Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can.

Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending:

Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel economy regulations were partly to blame. Looking into it, it's hard to say how much is regulations vs people wanting to buy vehicles that look rugged, but the regulations really aren't helping.

This chart is the core of it:

This is what manufacturers were looking at when they decided to build today's cars. To figure out the target fuel economy for a vehicle you first calculate its "footprint", which is the area between the wheels. On our 2013 Honda Fit that's 4.8ft side-to-side and 8.2ft front-to-back, for a footprint of 39sqft. Then you ask if it's a car or truck. This tells you which curve to use, and where along it to look.

If you ask the internet how to prepare pasta you'll hear two things:

• You must salt the water.

• You must serve it mixed with the sauce.

I disagree on both.

I've been cooking pasta since I was a kid, and I prepare it the way my mother (who grew up in Rome) did:

Google Maps thinks it takes half an hour to walk to from DCA to Crystal City, but you can actually do it in fifteen minutes.

I really like leaving airports on foot. There's something about it that feels like it shouldn't be possible: between an airplane and your destination there should be some other kind of vehicle, no? It reminds me of the first time I boarded a plane without using a jetway, where walking out on the tarmac just felt wrong.

I was in DC the past two days for meetings (my first time wearing a suit in a work context) and I was staying in Crystal City. I looked at Google Maps to see if I could walk:

I recently got a Venova and have been enjoying learning how to play it:

It combines a saxophone mouthpiece with recorder fingering and a little nose to overblow an octave instead of a twelfth.

It's somewhere between a real instrument and a toy, and one of its bigger problems is that while it's great in C it gets harder to play the more sharps or flats you want. Since I mostly play contra music, typically in 2-3 sharps, this isn't ideal.

A Venova in D (two sharps) would be great, but I don't see this coming. If we're going to put in a bunch more work somehow, what if we went all the way to a double bore?

This afternoon Cecilia and I played for Somerville Porchfest, with Harris calling and Danner running sound. There was rain, but not enough keep us from playing, or to keep folks from dancing: