues that were outstanding from us. The design firm wanted to confirm that we wished to use parallel chord trusses in the vault, and six-inch concrete core in the basement. They also wanted to know if we wished to use their structural engineering partner, or one of our own locally. We had done some investigation, found a local architect/engineer and were convinced that six-inch cores were code compliant, given adequate reinforcement. So I gave all that to the design firm.

Well, they called Brad the Builder, and again pushed back on the six-inch cores. They said they googled the firm I'd told them we'd be using, and couldn't find much of an online presence, which I guess was a red flag for them. So they asked us to pass along the proposal from their engineering partner and ask our architect if he was prepared to provide the same level of services. And, OBTW, could he please send a sample marked-up basement plan so they could see an example of his work?

We said we'd pass the proposal along and ask for a sample, and I did so in an email to him.

Brad had spoken to the architect a few times before, but I hadn't. I tried calling him earlier in the morning, but it went to voicemail. After I sent the email, Brad tried calling him again and he picked up this time.

Whoa! Apparently he'd read my email, and was very offended that he was having to send a sample of his work to a draftsman before he'd get the job! He's got a very pronounced Spanish accent, and it was hard to follow him sometimes, but we did have a good conversation. We learned that he had designed ICF homes before, he knows the code, he stands behind his designs and his work, he's been doing this for 40 years. I think he's Spanish, because he's very familiar with European building techniques, they use a lot of concrete over there.

After that exchange, I wanted to talk to the guy Brad knows who recommended him. So we called Bob the Builder and asked him about the guy. He had nothing but good things to say, and that he'd been working with him for over five years.

So, called back the design firm and said he was our guy, and they were all "Ok, we'll make it work," and so on. They said they hoped to have the plans off to him by tomorrow morning. Yay!

While we were phoning back and forth, we got a call from the firm that will probably build the deck over the walkout basement and the covered porch. Good conversation with him. Sounds like it'll be pricey. He said their engineers almost always work with the project engineer/architect, so that wouldn't be an issue. I sent him over the most recent draft of the plans so they could work up a proposal.

That was only about two hours of back-and-forth, but it was kind of exhausting!

Tomorrow, I'm heading down to Pennsylvania to meet up with a few of my Naval Academy classmates for a "Beer Summit." (None of us drinks very much anymore, but we cling to our youth.) It's only two nights at a cabin-camping location. We'll cook out and do some local sightseeing. Last time we did it we toured the Yuengling brewery and an old anthracite coal mine. Have to come up with something new this time.

I'll be back on Thursday, Mitzi comes home on Friday and Brad should be building the driveway on Friday as well.

Then we've got to get the septic tank pumped and inspected to get approval from the watershed protection agency. We've got to get emergency services to give us an "address" for the 911 system, so they have to come out and look at the property and they're backed up two weeks. We have to have the driveway completed before the electric utility will come out, and I don't know how far out they're booked; but we won't need them for the building permit, I think. We need them eventually, but not before the permit.

Brad needs the plans to finish his quote. I'm preparing for sticker shock. Mitzi thinks we can get this done for a little more than $500K. I'm thinking it's going to be more like $600K plus. Doable, but painful. Gotta count on not dying before the thing is finished.

But the beat goes on...

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Platner Panic

09:44 Monday, 11 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 48.33°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 56% Wind: 5.61mph
Words: 176

David French is clutching his pearls over Graham Platner. (Gift link.)

Comments were closed by the time I got to it, so here's what I would have written:

Platner is a symptom, not the disease. And as symptoms go, I think he's mild.

French ignores the larger problem: Why don't people of unimpeachable character and integrity run for office?

Sure, politics today is a cesspool. Who wants to beg for money, endure the scrutiny, the attacks, assemble a team, track the paperwork and the endless hours campaigning? Evidently, not the people of character French would prefer. Sure, Mills didn't have the baggage, but her age was not an asset. And surely it isn't the case that the only people with character and integrity are over 60?

I'm fine with Platner. At least he has the courage to step into the ring and endure the process.

But the real problem is the lack of engagement by broad swathes of American society from whom we might expect to draw more attractive candidates.

The rot runs deep.

Very deep.

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Apple Blossom

13:49 Sunday, 10 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 59.77°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 48% Wind: 12.39mph
Words: 1138

There's a small, scrawny apple tree at the back end of our property. Last fall I saw one apple on it. I did not try it. I don't know if it had more fruit and the deer ate them all or not. But there are a lot of blossoms on it today, so I'll try to keep a closer eye on it.

Last week I was thinking about data. Stuff. Well, information anyway. Things too trivial to remember, but too important to forget. I got that phrasing from Thomas Erickson, though I don't think it appears in the paper he wrote about Proteus. Way back in the latter years of the previous century Erickson had a web site, maybe even a blog, I don't remember. But I recalled his description of an electronic notebook he created using Hypercard.

To this day, I recall reading about that notebook with excitement and admiration. It was something that appealed to me deeply, and summoned all the optimism and enthusiasm I had back then for how computers could make our lives better.

Well, fast forward a generation or so, and I think I've finally gotten around to building my own version of Proteus, Captain's Log.

The impetus for building Captain's Log came from some success I was having automating the marmot, working with guys like Jack Baty, and the folks at the Tinderbox meetups and at the forum. The inspiration was Proteus.

Having created it, using it has been, well, a hit or miss affair. Mostly miss.

But today, it's becoming an integral part of my life, to the point where I'm beginning to alter my daily habits to better exploit its value. (I found the link to the Proteus paper in Captain's Log, because I knew I'd bookmarked it. Searching on "notebook" surfaced it quickly, though it's clear I need to do some organization.)

For most of my life, I've been blessed with a fairly decent memory. I seldom experienced a problem or embarrassment as a result of forgetting something. I seldom made notes, didn't really keep a calendar. I played with "personal digital assistants," like the Newton, PalmOS products from Handspring, even that Windows OS that went into handheld devices. "CE"? But they were never an integral part of my life

These days my memory, "ain't what it used to be." I don't know if that's a consequence of aging, or retirement. When I was "working," I was exercising my "working memory," regularly. I've been retired since 2013, and it just hasn't been as important to remember things, and I find that I don't do it as well anymore.

Enter Captain's Log, and information "too trivial to remember, but too important to forget."

I mentioned last week that I was developing a Tinderbox document for the new house, planning to capture all the information about the design and construction of the house. It could eventually become something of an owner's manual. Either for me, or for whoever ends up owning the place after we're gone.

I started writing AppleScripts to capture information about the house. This wasn't especially challenging, because they were largely duplicating those I'd written for Captain's Log. But that prompted a bit of reflection. Did I want to have two ways to capture information, having to kind of mentally shift gears at the time of capture, trying to recall which script to invoke.

So I've been working a bit on both the New House Project, and Captain's Log, adding some additional prototypes, changing some of the built-in automations, while this capture process marinated in the back of my mind.

I've decided that I'm going to perform all capture with Captain's Log. In its original conception, I'd intended to include a review of each days entries, either at the end of the day or the first thing the following morning. Like much else, it was mostly aspirational.

But I discovered I could copy a note from the Log and paste it into NHP, without losing any of the attributes. I may have known this before, but it's never been something I've done regularly with Tinderbox.

So the process now is to capture an email, a phone call, a web page, a file using Captain's Log, and each morning, review the previous day's entries and copy the ones relevant to the house over to the NHP document. During the review, prior to copying, I can add tags such that when pasted into an Inbox container, action code within the Inbox will place the note in the relevant container.

I still have more work to do to refine the structure of the New House Project. As it's currently constructed, I have no agents, just containers. Agents can gather aliases of notes based on the content of their attributes, including tags. So an HVAC agent would gather all notes of any type that contain either an HVAC tag, or perhaps I'll create a "System" attribute, that might associate that note with a particular house system, like HVAC, septic, plumbing, water treatment, electricity, network, lighting, etc.

I modified the AppleScript I used to log email to include an attribute for the date received. That hadn't been important before, but I want to have a chronological record of all the email correspondence in the NHP document. So I had to create that attribute and add a couple of lines to the AppleScript to capture that date and place it in the Tinderbox note, and I had to alter the prototype to make Received a displayed attribute.

NHP is what's driving the requirement for a daily review, because I'm capturing so much data about the house. But it affords the side benefit that I get more use out of the other notes I'm creating, by adding appropriate tags, additional text, due dates and so on in the course of reviewing them. So Captain's Log improves through regular use and review, and NHP becomes a valuable record of the construction of our new home.

I've used Tinderbox for more than twenty years, but for nearly all that I've used it as a kind of content management system for the marmot, and for Groundhog Day before it. I'd play with different documents from time to time, but nothing ever stuck from a utility standpoint. This has.

There are lots of "everything bucket" apps. I have Eagle Filer and DevonThink, but I don't use them. I think this is where long years of using one app can begin to pay dividends, as I don't have to learn another app's philosophy, or user interface. I mostly get Tinderbox, though it does trip me up from time to time.

Anyway, kind of excited. Something to do that feels productive, empowering. So much so that, here it is, an 1100+ word post!

Thanks, if you've read all of it!

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Green Acres

11:51 Sunday, 10 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 55.71°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 8.1mph
Words: 36

This is from three days ago.

Went to the gym this morning. I'm still recovering. Called Mom to wish her a happy Mother's Day. Now I just want to take a nap.

The beat goes on...

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Meta is Dying

11:48 Sunday, 10 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 55.22°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 60% Wind: 8.1mph
Words: 3

Good. (Gift link.)

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Curious Cows

08:29 Saturday, 9 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 47.35°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 8.37mph
Words: 10

From Wednesday's walk. Rainy again today.

The beat goes on...

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Testing AppleScript Post

12:14 Friday, 8 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 43.84°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 2.77mph
Words: 90

This is a test of an AppleScript that allows me to enter a blog post into the marmot in sort of a "headless" fashion. I can remain in whatever app I happen to be in when the inspiration strikes, and make a short post.

It seems to work. I wrote it some time ago and haven't seemed to use it since.

I'm kind of doing an audit of AppleScripts to see which ones work, which ones are useful and which ones I may want to assign to a keyboard shortcut.

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It's Snowing

09:28 Friday, 8 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.26°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 3.29mph
Words: 4

Yep. Big fluffy flakes.

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Politics

08:26 Friday, 8 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 40.84°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 4.14mph
Words: 442

I haven't been blogging much about the unfolding catastrophe that is the destruction of American democracy. Mostly because the new house has captured most of my attention, but also because it is so totally depressing.

This country is ruled by bad faith, zero-sum mentalities, wealthy élites, and an electorate that is misinformed, ignorant and indifferent. They know something is wrong, but they can't be troubled to do anything about it. Other than post on social media, I suppose.

I don't see this situation improving. I think the trajectory is firmly established. We're being sucked into a gravity well of greed, corruption, incompetence and malfeasance. I don't see a dynamic emerging that will provide enough thrust to alter that trajectory.

It's astonishing to me how brazenly corrupt the Supreme Court is. Roberts' protest that they're just "interpreting the law," exhibits gross contempt for our intelligence. We can believe our own lyin' eyes, Mr. Chief "Justice".

I watched a video about Graham Platner. I like what I saw and heard. I think it's encouraging, I just don't think it's enough.

I'm glad we moved to New York. I hope it can remain a relatively "blue" state, and I'm grateful that I have the opportunity to contribute to that effort in some meaningful way. It's not all sunshine and roses here, but at least you don't feel powerless. I suppose the Trump-loving "conservatives," (let's just call them what they are, fascists) feel as though they are shut out of power, but that's a good thing, isn't it?

I'm grinding my way through The Third Reich at War, and it's very similar to The German War inasmuch as it doesn't cover the war from a strictly military, strategy, tactics and logistics point of view, but from the standpoint of its inhumanity. The myth of the honorable Wehrmacht, that the SS committed all the atrocities. The entire war, most particularly in the east, was an atrocity, a war of annihilation.

We can, of course, talk about American conduct of the war. Firebombing. The atomic bomb. A difference of degree perhaps. And today we're killing very low-level individuals at sea in small boats. Murdering them. Because we can. We won't stop ourselves. We've started a war with Iran, because, well, why not?

What I've learned is that the capacity for brutality, murder, blind hatred is present in nearly everyone. It just needs to be summoned. ICE, IDF, the SS, all cut from the same cloth. You just have to stop seeing people as people, and instead, vermin. And that's apparently rather easy to do.

Maybe it's the rain, and the chill, but I'm unhappy today.

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Country Roads

07:49 Friday, 8 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 40.73°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 4.14mph
Words: 538

This is from yesterday morning's walk. It's cloudy today. The two guys installing the shower left around noon yesterday. One is supposed to be back today to do some more drywall work.

Made some progress on the new house yesterday. We have a local structural engineer who's going to give us a quote on reviewing and stamping the plans, hopefully more quickly than the four weeks the design firm's engineer has quoted.

We have to have our current septic tank pumped and inspected before we can get approval from the watershed protection agency, and that's set up for the 19th. That'll be more than $800. Our neighbor is onboard with doing the driveway and the excavation, we should have that contract in hand today sometime.

We'll need new power to the new house, which means NYSEG has to come out and look at the site. Because I said we didn't have a driveway all the way to the where the new house will be, they won't come out and look at it until we do. Seems pretty foolish to me. You can see where the driveway is going to go, and it's just an extension of the current driveway, and the power pole we think we'll need isn't near the driveway. But whatever. Our electric utility is owned by a corporation in Spain, so we got that going for us.

We're not planning on building the garage at the same time that we build the house for budget reasons, but I hope to get it built early next year. My plan is to put the rooftop solar on the garage. If I manage to afford a new Ford small EV pickup with bi-directional charging, the truck may be the battery backup for the house, and having most of that infrastructure in the garage makes sense to me. If the truck is going to be unaffordable, which is likely to be the case, I can install batteries in the garage to perform the same function.

I've heard that standing seam metal roofing, which is what we're using, is ideal for installing solar panels with no roof penetrations. I haven't verified that yet, but even if roof penetrations are required, doing so in the garage is lower risk than using the roof of the house.

We probably can't go completely "off-grid" because of limited solar in winter, but as long as net metering remains a thing, we can probably offset most of our winter electric bill with summer credits.

We're placing the garage very near to the house so we won't have a long walk in the winter to get to the cars. It also works for a short run to the mechanical room and power meter. The only downside is our "view" from the bedroom is going to be mostly the garage, and we won't get as much of the morning light. Mitzi is fine with that because the sun starts coming up around 0500, and she likes it dark in the morning. Me, not so much.

Anyway, things are starting to move, and that's a good thing. I know there will be surprises and setbacks, but at least we're getting started.

And the beat goes on...

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This Morning's Moon 5-7-26

06:42 Thursday, 7 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 33.55°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 2.1mph
Words: 726

Had to hunt around to find my mZuiko MC20 2x teleconverter. I've had the 100-400mm zoom mounted on the OM-1 for a while now, taking pictures of birds out back. Tried to take a hi-res shot of the moon yesterday, but I couldn't get it to work with at just 400mm focal length. There weren't enough pixels in the frame to properly align all the images.

But with the 2x teleconverter there are plenty of pixels and I got three decent hi-res shots. It was later in the morning than I'd have preferred, but I did have to hunt for the teleconverter. It was dark in the drawer, dark in the room, and their black. Should have done it by feel.

Yesterday was a bit of a loss. We had a tub-shower enclosure in the bathroom here, and it's mounted a step up so the plumbing could run underneath. I don't know why. So we had to step up onto a step, and then over the tub to take a shower. I had a couple suction-cup grab bars mounted, just to give us something to steady ourselves. Probably wouldn't stop us if we started to slip and fall, but reduced the chances of starting to do so.

Anyway, Mitzi wanted a walk-in shower and so that began yesterday. Two guys and sawzalls, lots of dust, traffic and noise. I basically just put my AirPods in and watched YouTube all day.

Of course they'll be back in about an hour to hopefully finish the job.

Can't focus on anything while they're here, so today will be another loss for anything productive. I'd go to the gym, but I can't be assured of a shower when I get home. It's looking pretty sunny, maybe I should just go for a walk somewhere.

We received what should be the penultimate set of drawings before they go to engineering yesterday. Discovered two discrepancies we should have been aware of from the beginning. The designer was using scissor trusses in the vault, which changes the pitch of the ceiling from that of the roof. We thought we'd told her, more than once, that we intended to use parallel chord trusses. She kind of pushed back on it that it'll make the windows bigger in the peak, which, okay, good!

The other problem is that she designed the basement for eight inches of concrete, and we intended for the whole house to be six inches. The designer maintains that eight inches is a code requirement for backfilled basements in New York. Brad disagrees, but he's going to call a licensed NY structural engineer and get a second opinion. It's not the end of the world if it turns out she's right, but it does add some complexity and expense.

The designer is on Mountain time, so we have a couple of hours this morning to get this sorted out before we have to give her an answer. The issue is that if she re-draws the plans for six inches and their engineer says it has to be eight, then there will be a charge for reverting back. ("Their" engineer is one of the engineering firms they have a relationship with, which is licensed in New York, though they may not be located in New York.)

In our last meeting she mentioned that it takes their engineers about four weeks to go through the plans and mark them up. She said we could find our own if we wanted to, so that's what prompted Brad to reach out to an engineer some of his peers have worked with before. He indicated he'd be interested in the job, but we hadn't sent him any drawings yet, waiting for this set. We should get that all sorted out this morning.

We hope to sign the contract for the construction driveway tomorrow. Our neighbor, Brad's brother-in-law, is probably going to do the job. He's in that business and offers a number of advantages that should save us money, not the least of which is hauling away excess fill. We may need to use his driveway get the large cement pump trucks up onto our property, so keeping them onboard may facilitate that.

Depending on weather, they'll start on the driveway in the next couple of weeks.

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I'm tryin' ta think, but nuttin' happens

16:42 Monday, 4 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.82°F Pressure: 1005hPa Humidity: 34% Wind: 11.18mph
Words: 294

I have the beginnings of a rather efficient process for capturing information I wish to save for future reference. Information that is of some immediate or long-term relevance in my life, if not of profound philosophical value.

We also have this new house project that we're trying to get our arms around; and as I've mentioned before, it involves a lot of details.

I've been capturing many of those details in Captain's Log, but Captain's Log contains a lot of other stuff, unrelated to the house project. I can create an agent to sort out the house stuff and work exclusively in Captain's Log; but it occurred to me that it would be useful to create a document exclusively for the project. To "document the house," so to speak.

Now I'm grappling with how to do that efficiently. I started creating some new AppleScripts for the New House Project Tinderbox document. To keep things simple, I route everything to an Inbox container in the NHP document. Soon I'll add some action code to then file new information in the relevant container within the house, depending on Tags.

But I wonder if it might not be of more value to capture everything in Captain's Log, and then, upon daily review, copy the entries related to NHP to that document. It's possible that I could use Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript to automate that process as well. Reduce it to a couple of keystrokes anyway. Then the information would be in both documents. In Captain's Log it would retain its chronological context, which may be of some value at some point.

What was I doing that day?

I'm undecided, but I'm leaning toward routing everything through Captain's Log. Fewer AppleScripts to create.

I'll sleep on it.

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Critical Thinking

06:50 Monday, 4 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 44.26°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 65% Wind: 10.8mph
Words: 850

One of the knocks against AI is that it may erode critical thinking.

Really? Like, more than social media? More than conservative talk radio? More than an attention-based economy? More than popular media saturated with marketing messages?

And how much "critical thinking" does anyone do?

What is "critical thinking?"

What good is it?

Is it essential for living in today's society? And by "living" I mean "getting by," not in the context of a "good life."

Isn't "critical thinking" an élite concept? Something only those people who think they're better than you can do?

"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

Mark Andreeson is rich, and he doesn't believe in introspection. Is introspection an element of critical thinking?

Maybe not, I guess.

Most forms of "thinking" are exercises in rationalizing our feelings. Something comes to our attention and evokes an emotional response. To the degree that it may be an uncomfortable response, we summon a "chain of reasoning" that is little more than an habituated recitation of talking points.

Thinking is hard. It's resource intensive. We have evolved to conserve resources. We will not naturally do something that compels the expenditure of energy without some compelling reason or desire. Most of what goes on our heads isn't "thinking" per se. It's the experience of the idling circuits that can be recruited to perform thinking, if trained to do so, given sufficient stimulus to do so.

Even people who have highly developed critical thinking skills will rely on habits of thought, heuristics, emotional "gut" reactions, when considering a question that might seem to require the application of critical thinking skills. Because it's hard work, and experienced "critical thinkers" have come to an appreciation of which questions really deserve critical thought. And we often have other things we'd rather expend that energy on. ("Upon which we'd rather expend that energy." Mrs. Peretta is always in my head when I end a sentence with a preposition. Especially when I'm writing about "critical thinking." I'm being colloquial, teach.)

I used to write >1K word posts. Not so much anymore, or for now anyway. Maybe it'll be different when we're in the new house and the "Dave Cave" will be a windowless room in the basement where there will be fewer distractions, much like the loft was in my condo.

We don't teach "critical thinking" as a core element of primary and secondary education. We make gestures toward doing so in things like geometry, literature and composition and maybe "computer programming." I don't think you really encounter it until college or university, and even then, only in certain disciplines.

Critical thinking is a skill. It can be taught, but it can also be acquired through experience. In either case, it may be a perishable skill. There must be some desire to practice it, or some stimulus that compels it. I have to say, it can be quite unrewarding.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is called an élitist.

Not that critical thinking can't lead you astray. It most assuredly can.

In yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, I got rather exercised about this topic. I called Mark Andreeson an idiot.

Mark Andreeson is not an idiot. He's either a fool, or a poser, possibly both. But he's not an idiot.

Many intelligent people are fools. The practice that guards against foolishness is critical thinking. Which, as I've mentioned, is hard so we're often disinclined to do it, especially when we're offered large sums of money, or positions of power and prestige that a wise person would reject.

We supposedly value "freedom" in America, but who really knows what that means? Free from what? Free to do what?

Anything I want, man!

Yes, I suppose so.

I can't recapitulate everything I thought about back in the days of Groundhog Day, when I wanted to understand how my life came to be at the place that it was, which was not where I'd intended it to be.

Critical thinking is a skill that can be acquired. Wanting, no, needing to understand something is a powerful stimulus for acquiring that skill. A teacher is very helpful, not essential.

All they can do is "show you the door."

The only "power" that exists in your life is the power to choose. It's a very weak power. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces of the universe. (Five, if you count irony. Which would be the most powerful.) But gravity holds the whole show together, so don't discount the value of a weak force.

Will AI erode critical thinking? I don't think so. If it can be made more reliable, less prone to hallucination, less sycophantic, it may even facilitate critical thinking. It may help develop the skill in those who are seeking it.

But it's no more a threat to critical thinking than the society, culture and economic system that has intentionally devalued it.

Back in the day I'd close with, "I"m an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You're strongly encouraged to do your own thinking."

That still holds.

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Meadow Vole

15:53 Sunday, 3 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 52.93°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 46% Wind: 15.59mph
Words: 173

I went through and corrected all the date/time issues in the May archives of the marmot, so On This Day in the marmot should be canonically correct, chronologically speaking.

This bird feeder I put up has been very entertaining, though there hasn't been very much activity today. We've had chipping sparrows (very small), red winged blackbirds, American goldfinches, song sparrows (slightly larger than the chipping sparrows), and doves. Seeds knocked from the feeder land on the ground, and to my delight I learned we have a couple of meadow voles living in the grass behind the house.

That's not all good news, as they can host the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

But they're adorable.

I love watching the goldfinches as they fuss with each other at the feeder. The red winged blackbirds come in and chase them off. The chipping sparrows hop around on the ground in front of the sliding glass door. It's a little distracting when I'm trying to learn something about house construction, but I love seeing them.

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Blue Jay of Happiness?

14:22 Sunday, 3 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 52.11°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 45% Wind: 14.88mph
Words: 30

I've been busy with house stuff and neglecting the marmot.

Lots to say, but little time to focus enough to say it.

Post a pic instead.

The beat goes on...

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