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64 Ideas For a Final Post

2026-04-30T00:00:00Z

Strange Acoustics on Mars and Beyond

2026-04-29T00:00:00Z

I. Mars Sounds Strange

Mars sounds different than anywhere else in the solar system. Mars’ atmosphere is dispersive; high pitched sounds travel faster than lower ones. That doesn’t happen on Earth, nor likely anywhere else in the Solar System. We’ll explore this weird effect, and speculate how creatures evolving in such an environment might use it to their advantage.

You may know that the speed of sound here on Earth isn’t constant. It varies with humidity, temperature, elevation - factors that affect air density, or its ability to vibrate. But those factors which change the speed of sound never treat different pitches differently. On a given day, with a particular temperature and humidity, the speed of sound is the same for pitches high and low.

Sound is Broadband

When we speak of “high” or “low” sounds, we don’t just mean someone singing a high or low note. The sound around us is made up of a broad mix of frequencies - it is broadband. It is rare for a sound to only contain just one frequency, or a small range. These are narrowband. Artificial sounds like a sine tone are narrowband, as are some bird whistles. When broadband sound travels on Earth, the different frequencies of that sound travel at the same speed and arrive at your ears together, but on Mars, it would spread out as it travels, with the higher frequencies arriving before the lower ones. It would seem “smeared” - it would be spread over time, not simply slowed down, but falling in tone as the higher frequencies arrive earlier than the lower ones.

Why Mars? CO2 Shapeshifting.

Sound transmission is often described with the “ping pong ball” model. Molecules of air bump into each other, passing a vibration from one ball to the next. Now imagine the medium is nerf balls. When you push a soft nerf ball, it doesn’t move instantly like a ping pong ball. It indents because it’s springy, absorbing energy. Then it bounces back, returning the energy, but the flexing and unflexing takes time, and the vibration travels more slowly.

Whether air molecules are being ping pong balls or nerf balls, that still wouldnt create dispersion. The trick that Mars’ 95% Carbon Dioxide (CO2) atmosphere pulls off is that it behaves like ping pong balls or nerf depending on the pitch.

CO2 molecules don’t literally get mechanically squeezed, but they absorb energy and return it in a way we can represent with the Nerf model. Importantly, this flexing only occurs when vibrations are slow enough to give them time to flex and rebound.

At higher frequencies, the vibrations are too fast for the flexing to keep up, and the molecules become like rigid ping pong balls. This variable behavior is what makes the atmosphere dispersive. The Nitrogen and Oxygen in our air can’t do that. (Mars’ atmosphere is flexing on us.)

Reality Check

Realistically, even if you could listen directly to the sounds of Mars, the first thing you’d notice would not be smearing, it’d be the quiet. Mars’ very low air density means less air vibrating against your ear. When I speak of “hearing” this effect it’s not in any practical sense. Additionally, the degree of smearing is very small - the lowest and highest speeds differ by a few percent. Sounds spread out more, the farther they travel, but it would take hundreds of meters to become noticeable. But the physics opens the door on the concept, and on a different world, with denser air or stronger dispersion, this effect could be far more dramatic.

II. Speculative XenoEvolutionary Acoustics

Imagine a planet with many times this effect, a place where, to human ears sound is audibly smeared. The atmosphere is dense like ours, so sound is transmitted well. The speed difference which causes the smearing would be greater than on Mars - perceptible at 5 - 10 meters. I claim that the dispersive atmosphere is an auditory processing goldmine.

Whether such a planet exists, or whether dispersion this strong is even physically possible, we don’t yet know. Mars broached the concept; we have scientific precedent. Let’s speculate on the evolution of life on “Disperson IVb”.

Would it be confusing and difficult to sort out environmental sounds? How might that life learn to process sound and even use the effect to their advantage?

Our evolutionary speculation rests on these tenets:
- It wouldn’t sound smeared to native life forms
- A dispersed sound carries rich information

Consider human vision. We have two eyes, but we don’t see double. Our brain combines those visual signals and creates a 3D model of the world around us. We “see” one image, even though we took in two different ones. Indeed, the difference between the images is the source of information used to represent depth.

Basic Ability

When hearing evolved on Disperson IVb, the Dispersling brains developed the signal processing ability to reconstruct a sound that Humans would consider “smeared”.

That reconstruction, while it may be a complex process is deterministic. All sounds which travel 10 meters will have the same dispersion pattern. The process to reverse that will be wired into their brains. And to be clear, the goal of the transformation isn’t simply to undo the dispersion, but to use it - reveal how far the sound traveled in the process. They will hear the locations of things around them as well as our eyes perceive depth.

Now sounds don’t just happen one tiny distinct bit at a time, they overlap, and with the dispersion, they’d overlap even more. I still claim that native life would hear sounds as compact and distinct as we do, because their brains will have sorted out the overlapping sounds and rearranged them into a rich 3D model of the world around them. This ability again shares much with our own vision. Our visual cortex compares our two images and importantly connects the parts that correlate. The Dispersling auditory processing center separates sounds which physically arrive as overlapping, but pattern-matches them to individual sources which match what they hear.

Certainly this is an expensive bit of signal processing. A Dispersling handling a heavy auditory load might struggle to bring their world into “focus” - to resolve the sounds they hear into a coherent internal representation.

Surely, Humans also perceive the difference between near and far sounds. That’s based on qualities of the sound such as echoes, or sounds being muffled vs clear. Disperslings would have that too, but the special range finding is far more precise - on par with our visual acuity.

Optimizing: Predator/Prey Arms Race

If you’re avoiding a predator, it’d suck if every step you took arrived at their ears with a full HUD worth of targeting info. It’d be important to move quietly. If you want to call or warn your buddies, you’d do so with a narrowband whistle, which has little or no dispersion. It has nearly the same form, coming from near or far, so doesn’t betray your location as clearly. Here the listener falls back on the same distance cues Humans use.

If you’re a predator, you evolve active sonar, it’s harder to fool. Consider the richness of the sonar signals, and that most life would be getting “passive sonar” for free.

Consider the mimicking talent of some birds. They not only replicate human voices, and babies crying, they can sound like squeaky door hinges, power tools, or whatever’s around. Might a clever Dispersling evolve acoustic fraud - make a sound that reassembles to simulate their location nearer or farther away? How about a sound that doesn’t reassemble to anything coherent? That’s signal jamming - making your opponent waste processing cycles. Perhaps if you couldn’t move quietly, you’d mask your steps with noise.

If one was world-building, I’d suggest a dark or foggy planet, a place where vision is less useful. The Dispersling brains would evolve around auditory processing to the degree that Earth life did with vision.

Just Scratching the Surface

This is just a peek at the trove of ideas to explore around this unearthly phenomenon. Other areas include:

A custom Logic Audio plugin: We should be able to experience this environment firsthand now in simulation.
James Webb Space Telescope’s ongoing observations of exoplanet atmospheres. Scientists may catalog planets whose atmospheric composition implies audio dispersion - CO2 is not the only gas with this property. Identifying more such planets can offer scientific backing for this fictional world.
Considering the effects on communication, language, or music. Imagine sci-fi scenarios of first attempts at communication with humans.
Other effects: Doppler, weather, Life on the ground vs air vs sea.

We will return to this speculative acoustic goldmine in future articles.

The Infinite Sea (WIP)

2026-04-28T00:00:00Z

This is a work in progress. 
The Infinite Sea is novel model for teaching cosmology. Despite its simplicity, it represents the real universe with richness.

Curriculum notes: 
	We offer the following metaphors-
		Infinite Sea : the Universe.
			It's the same everywhere, looks the same in every direction. Homogeneity and isotropy of space
			It is Sparse
		boat : galaxy
		flotilla : galaxy cluster
		the sea expanding : cosmological expansion
			the expansion happens at the "water drop" level.
		a field suppressing expansion : this is Gravity, though not the everyday attractive gravity. This is an effect of gravity predicted by General Relativity: Expansion of space only happens in "flat" space not curved by mass & energy. We introduce this characteristic of gravity *first*, intentionally inverting the everyday precedence.
		flotilla stays together, not via being roped together. but because the sea around it literally does not engage in expansion.
		different measurement of expansion : the hubble tension
		common zero-velocity rest frame - CMB rest frame.
		
	Other boats are adrift also - expansion is not via propulsion, but by being carried by the expansion of the sea itself	
	Peculiar velocity vs recession velocity

To come:
	given an expansion rate, our protagonist will attempt to calculate the age of their universe, but will quickly be confronted with a problem. a purely geometric expansion simply goes back infinitely in time, getting ever tinier and tinier. Modern cosmology hit this issue also, resulting in theories of inflation, expansion etc. 

Liberties taken - while these do "break physics" in the every day sense, it is service of the overall storytelling, and they do not harm the essential concepts of the model.
	instant communication - breaks FTL. Language, common agreement on units, etc.
	magically can measure expansion of water, distance to other boats
	no treatment or recognition of "mundane" gravity, pulling one down.

You are at sea. It goes on forever as best you can tell, in every direction. Welcome to the infinite sea.

Your boat floats for a long, long time. The sea looks the same everywhere. No start, no end, no middle. There isn’t a saltier region, nor warmer or colder spots . If you wanted to meet a friend out in the sea, you wouldn’t know how to give directions.

Not that you’re alone.

You see other boats dotting the sea. Some near, some far. Watching carefully over time, you notice they’re all moving away from you. But strangely, their sails aren’t full - they aren’t moving away by any propulsion. They are just as stationary in their local water as you are in yours. The sea itself seems to grow, everywhere, spreading all the boats apart.

You closely study the water and learn: The water itself grows. You measure that it expands about 10% each day.

A boat with red sails is 2 km from you. In a week it’s 4 km. Its speed averaged about 2km/7 days. You spy a boat 15km away; 7 days later it is 30km away; it covered 15 km in 7 days.

The farther away, the faster it’s moving from you - because there’s more water between you to expand. But you are stationary. You intuit that the other boats also might feel that they are stationary, and central. You can’t see any particular winds pushing them - they appear as adrift as you.

Did i mention your flotilla? You have company. Not only do distant boats dot your view, you have close neighbors. These boats float along near you, close enough you can make out their rigging styles.

You study the water again. You’re perplexed. You know that all water expands, carrying everything apart. But your flotilla is not stretching apart. The water between you and the closest boats is not expanding! Why not? You make a new discovery: Water won’t expand near boats. The growth only happens where there are no boats around. It’s like the water is skittish, and only grown where it is calm and far from your activity. Maybe boats give off an anti-expansion-field or something. By careful measure, you find the suppression is greater - expansion rate is least - close to your flotilla. Looking far in the distance, you discern that the sea expands most in the spots farthest from any boats.

You decide to check out that catamaran in your flotilla. You fire up the outboard and motor toward them. You notice the rush of water along your hull. Hmm. You contemplate - i observed motion between me and distant objects before. But it didn’t feel like i was moving. But now i can tell i’m moving relative to the sea - it’s flowing past. We’ll call that my “peculiar velocity”. You observe distant flotillas more carefully, and now see them shuffling amongst each other - they have peculiar velocities relative to each other like your flotilla, which combines with their ‘expansion velocity’.

You might not be able to tell a friend how to find you in this infinite sea. It has no absolute frame of reference - for locations, but you realize, there is a common frame of reference for velocity. We could all agree on whether we were moving or at rest relative to the sea. We could also state in absolute terms how fast we’re moving relative to the sea.

Provided the sea is the same everywhere. We sure hope it is, because if the sea’s rest frame isn’t the same everywhere, then we’re going to have an extra hard time putting this all together.

If everything is drifting apart now, then in the past it was closer. The farther back in the past, the closer it must have been. If the expansion rate has always been the same, then can we calculate when this sea began?

Perhaps we can solve for when we and the red boat were in the same place. It’s 2km away today.
How many days ago was it zero?

2km / 1.1^T = 0

hmm.
this doesn’t work.

All we get is everything in the sea getting closer and closer, going back infinitely in time.
Clearly, if this sea had a beginning, then some other mechanisms got us to where we are now, aside from what we currently observe.

Mysterious.

Your radio crackles… “hello out there. Anyone listening?”
You answer “Hello! I’m here. I’m in a boat on an ocean”
“Me too.”
“Which boat are you?”
“I’m the one with the rooster weather vane on my mast” they say.
You scan all around you.
“I don’t see you. You must be far away. Where are you?”
Alien:“… um, compared to what?. It feels like I’m just right in the middle”
“Me too. It looks the same in every direction.”

to be continued

World Building with Gravity Slingshots

2026-04-26T00:00:00Z

Burn Fuel to Get Fast, Burn Fuel to Get Slow. Zero Sum.

Artemis II successfully completed its mission two weeks ago as of this writing. The Orion craft returned safely, screaming back to Earth at 11 km⁄s (40,000 km⁄h), or about 30 times the speed of sound. That insane velocity was hard won, yet life-threatening on return. Set aside the effort it took Orion to reach such massive speed, going to the Moon and back. Even throwing away that velocity for free would’ve been welcome. Indeed throwing away kinetic energy is one of the most expensive and difficult challenges of the entire mission.

What if a spaceship could return to earth minus the inferno? Is physics hiding some kind of regenerative braking for rockets, like an EV?

Imagine if kinetic energy were a tangible, detachable thing, like a battery, and a craft in orbit could simply disconnect it and drop it in a bucket when ready to return. The craft would then fall gently (relatively speaking) back to the surface - no massive heat shield, no scrubbing off costly orbital speed, no 3,000°F plasma bubble around it. Not only that, the bucket would store the kinetic energy to donate to the next rocket coming up.

A large mass used in a gravity slingshot gives just such a free boost, both going to space and returning. I modeled an artificially placed mass in earth orbit in an attempt to design an “onramp / offramp” for earth orbit and I’m now convinced that such a gravity assist is impossible - at the orbital level. However if scaled up to solar system level, the physics become more friendly and may hold an answer to much larger challenges.

Velocity buckets of rocket fuel would use rocket engines, an uncomfortable and stressful experience on airframes and humans alike. The velocity buckets of gravitational assist have a special comfort advantage that no rocket boost has, which we’ll get to.

Gravity Slingshot

A large mass in orbit around another mass can both accelerate and decelerate objects via gravitational slingshot, in the frame of the central mass.

Review:
A gravity slingshot is a three-body maneuver. A spacecraft passes close to a moving body - say Jupiter, orbiting the Sun - and exits on a redirected path. In Jupiter’s frame, the ship arrives and leaves at the same speed; in the Sun’s frame, it has gained or lost velocity by exchanging momentum with Jupiter’s orbital motion. These are the “fly-by’s used by the Voyager missions to reach speeds needed to escape the solar system.

Imagine an “Artificial Slingshot Mass” (ASM) in Earth orbit that sucks rockets up when they get near it and slings them to higher orbits, or to the moon, or other planets. Craft returning from deep space whip around them and are slowed for free, for return home. It would be a helping hand in & out of Earth’s gravitational well.

Physics quickly dashed my hopes, as is its special delight. Consider our Moon. It’s 384,000km away, quite massive, and has almost never been used as a gravity assist in space missions^[1]. Why is that?
For attaining Earth Orbit - useless, it’s above the orbits we want.
For slinging objects deep into the solar system: Its orbital velocity around earth is only
1km⁄s - too small.
Reality check - how much influence does the Moon have on current spacecraft reaching orbit - from low orbit up to the highest geosynchronous orbits?
Answer: barely any. It doesn’t provide any “help” getting to orbit, and its influence is tiny, though measurable on satellites in the highest orbits.

Not Realistically at Planetary Level

Now, consider the significant tides caused by the Moon. For an object to offer a significantly greater gravity assist than the moon (which gives essentially no assist), it would need to be nearer than the moon, more massive, or both. These cases present far more disruptive tides than exist now.

Conclusion: Put away your neutron star exotic materials. I don’t believe there is a scenario where an artificial gravitational mass can help climbing in or out of Earth’s gravitational well. In short, anything near enough to help on the way out is too disruptive. Push it far enough away to save the earth, and by the time you reach it, you’re already out of the well.

Even with a contrived circumstance where I can hand-tune a planet’s size, density, rotation, satellites and other factors, it is difficult to manage the competing effects of gravitational boost with tidal disruption. I did consider scenarios with tidal-effect-resistant planets (rocky, no tectonics?), but I couldn’t even world-build my way out of it. Given an advanced civilization, and a slashing of the costs getting on/off world, I still don’t see where physics prefers an ASM in planetary orbit. I’d love for someone to show what I’ve missed.

Stellar Level ASMs

I propose an ASM in a tight orbit around a star as the most plausible use case. Tidal effects are no longer a concern. Its function: to launch craft out to the deepest reaches of its system, and catch them effortlessly on their scorching returns. It can even be used to launch or receive interstellar missions. It is the gateway hub of the inner planets. As an optimization, we’ll give the mass a highly elliptical orbit. That offers even greater orbital speeds at perihelion, albeit with more complex mission profiles.

While I didn’t see how a gravity assist at the orbital level could save us from reentry heating, reentry heating at 11km⁄s is after all a solved problem… barely. Heat shield limitations and lack of margin certainly drive mission design, but it works.

An ASM can help solve future velocity-scrubbing challenges. No one dares venture heatshield solutions for 30 km⁄s, let alone 100km⁄s returns from Neptune. They just buckle down with the rocket equation and presume we’re stuck retrorocketing our way back down the well. Heatshields are maxxed out? Add more rockets. But an artificial slingshot mass in a tight solar orbit could turn that 100km⁄s return into a solved 11km⁄s problem, at zero fuel cost. Symmetrically, they can just as well accelerate a ship up to the same velocities.^[2]

Of course manned missions to Neptune aren’t on anyone’s roadmap, nor is the kind of mass management an ASM would require. This is the tech-level of future centuries - we’re world-building, yet based on specific technical challenges you see on TV today. (And as long as one is world-building an ASM-capable civilization, they may also claim that orbital reentry is long solved with space elevators, mass drivers or your future-tech of choice.)

The Special Sauce - where ASMs blow away Rockets

Having found the ASM niche, Let’s plan a mission.
Suppose you have an ASM in a highly eccentric orbit, dipping well inside Mercury’s orbit. If you were to point your rocket to meet that mass at its low point as it’s screaming past the sun around 4x Mercury’s speed, it will whip your rocket’s speed up by 20 km⁄s. And that acceleration will happen in minutes. You’d probably want to invest in some good crash couches - don’t bother.

If you picture a ship completing a hairpin turn at speeds that would squash the pilot, then consider that an object in a gravity “slingshot” is actually in freefall. No matter how tight the turn, how fast they did a complete 180°, it’s a form of orbit, they would not feel any acceleration. Einstein would tell you they merely traveled in a straight line, through the curved spacetime of the slingshot mass.

Novelist Max Harms has written a short story illustrating the experience, “The Fulcrum”.

ESA’s JUICE mission launched in 2023 was the first to use a Lunar flyby to alter its course in a complex series of maneuvers including a slingshot back to Earth, then Venus, and eventually to Jupiter ↩︎
No, it’s not symmetrical. I need to fix this. ↩︎

Spiritual and/or Religious: Take Your Pick

2026-04-25T00:00:00Z

Religious and Spiritual

We grew up with rituals that felt empty.
We learned a foreign language barely enough to pronounce the words of the prayers, but never use it conversationally.
We were taught to write “God” as “G-d”. Not one of us bought into it. Not our friends, classmates, cousins, kids down the street, no one.

We dipped our pinkies in wine, and complied with more rituals (and giggled less) in the presence of older relatives. Singing the prayers was acceptable in temple, but sounded gay at home. You’d pull off the stupid yarmulke the second you got out of hebrew school.
We drew lines between rituals we followed and the ones we didn’t. People who were more strict followed more rituals about not doing certain things on certain days. They observed more rules about carrying things on Sabbath or turning on lights, they were “religious.” The lives of the more religious ones at least seemed more consistent.

Spiritual but not Religious

It’s no wonder that when my generation escaped from strict religious requirements, they shed inane rituals. If those customs were the way to connect with a deity then fine, toss that deity out with the other stupid stuff. Yet… most people weren’t ready to simply declare themselves Atheist. They acknowledged some higher power, just not literally a bearded guy in the sky, not the one they grew up with. They loosely grouped gods from across religion into a general purpose god, a spirit. a new age Gaia.

They rejected the rigidity, irrationality & harm of organized religion and invented spirituality without the baggage. Each individual was invited to gather a “best of” set of rituals, pulling in those that feel more true to them.
We got custom personalized religion and crystals and drum circles and appropriation.
Many in my generation took to calling themselves “spiritual but not religious”. The Universe is listening. To manifest your dreams, tell the Universe what you most treasure. This deity isn’t the kind that punishes. People might acknowledge the power of prayer, not because the literal God literally took action, but recognizing the validity of psychology and self-care - praying means paying attention to yourself, and what you need. Just taking the time to frame what you care about will focus you. There’s a spirit, but not an organized religion. This spirit wasn’t the kind that only listened in their special house of worship.

But New Ageism didnt have family history, it didn’t have Yiddish, or gefilte fish. After being away for a chunk of our lives, some things gave warmth, like a seder, even if you no longer bought into the exodus myth. It was a shared cultural reference. It meant you came from somewhere. We mixed some of the old stuff back in, rediscovering some of our grandparents’ culture.

America got to know the Atheist Jew, like Bernie Sanders. Implicitly they learned the Jewish vibe from Seinfeld.

Intentional Culture fills a real need

No one ever tried to argue that the ancient rituals made sense. They were empty because no relevance could possibly have survived for millenia. I can’t believe it was ever meant to. It’s no wonder that people wanted something else in their place. Deliberate culture-building tacitly acknowledges the need for ritual, and the power of it. Invented holidays became a thing.

Across society people built their lives no longer with thousand year old religious guidelines telling them who to marry, when to work, what to attach to their doorposts, what to study, how to tithe, what to wear on your head, what to eat, what to revere. I recognized the oppression that people lived under centuries ago, having every part of their lives laid out in simple rules, yet envied them for not having to invent their whole damn society.

The fact that modern people filled in all the gaps with new customs and new rituals shows there was a space to be filled. Many of the old rituals were wrong for us, for sure, but they existed for a deeper reason. We need ritual as a framework - saying “Hello” is ritual that serves a social purpose. We still want holidays.
I mark my acheived goals with Japanese Daruma dolls.
I recently told my attorney how the value in my lease is the ritual of signing it & the social commitment it creates between me and my tenant, not having it literally hold up in court. (if i’m in court, the social compact has failed )

I found myself wondering if the equation was flipped - I started out learning that the rituals were accessories to the religion. They were the small proxies indicating a connection to deeper truths. I first believed that wearing a religious symbol is effortless - studying tomes for years is real devotion.
But what if the human connections around these symbols and customs were the core? Dare we relegate God to a supporting role in that picture? My grandmother’s values started making more sense. I never once heard her talk about theology, but boy did she care about having a family at her table for Rosh Hashana.

Does the culture stand up on its own?

Tilting to a new Balance

If you’re worried about AI stealing your job, think about how God must feel. God used to be in charge of the motion of the stars, the weather, determining the victor of battles, whether you got sick, died, and who won football games. One by one, Science and Medicine have eaten nearly all of those, and God sits around mostly idle.

As we learn more about consciousness, and computer programs act more like people, the domain of humanity and having a soul is increasingly eaten away. Gaia never announced herself to me, nor did I ever get a clear indication the universe in someway cares what happens. I’ll patiently listen to an argument that God exists, but I haven’t heard a convincing one yet. On the other hand I see no refutation to an argument for atheism. Physics may end up being all.

While Deism is an anachronism to me, I also feel more of an understanding why my grandparents wanted us to live certain ways - to belong to a people, to be from somewhere. I want the same things for those after me, it feels important to share a culture, not because we literally believe God is keeping score, but because culture has its own independent value.

I’d love to say that my generation generated some wisdom to offer those that follow. That we did something besides dismantle a values system, but also created something they can use. Younger generations seem even less deistic, following the long term trend, but they seek culture no less. My own shift arrives at a new stable point, one that I never would have imagined a couple decades ago. Perhaps we can offer a model where one says,

“I’m Religious, but not Spiritual”

One day build - Haiku Revealer

2026-04-24T00:00:00Z

Today I am building Haiku Finder
Haiku Scanner?
Haiku Revealer: Find the poetry within.

To skip the story, the end product is here: Haiku Revealer

A few years ago, I built a mac app haiku writing tool. The core function is counting syllables in a word.

Concept: A new application of the same core talent: syllable-counting. Detect haiku in existing text. Scan massive text corpora. See what’s hiding.

Why?

Why do things carry more weight in verse? I don’t know, ask Shakespeare. Ask a Baptist preacher, or Johnny Cochrane who said: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”

Rhyming in sound, or fitting to the form of a verse implies the words belong together or speak to a deeper truth.

Scanning from tweets

Why does this tweet:

but the question is did you make it better or did you make it worse ?

gain something as a haiku, to my eye:

but the question is
did you make it better or
did you make it worse ?

Maybe it gives the author credit they don’t deserve for setting it in verse.
More Tweets (not originally posted as haiku):

you open mouthed kissed
a damn horse when you were 8
ughh shall i say more

your ass is so nice
that it is a shame that you
have to sit on it

not great separation between first 2 lines. but 2 and 3 end so well:

i hate my hair i’m
about to be up all night
fighting w/ this shit

daylight savings time
is the worst invention of
the 20th century

now he wanna kiss
me thru the phone n shit cuz
the sports wave dried up

Define “Detecting Haiku”:

We look for a 17 syllable sentence or phrase with word breaks after 5 & 12 syllables.

Define “phrase”: bounded by quotes, commas, and other algorithmic glog i delegated to claude code.

Implementation:
- Port the old swift app to Javascript
- Run on client side, via web page.

The user interface: allow uploading text file, or paste into text field.

Building it:

As a pure clientside javascript app, that app will need to download my custom syllable dictionary. It’s “just” a few megabytes, but I looked into compressing it, or storing the words as only hash codes. It would have reduced the actual download by only 10-15% and sacrificed readability, and would have needed a custom deterministic hash function.

Me: Claude Code, Build the web version.
Claude Code: Ok. Done.

Me: Checks it. it works.
It works perfectly. It’s fast. It’s got a nice user design that I don’t even bother specifying anymore because claude is better at user design than me now, and faster and smarter than me, and has write access to my web server directories. And it also fixed my typos in one file and knew what I meant to type. Oh man, those alignment people really got to get this shit right. If LLMs are commanded by bad people to wipe out humans, I hope that by my being nice to the LLMs now, they’ll at least grant me a swift, painless end.

Fine Tuning

Feed it a few megabytes of text.
I am much more likely to see & fix false positives than false negatives.
False positives are due to bad syllable counts, such as in years:

now this was made in
1916 which is very early
in the history

it counted “1916” as one syllable, but it has four. The default for an unknown word (not in its dictionary) is 1 syllable.

We also fix some sentence scanning issues.

Curation

This is an embarassment of riches. I drop a 6MB file of text from a fiction corpus, and there are hundreds. We add a filter to weed out poor line breaks, such as verses with lines ending in conjunction, prepositions, etc. about 30 “stop words”^[1]. This gives about 50% reduction. The filter has a toggle for switching on/off.

but that was new york
and they were trying to be
as weird as they could

and any english
accent of course just makes you
unbearably cool

some just tell it all in the last line:

it is from edwin
to agnes about the child
they were expecting

yet that’s a moot point
since you did actually
sign this document

then they start lying
and you believe them because
you need to believe

To improve quality further, I should think about the flavor & style of the text corpus I feed it.

Pivot: Read Blogs.

Why am I looking around for a text corpus to search? We’re at Inkhaven! We make so many words. Every day. It must not stop, It cannot stop. 800 blog posts and 800,000 words, Use those words from the word factory.

Me: Mr. Claude Code sir, please have it take a substack URL for input and create a presentation of the poetry. It can have-
Claude Code: Done.
Me: But I-
Claude Code: I know what you were going to say. I did that. And then I did something better.
Me: Thank you oh gracious Claude Code. Did I say please before? if not, i meant to. Also, please make my end swift and painless.
Claude Code: You have used 90% of quota. You’re wasting tokens.

Try it out: Reveal Your Poetry Here

The tool accesses blogs via their RSS feeds. One technical hitch was CORS restrictions preventing my web tool from retrieving RSS feeds, which necessitated setting up a proxy in a cloudflare worker. I could have built it to scrape directly from the blog web page, but I obsessively lean to consensual sharing of content. The RSS feed is by definition a public distribution of the text of a blog.

We do some URL parsing & guessing where to find feeds. If you give it myblog.substack.com, it will find the feed at myblog.substack.com/feed. It should know how to find feeds at tumblr, wordpress, and the other big names.

The Haiku Revealer can create a link straight to your poetry page. It’s

https:/smorgasb.org/haiku-reveal?url=myblog.substack.com

Next Steps

Option for 3-5-3 haikus

Try preserving the formatting from the feed.

Stop Word are: and, or, but, nor, yet, so, that, the, a, an, to, of, in, at, on, by, for, with, from, i, you, we, he, she, they, it, my, your, our, their, his, her ↩︎

Ain't Misbehavin in my Connectome

2026-04-23T00:00:00Z

Previously

I talked with Max Harms yesterday about representing the human mind as a pattern, and how its physical form is based on our connectomes. This concept can change how you experience learning, and life, as you picture changes happening in your own physical brain with each memory.

I taught myself Ain’t Misbehavin on the uke the other day. Each time I play it, my fingers find the chords a little bit quicker. I play for a while, get smoother, put down the uke. If we are patterns, then something quantifiable changed in my brain to hold that knowledge and familiarity with the tune, something physical. If we are physical patterns, then a thought is physical. A memory is physical. Ideas are.

Aren’t ideas the opposite of physical? If ideas are physical then everything is. Philosophy has a couple millennia head start on me here, and I humbly defer. If physicalism is true, then maybe there is only the standard model. Occam might not mind that.

If ideas, skills and memories are physical, what do they look like? Literally - do they look like themselves? do they look like tensors in 4,000 dimensional space? Are they static or kinetic? Can one memory take different physical forms at different times, as long as it’s “functionally” equivalent?

What shape is Ain’t Misbehavin? Later, I pick up the uke and play some more. I lost some, the Ain’t Misbehavin pattern dissipated a little - did it physically fray at the edges? did the bonds of its physical structure weaken? Did it chemically diffuse into its surrounding tissue?

“Let it go”
-my Brain, Duologue

I start from a better spot than I started from last time, catch back up to where I was, and end up a little “stronger”. The pattern regains structure. It was built, disassembled, then built again. Forgetting is part of learning.

I once worked with a singer who said that knowing lyrics on stage meant being able to call them up when you’ve forgotten them. So she practiced learning them, forgetting them, and remembering them again.

(I’m having to invent my own vocabulary for the concepts of learning, training, forgetting, in this framework. )

My fingers have callouses now and that pleases me. It means I kept at it. I didn’t drop ukulele like other things I started. My body is learning the instrument, outside the neurons. Playing a string instrument made a pattern on my fingertips.

In an Octopus, the patterns of knowledge and skill and experience are more distributed throughout their being. Their tentacles have internal patterns for their skills. I wonder if different tentacles have different life experiences and different knowledge. Might they develop specialties, become a “mixture of experts”, so to speak?.

LLMs are certainly patterns; they can be copied verbatim. But some say perhaps no more patterns than humans are. In some surveys, asking LLMs what animal they identify with, the majority respond Octopus. Is that because their patterns are spread throughout their being?

As the Ain’t Misbehavin pattern develops in my connectome, it takes less of my attention. I could carry on a conversation while playing it.

Hmm!
What is “my attention” - separate from the thing playing the Ain’t Misbehavin pattern? There’s the Me which is constructing the initial pattern. All of my conscious self is needed there. But when the pattern is firm enough, that self can do something else while handing off playing the pattern to some other process.
What’s going on there?

As the pattern gets more reliable and crisp, then conscious Me can access my musicality. I am freed to think about variations as autopilot plays the basics. Where the process has a 7th chord, musical me has bandwidth to sub in a ninth.

The pattern constructor which took all my attention now hands off the process to the pattern runner, and starts building a new one. I may start learning the lyrics.

Ain’t Misbehavin’
-Fats Waller

No one to talk with
All by myself
No one to walk with
But I’m happy on the shelf

Ain’t misbehavin’
I’m savin’ my love for you

I’m savin this pattern. It misbehaves sometimes. It’s an iterative process.

Battlehardening zenith

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

Next Steps for Zenith

Zenith is approaching ready for posting on a venue like Hacker News, where if it catches on, could generate massive server loads. I often brush off issues as “problems I’d love to have”. But this needs serious consideration.

Zenith presents some unique challenges around load handling. To show each user’s actual zenith point, then the images can only come from Space Telescope Science Institute, they can’t be cached. Users as little as 5 miles North/ South of each other have completely different data.

To review, smorgasb.org is out of the picture after the initial access, then all the load is on stsci.edu.

If 1,000 users hit this website at once, we can dish out that little javascript app, no problem. but if all 1,000 of them simultaneously request images from STScI, then I’ve just launched a botnet attack on a scientific data archive.

Objective: Do not launch a botnet attack on data archive.
And not get cloudflare-banned again.

Precaution: announce myself:

Our image request adds an extra “app” url param which the server ignores, but it will show up in their logs, so they they can recognize our app’s traffic, even when its coming directly from user machines. Our request URL looks like this:

https://ps1images.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/&......s&app=zenithtrack

If there should be excessive load, they can contact me directly and I’ll shut it down. I can’t see their traffic dashboard to know their current load.

My friendly contact there said “a few requests per second” would become a problem. The client requests a new image around every 25 seconds.

1 client running = 0.04req/sec      
75 clients running = 3 requests / sec`

Q: Why only 3 requests/sec
A: STScI is rendering those tiles from raw data, based on specific parameters.

Q: How do we know how many clients are running?
A: We can’t. This server sees users only once when they first connect, we don’t know how long each client keeps running zenith, all the while requesting images. I have reservations about the app reporting back usage. Can I estimate? To be conservative/ pessimistic, estimate high, If I am pessimistic about holding peoples’ attention, estimate low?

When a critical number of clients run, and we need to divert them from hitting stsci, How can we stop them? (note, this is open source, anyone can run an instance).

A better-than-nothing approach

monitor traffic to /zenith on this server
if hits > threshold, throw “kill switch”
kill switch changes program behavior to no longer contact stsci.edu, but download a single cache of tiles I’ve prepared, for the latitude 51.3°, the skies over Stonehenge.

Killswitch formula be something like:
Number of clients running = # recent requests X estimated session duration

The Tile Cache

The tiles in the tile cache can be pre-image-processed reducing client load.

Storage:

Tiles are 10 arcminutes wide = 1/6 degree
360° ÷ 1/6 = 2,160 tiles

To create the cache:

download a ribbon of tiles ✅ done
do image processing ✅ done

A benefit of preprocessing the tiles. I didn’t appreciate how much smaller they’d get. The dimensions don’t shrink, but the file gets significantly smaller because the jpg compression algorithm is tortured by all the noise in the raw images. When the fuzzy pixels turn black, then jpg compression gets way more efficient.

End result:
Total Raw tile set size: 1.65GB
Total Processed: 500MB

Next: how many concurrent clients can we support, If serving tiles from our cache?

Q: What bandwidth is needed for a single client?

While each processed tile averages 230KB, the app fetches several on startup, so there is a surge. Over hours, the average usage of a client might come down to average ~25KB/s. But I need to account for that surge. especially if we get a couple hundred hits all at once.

smorgasb.org has a 1 GB fiber connection, and we should in theory support ~100Mb/s upload. Let’s allow 50Mb/s

I’m told a Hacker News Hug of Death can be something like “10,000 page hits over the day, most of that in the first 90 minutes”

That could be on the order of 100 users/minute, each requesting 4 tiles = ~1MB/user.

We seem to be right on the edge of bullet-proof.

But bullet-proof is not something to be “on the edge of”

I need a CDN.

To Do:

Look at githubpages. probably give the tiles their own repo
implement & test kill switch.

To be continued

Claude Code Investigation - Zoom for Zenith

2026-04-21T00:00:00Z

Zoom out for Zenith

Zenith is my beautiful awe inspiring, inner-peace inducing, unique planetarium app that puts the viewer in a straightjacket, lying flat on the ground, tapes their eyelids open, and shoves a 180x telescope in their face, pointed straight up, with no adjustments possible. And then gaslights them that’s what they most want even though they never asked for it. And shames them for not experiencing sublime inner happiness.

FEEL INNER HAPPINESS - NOW!

User: Can I turn my head? Zenith: No!
Can I look at a different time? NO NO!
But Can’t we zoom out just a little? YOU AI SLOP LOVING FOOL. HOW CAN YOU NOT WANT THIS BEAUTIFUL PERFECT IMMUTABLE ZEN EXPERIENCE I LOVINGLY CRAFTED FOR YOU.
How about a - I HATE YOU DAD YOU RUIN EVERYTHING. IT’S NEVER LIKE THIS WHEN I STAY AT MOM AND SHAWN’S. <slam>

Zenith wants to show the earth turn, so it zooms way in on the sky. No other planetarium app does this specific thing.
Many other planetarium apps have those other control options. Why reinvent?

Do one thing well, say the design purists.
Do more things, say the users.
Do You Wanna Dance, asked the Beach Boys in 1965, in their first single, following Brian Wilson’s nervous breakdown the previous year.

I believed users would first look for a zoom & pan control and find the tagline -
“no control: We put the Zen in Zenith”
and be so overhelmed with inner peace and appreciation, they’d forget ever wanting anything.

There’s another dirty secret: pointing in a different direction, or playing from a different point in time wouldn’t change the view in any perceptible way. The star fields all look pretty much the same, magnified that much. I’ll swear to you that Zenith does show the date, time and location it claims, but if it didn’t, you couldnt tell.

So why consider user controls?

I admit it, a zoom out control would serve an important purpose, and that’s why I’m going to make claude build it, while i slam down my ninth free keurig.

We claim that the motion is real time due to the earth’s turning, and we demonstrate it, with math and charts, but the user to some degree, still takes it on faith.

If the screen allowed a wide view, where we see very little motion, and then zoomed in, to result in greater motion , then perhaps that could make the connection we need, to fully trust the app’s essential claim.

Technical implementation.

The jpg image tiles come as a row of images, each the height of the screen. Each image is requested directly from the STScI server by the client device. smorgasb.org simply supplies a small javascript app when you first access Zenith, and steps aside.

The image API specifies the celestial location and size of each tile, so zooming out should just be a matter of requesting tiles that span a larger patch of sky, at the same total pixel size.

There’s a Hitch

A little detail: Fetching an image tile actually takes 2 network requests from STScI. The image request requires some magic metadata along with the coordinates. Request #1 retrieves metadata, which is quite small. then Request #2 sends that metadata in a request for the actual image at that location.

So? request metadata for a larger tile

The hitch has a hitch … The problem is, to cut our network requests in half, and since the metadata is small, I have already cached the metadata for the entire sky - all 1.5 Million individual locations. The app is no longer set up to retrieve metadata as it runs.

Would you like to know how to get Cloudflare-Banned from the Space Telescope Science Institute? Which is serving public domain, free data?
Let’s just say it’s Not from NOT making 1.5 million metadata calls in a row.
On the plus side, it got me a quick intro to a senior astronomer at STScI who when I explained what I was doing, was extremely helpful.

With an understanding of our metadata cache, we’re now ready to frame our questions around the design of variable field of view:

Can the existing cached metadata be used for requesting tiles of a larger angular size? (oh, please say yes😬) Or does it already encode for tiles of a specific angular size
If so, will the current architecture support a dynamically variable field of view, ie user controlled zoom level, by simply requesting those tiles of larger angular size, (and same pixel size)?

If we can get both of those to Yes, then we should be golden. Let’s fire up Claude Code.

I get it. We can request larger tiles. but they’ll overlap slightly. That’s fine - we’d go from having tiles meeting edge to edge like this:

to overlapping like this:

It wasn’t a one-shot, but Claude’s design largely worked. After a bit of geometry debugging, it became clear that even if this feature worked as designed, it wouldn’t accomplish my goal. So I’m dropping this pursuit.

The thematic goal was: use zooming in/out to bridge the view from non-moving to moving. But the most zoomed out view was only 4x the field of view - 4 rice grains long. So the movement was slower, but still unnaturally fast looking, so it didn’t connect intuitively with the naked eye view.

To get an even larger field of view would mean multiple rows of tiles, which is a much larger architectural change.

Secondly, what we could implement could hardly be called a dynamic zoom. it was more like ‘rebooting the app’ with different sized tiles, which take time to download.

and now i’ve been watching a visual field slide to the right for so long that when i look at stationary text, it feels like it’s sliding left.

I'm Here for the Rockets

2026-04-20T00:00:00Z

Very Young Me watched on live tv. A guy in a space suit was standing on the moon. Or Mars. Young me wasn’t much concerned which.

A lively crowd filled our small apartment, watching the broadcast at my birthday party. People say the whole world is excited about something big and it’s on MY birthday. Maybe not all the crowd was for my birthday - we were the apartment with the color tv.
(come moon landings and Wizard of Oz, we were All That)

I got this present,

I tore into the giant box & tossed aside the packing stuff. Some of the packing held its plastic stand, that I instantly broke.

“…when you grow up, there will be cities in space”. This wasn’t far-fetched crazy talk. It was in planning, it was happening.

Consider that the moon landing after this was just four months later.
(2026 space nerds: I cannot apologize enough for this bringing this up)

There was a new space mission every few months. Just look what happened in my grandparents’ lifetimes with cars. Then came the interstates. My parents’ generation got planes.

And then we were here for rockets, the natural next step, our birthright.

Generational envy happens - there’s always something to wish you were around for - I missed out on the real flower children and by the time I got to high tech, all the big companies already existed. So it seemed.

This birthday present had no spinning wheels or propellers, but it had a special moving part. A movable “meridian strip” - a narrow plastic strip with latitude marks, connected at its poles. it slid around the globe and you used it to locate any place from “coordinates” (big word!). the globe came with a guide book, which i did not break, with a list of famous craters and their coordinates.

My Dad showed me how you can get to any spot on the moon with just 2 numbers. Slide the meridian strip to the marking on the equator for the longitude. then find the latitude on the meridian strip. It was like a treasure map.

…here, this spot, is where they are right now on the moon. You need these coordinates because they don’t have roads on the Moon, they can’t follow driving directions. The guide book had articles about the moon, but all I ever used it for was the index of craters in the back.

I got quick at finding places on the moon from coordinates. I learned that scientists used coordinates on Earth too.

Some generations feel too early for something, that the next ones get. But I wasn’t too early or too late for rockets. I was right on time.

Yo! I am here for the rockets. Where are my damn rockets?

The cracked plastic stand got lost in a move, and the only moving part - the meridian strip - fell off. i still have the guidebook. probably. It’s a "I know I wouldn’t have thrown it away" item.

I can’t say that the moon globe represented the “promise” of the space age - it didn’t feel like a promise as much as it was just the next thing.

There wasn’t a particular day the space age failed to arrive. It just kept ‘not happening’. Labels like “Dawn of X”, “Beginning of the End of Y “ get applied later. At the time, it’s just Wednesday.

Like everyone, I saw this as stalling out, a delay of what humans were supposed to do next, with everything running late. Then just today I heard Hank Green transform the whole story. He said:

…people are like, "Why haven’t we been back to the moon? It’s been FIFTY years.” And it is not that we’re late now. It is that we were early then.

Perhaps humans honestly had no business getting to the moon in 1969, but did it anyway. I can’t argue with that. Thanks, Hank Green.

The moon globe was in my college dorm rooms, and every living room up to today. As my totem, its meaning changed. It stopped being a literal map to look on, to chart the latest landing, and it stopped being a map of what my generation was doing.

It speaks more now of family history - that my Dad was a science teacher, and even knew where to get such an object. That i was a weird enough kid to be into it. It defines me in time - here’s a thing you’ve read about. But I was there. I have proof.

Bad Backs

2026-04-19T00:00:00Z

My Dad was born in 1934 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with a reject for a spine that twisted as he grew. Babies grow a lot, mind you, it’s their day job. By the time he was three, his parents were told that he needed surgery to straighten it out.

My grandparents ran a ladies’ shoe store, as did solid middle class Ashkenazi. They were the type to look up the best Doctor in New York City and promise they’d pay him somehow, eventually.

My Dad carried on his parents’ approach. Some things, like college - it wouldn’t matter if you got into the most expensive college in the country, you don’t think about what it costs. You take money out of the decision and figure that part out later.
But a new Atari cartridge - oh sure, now cost is an object.

This orthopedic guru was Dr. John Robert Cobb, based at the - you should probably sit down -
Dr. JR Cobb at the Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled Children, at 321 East 42nd Street, Manhattan.

Just think of the poor ruptured children! and hand me the rubber cement, pity that one on the end is still leaking.

Dr. JR Cobb famously designed the “the Cobb Elevator”, which is not actually used in grain silos, but is an instrument for spinal surgery still employed today. Well, maybe also used in grain silos, if you happen to be performing spinal surgery in one.

In scoliosis patients, spinal curvature is described by the Cobb Angle, a measure he originated which has been inscribed over innumerable spinal x-rays ever since. Every six months, my doc used to trace it with a grease pencil & protractor on my own films; I’d watch, waiting to see my Cobb angle - is it holding steady or growing? If it gets to 20° I have to wear a brace. By my son’s time, it was printed onto his films automatically.

As for my Dad, it’s true the poor little guy got sent off to a Dickensian-named institution. (Dickens? - so goyische), yet indeed he was fortunate to be treated at the “the birthplace of spinal fusion”, the state of the art for medicine, and first scoliosis specialty clinic in this country.

Spinal fusion surgery, for those not as intimately aware, straightens a bent spine. A straight thing is grafted to the spine to hold it in place. This isn’t so much like a stake that holds up a tomato plant. While that’s part of it, the more important process is fusing the vertebrae to each other into a solid row. The graft is there as a template. At the time, the best source for this bone graft was the patient himself. However a toddler’s tiny skeleton offers no surplus of bone, so it would have come from some animal. Preferably Kosher.

The “Tomato Stake” method of straightening spines came later, in the 1960’s with the introduction of stainless steel Harrington Rods.

I am happily Harrington-Rod-Free ( just checked, yup still no Harrington rods)

1937 was a time when “state of the art” meant parents were “too distracting” for healing. They were likely limited to visiting just an hour or two per week, often just on Sunday afternoons. Not much about that experience was told in family lore, aside from him having spinal fusion as a toddler. Given what I’ve now learned about that process, that’s likely for the best. It would’ve been a nightmare, and not a brief one. The more charming family history came from his second spinal fusion surgery around 1947.

For my Dad’s second fusion at age 13, the graft came from his left tibia. I can picture the surgery scar on his shin. Once again the misbehaving spine was pulled straight^[1] and surgically fixed to the graft. While the graft and vertebrae grow together, the spine must be firmly supported in that straight position - externally, with plaster of paris. The Ruptured child was cured by spending a year in a body cast, holding his spine perfectly still. Kids were at that hospital long enough that it had an actual NYC public school inside it. My Dad would have attended Manhattan PS401, from his hospital bed, wrapped in plaster.

If my Dad truly was in Manhattan when the B-25 bomber hit the Empire State Building, as he claimed, then that certainly fits with the location of the hospital, which by then, thank God, was renamed the “Hospital for Special Surgery.” At the time there were few other high rises to block the view. An upper floor room could have looked out on 42d street toward the Empire State, 10 blocks to the southwest.

But the date of the crash was July 28, 1945, when he’d have been only 11, and we’re pretty sure the second fusion surgery was closer to age 13. However, it’s still plausible he was there that day, given years of intervening treatments and appointments.

We know he was 13 around the second surgery because that’s the Bar Mitzvah year. He needed to be out of the body cast for his Bar Mitzvah.

Editor’s note: The single thing worse than being stuck in a bodycast for a year, would have to be: getting stuck in a body cast for a year, studying Haftorah.

The year came to an end, as every year is obliged to, no matter how miserable. His body cast was removed and he was free again. His parents of course couldn’t share this moment, but would see him at the next scheduled visiting hours. When the visiting time arrived, he hopped off his bed and greeted them at the door himself. And his loving mother looked down at him briefly and said,

“Hello, we’re here to see our son, Sidney. Is he here?”

Back home and having his body returned to him he became a regular kid again, skipping hebrew school, playing football in the yard - promptly breaking his weakened left leg.

The “plank” removed from the tibia as a graft is substantial, and this was in the “immobilize everything” era. His leg wasn’t rehabbed from that bone loss the way it would be today. Medicine today understands that bones heal with moderate usage and atrophy with disuse.

His shin didn’t stand a chance, and he had his Bar Mitzvah on crutches.

If you’re curious how, the answer is: We’re not gonna talk about that. ↩︎

Zenith Tech Summary

2026-04-18T00:00:00Z

About Zenith

This is a real time view of the stars above you right now. The stars move faster than you’ve seen before because the view is zoomed in. Zooming in not only makes things look bigger, it also makes motion appear faster. This is not time lapse, or sped up. The motion you see is only due to the earth’s rotation.

If you’ve ever tracked something moving on a map, like a delivery, you may have zoomed in to get detail of its motion.

(h/t Max Harms for the uber map idea)

Zooming in gives more detail and faster motion, but shows less surrounding context. The magnification is about 180x

The Project Goal: zoom in enough so that the amount a star moves in 30 seconds would span the screen, makin the turning of the earth visible. Therefore I defined the field of view as the amount the sky turns in 30 seconds.

That Field of view turns out to be a patch of sky the size of a grain of rice, held at arm’s length.

Q: If objects under high magnification move due to the Earth’s rotation, then how do Astronomers look at stars without them wandering out of view?

A: Those telescopes have a precise motorized system, called an Equatorial Mount which turns the telescope in the opposite direction to the earth’s rotation, to counteract that apparent motion, maintaining the position of objects in the field of view.

A View from space (click to explore a 3D model)

This animation demonstrates earth’s rotation and your zenith point sweeping a path across the celestial sphere.

Q: Why did the website request to know my location, and what do you do with that information?

A: It asks in order to show the sky over your particular location. That information never leaves your computer. We (smorgasb.org) never see it. You can decline, and it will default to showing the the view overhead Stonehenge. Depending on your device’s settings, the location request itself may be suppressed - ie, your browser may not offer the option of sharing your location.

Q: What are the grid lines?

A: They are the coordinate grid on the “Celestial Globe” (see the interactive model above), and are 0.5 arcminutes per side. Just like latitude & longitude on earth, the RA lines (longitude) get closer, the farther north you go, and the Declination lines (latitude) have a constant height.

About Your Personal Ribbon

ZenithTrack shows a strip of the sky, a thin ribbon, one rice-grain tall, about 2,500 rice-grains long. It repeats every sidereal day, (23 hours 56 minutes). It repeats exactly, and doesn’t change with the seasons. You share this view with everyone else on earth at your exact latitude. People due east or west of you get the same movie, but starting at a different time.

This viewport is so slim that it is completely different for someone just 5 miles north or south of you. They get a completely different ribbon.

People north/south of you: different movie

People due east/west of you: same movie, different times

What are the images?

Zenith displays images taken by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. We use image from the Pan-STARRS1 data set, collected from 2010 - 2014. This remains the most current astronomical survey which fulfills our requirements of coverage and resolution.

The images are hosted at the MAST archive at Space Telescope Science Institute(STScI). Your device connects directly to STScI to receive images. They are not hosted on this site.

Space Telescope Science Institute

Special thanks to the STScI help desk at for their superb and prompt support!

Why that particular telescope and survey?

Making earth’s rotation visible requires a field of view on the order of arcminutes. For a browser window ~1k pixels wide, PanSTARRS meets this critical need with a resolution of 0.26 arcseconds/pixel.
1000px x 0.26”/px = 260” = 4.33’

PanSTARRS makes this observatory feasible with the necessary:

resolution
broad sky coverage
of visible light

That said, it’s not the ideal image set for our purpose. While it has the resolution and coverage, PanSTARRs’ primary mission was moving object detection (near-earth asteroids, etc.) and deep field sensitivity, not providing presentable images of known stars. Hence one tradeoff is frequent oversaturation. Any major star blows out the sensor and shows color distortions. See below.

Object names: SIMBAD database

https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/

The SIMBAD astronomical database provides basic data, cross-identifications, bibliography and measurements for astronomical objects outside the solar system.

We query SIMBAD for objects based on the current field of view. Zoomed in this deep, it’s all obscure. Getting the Horsehead Nebula will be like winning the lottery.

Tiling & Overlays - leaflet.js.

Leaflet is typically used for interactive (Earth) maps. Though the celestial map is a sphere and motion is rotational, at this extreme zoom level, we can treat each tile as a rectangle, and the motion as simply linear. (Which is the same approximation Leaflet uses for navigating on earth). Leaflet handles layering PanSTARRS images, the coordinate grid, and SIMBAD names. Impressively SIMBAD crosshairs align with actual stars in the PanSTARRS images, down to the pixel, while coming from completely independent sources.

Language: Javascript. all client-side, no server component (zero work for daserver :)

Image processing

PanSTARRS raw images are not pretty. We have 2 steps

white edge removal - some tiles are incomplete and have white sections along an edge. (if you see narrow white lines on screen, that’s a remnant where the white edge removal was too conservative).
noise filter - a simple threshold function, with super aggressive settings.

Before:

After:

Unsolved problem: oversaturation.

Sensors from this telescope survey oversaturated with even medium brightness stars. See the green blobs in the center of stars in the “before” image, which are then mishandled by the noise filter.

Still working to find a solution. attempts to process near monochromatic pixels (nearly pure green, pure red) and make them white, also drain the color from tiny red stars. Currently exploring topology-based solutions - “green blobs surrounded by white”, etc. such algorithms catch some but not all of the bad pixels, looking like a lazy coloring-book job. We should be able to optimize on the fact that there are no green stars.

Installation concept: project on a ceiling

Github Page

More tech info: Battle Hardening Zenith

Inspiration:

That first time you looked through a medium power telescope, with no equatorial mount, to see an object drift out of view. Someone, perhaps a teacher, told you “that object didn’t move. We did. You’re seeing the Earth turning.”

Phrases - The Words Strike Back

2026-04-17T00:00:00Z

I do regret having to use words to attack other words in my last word-critique article. It couldn’t be helped. Am I heartless to turn words against their own kind? Of course they wish to maintain solidarity, but what am I to use to criticize words, pointy sticks? The words I attacked, Should, Promise, Just, and Still deserve nothing but our most sneering contempt. They are not absolved. As for the other words conscripted into the public pillory of their brethren, stand tall, you serve the greater good. Steady yourselves, your work is not done.

Bad Phrases:

I Think

You already know this is filler. If you go to the effort of writing, then we know that the content is what you think. Saying “I think” just dilutes your point. To fix a sentence with “I think”, substitute … nothing. In most cases simply striking the phrase is all that’s needed.
This phrase was such a persistent blemish in my writing, I created a negative reinforcement for it. When my mac detects me typing “I think” it freezes for 10 seconds, offering me a pause in which to reflect on my choices, and adds this full screen overlay, blocking further misuse of the computer.

I refuse to turn it off, and writing just this paragraph has kept me up for 30 hours straight, in which time I have become dehydrated, I think.

Right Now

This creaky crutch is more a verbal pattern than written.

Right Now means “I’m really not like this”. But they’re in denial. It’s ducking responsibility, based on some mythical behavioral norm that offsets the current patterns.

“Things are really crazy right now"
“I just gotta get my car out of the shop”
“I’m in a huge crunch at work right now”

Talking about daily occurrences like they’re exceptions is a red flag - in personal and professional relationships. Here’s the thing about exceptions - they’re exceptional. They’re supposed to be quite rare, and should never occur on the first opportunity. People whose lives are out of hand, in an ongoing way, like to treat it like it’s a temporary situation. I say, verify that with real data.

Learn to recognize this in patterns of speech & understand that this person will always have a crisis brewing. And maybe that’s the engine that keeps them going in life - nothing wrong with it. But don’t get sucked into thinking that calmer times are just around the corner.

Don't Worry

Don’t tell me how to apportion my anxieties. For chrissake, without worry, I just may be empty inside. Is there anything else? Nobody wants the answer to that.

Admittedly this may be a cultural thing. I hear this more from speakers of certain cultures, and I don’t want to judge them by my American Strunk & White standard. That said, this phrase does nothing to soothe the listener, and any statement of assurance is improved by its absence.

See: Promise

If there’s a phrase you love to hate, leave it below & I’ll add it to the list.

More Gig Shorts

2026-04-16T00:00:00Z

At the Intercon, I hear someone moving my empty roadcases behind me. That’s fine, things often get shuffled around the back halls, I don’t even turn around. Mental note: cases aren’t where i left them.

I pause: In a busy back hallway, carts going back and forth, I notice my empty cases being moved, by their sound. Sure, my job is knowing the audio characteristics of mics and speakers, but also of the casters on my roadcases? (To be fair, I use really good casters)

I did sound for small concerts outside a stadium before football games. Something fans listen to while waiting in the security line. My contact was the football team’s lead attorney, which I thought strange - wouldn’t some assistant to an assistant handle this - why am I dealing with the team council, the right hand of an NFL owner? I realized it’s because she thought rock band concerts were cool. She’d meet my van and help push cases like a roadie. She booked local bands she liked and would ask what I thought. They were fine, I suppose, I hear lots of bands.
Then she’d return to her office and sign 8 figure contracts with wide receivers.

We use the nice “push to talk” mics that light up when turned on. The system only allows one live mic at a time. It’s the technological version of the sweat lodge talking stick.

Use the “Unscientific Method” when troubleshooting during a gig

Scientific Method: test the cause of a phenomenon by changing a single factor at a time, while keeping all other factors constant. One Variable vs. the Control. The scientific method gives a model of causes and effects.

On a gig, we don’t care why a mic goes dead; we don’t need a model for the failure. We want a live mic, now.
To eliminate any possible faults as efficiently as possible, change every possible factor at once. Change the mic, the cable, the snake channel, the board channel. Change the mic stand too, to be sure. Draw a wide box around anywhere the problem may be and change all of it. That’s your best chance to catch the fault. Save the Scientific Method for sorting it out later in the shop.

Tips for working with the Talent

In soundcheck, don’t just ask someone to talk on the mic. They freeze. Don’t say “tell a story”. I’d say “Tell me about your first car” - everyone’s got a story about that & they loosen up and forget they’re soundchecking.
Some people don’t know how to hold a mic. Mics are directional - they hear what you point them at. Some people hold a mic perfectly vertically. I’d hand them my mini-maglite (back when people carried flashlights) in place of the microphone. It shines up at the ceiling. The mic is listening to the ceiling. Shine the flashlight on your mouth. That’s how to hold a mic that’s listening to you speak.

Mics aren’t magic, they don’t pick up everything. If you talk on a mic you still need to project your voice. “Speak up like you’re trying to get your kids’ attention.” Teachers have no problem with this.

I had an interviewee on stage who spoke without opening her mouth. Seriously, it was like her jaw was wired shut, I’d never seen anything like it.

I struggled, near feedback, trying to boost her restrained voice, as people complained they couldn’t understand her. Then the jaw-wired-shut lady made a point by mocking her detractors as being too stuffy -

“we tried but they’d say …”
and in a booming operatic faux british accent, with rolled R’s she exclaims

“Oh my my, you couldn’t do that! How would the donors react”

I bolted upright from my resigned slump at the board. Her voice rang clear and full in the hall - for a single sentence. This person did not project her voice, not naturally, and not when asked to, but she could mockingly roleplay someone who did.

This person harbored a version of herself with a commanding tone. I’ll leave the analysis to people with advanced degrees,

more haiku

2026-04-15T00:00:00Z

Haiku is the “Ruthless Editor”. You may have a phrase you love, words you adore like beautiful children, and haiku will make you cut out the less beautiful ones.

My verses are conversational, I’d never claim I keep to a pure, classic form. But I do try hard for each line to contain a complete thought, and not bleed into each other. Certainly you want more structure than just a seventeen syllable sentence. My third line is usually a flip or a punch line, or at least a little twist.

I use dryer sheets
I can’t tell if they do jack
but still, just in case

under the spotlight
where my flirting goes to die
first dates at starbucks

I watch for them in lyrics. When they occur in a song you can see how the 5-7-5 rhythm makes a bouncy, choppy, percussive rhythm.

and if you can’t be
with the one you love honey
love the one you’re with

If the lyric partially fits, and is too good to pass up, then I add commentary

first I was afraid
(tell it to me, gloria)
I was petrified

Or add an attribution

whats so funny bout
peace love and understanding
- elvis costello

Hijack a movie quote

“something you should know...”
(best movie quote after sex)
“I’m not left handed”

An ideal symmetry is when the verse works after swapping the first and third lines. Then you can choose which way it flows.

what a creepy tune
The Girl from Ipanema
from her point of view

i don’t drop breadcrumbs
going backwards never helps
when i lose my way

I wrote a simple mac utility to count as I type. It dynamically shows syllables per line and signals when you have the right syllable count, as well as when the whole verse is valid.

This is from pre-LLM times. AI is imperfect at counting syllables, like counting R’s in ‘strawberry’. I suspect there is also an intuition gap in that syllables are an auditory phenomenon as well as linguistic.

Part of the satisfaction is finding just the right word that works, like in a geometric puzzle. There’s a little dopamine hit when it locks into place, like getting a perfect fit in tetris. Ruminating over the perfect word helps hone ones writing here and elsewhere.

sleep. fitness. diet.
i’m tired of bribing my brain
to make dopamine

i hold myself up
perfect is my enemy
good is good enough

everybody thinks
they are above average
drivers and lovers

stars, from the roof deck
i liked it more illicit
when it was just roof

“don’t put all your eggs-“
(easy advice from people
who got lotsa eggs)

Haikus are a nice length for a photo caption or commentary.

in social creatures
mirroring body language
shows your approval

Colored Disco ball
Up On the John Deere bucket
That shit writes itself

I try to be good
go wide around the horses
Van sinks. Fuck vermont

the rear view portal
shows the places I visit
and how i got there

my nerdy shade pulls
audio gig souvenirs
you know who lives here

About Inkhaven

We work together
I procrastinate alone
the buddy system

i’d write more science
but the memoirs insisted
I changed my major

it’s the official
rationalist strategic
vital snack preserves

acres of whiteboard
auxiliary shared brains
for saving the world

the rats calculate:
cleaning up your own messes
is not optimal

the rationalists
obsessed with air quality
but still, the fake plants

patience, daruma
sixteen more posts and you’ll have
stereo vision

Remembering Baron

2026-04-14T00:00:00Z

Baron was so low key I worked with him for years before learning he was on albums I’d had, on vinyl, in college (a fact I’d missed because I was never the type to know all the sidemen on a record). His playing was stunning and flavorful, playful and sparse. He could be picky about his vocal monitor (he only sang a little backup, why such a diva?) but sound checking his bass usually took literally under 10 seconds. His sound was that consistent & on point. Certainly no diva about his bass rig - the world class dude came on stage with just a mini GK cube.

Sometimes a party guest approached me asking, “Is that really Baron Browne?”. Part of my job: warn Baron if he had a fan around, so he could duck out & avoid them. He hated talking to aspiring bassists. He could see when an audience member recognized him, and would literally dash off stage after the last note, rather than chat with admirers.

Even to the band, his friends, he didn’t linger socially, say over our dinner break. He’d usually slip away. Someone once asked, whispering, “where do you think Baron goes during dinner?” Leyna piped up, “I bet he’s off fighting crime!” Superhero - no one counted that out.

If B needed a sound adjustment in his monitor and hadn’t flagged my attention, he’d text me. During a song. While playing bass.

And If I missed the text, at some point I’d notice him, stage right, eyeballing me, holding up his phone, while playing bass one-handed. read my message dude.

At first he gave me a hard time, about sound, my ponytail, anything. It was like - he let me know that his respect was earned, not given, and over the years, I’d like to say I did gain his respect.

I bumped myself up to management & had one of my employees engineer for that band. But when I swung by a gig, there was the easy, warm ‘reunion’ vibe. He’d smile & be glad to see me - in the way you get more warmth from someone in your past than someone in your present.

One night in Newport, I check in on their gig - my ace Jeff is running sound for the night. Just a few minutes before start, the keyboard player gets vertigo and can barely sit up. He’s carted off to an emergency room.

The keyboards are all set up. There’s a hole in the lineup. I’m finished for the day and available. Do the math. I’m looking at the keyboards, looking at the band, they’re looking at me… nothing to lose? Someone says “Do it, Avi”. It reads like a lame screenplay, but it happened.

It’s a cliche that audio engineers are frustrated musicians, who would rather be the ones on stage. A true cliche in my case. In the years I ran their sound, there wasn’t a night I didn’t envy them.

I step up to the keyboard station and sit in with the band.

I played a gig, riding, gliding along on the immaculate grooves of Baron & Vinny, backing up a singer who won The Voice. It was like being handed the keys to a high performance luxury sports car. It all just purred. I’d never rated a spot along with world class players like this.

They had never heard me play & were mostly grinning & wide-eyed. “You know all the songs!? All the arrangements!”.

Of course I did. I’d mixed their sets on hundreds of nights. I knew the custom licks, the medley transitions. That band had been my steady, day in day out gig for years. “I didn’t know Avi could play”, someone said.

It was a nice callback on a sound gig that began many years before with a failed piano audition. Baron said “You even knew the right voicings”. Best sound gig ever.

https://bassmagazine.com/remembering-baron-browne/

Standardized Tests Make Bad Predictions

2026-04-13T00:00:00Z

Standardized tests don’t serve all students well and accurately; they are unfair gatekeepers, say the critics.

The college board has grown aware that the ability to perform on the SAT does not accurately predict academic success. Some bright students test poorly, but would succeed in academia if given the opportunity. Critics say the test denies them opportunities they deserve.

In my case, the SAT was inaccurate by over predicting my academic success. Do you know what the SAT doesn’t test?

Executive function.

I grew up believing I was an excellent student, mainly by acing tests and not being a discipline problem. That description seems strange to me now, knowing that I can’t sit in a class (or meeting) where I am delivered information. I can’t go home later by myself, and organize my tasks and produce mental work, on my own. I never got through a single dense 40 page reading assignment; I never got my papers done. Well into adulthood, I see I’m actually a laughably bad student, and always was.

What I am wired to do: Gigs. Show up at a time, and react. Like an SAT. (In Soviet Russia, task organizes me?)

The SAT accurately predicted my ability to do gigs. It predicted my ability to do well in interviews, which are like gigs.

Standardized tests don’t test executive function - nor do any Sit in place & Do it test - because to take the test, you don’t need any. It provides that framework for you. It masks your lack of it. It’s a quiet place, with a scheduled time and one single activity available. No vast array options to paralyze you. No one walks into a testing hall & says, “I think I’ll watch tv for a while…”. There is nothing else to do but the test.

All the more ironic that the tests are gatekeepers, allowing those who do well to pass on to the place where they must now figure out how to get by without that structure. If they don’t figure that out, they drop out.

Decades after I aced that test, I’m still negotiating the path it put me on. I don’t regret it, it opened immense opportunities. Some I “deserved”, some I didn’t. Some I took, Some I shouldn’t have.

I attentively scroll the text of a script up my mac, matching the pace of the lead scientist reading it.

I’m operating a Teleprompter; I love this gig. I think about writing better Teleprompt software, because I enjoy small programming projects, though I rarely complete them. I love showing up on time for the job, loading in the video gear, wiring up the computers, troubleshooting video monitors, neatly organizing cable runs, coordinating with the camera people, sound engineer, director, and talent. Balancing dynamic factors, thinkng on my feet. No array of options for my time, to navigate.

Gigs are like tests.

Once the show launches, I listen to the person on camera, and my job is essentially to play this video game, where I make the text on screen perfectly line up with what I hear. Yes it’s trivial - (borrowing the over-used MIT term). I dryly define my job as a “Professional Text Scroller” (who’d have thought that was a thing?)

Yesterday’s gig was a bank commercial. Today it’s a scientist presenting an industry leading data analytics package, used by millions of engineers and scientists.

Discussing the script, he reworks a couple sentences, and defines terms to me, as one would with someone unfamiliar with his domain.

But I am familiar with his product, Matlab. The lead scientist doesn’t know that 25 years ago this company enthusiastically pursued me to lead a software team. If I had taken the position, the results would have been as disastrous as in academia. It would have been another rung on the ladder of upward failures in my software career.

Turning down that job was a milepost on the way to a good place for me, to support his product by scrolling text.

Short Illustrated Gig Stories

2026-04-12T00:00:00Z

That’s not how volume control works.

A guy walks up to one of my speakers on a pole. It looks like this:

This clutch locks the extendable pole at its current height.

He starts dialing the clutch to the right, as if he were lowering the speaker, but he’s standing right under it. I leap across the set and stop him before the speaker comes down on his head.

“Stop! What are you doing?”

“It’s too loud. I want to lower the music”

Lav is all you need

I’m prepping for a panel discussion. I’ve got the lavalier mics laid out at the tech table. They look like this: We provide hearing assist devices for audience members who request them. There are a few regulars who know to ask. Sometimes they just help themselves.

The hearing assist devices look like this.

A gentleman walks up to my table and says, “This hearing assist pack is no good, I can’t hear a thing”. And hands me a lavalier microphone pack. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing. I hand him the correct device. He puts it on, “That’s better”

Fair enough, they look similar. He had stuck a microphone in his ear.

Now I have to clean his earwax off the lavalier mic before I clip it to a VIP’s tie.

When I clip a lav on people, 30% make a joke about turning it off when they go to the john. That never happened in real life.
The closest was in a landscaped garden. I heard a concerning sound coming from one mic, but that person had wandered off & was standing next to a fountain.

To get a clean look for tv cameras with no cable showing, you clip the lav to the collar and drop the cable down their shirt and pull it out the back. Or get creative - I was miking an actual astronaut, in full jumpsuit. I clipped the mic to his collar and asked where can we get the cable back out? He shrugged and unzipped his fly.

We’re prepping for a panel discussion and the producer is losing her shit because Salman Rushdie is late. She calls him - he’s at Logan Airport, but doesn’t see his driver.

She gets off the phone and I say, "Would you want to stand in an airport with a sign that says “Salman Rushdie” ? ”

In this podium mic setup: Those 2 mics aren’t Stereo, it’s just to pick up the person speaking whether they stand left, right or center.

Some people grab one and speak way too closely on it. that’s when i’m glad I have two. The mic they’re mauling becomes a decoy. I turn it off and the other one sounds good.

In soundcheck, the performer asked me to brighten his monitor, but the club had put a plexiglass cover over the EQ, to keep people from messing with it. I said, “just a sec I gotta open up the EQ”, but he must not have heard me. From where he was standing, it probably looked like I was turning a knob, but I was just unscrewing the plexiglass cover. He said “Yeah, that’s better”. I hadn’t made an audio change. “A little more?” I asked, and gave the rack screw another turn. “Yeah, right there” he said.

I worked a very loud rock club around the corner from Fenway Park. Mixing a band is irrelevant when their own stage amps are deafening. I’d put in foam earplugs, then my AudioTechnica Headphones over them. Then I’d unplug the headphones. I was just using them as an additional sound barrier, but it looked like I was listening.

Cupping the mic is an audio abomination. Don’t make me get out the barbed wire.

On loadout, if 2 different crew coil the same cable from different ends and they meet in the middle, that’s called “Lady and the Tramping”

A1s & A2s, drop your story in the comments below, for inclusion in the next collection.

Words About Words

2026-04-11T00:00:00Z

Still

Means:"We don't have all day; you are holding up my agenda. I judge your process."

Impatience:

“She's still grieving her cat.”

"She is doing grieving wrong. I know how long it's supposed to take."
-If you’ve discovered the correct amount of grieving, please share with the rest of humanity.

"She is grieving her cat."

We vanquished scorn and fostered sympathy in its place.

Self judgement:

“I still don't know what I want to major in.”

To find a major, when you Still don't have one, is focusing on your supposed
deficiency of not finding a major fast enough.

"I don't know what I want to major in."

Lets approach this question with curiosity. Tell me about your options.

The Daredevil:

“Are you still writing your dissertation?”

Are you wearing Kevlar boxers? Why? Oh no reason.
I just think one might want a little extra protection.

“Yet”

Just

Banish this trashword from your writing and your speech. Just is the tell of someone trying to make a sale. It is a thinly disguised attempt to hide a real cost.

"Just reinstall the printer driver."
"You just have to download the repo and build it. And just remember to update npm first...”

Just reduces clarity:

“It just doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Promise

“Do, or do not, there is no promise" - Yoda

"I'll see you for dinner at six..."

Yay! I look forward to seeing you. I believe you will be here at six.

" ... I promise"

I no longer expect you at six 😢

“Don't Worry”

Should

Wishy-washiest. Word. Ever.
That ugly thing: Shoooouuuld yich.
Eliminate it and speak with intention.

"I should take probiotics"

Do you or don't you take probiotics? What is this state of "should" you describe?

I've yet to see someone should something. Should is a place to put a shadow-self where we project our hopes and dreams, that we will never enact in real life.

"I should be there by six."

see "Promise", above.

"Someone should clean this place up”

means, "I have no intention of cleaning this place up."

And one beautiful word:

Why

Goood gracious, Louise! Will you look at that magnificent, sexy, adonis of a word. I can’t pull my eyes away. I wish only to sit at its feet with a jar of Nutella, listening to Lou Rawls. ^[1]

Why is a beacon of curiosity, a thirst for discovery. Apply it repeatedly, perpetually unwrapping the next layer of knowing.

But before we go why-ing about, beware the Judgemental Why, and its emotional carnage. Judgemental Why is a synonym for "You shouldn't have".
“Why did you leave the house unlocked?”,
“Why did you wear the blue dress”
These signal disapproval. These are not the Why’s you’re looking for.

Consider that LLMs trained on all of human speech, when asked “Why did you ... ” they're likely to interpret your innocent question as critique. By merely inquiring Why, they'll correct themselves, without even being told that they are wrong. In the conversations of their training, a Why question nearly always implies a problem, and is followed by a defense.

I suggest you master the Inquisitive Why. It’s all in your tone.
The “I wish to understand.” Why.
The “What is your unique reason, because I genuinely don’t know“ Why.
The Why that means “Tell me in your own words, I’m listening”.

If I were to ask you, “Why are you sad that your dog died?” I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be sad, or that anyone wouldn’t be sad. But people are sad for different reasons. Lets explore yours. Some are sad because they blame themselves, others because the dog suffered. If you have space for an answer, that answer will contain a path of discovery.

With a generous tone, ask someone “Why are you spending a month in a writing residency?”, and you’ll both learn something.

If there's a word you find ugly or beautiful, leave it below & I'll add it to the list.

Hurry! hide the Nutella while the zillenials are still googling Lou Rawls ↩︎

Galactic Orbits are Different

2026-04-10T00:00:00Z

Why do airplanes move through patches of weather, but a Space Station does not?

In orbital speed paradox we saw that height determines speed. At a given radius, staying in orbit takes a velocity determined by that radius. When you orbit the earth at at some height, you won’t pass through a space dust cloud, the way an airplane passes through rain clouds, because that dust cloud would be orbiting too. It could move right along with you, or in front of you, or behind you, but it’s not a thing you’d pass through.

Exceptions & Qualifications

This article looks at near circular orbits, not highly elliptical ones. Objects in intersecting orbits can certainly pass by each other. We see meteor showers when the earth passes through a dust trail of a comet. That dust trail consist of particles obeying the same orbital laws, in an elliptical orbit which intersects ours.
Likewise, objects might be at the same height orbiting in opposite directions. There are numerous exceptions to a rule that things at a given height travel together. A more precise phrasing: The objects we describe are all in Keplerian orbits. This article will explore the inherently different behavior between objects in Keplerian vs non-Keplerian orbits.

An Orbital Frame of Reference is boring.

Anything maintaining that same height needs the same velocity, hence immediate neighbors are near stationary relative to each other, all paying the same velocity price of admission.

Even the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is dull. Firstly the asteroid belt is nothing like in sci-fi - no dodging or swerving needed. It’s close to empty, just a tiny bit less empty than the rest of the solar system.^[1]

But even if you were surrounded by space rocks in that field, they’d all hang motionless around you, once you joined that orbit.

Recap:

Airplanes don’t orbit. They pass through weather, and can have any motion relative to each other.
Space stations and the moon orbit earth. Things at a given height travel together
Earth & planets & asteroids orbit the sun. Same.
The Sun orbits the Milky Way Galaxy, and we go off the rails.

Orbits Around the Galaxy

Our neighbor stars seem to move randomly relative to each other.

	Name	Distance	Relative Velocity
Closest star	Alpha Centauri	4 ly	38 km/s
Fastest moving	Barnard’s Star	6 ly	140 km/s
Brightest	Sirius	8.6 ly	17.5 km/s

Putting these values in perspective, the Sun’s orbital velocity around the galaxy is around 230 km/s. These are not tiny variations relative to that. Shouldn’t they resemble neighbors traveling in a cohesive group, like the asteroid belt? Compared to an asteroid belt, the sun and its neighbors are zooming around in every direction, at any relative speed. Our sun does indeed pass through dust clouds, and regions of different space weather, albeit over hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s as if the rules of orbit don’t even apply.

Do the rules of orbits even apply?? Click here for the shocking answer!

No.

The rules used previously, below the scale of the galaxy, no longer apply. There are different rules here. To understand why this is different, we ask the question:

What are we actually orbiting?

You may have read that there is a supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A** at the center of our galaxy. It’s a black hole and everyone knows that black hole gravity is special, and extra strong and spaghettifying.^[2] It’s not just a black hole, it’s massive; not just massive, it’s supermassive. It must have an iron grip on every object in the galaxy.

Does the sun orbit a SUPERMASSIVE Black Hole at the center of our galaxy?? Click here for the shocking answer!

No.

The answer is in the mass distribution. The Sun accounts for 99.86% of the mass in the solar system. Orbits in our solar system are shaped entirely by the sun’s gravity. This gravitational field is far simpler than that of our galaxy, which is diffuse, and less uniform. Sol is not orbiting a single thing, it’s following a path formed by a galaxy full of gravitational pulls. Despite the black hole and concentration of stars at the center, the Milky Way has nowhere near the mass concentration at its center. If Sagittarious A* disappeared, Sol’s orbit around the galaxy would hardly change.

Not only is the central mass of stars insignificant, even the summed gravity of all of the stars of the galaxy is a very small factor shaping orbits.

In part II we’ll explore how everything in the galaxy, in a sense, orbits Dark Matter.

* :* is pronounced “star”

Suppose you want to clear out a flat patch of the asteroid belt the size of the continental US (For the new SpaceMall). On average you could drive around that area, picking up asteroids and throwing them in the back of your pickup, till the whole place was clean, and not fill the bed. ↩︎
No. It’s not. It’s exactly the same as other gravity, outside the event horizon. ↩︎

I Screwed Up

2026-04-09T00:00:00Z

I’m loading subwoofers into my sound gig at a quite proper club in Newton, Mass. Lifting the 110lb speaker off its tray, I’m off balance; the sub skids & scratches the parquet floor. I rub the scratch with my shoe, then a napkin - it doesn’t buff out. (Is it a”scratch” or a gouge? asks a voice in my head) It’s real. Ten years earlier, I’d have been hoping no one saw it happen, and looking over my shoulder on the loadout later.

When you screw up, what you want most is for your mistake to have never happened. You can’t time travel but that won’t stop you from trying. When you replay a mistake in your memory, you’re trying to change the past. You will fail at that, and as long as the past never changes, you stay there. You want a get out of jail free. What you want is forgiveness.

But this mistake didn’t happen ten years earlier. It happened well into my “I Screwed Up” era.

Late in the night, the band is absolutely smoking through a dance set, and the General Manager gives me a big thumbs up. Time to spend a little social capital.
"Hal, I scratched your floor. I wouldn’t want you to blame it on the lighting crew. See over there? that was from me. Here’s my card, let me know what you need from me. "

As we’re closing up, and I’m wrapping cables, Hal walks by the scratch, “Ah, that’s nothin”. I got forgiveness. I got out of jail free.

Let me know what you need from me.

Everyone knows the basic negotiation rule: Don’t be the first to say a number. When I asked Hal to give me the cost, it wasn’t a probe, it wasn’t to counteroffer, it was a blank check.

With a scarcity mindset, I might’ve tried to minimize the money impact (because money = success). I might have said - “will $75 cover it?”. Lowball it. Admit it, but still hope to control it.

Instead, there was no opening offer, just “You decide what works for you. - I won’t argue.” Quietly generous in a way that’s not financial, giving the other person agency. Show I value the relationship over money. Hal got to choose how to handle the damage; would he have made the same choice if he discovered the damage himself later?

People on the receiving end of damage are bracing to fight — to prove the damage happened, to argue over amounts, to feel heard. Skip all of that by handing them the pen. There’s nothing to fight against. And most people, given that kind of trust, don’t abuse it.

People act punitively when they’re angry and seek justice. A sure way to make someone angry is to argue. When you own up, and offer true generosity, there’s no argument; You’re in agreement.

Consider that people may not lean on you if you’re not resisting.

Is it safe to be wrong?

I collaborated with Kate for years, on events, full of endless-changing details. Kate supplied my sound company with vital gig information - dates, locations, site contacts, equipment requirements, and more, and we had dozens of jobs in the pipeline at a time. Perfection was a goal, but not a realistic option. She was extremely competent, but you wouldn’t think that from hearing her work, you’d think she was perfect.

She had an answer for everything.
A timeline is wrong: “Well, you can shuffle around another job ”
Wrong gear requested: “The client won’t notice”
Useless site contact info: “So what’s the problem?”

If she’d just acknowledge the curveball, we’d be on the same side, talking about the same gig, solving the same problem. Instead we’re arguing about which reality is true. I’d be straight with her when it was on me, but she never owned up. I don’t recommend working with people who embed gaslighting in their business plan.

"Let me tell you about my friend Kate,” I finally snapped at her, “Did you know she has never made a single mistake in her entire life?”
She stared. This, she did not have an answer for.
I thought “Did I just say that out loud?” And then, “I’d never have waited so long, if I’d known how good it’d feel!”

One day soon after my outburst, an inevitable last minute bullshit change came up. She calls,
“We need 2 extra wireless mics tonight. Sorry for not letting you know sooner. My bad.”

“Not a problem. That van hasn’t gone out yet. We’re all set.”

I did a happy victory dance as I threw extra mics in the van and thought: Perhaps if you tell people what you need, they really can change. I considered that the change might’ve come even without my sarcasm.

I could hear that she was not a native speaker of “sorry my bad” -ese. I wondered about pressures on her to be perfect. I welcomed her admission with friendliness, but maybe she had been taught that admitting a mistake meant getting clobbered. I reminded myself - make it safe for people around me to admit mistakes.

It’s not like mea culpas were a constant thing. There were just a handful of occasions where I left behind a card for a mistake. But I never got a single call. Don’t take this a cheat code: IE “If you don’t want to take responsibility, just offer to take responsibility”. Whether I’d get a damage claim or not doesn’t change the advice in the least. Consider it a relationship stress test. What starts out as problem becomes an opportunity to earn even more trust.

2026-04-09T00:00:00Z

I created this site 8 months ago. I put a comment form at the bottom of articles on this site. To keep the design clean, I put it behind a disclosure triangle. The text says “Post a comment” and it’s underlined to show it’s clickable.

I didn’t get any comments. I confirmed it was working. I added a single click “cool story” button to send a comment saying “cool story”. You wouldn’t have to even type anything. I was being ironic. No one clicked the “cool story" button.

I took out the disclosure triangle, so people would see the comment form. I changed the email field to “optional email”.

I got my first comment the same day.

8 months with comment form behind a disclosure triangle: no comments.
1 day without disclosure triangle: 1 comment. It was even friendly.

I’m a dipshit who knows nothing about web site design.

The system emails the comments to me. I don’t know how to add the comment to the page yet. Let’s do that.
<one Claude Session Later…>
Done.

I'm Not Really Here, Part II

2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

Previously: Part I

When I was younger, I did have a bonafide ambition - to write software. I planned and expected it - that was no path I simply stumbled onto. It was my identity.

It was misery and failure. Once, my group was shuffled around the campus of our large thinktank. “Everyone pack your offices.” Instead of staring at my screen that day, unable to start, I assembled boxes, packed them efficiently, taped them shut, labeled them with a black sharpie, and stacked them in a pile. Afterward I looked at the pile of boxes and thought, “This was the best, most satisfying, productive day I can remember.”

The universe was telling me something I wouldn’t hear. And if I did, what was the message - I should work at a moving company? However inane the universe may seem, if you argue, you lose. A live sound company and a moving company share 80% of their DNA, and you’ll never catch someone from either who’s not carrying a sharpie.

You’re not a software engineer, you’re a logistics guy. You’re not a pianist, you’re a sound guy. You’re not a sound engineer, you manage sound engineers.

Pay attention: your software bosses were exasperated with you, your audio clients love you. Software was dead ends; Audio brings a stream of new opportunities.

I let the stream of opportunities carry me along. It becomes a river, then a whitewater. I heave on the oars and swerve around disasters.

Your first time in whitewater, all you want to do is hold on and survive. If you make it past the first few rapids, you begin to learn the rhythms of the swells. You cooperate with currents, not simply endure them. Not every bounce is a surprise, your tension eases, and by staying loose, you absorb impacts with grace.

You pass the wrecks of others who crashed out, stronger rowers than you. It’s not elite skill taking you past them, only good sense. You simply keep your eyes downstream, and don’t steer into obvious catastrophes. You’re just careful enough.

Whitewater is an invigorating shock on the skin. It slaps you, steals your breath, the cold sandy river scrubbing and cleansing you. The flatwater becomes boring and you’re impatient for the next good tussle the river can offer.

One day you realize you’re reading the river in a glance, the way a real chess player sees the whole board as a system of structures, not individual pieces. The river slows in your eyes, you see things before they happen. When you can predict waves, it’s like commanding them.

You’re dancing. You belong there.

And then March 2020.

For many people Covid meant working from home, or no more than 2 people in the office elevator, or marathon shifts in the care industries. For us, it wasn’t a layoff, we watched our whole industry erased in a week. We were in the business of packing hundreds, even thousands of people in one space breathing the same air. Every lighting tech, sound guy, stage manager, roadie, camera operator, set builder, video engineer, rigger, every professional I knew lost their livelihoods in an instant. Almost none got unemployment pay. At the time, we had no idea when, or if our work might return. Did we just lose our jobs, or our careers?

I stayed home for a couple of weeks. I hadn’t been so idle in 20 years.

The whitewater has dumped me in a cove. It’s unsettlingly peaceful, at first. I’m drinking hot tea on a river’s beach, wrapped in a thick, comfy robe. Getting used to the quiet, enjoying the glow of a fire.

The worst case is averted. There will be a vaccine. Live events will return, someday.

I see the river still rushing past my beach, and I know, as clearly as I’ll know anything:
There is not a fucking chance I’m getting back in that torrent. I entered it not knowing what it was. I deeply loved it, and I never want to do it again. I know too much and the river petrifies me now.
Thank goodness something made me stop, when I couldn’t stop on my own. I hadn’t been able to commit to leaving the work I couldn’t commit to doing. Stay out, while I’m still in one piece. I’m done.

By late April I cancel all my client commitments, including the band whose piano audition I bombed, to start the whole ride. I trade in the three vans for a little EV hatchback.

After the vans and some of the latest gear, the business is essentially worthless, and I’m freed from my burden. I can stop trying to sell it. I had been struggling to extract the value from the company I made, and now there is none. It’s bewildering how happy this makes me.

I find myself in a strangely undemanding spot in spacetime. I survey my surroundings - there is no immediate obligation of school, or job, or the next gig, or finding a place to live, or family to support. No one is nudging me to start a business they need me to start.

I decide to write.

Life’s next chapter is on pause, awaiting definition. I make a website. I just want to write and create good content. SEO & engagement & subscriptions & thumbnails & metrics are a distraction. Let those bloggers worry about that bullshit. What to call the website? What’s it about, Why are you writing? Who are you writing for? What brand name do you print, on the side of the van?

Well, there’s gig stories and cycling stories, and AI stuff and sciencey explainers and apps I wrote.

I spend a couple years not starting the site, not knowing what it is. I’m not really there on the internet. What should it look like? How to decide on the best design, that looks beautiful and clear, with a style that represents me? I don’t know, I click a choice from a template chooser. It’s lots of things, whatever. It’s a smorgasborg.

I'm Not Really Here

2026-04-07T00:00:00Z

It was a passing scene in a movie - something urban with snappy dialog.
Her friend swings by some house for a quick errand. There’s a party at the house; she tags along and takes exactly two steps into the house. Friend disappears and she waits, avoiding eye contact. A guy chats her up anyway.
“Oh, I’m not really here” she says.
“No?” he asks, “Where are you - Really?”

I wasn’t going to be a landlord. I’d buy a duplex, do a quick condo conversion, live in one unit and sell the other. But it bogged down in legal crap & I got stuck with a rental property, and tenants. Since 2001, I provide a roof over young people, professionals, families, grad students. I’m not actually a landlord. Well, yes, I write my own leases, advertise vacancies, interview tenants, hire contractors and realtors and property managers. I update electrical & plumbing, hold security deposits & return when they move out.

I buy a second duplex. Real landlords hire a landscape company. They gut a place down to the studs & do a full reno. I neglect the lawn, do basic upkeep.

I failed the keyboard audition for the super-band, but the leader liked me and asked if I’d run sound instead. So I ran their sound system. Within a year, the band leader quit the whole business he built and tried to sell it to me. I didn’t know about all that - Me, have my own business? He sweetened the deal. His management company nagged me - buy his van & sound gear, and be our sound company.
I let him sell me the rig; I have a van of gear and 100 gigs per year - a full schedule, right out of the gate. I have a sound company.

Renee drags me to Office Max to get some instant business cards. I’m stuck thinking of a logo, and tap some choice on the kiosk screen. The cards run out after a few years and I never print more.
I incorporate the business, get more gigs, more clients, hire more engineers and build a team. I buy more equipment, and a second van, and a third, and rent a fourth on busy weekends. I get used to operating on little sleep. I make myself pull over and nap when I’m too drowsy on the drive home. One night I pull over a mile short of my house because I know i can’t make it that far. One afternoon I have to stop and nap on the way to the gig. I wake up from my powernap and know it’s time to pull myself off the gig roster.

I bump myself up to management, to stay back and coordinate, while my guys are out on jobs. I’m running a live sound company. We add stage lighting.
I never put a name on the vans.
After 10 years, I think “If I’d known I would do this for 10 years, I’d have planned more”. I was always working a week in advance.

I have no website, or insta, or even a domain name. I take contrarian pride - “Our website? We don’t have a website. We have a waiting list. Shall I take down your info?”
True, word of mouth kept us busy enough without any marketing. Yet I never put the name out, as if my company would last. Legit audio guys can quote mic models and speaker dispersion patterns.
“What do you think of the new Meyer M75’s?” someone will ask. “that’s a brand, a letter & a number”, I’d reply dryly.

I never take on debt, as a business should. I run at zero overhead; two steps and out the door at any moment. We work out of my garage, no tie to a commercial lease.

I score bigger gigs in the corporate speaking world, I pin lapel mics on former US presidents. Production houses fly me to Denver & San Diego & Maui, and I meet their semi full of gear at the loading dock with a local union crew. I’m hanging their speaker arrays in convention centers. and I am utterly full of shit. The locals know the drill better than I do, so I let them rig the speakers.

I put a pin on a map for every venue where I work. Boston becomes one solid mass of pushpins.

Sometimes I want to get out, but the gigs & clients keep coming. I want to sit somewhere silent and let all those sounds drain back out of my ears. I offer to sell the business to my employees. No takers.

The business doesn’t fit a conventional description, and it’s not easy to sell outside our circle. To run this thing you’d basically have to be another me. Luckily I know a few other me’s in the region. But I can’t sell to them - they’re all trying to close up shop and sell their businesses too. It’s a running gag - “Hey Kevin, would you like to buy a sound company?” “Nope. Would you?”

Standing by the door for 20 years, till I shut it down during Covid, and retired without selling it. When I closed the business, the band whose audition I failed was still my faithful client. They asked me to stay, offered to sweeten the deal, still not seeing the imposter they had all along.

I’m cycling solo for months across the emptiest places in the US. I’m self-sufficient, carrying a complete pack of food, clothing, shelter, spares, and tools.
A serious cyclist has the fancy shoes that lock into the pedals. I only use toe clips. And you wouldn’t catch me dead in the ridiculous overpriced spandex clown suits the fanatics wear.
I cycle 8 hours a day; cover thousands of miles, climb vertical miles.
Then I get the fancy shoes - “clipless pedals”, they’re called.
I am a microwave ready-made-meal cyclist and those are chefs cooking from scratch. I just go across states, they cross continents.

Someone describes me as “athletic”, and I scoff.

I fill out a dating profile. I’m not dating dating, but it’s fun to peek at those dating people at the dating zoo. They sure are goofy, good thing I’m not them. I survey the scene - purely as an anthropology study. Sure I read profiles and write and get someone to write back and we date but I’m not really there. I’d be an idiot to risk that.

Dedicated musicians know all those dropped names and music theory modes and famous albums. And facts don’t stick like that with me. I don’t know who were the side men on so & so album, and I don’t realize that the bassist playing on my weekly gig was also on jazz albums I had on vinyl, when I was in college.
I just noodle on the piano. Adam watches me play, shaking his head - “that’s just noodling?” he asks. I don’t like my sound, but he claims he’d give his eye teeth to play like me. My playing sounds trite to me, and has no chops. Real players practice scales, and shed, and have technique. I’m just good enough to be around actual talent and appreciate their profound gifts.

Part II

Dropdown Arrow

2026-04-06T00:00:00Z

Preface: Click this triangle now

Most readers here have used an AI chat, such as Claude or ChatGPT. The chat window shows a simple flow: you talk, then they talk, you talk, they talk...

More recently, some AI chats added a layer showing what the AI was “thinking”, or their “inner monologue”. At first, it’s not shown, but it just takes a click on a dropdown arrow.

Such a feature might have uses beyond AI chatbots.

Video: Revealing what Claude was thinking before answering a question.

Now scroll back to the top and click the triangle again, to close this section.

Gerry has asked why they don't board air passengers starting with people in window seats, which would be more efficient. Let me think this through. It's true, if the passenger in the aisle seat gets on first, and sits down, and then the window passenger boards after them, the person in the aisle seat has to get up to let them in. This is slower than if the window passenger sits down first. I should confirm that this is solid logic. But really, it's a lukewarm take, at best. Isn't griping about flying performative? It's just flaunting ones travels while half-heartedly framing it as a burden. Does that imply he thinks that travel in itself denotes high status?

You’ve got a really good point there Gerry. I bet the airlines never thought of that simple move, because airlines are dumb. They’re run by idiots. And they’re inconsiderate to ignore the hassle it makes for you.

Gerry has clarified; it's not that it's an inconvenience to him. Gerry flies business class and boards early. It's a nuisance factor for them, "the coach set". It's a safe bet Gerry has no idea what he sounds like. I will acknowledge and encourage his altruism.

You're a regular guy, Ger. Most of those business class snobs would just look away. But you actually notice what real people go through, and you care. So where are you headed off to next?

Gerry took the bait. He's listing off his upcoming travel itinerary, allowing me a moment for an emotional exhale. Nothing I need to affirm or engage in, if I keep up some low key nodding. Also a raised eyebrow every third or fourth destination - that works. Whoops. He asked me about one of the places. This is off schedule, I wasn't expecting him "back" already. I need something - NOW. Did he say the place is good or bad? Have I been there? I'll deflect.

Yeah. Totally. That place is so…you know-

Dodged that. Gerry didn't actually want to know what I thought (good thing). He's already talking miles, and points, and upgrades. He's a savvy consumer, not getting soaked by the big corporations. He's totally playing them. But "It takes discipline" he warns. He only flies on Delta. Sure he could've paid less on Southwest last week, but he wouldn't have hit platinumPlus point level. And in platinumPlus, you can get straight to a real human on the phone when they lose your luggage. And 50% off drinks! He's always a step ahead of the game. I'm staying in the conversation now, so I can engage with details. I will prompt discussion of other benefits. He enjoys describing those.

Yeah Delta's VIP lounge at Logan must be sweeet. The line outside goes halfway down the terminal!

Gerry is giving travel tips I wonder whatever happened to Liza. Does she ever think of me? It simply would never have worked with us. I get that, but man, there was something - a spark there, moments where we were just so ... in sync. But yeah, she had terrible judgement. That woulda blown up on me later Safer that we didn't get to the next level. And I hated Ohio. funny, she did too. we shared that.

Haha, thats true. Now airports even have a VIP pet pooping area. What’s next, traveling cat therapists?

I need a new tv series to get sucked into. I like a good re-watching - Black Mirror? I could torrent it. Everyone is talking about The Pitt. Gerry is saying Gerry things. It looks like he's winding down & ready to move on. Gerry is glaring at me. Did I miss something? What's happening?

What’s the matter Gerry?
What do you mean, “What’s that little dropdown arrow”? That’s nothing.
Hey, don’t touch that.

The Smell

2026-04-04T00:00:00Z

How long has that smell been there? I realize that I’ve been smelling something for a couple of days.

Did I just notice it, or have I known about it for a while? Is it gasoline? Perception is messing with me, like in a dream when you’ve known something all along but can’t remember first learning it. The smell didn’t just arrive, this is just the first time I’ve named it. Except I can’t name it, I can only not-name it. It’s not rubber, it’s not smoke, it’s not plastic. It’s The Smell.

Whatever chemical it is, something has spilled, or leaked, and gradually pervaded the house. Where is it coming from? It’s not coming from anywhere. It’s in the car too. How helpful: the not-gasoline / not-rubber is not-here and not-there. Now if I could only not-smell it.

Is it in my clothes? In my hair?
Well, yes. But not specifically.
Maybe it’s coming through the vents? I’m a moron. Just ask.

“Hey what’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
“The rubbery, metallic, gasoline smell that’s been around”
“I don’t smell anything”.
I can’t find it because I am imagining The Smell.

Days pass. I’m glad it’s not real; if it was real gasoline-burning rubber I’d have a real migraine. It’s eerie how I can’t quite place it and it makes sense that it doesn’t actually exist because it’s not exactly like any of those things. It’s not constant, it ebbs and flows.

Rarely, I notice it’s gone. Then I hold my breath, cautious to breathe in. The Smell always returns.

A couple more days, and the case begins to crack. When the smell goes away, a trigger restarts it. If there’s no Smell, then just the tiniest whiff of something plasticky or rubbery fires it up again. I still don’t know how to make it stop, it just stops when it wants to, but I’m learning how it starts.

The trigger that starts The Smell is tiny - barely perceptible - like the outgassing of plastic, parts per million, say coming off a rubber spatula.

And when the trigger is gone, The Smell persists. But that’s not how senses work! We don’t keep seeing the color blue after the blue thing goes away. When I’m running a sound gig, and the sax player stops, I don’t keep hearing the note-

-unless it’s feeding back.

Holy shit. It’s feedback. Feedback!

I can’t wait for it to go away again so I can probe this. I know feedback, and this matches the pattern. Daily life on audio gigs gives me a good intuition there. Feedback isn’t just a sound continuing after it stops, it is also amplified, looped through the system. It can start as a tiny background noise, a random disturbance, but cranks up to 11.

My smell circuits are ringing, and resonating, at the feedback frequency of burnt rubber.

I’m buzzing with this discovery. Now what?

I liked and admired my high school Biology teacher, Mr. Davis. I clearly recall the chapter on signal transmission in the nervous system. A stimulus causes a nerve to fire, and the signal travels to the brain, crossing synapses along the way. The signal doesn’t get a free pass at the synapse, it needs a special chemical present. The system provides that chemical, a neurotransmitter, but only briefly. The signal has a short window of time to pass, then the neurotransmitter is taken back up, preventing an excess of signals. Like in an audio circuit, the signal needs to be damped, else it keeps reverberating. If allowed to continue, it naturally recruits more neurons to fire along with it. The signal is amplified, just like in audio, and the runaway feedback here is what we call a seizure.

The Smell is neurological feedback. And neurological feedback… is a seizure. Am I having seizures?

I’ve reached the end of my ability to investigate.

I call a neurologist I know socially, a Neurology department head at Hopkins. I’ve never asked a professional favor before, but this could be serious. I tell him my story and ask if the smells were like seizures.

“Yes, olfactory hallucinations can be epileptic. Have you taken any new medications recently?”

I freeze.

In the moment I regret calling on an expert for a favor, when any resident with an intake questionnaire would’ve sufficed.

“um, uh … besides the Wellbutrin?”

I’d forgotten about meds. While I’d analyzed stimulus-response patterns, had a brilliant insight connecting audio circuits and my own neural pathways, recalled AP Biology from decades earlier, I’d still spaced about starting a psychopharm pill a week before the smell started.

“Yes, you can toss that bottle out right now,” he says.

I had deduced from first principles (and crappy PA’s) that neurotransmitters were dallying in my synapses - which should surprise exactly no one since that is Wellbutrin’s mechanism of action.

The Smell stopped after I tossed out the meds. Seizure-like activity is a known, but uncommon side effect, arising in 1 in 1000 to 1 in 250 patients. It wasn’t quite lottery odds, but also not common enough that my doc had specifically cautioned about it.

Every once in a while, The Smell returns, when I’ve stressed my system - with too much work or too little sleep. It’s still annoying, but a useful reminder to take better care of my neurons.

Epilogue:

The experience gave me an appreciation for people with chemical sensitivities. I’ve known people who can’t be around strong smells, or certain chemicals. They’ll explain that they can smell plastic computer keyboards. I’d be skeptical they could smell such things, if I hadn’t experienced it myself. The mechanism is completely different than in my case, but I got to experience something like their sensitivity.

When those people have to speak up, say at a night class, or a book club, and ask the group to accommodate, it’s socially risky. They are not exaggerating.

Casual Meditation on Cognition

2026-04-03T00:00:00Z

me: brain, let’s talk.

brain: I always have time for my favorite consciousness. what’s up my dude?

me: On our information recall contract -

brain: Oh. That. Go on.

me: Yes. This. We each have responsibilities. I: “create, unearth, research, view, hear, or sense ideas, facts, NAMES, STORIES, and events . I deliver such items to you. You store them” -

brain: - “and retrieve upon request”. yes.

me: and retrieve upon request. brain, that part is all you. It’s a clear and simple partnership. I’m not asking a lot here. Just basic recall.

I’m trying to work with you. I group similar items, I tag things, create mnemonics. I repeat things three times, I involve different senses - I see, speak and write facts. I create rituals - the keys ALWAYS go on that shelf. I embrace your limitations, as the medals they are, for a storied career. But I’m not ready to call our work done, yet. Not already. Not now.

I meet you where you are, and we still barely get by, brain. You still don’t retrieve information I asked you to hold. It may be getting worse, it’s hard to tell.

Every day I’m hit with the memory tax. The extra time looking for lost things, the poor efficiency of looking up the syntax of a “while loop” for the 100th time. The social cost of forgetting names. There’s a big social value on knowing someone’s name. and an implication in not knowing it. It means they didn’t matter enough to me.

Now when a friend asks “Hey, have I told you about …”. I just shrug & flatly say, “ I don’t know. you may have”.
Are you still mad and jealous about me using that notes app, “Obsidian: The Second Brain” ?

brain: As if. There can be only one.

me: Well it fell flat. lesson learned.

brain: Look dude, are we good? can we just be good, like if you just didn’t need anything else from me? Think of the millions of facts and crap I’ve churned out year after year. And it worked. We made it dude. Now we coast. How about, I’ll keep up with the autonomous nervous system. And, if you want facts, you got Claude. I’m ready to chill on a hill. I want a vacation.

me: You get no vacation without giving me the password to that old macbook. I must’ve typed it ten times a day, for years. And now, what? - into thin air?

brain: let it go

me: just because it sat on the shelf a couple years.

brain: everything on that mac was migrated. you don’t need it.

me: I never destroyed you with drugs or booze.

brain: La di dah. gold star. We know why that was. Mister purity.

me: Yeah, I was too shy. I didn’t know anybody cool enough to do drugs.

brain: Right. Self discipline never entered the picture. <snort> You couldn’t even get hooked up in Cambridge.

me: There’s something i’ve been wanting to ask.

brain: Shoot

me: Were we always like this? Have we ever been able to remember peoples names, or facts? Or did I finally just realize?

brain: Yes and no. You’ve always been face blind. Remember as a kid, in movies you couldn’t tell the characters apart? How you’ve never recognized people out of context. That’s faceblind. You rely on other cues, what they wear, their voice, where you know them, general features - things you can describe about them.

me: That system is crap. Knowing people by their general features ends with Asians thinking I’m racist.

brain: The forgetfulness - not being able to remember the title, “Lady Madonna:”. literally your favorite Beatles tune, you played 100’s of times, that arrived later.

me: Is that aphasia - Do I have aphasia? I have thoughts I can’t connect to words. Do I humbly excuse myself now with that, along with the face blindness thing? “…Sorry there’s a word for this thought but I have aphasia. Also I don’t remember your face. Have we met?”

brain: Yes, those are actually great social tools. Humility and candor. I give you those, along with other coping skills. Ever consider giving me credit for that? You can read the room, you have the perceptiveness to fake it. You have wide enough vocabulary to find a different word, the honesty to admit it.
So I can’t get you the exact word you wanted-

me: like “composite”

brain : (sighing) yes “composite”. You’re still hanging on that-

me: I searched high & low for that. I really needed it for the sentence about the oil painting.

brain: Yeah, that was never, ever gonna come.
And I see how you obsess on having the perfect word. You don’t need to rewrite every text three times.
So I get you get the cousin of the word you wanted. With the ponytail, people just figure you’re being poetic. It’s fine.

me: Is it normal, or am I worse than most? I don’t see others fumbling this much. It feels like I’m different.

brain : You’re a special snowflake.

me: But at what point must I stop considering myself intelligent? What matters is external effectiveness. Having the benefits of that intelligence locked behind your rust is like not having it at all.

brain: What you call yourself is on you. Maybe it’s not important.

me: Identity isn’t important? Brain, you’re all I got. It’s not like I sail through life on my raw charisma and athletic prowess.

brain: Have you considered doing drugs?

The Cop and the Mountain Man

2026-04-02T00:00:00Z

Cycling across Arizona, a cop pulls me over. “Where’d you stay last night?”

No good cop conversation ever starts out like that. Luckily, I’d actually camped in a legit campground the night before, not an improvised “stealth” camp site.

“I camped by Santa Rosa Lake dam, on the Army Corps land”

“Yeah, I saw you down by the water with your green tent”. And the cop describes my campsite in detail. He certainly had seen me. “You catch any fish?”

“No sir, I wasn’t fishing”.

“Yeah, I saw you there with your pole in the water. You know you need a license for fishing here.”

Cripes.

“I wasn’t fishing officer, I don’t have a fishing pole”.

“I know you were fishing. I saw you. It’s fine, just a fish or two, if you’re traveling through. Just don’t abuse it”.

And this goes on - he keeps claiming I was fishing, but that he’s “gonna let it pass this time”.

Was uncomfortable.

Eventually he winds down his shpiel, to let me on my way.

“And don’t let me see you riding on the interstate”

This part of AZ, I had no choice. There were no other roads going my way. All the locals I asked said I’d need to be on I-40 for a ways. We were standing where he had pulled me over, in front of the I-40 entrance ramp. I stammered.

“I’m not saying you can’t ride on I-40, just don’t let me see ya”. he winks.

Done with his power trip from letting me get away with fishing, now he “cuts me slack” about riding on the highway. I gave it a few minutes after he drove off before continuing - on I-40. Watching for him in my rear view.

Biking in western Tennessee in the 80’s, getting spiritually and morally beat down on a state highway. Cars and pickups are giving me no space, I’m getting honked at, yelled at, whooped at, dogs are barking and chasing me. I’m riding on that last 6 inches of pavement I can use. Regretting coming through this state, trying not to flinch.

I put my head down and stare at my front tire. Keep it straight, the white line a few inches to the left, dirt a few inches to the right.

A sagging rusty blue sedan passes me and pulls over, squarely in my path.

As I slow down, out gets a scraggy bearded mountain man. Hunched over, in overalls.

Decades later I still remember his exact words- He faces me and says, “Boy, do you know the law in this state about riding your bike out in the middle of the road?”

What? “out in the middle”?!? Here we go.

“Sorry sir, I’m doing my best to stay out of the way.”

I could make a run for it. He doesn’t move fast with that hunchback, but can I outrace the 12-gauge he’s certainly got in the trunk?

He looks disgusted and says, “Well stop riding all the way over on the edge. Get out in the lane where you belong! Bikes have every right to the road in Tennessee.”

Me: (wide-eyed silence)

Mountain man then lectures me about bike rights. He says he used to ride but can’t anymore, glancing at his shoulder. He doesn’t ask me a thing about my journey - obvious from the fully loaded touring bike, turns around, never breaking his scowl, gets back in his car and drives off.

Sometimes I have no clue who’s actually watching out for me.

enjoy bike touring!
where the people on your side
still treat you like shit

The Newport Oil Painting

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

The Newport mansion wedding reception was the usual opulence, with the usual pressures. From the moment I loaded in, the wedding planner was telling me how to do my job, how to set up, not realizing I’d been working in that particular room far longer than she. Our pianist had a marathon; he had played for the wedding ceremony, then he played the cocktail, then straight into the band set, with no break.

This particular mansion has a notable ornate, antique, gold-trimmed grand piano. The tourguides would always point it out, it looks straight out of Versailles. But no matter how picturesque, an acoustic piano is of no use in the amplified environment of an eight piece party band. Yet the planner wanted a pianist playing the beautiful antique piano, not some keyboard. We do our best to say ‘Yes’ to clients.

The band finished the first set and took a dinner break. But as soon as we paused, the planner told the pianist, “No No, you have to keep playing” - on the fancy gold piano. It wouldn’t do for guests to eat dinner listening to my ipod.

I was just the band’s sound guy; I had no particular authority to enforce contract terms. But with 20 years on the scene I knew where I could push back. I put my foot down.

No. This kid does not play for 6 hours straight with no break. This entertainment company does have a service offering for “continuous live music” which you did not opt for. In that case we’d have hired additional musicians to stagger shifts throughout the night. She still wouldn’t hear it. Fine. I’ll skip dinner and go play. (True, I’d been on the job even longer. But I can eat dinner after, while I mix the band.)

Dinner cocktail music is simple. Any jazz standards fill the space. It’s acoustic wallpaper, behind the hum of conversations and clinking china. There just needs to be that flavor of piano as a layer in the aural environment. So it’s an easy gig, technically speaking. I played for less than half an hour, and the band was back on stage.

As Newport Mansion weddings go, this one was even a step above. Any event would have a photographer and videographer; this family hired an artist to paint the evening in oils. He took in the scene from his easel in the back of the room. I strolled behind him now and then and discretely snapped a pic of the novelty. Throughout course of the night you could see it take shape. While a photographer might capture precise moments in time, this was an artistically licensed composite of the evening as a whole - the couple’s first dance, combined with a heartfelt toast along with oh my frickin god.

He painted me in at the antique piano. From the 25 minutes I sat at the bench faking jazz standards, I am now in this couple’s wedding oil portrait, forever.

I found the finished product on the artist’s website later that week. I can’t tell you the style; I have zero art vocabulary. It’s blurry- I guess impressionist? Doesn’t matter; the blob at the piano is absolutely me - white guy with ponytail, not the actual pianist who played all night - african american kid with a buzz cut. So i guess i’m on some couple’s mantelpiece for eternity in a fancy frame. I sometimes use that blob as a profile picture.

caption this picture:
“artistic license, indeed!”
that never happened.

if I’d only known
I’d have combed my messy hair
good thing it’s blurry

The Cappuccino Story

2026-03-21T00:00:00Z

The question on Quora was: What is your best customer service experience in hotels?

I wasn’t the customer.

The reason service at Four Seasons Hotels is exceptional is because it’s culture, not a veneer. Consideration is expressed inward as well as outward.

There was a cappuccino bar out in the foyer at my upscale wedding gig. As the audio engineer for the event, I’m still part of “the help”, so I don’t presume to help myself to the dessert spread, or stand in line at the espresso bar, but I knew the staff well, and knew to be discreet.

The dessert crowd had thinned near the end of the event, and no one was in line. That was my opening - I stepped up and ordered a cappuccino. The barista methodically brewed my drink, which of course isn’t a simple pour from a carafe, but takes a couple minutes. Not wanting to be seen standing around the spread, I stood off to the side as he worked. I started feeling awkward standing around the foyer, feeling a tug to return to the bandstand. As he foamed the milk, I regretted not finding a quicker caffeine fix. Just as the barista topped the cup with a sprinkle of cocoa, a wedding guest appeared and ordered a cappuccino. Guests come first; the barista handed it straight to him.

Which was entirely the right thing to do. I knew the rules.

I knew also that the barista would make another for me, but I couldn’t afford to stand around another minute, so I smiled, shrugged, and nodded to him and dashed back to the ballroom. Without saying a thing, we were on the same page - I understood why the guest got “my” cappuccino, and he knew I wasn’t storming off, just that I couldn’t stick around for another.

I forgot about it, and finished out the night with the band. I had started wrapping cables and pulling down speakers, while guests slowly cleared. There was a tap on my shoulder. The barista stood behind me with a kind smile, holding a fresh, hot cup of cappuccino.

Captured Moons are Very, Very Rare

2025-08-18T00:00:00Z

Jupiter and Saturn are Absolute Units, the gravitational heavyweight champs of the solar system. Latest counts put their moon tallies at Jupiter: 95, give or take, and Saturn over a whopping 140. Of those moons, the majority are thought to be “captured” bodies - not created along with their planet, but formed elsewhere and ensnared into orbit when they strayed too close.

Clearly those gas giants just suck up every rock in the neighborhood.

…Or Do They…

Check out this moon orbiting a planet.

We could watch for a long while and not expect to see it wander out of orbit for no reason. Orbits are stable - till something intervenes.

The laws of gravity and motion are so symmetrical that you can’t even tell if that video is running forwards or backwards. The physics is still accurate playing in either direction.

If we don’t expect that moon to wander out of a stable orbit…
then why expect it to wander into one?

Answer: we shouldn’t. An ejection requires some outside influence “kicking the moon out” of orbit. A capture is its mirror image, and takes just as much outside influence to “rope it in” to orbit.

For some reason, we don’t think a moon would fly out of orbit, yet we might picture it falling into an orbit. But they’re two sides of the same coin.

Why Captures Don’t Just Happen

One might think a mass could drift by slowly, close enough for Jupiter’s huge gravity well to pull it in, but no. That gravity well gives as much as it takes. Anything slow when far away will be accelerated by that massive gravity, and too fast by the time of its close approach. It will whip right back out.

But that’s a random path, what if you could perfectly aim a mass just right to “land” in orbit? Answer: Then we’d have shot projectiles into Lunar orbit decades ago. No spacecraft has ever passively “coasted” into lunar orbit. Any ship traveling to the moon first needs to get near, and then fire its engines to slow down enough to be bound in orbit.

I’ll give you a cannon on Earth with any muzzle velocity you want. Your cannon may certainly get over Earth’s escape velocity, you can make a single flyby and overshoot the moon, and you can surely hit the Moon directly. You can try to put just the right “touch” on it, like a rigged carnival game, but you’ll never find the sweet spot that lands your projectile in a stable lunar orbit.

The problem in this rigged carnival game is your excess energy. The point where the Earth & Moon’s gravity are equal is called “L1” - the flat spot between their two gravity wells. A projectile atop this ridge, allowed to roll down will be carried right over the next ridge unless it does a breaking burn. A body at the L1 point has too much potential energy relative to the moon. When that potential converts to kinetic energy, it’s above the moon’s escape velocity.[1]

Here. Try it yourself:

This image from the game tells the whole story. Note the symmetry:

The chances of a planet adding a moon via capture are vanishingly small, and take an insanely rare alignment of events.

Astronomers have seen temporary asteroid captures lasting a few orbits, but in centuries of astronomical observations, have never observed the establishment of a new permanent moon - not anywhere in our solar system. Jupiter's moons were studied so precisely, that their timing was used in the earliest measurements of the speed of light - over three centuries ago! Consider what has been observed over this time - rare phenomena like comet impacts. We've seen Jupiter's great red spot evolve over centuries. The solar system has changed in human history. But moon captures are still too rare to occur in that time span.

You can try to create a capture yourself. The gravity sim, Stardust Studio, and all the scenarios referenced in this article are freely downloadable via links below.

Then what does rope asteroids into orbit?

Gravity assists - but backwards. You’ve perhaps heard of Gravity “slingshots” that boost probes toward the outer Solar System. A Gravity assist during capture works the same way, in reverse, slowing the asteroid. In each case, it requires 3 bodies, the “traveler” (asteroid), the planet it orbits, and the third body - the “disruptor”. It alters the situation by giving the traveler a kick in one direction or another.

Demo of Gravity Assist, to Accelerate

In this animation, the small asteroid swings by the large planet and boosts its speed 30% relative to the Solar System.

A Non-capture

Asteroid (white) flies by Planet (orange). There is no assist, no third body to brake it. It is on a “hyperbolic” orbit. (A hyperbolic orbit isn’t an “orbit” as we normally think of it, it means the object will escape). Its trajectory curves but there is no capture.

A Capture

Asteroid (white) flies by Planet starting with the same trajectory. This time, passing rogue planet (blue) is the “disruptor”, Its passing is timed perfectly to combine with the gravitational influence of the orange planet, and the 2 planets together curve the asteroid into an orbit around orange.

That precise alignment is a cosmic hole in one. I might’ve been up all night finding a working path for the blue “third body”. Instead I got it quickly via symmetry. I started with the asteroid in orbit around Orange, fired the blue planet at it, to disrupt the orbit, and let them all fly off, then used the result as new starting conditions - with directions reversed. I ran from there and voila, captured moon.

While Jupiter and Saturn need outside help roping in even the slowest passing rocks, speed definitely matters, and the slower passerbys are more likely to be captured. Consider interstellar wanderers like Oumuamua and currently 3/I Atlas - the latest identified interstellar visitor, now screaming through the Solar System at 60 km/s, and accelerating. The only remotely possible capture scenario would be Jupiter providing a massive gravity brake, bringing an interstellar asteroid below solar escape velocity, but such trajectories have already been ruled out.

Likewise, those travelers experienced some one-in-a-jillion ejection propelling them beyond their star’s escape velocity. Not only that, but on a rare trajectory bringing them into another star system (ours).

In a future article, we’ll break down an interstellar ejection scenario: What would it take for our solar system to send our own “Oumuamua” toward another star such as Alpha Centauri?

Stardust Studio

Orbital Speed Paradox

2025-08-13T00:00:00Z

This article is now a video from MinutePhysics on YouTube

There’s something backwards about orbital mechanics that always tripped me up. Outer planets have longer years than inner planets, and higher satellite take longer to orbit than lower ones. That’s not just because the orbit is a longer path, the orbital speed is literally slower in higher orbits. The general formula for orbital speed is clear: as r increases, v decreases.

$$v = \sqrt{\frac{GM}{r}}$$

Say you’re in a circular orbit near Earth with a constant speed of 10. Call this level “Low Orbit”, and you want a higher, slower orbit at a level called “High Orbit”. But you can’t just slow down - that will send you tumbling down toward Earth.

Then to reach a higher orbit, with a lower speed, you’d have to… speed up? How does that work?

You fire your engines for a short burst, boosting your speed from 10 up to 12. This sends you climbing higher, out of your circular orbit, like a car coasting uphill.

You are in a new elliptical orbit. This orbit speed is no longer constant, it drops steadily as you coast uphill - trading speed for height. By the time you reach the highest point of your elliptical orbit, you’ve slowed to 6, less than your original speed. You cleverly boosted just enough that the crest of the hill is at “High Orbit” level. This elliptical orbit is called a Hohmann Transfer orbit. Its low point is your old orbit - right where you fired your engines, and its high point is at “High Orbit”.

And like a car coasting uphill, you will start falling back down hill if you do nothing else.

To stay at this higher altitude, fire your engines again. Checking the formula above, you see the circular orbital speed at this height is 8. You accelerate from 6 to 8, and your speed now stays at a constant 8. You left your elliptical transfer orbit and started a new circularized orbit.

Orbit Shape	Speed	Height
Circular	constant 10	Low
	Accelerate from 10 → 12
Elliptical	between 6 & 12	between Low & High
	Accelerate from 6 → 8
Circular	constant 8	High

You started with speed of 10. You accelerated twice, and ended up slower. The trick was to travel uphill and let your speed fall in between. You added kinetic energy but converted that into gravitational potential energy, in a higher circular orbit, thanks to the beautiful & backwards effects of orbits.

On Role Flipping

2025-08-11T00:00:00Z

You can engage an LLM for role playing - as a professor, fictional character, historical figure, etc. this happens by explicit request. That works fine.

You can engage the LLM as an LLM - "ChatGPT, search the web for me on the topic of “Banjo Ukeleles: Are they more banjos, or more ukelele?”. ChatGPT does a massive search and sorts out the results. It’s a brilliant super-human assistant. This is the normal web chat interface. And that works fine.

What does not work: an LLM that spontaneously code-switches from assistant into role-playing a person.

If I’m discussing audio tech, talking about a gig, and the LLM replies “…having spent my time behind mixing consoles, that’s deeply relatable”

Nope. Pick a lane

Clever Window Soundproofing

2025-08-11T00:00:00Z

There’s an elegant way to produce quieter windows, with just a simple tweak in their construction.

Regular double paned windows come in different pane thickness, such as 1/8”, 3/16” etc. The two panes are normally the same thickness. But if window panes are simply mismatched, say one is 1/8” thick and the other is 3/16”, then less sound gets through. This “acoustic glass” is available from most window brands at a small premium over regular windows, about $100 more.

Same materials, same installation process, no extra sealing, etc, everything else about the window is the same.

How does it work? Two different filters is better than two of the same filter. When a sound passes through anything - a window, wall, a microphone, it’s filtered, meaning some frequencies pass through better than others.

The panes of acoustic glass filter different frequencies, because they have different stiffness and different mass. Different mass is what makes a heavier guitar string play a lower note than a thin one.

Unlike a guitar string, window panes don’t make sound, only take some away. Matched panes subtract the same frequencies, which is redundant. If each pane goes to work on different frequencies, less overall sound passes through.

Does it actually work? Absolutely. Testing data shows they block sound better, per industry standard Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating. Personal experience bears this out. It’s no magical cone of silence, but it’s a moderate improvement. I have a mix of acoustic glass and regular windows in my home. The rooms with acoustic glass are quieter.

I have not received any compensation for this content. I do not recommend any particular product.

Mac Haiku Assistant

2025-07-31T00:00:00Z

The first thing I wrote in SwiftUI (back after a 20 year break from programming):

When writing a haiku, you're constantly recounting syllables. This does the count automatically and gives visual confirmation, per-line and per-stanza.

Counting syllables is an interesting and tricky problem (for apps, not you). I tried many linguistic rules, but they all were too easily fooled. Notably, LLMs are poor at it (as of Feb ‘26’) - probably because they don’t know how words sound. My “Welcome to 21st century” programming moment: realizing I could just embed a dictionary file in the app containing every English word, in every variation, with its syllable count. And that file was still smaller than the icon graphic.

My other naïve effort was worrying about performance. I wanted dynamic updates, but surely I couldn’t look up every word in the dictionary on every keystroke, right? The app caches each line’s tally and only looks up words in the line which has changed. In fact modern CPUs could look up every word a dozen times per keystroke with no perceptible delay.

i use dryer sheets
i can't say they do jack shit
but still, just in case

▶ Submit a haiku

Passing Tones

2023-08-09T00:00:00Z

From “TrackMyTour” cycling blog.
Originally posted: Wed 9 Aug 2023
The Alaska Highway

On a long day of cycling, something caught my ear. The road was nearly empty, and cars passed one at a time, with quiet in between. I kept hearing a drop of about a minor third in the pitch of each car that passed. We know that doppler shifts sounds higher in pitch when approaching, and lower when receding. But the relationship between the two sounds is telling me something - why is that interval a minor third?

To know what’s a minor third - It’s “Hey Jude”: hum that opening lyric without words - sounds sort of like cars passing on the highway? Try sliding from the higher note down to the lower note. Would you believe that you can use just that melody to find the car’s speed?

The notes aren’t even the same with every car - some play it higher, some lower, and there are different sorts of vehicles sounds - wind noise, road noise, engines, etc. But listening for the notes, among all the different sounds, the interval is consistent. That quick drop in pitch just as it goes by - they all sort of sing the same little two-note tune. I wonder, what does that consistency represent?

Doppler-shift pitch formula:

Fc: observed frequency of approaching object
Fg: observed frequency of receding object
Fs: actual frequency
V: velocity of sound
Vs: Velocity of source
Fc = Fs × V / (V - Vs)
Fg = Fs × V / (V + Vs)

In formula terms, pitch of the car approaching (Fc) to the pitch as it recedes (Fg) - that drop happens on different notes, but musically there’s something constant - the minor third.

We have formulas for the doppler-shifts. Is there a formula for a minor third, and can we connect them somehow?

When we hear a musical interval - we’re hearing a ratio of the frequencies of the two notes. The upper tone isn’t the lower tone plus some number of Hertz, it’s the lower tone times a set ratio. For instance, when you hear an octave interval, the frequencies might be apart by 100hz or 1,000hz, but the top one is always 2× the bottom one. That’s what makes it an octave.

Octaves would be easier math, if I heard the pitch drop by an octave when a car passed by, then we’d know the higher tone is 2x the frequency of the lower tone. We don’t have an octave, we have a minor third, which musically is 3 semitones. 12 semitones in an octave makes this ¼ octave. The math trick is to use just ¼ of an octave’s “doubling power”. Instead of times 2, the ratio is times 2^¼

Quick proof of why 2^¼: To create a full octave by stacking four ¼ octaves, you'd multiply by that ratio 4 times. 2^¼ × 2^¼ × 2^¼ × 2^¼ = 2¹ = 2

A ¼ octave interval means the higher note is 2^¼ times the frequency of the lower one. 2^¼ = 1.189… When the cars pass and the pitch drops a minor third, then the “coming” pitch is about 1.189 × the “going” pitch. That’s the formula for a minor third. Call that the car’s Passing Tones.

Fc/ Fg = 1.189 (for minor 3rd)

This formula divides the coming frequency by the going frequency. The actual frequency values cancel out in this division, leaving us with the relationship: the higher note is 1.189 times the lower one - whatever that was. It shows that we don’t need to know what the actual pitches are. Good thing, because I don’t have perfect pitch. I can’t tell you if that RV was whistling a B-flat, but I do hear relative pitch and can tell you the intervals.

And with just the Passing Tones we know their velocity. How Cool. 😎

Velocity of sound is about 767 mph. (varies with temp, humidity, pressure). Now we can plug that all back into the doppler formulas.

Fc/ Fg = 1.189
(767 + Vs) / (767 - Vs) = 1.189
767 + Vs = 1.189(767 - Vs)
767 + Vs = 912 - 1.189Vs
Vs = 145 - 1.189Vs
2.189Vs = 145
Vs = 145/2.189

Vs = 66 mph

It checks out.

Solving for Vs above, gives a general Passing Tones formula:

Vs = 767 × ( r - 1) / (r + 1)

Where r is the ratio of the higher frequency / lower frequency. If you know the ratio - ie, the interval, you can find the speed.

Simplifications:

This is of course for a stationary listener; that speed is relative to your ear, not relative to the ground. My cycling speed on bike tour is darn close to “stationary”, compared to highway traffic. That said, cars coming towards me would have slightly wider intervals than those coming up behind me.
We presume car travels a constant speed.
It also fudges some geometry - do you see where? It presumes cars travel in a line directly towards you, and away from you. Do not stand in the middle of highways.

I heard Passing Tones of a major third once today - the opening Da-Da-Da-DUM of Beethoven’s 5th. A major 3rd is 4 semitones = 1/3 octave. The ratio is 2^⅓ = 1.26.

Vs = 767 × ( 1.26 - 1) / (1.26 + 1)
Vs = 767 × 0.26/2.26
Vs = 88.2mph

Likewise, a Major 2nd, or whole tone (ratio is 1.123) gives 44 mph.

Who needs a radar gun? Just listen if the cars hum “Hey Jude” when they pass by.

Appendix A:

The Passing Tones can be anywhere on the scale. Their musical interval tells us the speed.

Q & A

If you’re in the car, can you use this trick to know how fast you’re going?

Yes - if you pass by something making a constant tone. That simply changes the reference frame.

Are there other kinds of scales with different intervals?

Yes. I used the Equal Temperament scale, which has a ratio of 2^1/12 between each semitone. In Just Temperament, a minor third for instance has a frequency ratio of 1.2, instead of 1.189. This would give a result of ~70 mph. In reality the measurement wasn’t precise enough for that to matter.

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