I’ve known about some of Google’s special operators for years, but librarian Hana Lee Goldin goes through all of the ones she knows about that supercharge search results beyond the usual five paid results and AI Overview at the top of the page. Bookmarked!
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has always offered an interesting look at world history. In this 7,000 word essay he looks at the current Iran war from a strategic viewpoint, and, not surprisingly, finds it as useless and stupid as everyone else besides the current Administration does:
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
A comment on the Metafilter post also reminded me that the military wargamed a scenario similar to this in 2002, where a Marine Corps general commanding the opposing force (read: Iran) used asymmetric warfare tactics to “kill” sixteen U.S. ships, including an aircraft carrier, and the equivalent of 20,000 service members on the second day of a three-week exercise. The wargame was restarted and the opposing force was required to follow a script which resulted in a U.S. victory.
I don’t think there will be any do-overs this time.
Whoami.wiki is a new project built by a software engineer that gathers information from its user, then employs AI to build an interconnected personal Wiki site tying everything together. The author fed it a series of old photographs along with notes he’d taken from his grandmother’s recollections, and then added newer photographs, timelines, online playlists, receipts, FB, Instagram, and Whatsapp entries, and bank transactions. He used Claude to spin up a local Wiki with all of this information and it built out pages of detail on his trips, where he visited, what he ate, and who he met with. It even identified locations in the photos he took.
Powerful stuff, to be sure, and very tempting to play with. I’ve spent a lot of time and a bit of money working on family history, mainly in the realm of photo archiving, but this author has found a whole new way to harness AI to connect hundreds of separate events into a coherent, searchable narrative. However, there’s no way in hell I’d ever give AI access to my personal data on this level.
* * *
On a separate note, I’ve been using Codex to help me with several different projects, and it’s been extremely useful. The first thing I had it do was build a Perl script to scrub excess HTML from an Indesign export so that it could be used in my company’s CMS—automating the process of publishing research products on our website. With some small caveats, it worked exceptionally well. The second thing I had it do was build a simple web page which pulls in my work and personal calendar information for the day, a local weather report, and the top five news articles from the AP and CNN feeds into a responsive page layout. This way I can pull up the important stuff for the day before I drag my old bones out of bed.
Along with getting work done on the trucks, I took care of some projects around the house, some of which were on the 2026 list.
First and foremost, Hazel got a bath. She has smelled like landfill dirt mixed with old socks in a bag of moldy Cheetos for the last two months, but I don’t like sending her out into 30˚ weather soaking wet after a bath. I took advantage of the warm weather to scrub the stink out of her fur and let her dry off in the warm sun on the back porch. I’m sure she quickly rolled around in the mud to spite me.
I pressure-washed the dirt and green algae off our front stairs, which has been bothering me since November.
I climbed out on the roof and replaced the section of aluminum siding that was blown off during the windstorms in December. The aluminum itself was AWOL until last week, when it magically appeared in the flower bed below the den, as if to say, it’s time to get me back up there, Chief.
Along with that, I pulled the rest of the fiber tiles off the attic ceiling down and stacked them by the stairs. I couldn’t bag them for removal, but that will be the next step in cleaning out that space.
The greenhouse has been straightened up for the first time in three years. My residual anger from the Caterpillar Massacre of 2022 seems to finally have subsided, and I was able to get in there and clean things out. I even put three of the bins out on the table in the center and considered buying a couple of bags of soil and some tomato seedlings just to have something growing in there again.
All of the neighbors’ leaves that have collected under our back porch are now bagged up and ready for the County to collect on Thursday morning. And there are three contractor bags full of garbage from the garage and greenhouse ready to go as well.
What a long, strange trip it’s been so far.
PS. my phone and email have been flooded with well wishes this morning; I can’t tell you how much that means to me.
oooooh, this essay on technology is really good: it puts the state of current technology and its cross-section with society in really clear perspective. I won’t spoil it for you: it’s a great read.
(via)
The court deposition videos of DOGE members being questioned about their activites were posted last week by several of the agencies targeted, and on Friday a judge ordered they be taken down. The reason given was because “publication of the videos could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm,” according to the government complaint. Because sometimes the internet can still be awesome, the videos were archived and posted elsewhere, as well as torrented, ensuring they’ll always be available.
I don’t know what’s more maddening, the fact that the government is more concerned about the safety of these privileged white men than all of the people that were fired, or the fact that they’re so bored-looking as they struggle (and fail) to define what DEI even means.
It was almost 80 degrees here in Catonsville yesterday, so I pulled the Scout out of the garage after work, buttoned the sides of the soft top up, and pointed it north on the Beltway for her first drive of the year. I had a class scheduled after work up at a gun range north of the city: a free seminar on how to clean a shotgun. The class was run by the armorer at the range, who is the son of my CCL instructor, and about 20 of us found seats at clean worktables, waiting to begin.
Around me, the other guys pulled fancy new shotguns from expensive cases: tactical models with pistol grips, camouflage-patterned hunting models, and military-style breaching models with flashlights and shell clips. I pulled Dad’s humble New Haven 600, a Mossberg 500 license-built for department stores in the 1970’s, from its simple bag and waited for our first instructions. I’ve known that it needed to be taken apart and cleaned ever since I brought it home: the action was caked with carbon and dirt, like it had been fired for several years, dragged through mud, and stored in a garage.
I also brought Dad’s cleaning supplies, so I started by polishing the crusty barrel to a mirror finish with a brass brush. The armorer walked over and I saw his eyebrows jump as he took in the condition of the rest of the gun. I explained where it came from and asked him not to judge me, and he chuckled as he broke it down so I could clean each part individually, assuring me he’d seen and heard worse. Over the course of an hour I was able to get the firing pin assembly, bolt, trigger group and receiver cleaned for the first time in decades, making a small mountain out of filthy cleaning wipes on the table next to me.
Seeing how the gun came apart was very helpful for me—I’m more than willing to disassemble almost anything, but where firearms are concerned, I want to know exactly how it comes apart and goes back together before I put a round in it and pull the trigger. Eventually I’d like to replace the original wooden forend on the gun with something lighter, and I knew before the class that removing it requires breaking the gun down almost completely. At the end of our time, he came back over and complimented me on the cleaning job I’d done, and then I watched as he expertly re-assembled the gun and racked the slide with a satisfying clack-clack, as opposed to the muffled whup-whup it made before.
I said my thanks, packed up my stuff, and enjoyed a twilight ride home with the warm wind in my hair.
This week’s brainpan echo: Fu Manchu, Mongoose. I have a deep love for stoner rock: bluesy, distorted, repeating riffs with nonsense lyrics and a driving beat. Fu Manchu has been around for decades and brings the thunder on this track; their killer-to-filler ratio is much less than a QOTSA or Clutch, but when it works, it works.
All things considered, I had a really good weekend. On Saturday morning, I woke up at zero-dark-30 to drive down to Annapolis and pick up Zachary for another snowboarding day. We were able to get to Pennsylvania, get our gear and be on the slopes by 8:30.
Years ago, when I was mountain biking regularly with Rob, he taught me everything about how to do it right. Being a full 6 inches shorter than me, and having spent a ton of time on the West Coast biking on original trails, he knew what he was doing and would launch himself down mountain sides with abandon—but the key was that he was always in control. He showed me how to lean all the way back in the saddle and control my balance on the bike itself, anticipate obstacles and the right way to get over them, and just to generally not be afraid. After riding with him for a couple of seasons, I could keep up with him and follow him down steep mountainsides without blinking—often we found ourselves laughing the harder things got.
With Zachary on Saturday, we started on the intermediate slope and I followed behind as he snowplowed back and forth to get his balance and technique sorted out. We ditched our heavy winter gear after the second run, opting to go in longsleeve shirts under the warm sun, and by the fifth run he started carving back and forth—and I had to work to keep up with him. I found that I had to push myself to stay behind him, and that old familiar feeling of unease and exhilaration put a smile on my face. We went nonstop from 8:30 until about 3PM, and I tapped out when my right leg (my steering leg) started getting wobbly. Zachary did one more run by himself (another excellent sign) and we packed it in at 3:30. He’s ready to level up to the advanced slopes, and I’m going to have to spend some serious time this summer working on my core and leg muscles to be ready to follow him down those trails next season, as well as screw up my courage to follow him, just like I did with his dad 30 years ago.
Sunday morning Finn and I woke early, got some breakfast, and took Hazel for a hike in Patapsco State Park near the house. It was a beautiful day to be outside, and we got to talk about a bunch of different things while waiting for Hazel to smell the smells. She was happy to be out on the trails, and even though she claimed she wanted to walk as far as possible, I could tell she was gassed when we got to the top of the steeper climbs. I’m resolving to make hiking a weekly activity, both to get her out of the house, but also to try and re-connect.
Back at home, I put the carb back on the Travelall, drained as much gas out of the tank as possible, and did a wet compression test on the Scout 800. After monkeying with the distributor for a bit, I finally got it running! Once I sorted that out I jumped in and got it in gear and moving forward and backwards. This is a HUGE relief, and I’m extremely pleased with myself for sticking with it and diagnosing all of the issues up until this point. Now I need to sort the front brakes out to get at least a little stopping power, and I should be able to pull it around to the garage and swap vehicles out.
Back inside after the sun went down, I sat on the couch and mindlessly surfed the web with the dog snoring next to me, feeling the soreness in my entire body—my legs, arms, hands, back, neck, and brain. It’s been a while since I’ve gone that hard and it left me righteously tired. Given how fucked up current events are right now, it was good to have a bunch of wins close to home.
a few years ago, I was asked by the faculty at MICA to supply data for a class in the Data Vizualization graduate program, and if I could sit in and help with critique for a few of the classes. I’ve done it for two semesters now, and one of the students in the last cohort got in touch with me after the final class and asked if I’d come and give her students at the Yale School of Management a presentation on how WRI uses data visualization. That sure sounded like fun, so I immediately agreed.
I’ve spent the last week or so working on the deck and my delivery, and I had it down pretty good by the time I had to board the train to New Haven. They paid for my ticket and a hotel room, which was very nice of them, and after checking in and doing a final runthrough I took an Uber to the shiny School of Management building for my big show. After some technical challenges with the room A/V setup—my work laptop would not connect, but luckily I had my personal machine with me, and that played nice—I went through my deck and our work successfully. The students seemed to respond well to it, and there were more than a few who were from the School of Environment, so I had some good questions to answer at the end.
From there, they took me out for a delicious Italian dinner, and a few more faculty from the Urban Studies program joined us, where I learned they are working with WRI on a project I’m involved with. The conversation was far-ranging and very interesting—I was worried we’d only talk shop, but the topics went from the environment to architecture to personal histories to where the best thrift stores are (I said Austin; one of the students suggested London).
This morning I woke to sunshine coming through the window. I got a coffee and a muffin at a crunchy cafe down the street and walked back over to the campus to meet one of the Urban Studies folks I met last night. I was there to look at a room in the Sterling Library where WRI will be exhibiting an installation featuring five years of the WRI Ross Prize. I’d been in the fancy new Management building on Wednesday, but the Library was like I was walking through a Harry Potter set. With my reconnaisance done, I got a car back to the train station and headed back home.
I was nervous going into it, but I think seven years of teaching and other opportunities I’ve had to do public speaking have gone a long way to making it easier to do. As a kid, I never thought I’d be doing this kind of stuff, but I find it a fun challenge, and I have to say, I kind of enjoy it.