Kingfisher is playing BIDA on Sunday April 19th! Very excited to have a local gig!

Contra Dance Piano Teaching Videos About ten years ago I sat down in front of a camera and recorded eleven videos showing how I play mandolin for contra dances. I've now done something similar with piano, this time with thirteen video...

I made some videos teaching how I play piano for contra dancing. This is not a high quality effort: I didn't write any scripts or even plan what I was going to say. Think of it as if we spent half an hour together, with me showing you how I play.

Destruction of Infrastructure for the Impact on Civilians is Manifestly Illegal Last week the US president announced that: ... if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately "Open for Business," we will conclude our lovely "stay" in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all...

Threatening to destroy Iranian infra to make civilians experience “Hell” and pressure leaders to open the strait is not a legitimate military objective. Under the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual that purpose is plainly unlawful. It doesn't matter what Iran does: our duty here is unconditional.

Unsweetened Whipped Cream I'm a huge fan of whipped cream. It's rich, smooth, and fluffy, which makes it a great contrast to a wide range of textures common in baked goods. And it's usually better without adding sugar. Desse...

I'm a huge fan of whipped cream. It's rich, smooth, and fluffy, which makes it a great contrast to a wide range of textures common in baked goods. And since most baked goods are too sweet, and can't be made less so because the sugar is structural, whipped cream is better without sugar.

It's very new!

Chicken-Free Egg Whites Baking has traditionally made extensive use of egg whites, especially the way they can be beaten into a foam and then set with heat. While I eat eggs, I have a lot of people in my life who avoid them ...

The way egg whites can be beaten into a foam and set with heat is hard to replace when cooking for vegans, but you can now by precision fermented egg white protein and it works great!

Reconsider Challenging Sessions at Weekends I've played a lot of dance weekends over the years [1] and if I could change one thing it would be no more challenging sessions. I see it happen every time: it's a great crowd of people, with a wide r...

If could change one thing about dance weekends it would be no more challenging sessions. The dances are too hard for the crowd and it's not fun. Some ideas for what to do instead: www.jefftk.com/p/reconsider...

More, and More Extensive, Supply Chain Attacks Open source components are getting compromised a lot more often. I did some counting, with a combination of searching, memory, and AI assistance, and we had two in 2026-Q1 ( trivy, axios), after four ...

Open source components are getting compromised a lot more often, and we're seeing a lot more attack chains and clusters. While it's always hard to call the departure of an exponential from a noisy baseline, if this is AI helping with attacks we should expect this rate of increase to continue.

Label By Usable Volume I always look at unit prices: how much do I get for my dollar? But that assumes I can use all of it. The manufacturer gets

We should update our labeling laws to require manufacturers to use the amount a consumer could reasonably extract. Maybe manufacturers would shift to more efficient packaging, or maybe consumers would accept higher unit cost for more convenience. The important thing is aligning incentives.

A Spanish-Speaking Robot in my Pocket I've recently started using ChatGPT voice chat to practice Spanish, and it works surprisingly well. I don't know if I'll have the discipline to keep doing it after the novelty wears off, but I've alre...

I've recently started using ChatGPT voice chat to practice Spanish, and it works surprisingly well. I don't know if I'll have the discipline to keep doing it after the novelty wears off, but I've already spoken more Spanish in the last week than in the last fifteen years combined.

Contra Dances Should Avoid Saturdays There are a lot of great musicians who don't live near you, and if you hold your dance on a Saturday it's much harder to put together a tour that brings them to you. Consider a Friday evening or Sunda...

There are a lot of great musicians who don't live near you, and if you hold your dance on a Saturday it's much harder to put together a tour that brings them to you. Consider a Friday evening or Sunday afternoon, or even a weekly evening slot?

That's a very good point! I didn't realize it did, and it looks like the affordable units are allowed 19 spaces, distributed by lottery. I'll edit the post!

How Many Parking Permits? In 2017 I wrote: One of the major reasons existing residents often oppose adding more housing is that as more people move in it gets harder to find on-street parking. What if we added a new catego...

To make building housing more palatable, Somerville allows new units near transit to be ineligible for street parking. Affordable units are always eligible; how much of an impact is this? Of 90 affordable units in the 450-unit Union Sq tower, only 7 have permits.

They call this the "snowball method". The idea is that you should always pay off your debts from smallest to largest, regardless of interest rate. As each individual debt is retired, motivation increases, allowing you to keep going.

Conflicted on Ramsey People are often pretty short-sighted, spending money today that they'll want tomorrow. Debt makes it possible to prioritize your current self even more highly: you can spend money you haven't even ea...

People are often pretty short-sighted, spending money today that they'll want tomorrow. Debt makes it possible to prioritize your current self even more highly. This is a trap many people fall into, and one different communities have built social defenses against, but they could still be better.

Chore Standards draft post A common source of friction within couples or between housemates is differing quality standards. Perhaps I hate the feeling of grit under my feet but my housemate who is responsible for sw...

It's great when you can give chores to the person with the highest standards in that area, but you don't want that to turn into one person doing all the chores. Some strategies for cases where partners or housemates have pretty different standards.

[BOS] I'm hosting free introductory workshops on running sound for contra dances and other small folk events. I'll be going through the same material on 3/19, 3/23, and 4/10; let me know if you'd like to come to one of them?

Introducing and Deprecating WoFBench We present and formally deprecate WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark showed initial promise as a challenging evaluation,...

We present WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark unfortunately proved to be saturated on creation. We note that saturation joins human extinction on the list of reasons for concern about the pace of AI progress.

Here's to the Polypropylene Makers Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, my sister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed an N95 and told to

Six years ago, 80 workers moved into a plastics factory, and stayed there for a month. In those 28 days they produced 40M pounds of polypropylene, enough for maybe 500M N95s. Ordinary people, looking at their situation, and thinking creatively about how to do their part.

Storing Food I think more people should be storing a substantial amount of food. It's not likely you'll need it, but as with reusable masks the cost is low enough I think it's usually worth it. It's hard for me ...

I think more people should be storing a substantial amount of food. It's not likely you'll need it, but as with reusable masks the cost is low enough I think it's usually worth it.

You May Already Be Canadian I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, both of which had American parents. You don't normally suddenly...

I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, but with Bill C-3 anyone with any Canadian ancestry is now Canadian. Perhaps you are too?

This week I'll be playing contras up and down the mid-Atlantic coast with Cecilia Vacanti (Kingfisher); Alex Deis-Lauby calling:

* Wed 2/18: Princeton
* Thr 2/19: Philly
* Fri 2/20: DC
* Sat 2/21: Lancaster
* Sun 2/21: Brooklyn

Come dance, and/or let me know if you want to try to meet up!

Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2025 Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2025 Lily turned 11, Anna turned 9, and Nora turned 3. (Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" coul...

As the kids say funny things Julia and I put them in a FB group because it's a convenient way to share them. But I don't trust FB to keep things around long term, and I don't want these to be limited to people with FB access, so with my 11:30pm flight delayed to (so far) 2:15am I've run an export.

Gemini's Hypothetical Present I use several AI models at work, switching between them based on which is best at the kind of work I'm doing. In my limited testing I've found Opus 4.6 to be the best coder (via Claude Code) and has t...

Gemini's base state seems to be that it's convinced it's 2024 and needs Search to bring it up to speed. If you look into its Thinking it often seems to put a lot of effort into keeping track of everything recent as a giant hypothetical.

Ending Parking Space Saving Shoveling out a parking spot is a pain, and many snowy places have a culture where when you leave you put some kind of

Reserving a parking space because you shoveled it is rude, illegal, and inefficient, but if you're the only person who doesn't you'll come back to nowhere to park. The mayor asking us all to move space savers would break the link from "car in spot" to "they moved my chair" to "tire-slashing time".

Playing with an Infrared Camera I recently got a Thermal Master P1 infrared camera attachment for my phone. The goal was a house project, but it's also a great toy, especially with the kids. Getting a room pitch black but still bei...

I recently got an infrared camera attachment for my phone. Getting a room pitch black but still being able to 'see' with the phone was fun, but the real fun was in exploring to observe all these thermal properties we'd never thought about.

Far-UVC is also much more effective with large rooms with long sight lines, so the dance hall I pictured is a great case for it.

I like those a lot! My impression is they're still much louder per CFM (or equivalent CFM) than far-UVC, though. But the real question is, if you need a given amount of air cleaning in a given situation, is the house level within what you can accept.

Box fan-based air purifiers are usually more cost effective than far-UVC if you're using them in a situation where noise is not an issue and you can run them on "high". But noise is often a big issue, and people respond by running fan-based purifiers on "low" or even turning them off.

Differentially Scary Movies This post has spoilers for My Neighbor Totoro, Frozen, Bambi, and the Lion King People at different stages of development enjoy different things in movies. Some of the best children's movies are able...

People at different stages of development enjoy different things in movies. Totoro and Frozen are good examples of children's movies that are able to make things scary or intense for the adults without being too much for little kids.