I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food. And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but heat and water gelatinize the starch and make it bioavailable. [1]

This means you need some way to heat things up. If the power grid is working then you have lots of options, including immersion heaters and boiling water with a kettle, but in many disasters this is not an option. What else can you do?

A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound. They were asking if they could use some of my recorded music for the dance. Here's a lightly edited and linkified copy of what I sent them:

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This is a tricky situation, and I'm sorry you've ended up here. This is probably not what you want to hear, but I would not hold a dance with recorded music. Instead I'd:

Daniel Drucker pointed me at a fun bug in Google's calculator: the parsec is wrong when you do math on it.

As the earth travels around the sun, closer stars appear to shift back and forth against the distant background stars. The closer the star is the bigger this effect is. Think of how when you switch which eye you're looking through you notice near things shifting relative to farther ones. For example, holding up my finger I see this out of my right eye:

If someone tells me a cake is vegan plant-based, I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment: I've had a lot of bad vegan baked goods. Some bakers are vegan for health reasons, and minimize all the other things that make food worth eating, but even a fully hedonistic vegan baker is at a serious disadvantage. But much less now that there are precision-fermented egg whites! I made an eggless cake last weekend that was indistinguishable from the summer cakes we'd eat growing up.

Julia and I host a monthly effective altruism dinner. Since many EAs are vegan, we try to have good vegan options. Julia let me cook this time, and I adapted one of my favorite family recipes into a vegan apricot berry cake.

A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook, a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice. Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline, following up from an informal one the year before, and I noticed several annoying things with its chord handling:

• Despite being digital, it didn't support transposition.

• Some songs didn't repeat the chord if they were unchanged, which meant that when scrolling new lyrics into view you'd lose the chords.

• This is minor, but I like to align the chords in a grid and the repeat sign was very slightly to narrow, throwing off the grid.

In asked Claude Code to fix these, and it did almost all of it. The exception was a few cases where it wasn't obvious which chords to use and I needed to make some manual edits.

DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reductions.

I've done a lot of DIY testing over the years ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The goal is generally to understand how well something removes particles from the air. A professional particle counter (example) costs thousands of dollars, and they're amazing devices, but what you're paying for is convenience, reliability, calibration, and dynamic range. If we're willing to give up on convenience and buy multiple devices for reliability, we can cheaply address calibration and dynamic range with experimental design.