In some languages pronouns are often optional. For example, in Spanish you might say "estoy feliz" for "I'm happy" though it literally translates to "am happy". In both Spanish and English the implied pronoun is clear—'estoy' and 'am' are first person singular conjugations—but in Spanish it's grammatical to leave out the pronoun while in English it's not. Languages vary in whether they allow you to leave it out, and those that do are called pro-drop. [1]

Because pronouns in English are traditionally gendered and we haven't finished switching over to singular 'they' yet, sometimes you're in a position where the sentence in your mind calls for a pronoun but you don't know what pronouns the person in question prefers. In some of these cases speaking as if English were pro-drop can be helpful. more...

Before Lily was born I made a cosleeper:

It goes on the side of the bed like a little annex, so the baby has their own place to sleep but is still easily accessible for nursing and doesn't feel abandoned. We used it until Lily was maybe 4 months old before transitioning her to a crib.

The cosleeper isn't being used at the moment; does anyone want to borrow it for a few years? At some point my sister wants to use it, but her first is still several years out.

(It's 35" x 18", walls are 7.5", and the top of the mattress is 27" off the floor.)

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In a good game anyone can win up until the last moment, at which point the game ends and there's a winner. But even some very good games can have a point at which you're still playing and making decisions but there's definitely no way you can win. How should you play when you're in that situation?

For example, consider PowerGrid. The winner is the player who powers the most cities on the turn someone builds to 17 cities. So say it's your turn to build and a player before you just built to 17. The game is definitely ending this turn, and you can see that they can power 16 while you can only power 15. There's nothing you can do to win. The game isn't over, though, because we don't yet know if someone after you will power more cities. Your options include passing, building as many cities as possible, or building cities that make it hard for one of the remaining players to win. How do you decide?

Provisional answer: if you can't win, you should figure out which of the players who might still win is most to blame for your not winning and play to disadvantage them.

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Content warning: harm to babies.

I've never been an especially emotional person. I'm generally reasonably happy, sometimes excited sometimes bored, but almost never sad, anxious, or angry. [1] One of the more suprising things about becoming a parent has been feeling a change here.

When Lily was just short of three months old, I was flying to play a gig in Florida. Sitting on the airplane I read a 1970 account of the Altamont Free Concert. Then I got to a section that included a baby getting hurt:

Another man with a medical problem related his run-in with the promoters: "I went up on the stage to make an announcement to find the father that was stoned on acid and got separated from his wife and baby, because the baby had been stepped on by an Angel and they thought the baby was dead. The Stones' manager said, 'We're not making any personal announcements; we've told people where lost and found is, we've told people where the Red Cross is. There will be no personal announcements. I don't care if you die; there's not going to be an announcement.' He was the most uptight dude anybody ever saw."

In the past I would have read over this paragraph like any other, but now the image of a baby being stepped on struck me so hard I couldn't think about anything else. I flashed between panic, fear, protectiveness, and anger, over and over, emotions I'd felt extremely rarely before. This was a third hand account of something 45 years earlier, in a world where far too many children die, but babies must not be stepped on just sat there, burning into my head. I was completely thrown.

Something similar happened yesterday, reading about a potential Cascadian earthquake:

Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. "When that tsunami is coming, you run" Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. "You protect yourself, you don't turn around, you don't go back to save anybody. You run for your life."

I just sat there on the bus with a huge hole in my stomach. I was 3000 miles away and Lily wasn't in any danger, but the tension between the official advice to save myself and the fierce need to protect her was strong enough to bring me to the edge of crying.

The other place I've noticed a change is that now I'm occasionally angry. Someone does something not the way I think they should have, and I start to feel a bit of red rising up. I'm pretty sure this one is only an indirect change, mediated by long-term sleep deprivation, but it's frustrating how counterproductive it feels. I try to push it back down, and get back to "what did they believe and why, when they made their decision, such that this was the best option for them", but at times anger does get in the way.

This wouldn't have changed my decision to have kids, but I do better now understand the arguments people make about how we should encourage or discourage having kids based on how being a parent changes your experience of the world.

[1] I'd be tempted to say that not being anxious etc is mostly my being very lucky overall in my life circumstances. I'm going to have food and shelter; what is there to be anxious about? Except that lots of other people with similar life experiences do have substantial anxiety, depression, etc. Which makes me think this a different kind of being lucky and is more something about the way I am, for mostly unknown reasons.

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Several years ago I got into making pennywhistles out of pvc. My main goal was to get a low whistle without paying hundreds of dollars, but once I figured out the basic principles it was a lot of fun experimenting. I found one of those experiments yesterday and got it out:

That's a 5' overtone flute in A. It's six times the length of a standard D whistle, so the lowest note it can play is two and a half octaves lower, at 110 Hz. The flute is very narrow for its length, though, so it's extremely quiet playing that note and instead is much more at ease when playing overtones. more...

I've been reading in the news about Google moving more and more traffic to HTTPS. I was looking at my server logs, though, and I still see a lot of HTTP traffic:

Testing now, if I fetch http://www.google.com with curl I don't see a redirect to https but I do see one in Chrome in incognito mode. I wonder what's keeping Google from rolling out the redirect to other browsers? more...