I'm on various mailing lists, and the archives are a trove of niche knowledge. A dance calling list I'm on is considering making archives subscriber-only, to keep AI bots from snarfing up this data. But I think this harvesting is overall a good thing.

People have a range of motivations in posting to lists, but a big one is sharing information. For example, someone asked a dance with an 8-count swing followed by an 8-count chain. I replied to warn them at the form has changed and this no longer works well: this bit me back when I started calling, and I want to warn other new callers.

One strategy we often find helpful with our kids is the "do over": something didn't go well, let's try again. Two examples:

• Nora (4y) can't yet cross streets on her own, but we're starting to practice. Walking to a farther park, a walk where we often practice, she asked Julia "when we get to the little street can I cross it"? Julia said "we'll need to check in when we get there". But Nora did not check in, and 'practiced' on her own. Even though this was on a tiny street, this was still really unsafe and is something she very much needs to not do. I caught up, spoke to her firmly, she burst into tears, I walked her back, and we did it over together. As soon as she had the chance to demonstrate doing it correctly she cheered up dramatically, and then we had a good time at the park.

• We're in a hurry to get out the door and I put Nora's coat on her. She bursts into tears: "I wanted to put my coat on myself!" I ask "should we do a do over?" She says yes, I take her coat off, she puts it on, she's happy.

I fly to a lot of gigs, and I check a bag with my pedalboard. Airlines generally limit checked bags to 50lb, and I'd like to be able to get as much stuff as possible into that 50lb; how light can a suitcase be?

I'm currently using an old Samsonite clamshell that I found on the side of the road. I like how sturdy it is, but it weighs 12.2lb. That's almost a quarter of my 50lb budget allocated to the case!

It looks like a cheap modern hardshell would be 9lb ($70), saving 3.2lb. That's pretty good, but can we do better?

I did some looking for light options, and as far as I can tell Samsonite is the company making the lightest options by a good margin. They're also very expensive, with current-generation options going for $600 at full price. Here are the options I see under 7lb that would fit my 23.5" x 17.5" pedalboard:

Epistemic status: making things up

About six months ago I got interested in glycol vapors for reducing infections in crowded indoor spaces. I decided to give it a try, but it went poorly.

I was going to order some propylene glycol, but noticed that I already had some polyethylene glycol on hand. I figured that since people recommend propylene glycol, dipropylene glycol, and triethylene glycol for infection control, since "polyethylene" is just "propylene" with more syllables (how different could it be?) that it would work even better. In retrospect this was a very bad idea.

I had heard that you could use a regular fog machine, but these are designed to vaporize a liquid, and the polyethylene glycol I had ("Miralax") is a powder. Instead I decided to enlist one of my kids to slowly pour it into a box fan. This didn't work at all: instead of making a pathogen-reducing vapor it made a mess. To my surprise the powder settled quickly, and it was clear this hadn't worked. It really got everywhere (I can feel some under my feet right now) and it has been a pain to clean up. Worse, our cats seem to have eaten some, which has been an even larger pain to clean up.

The most common feedback I get about my writing is that people like my posts but the fraction of interesting posts is too low. Some of this is hard to avoid, because I write about a wide variety of things and what's interesting to one person is dull to another, but I still think some of my posts are much better than others. I currently cross-post everything to Facebook, LessWrong, and Substack, in addition to posting links to Mastodon, and Bluesky; I'm going to switch my Substack to just getting the best 10-25% of posts, about 2-4 per month. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, consider subscribing there.

If some of my posts aren't so good, and all of my posts take effort, you might wonder why I don't just write the good ones. A bunch of reasons:

Content warning: risk to children

Julia and I know drowning is the biggest risk to US kids 1-4, and we try to take this seriously. But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in a fountain. (She's fine now.)

This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids, eight parents, and ten grandparents/uncles/aunts. For the last few years we've been in a series of rental houses, and this time on arrival we found a fountain in the backyard: