While the effective altruism movement started out with a strong focus on donations, over time it has shifted more towards careers. If you're trying to understand how levels of commitment have changed over time, or you're just trying to get a ballpark estimate of the financial opportunity cost of choosing a lower paying career, this can be quite...
Sometimes it makes sense for sites want to treat things differently based on whether the user has seen them. For example, I like sites that highlight new comments (ex: EA Forum and LessWrong) and I'd like them even better if comments didn't lose their "highlighted" status in cases where I hadn't scrolled them into view. In writing my Mastodon...
As in past years the Boston EA/LW community is putting together a secular solstice celebration. It's a bit of a strange thing, somewhat like an atheist church service, with lots of group singing on silly and serious topics. For some of the flavor, see my 2022, 2019, and 2018 retrospectives. This year it's a bit late: 2023-12-30. More...
Portable chargers are great and underrated. For $20 you can get a little box that can charge a phone ~5x or laptop ~1x. [1] You can pay a bit more for one with built-in wall-charging and cables. It's great throwing one in my backpack and knowing I don't have to ration or worry, especially when traveling. And if the kids tablets are running...
I spent the weekend doing demolition: I'm redoing the first floor bathroom. I previously did the ones on the second and third floors, so I now feel like I have a bit of practice. Before I did my first one I read a bit about how to do it and what tools people tend to use, and while I don't remember any of it being wrong exactly, I know how much...
This year the fall EA Global conference was back in Boston, and it was my first time attending one since 2017. Our first floor tenants had recently moved out, our new tenants hadn't moved in yet: good opportunity for an afterparty! I decided I'd host a party with board games and quieter conversation in our apartment upstairs, and music in the...
In mid-September Facebook asked me if I wanted to start getting paid for posting things: This seems to be the performance bonus program. I think they offered it to me because my Facebook profile is in professional mode and I post a lot? It's all very unclear, including what effect saying yes would have: how would they decide how much to pay me? ...
Pre-pandemic I would publish a list each year of how many dance weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances contra bands and callers were doing: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. It's not much work, since I'm already collecting this data for trycontra.com/events, and it's interesting to see how the most-booked performers changed over...
What I'm calling "read length" here should instead have been "insert length" or "post-trimming read length". When you just say "read length" that's usually understood to be the raw length output by the sequencer, which for short-read sequencing is determined only by your target cycle count. Let's say you're collecting wastewater and running...
Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2021 Lily turned 7, Anna turned 5, and Nora was born. (Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us.) 2021-01-02 Anna: Hello, I'm Mr. Hamburger. Me: It's time to brush teeth, Mr. Hamburger. Anna: I can't brush my teeth, I'm a...
This week the Effective Altruism Forum is running an Effective Giving Spotlight, and they asked if I could post an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on my experience earning to give. Some background: I was earning to give from 2009 to 2022, except for a few months in 2017 when I worked on expanding access to the financial system in Ethiopia and looking...
While this is close to areas I work in, it's a personal post. No one reviewed this before I published it, or asked me to (or not to) write something. All mistakes are my own. A few days ago, some of my coworkers at SecureBio put out a preprint, "Will releasing the weights of future large language models grant widespread access to pandemic...
While this post is my perspective and not an official post of my employer's, it also draws on a lot of collaborative work with others at the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO). One of the future scenarios I'm most worried about is someone creating a "stealth" pandemic. Imagine a future HIV that first infects a large number of people with minimal side...
If the Lark/Gent is used to a Butterfly promenade and puts their right hand on the Robin/Lady's shoulder, while the Robin/Lady expects a Courtesy Turn promenade and puts their right hand behind their back, the dance doesn't flow as well as if they both immediately put their hands in the place the other is expecting. This means each dance will...
Probably the most common form of genetic sequencing these days is "paired-end" sequencing. It's very impressive: the sequencing machine can process the same nucleic acid fragment from both ends! This means that each observation looks like: +--------------+---------+--------------+ | forward read | gap | reverse read |...
Fifteen years ago I travelled to a bunch of dances and wrote something up ( pdf) on how people tended to dance in different areas. I'm curious how this has changed over the years, and while I have my observations I'd like to get some better data. So! I'm running a survey, and would find your response very helpful: survey. Comment via:...
We tend to cook in quantities where there are leftovers: it's not really practical to cook exactly the right amount of food, and it's much better to have a bit extra than not enough. Plus with several people working from home we tend to go through a good amount of leftovers for lunches. One thing I've discovered recently with leftovers: thicker...
Traditionally we control access to our houses with "something you have": a key. This works pretty well, until you have a visitor arrive when you're not home to give them a key. The traditional way to handle this is to hide a key (under the mat, in a flower pot, etc), turning this into "something you know" (the information about where the key is...
In early effective altruism it was common for people to give the example of deciding between donating to fund the training of guide dogs in wealthy countries or to reduce blindness in very poor countries. For example, here's what Giving What We Can used to say: For example, suppose we want to help those who are blind. We can help blind...
I work in the terminal a lot and I often want to write programs that color their output a bit. For example, perhaps I'm looking at a sequencing read and I want to know what part of it was the reason it was flagged. I could use colorama, termcolor, or another library, but including a dependency for something this simple is not really worth...
The park near our house has an interesting sign: A parent put it up, labeling the area you're able to explore from this point without crossing any streets. It's the large red area on my child walksheds map. The name has caught on well, and it's very useful to be able to refer to this block! Yesterday I added it to OpenStreetMap and Google Maps...
Sometimes people have something they want to say without it being traceable back to their main identity, and on internet forums it's common for people to use multiple accounts ("alts") for this. As machine learning software gets better, however, it becomes increasingly practical to link a person's accounts. A few months ago someone ran a simple...
The US government is in a less functional position than usual: Legislation requires (among other things) a plurality vote of the House of Representatives. This requires the Speaker of the House to call a vote. This requires a Speaker of the House The House removed its Speaker on Tuesday We've never done this before, so it's unclear how it will...
I recently tried to get my whistle-controlled bass synthesizer working on my Mac, as a backup to my Raspberry Pi version. [1] It's written on top of PortAudio, a cross-platform audio library, so getting it to compile and run was mostly a matter of getting the library installed, which went quickly. Unfortunately, the latency was far too high to...
Let's say you're planning on getting a covid booster this fall: when's the best time to get it? The updated boosters ( targeting the XBB lineage) have been out since mid September, so there's not a new vaccine to wait for. Instead, I see the choice as balancing two considerations: If you get it too soon it might have worn off too much by the...
After working as a professional programmer for fourteen years, primarily in ads and web performance, I switched careers to biosecurity. It's now been a bit over a year: how has it gone? In terms of my day-to-day work it's very different. I'd been at Google for a decade [1] and knew a lot of people across the organization. I was tech lead to six...
It's common for people who approach helping animals from a quantitative direction to need some concept of " moral weights" so they can prioritize. If you can avert one year of suffering for a chicken or ten for shrimp which should you choose? Now, moral weight is not the only consideration with questions like this, since typically the suffering...
Let's say you're vegan and you go to a vegan restaurant. The food is quite bad, and you'd normally leave a bad review, but now you're worried: what if your bad review leads people to go to non-vegan restaurants instead? Should you refrain from leaving a review? Or leave a false review, for the animals? On the other hand, there are a lot of...
Another round (previously: 2023) of liberating kid posts from Facebook: (Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us.) 2022-01-01 Me: Anna, if you don't come soon, I'm going to start brushing your teeth without you Anna: how can you brush my teeth without me there? Me: [turns on toothbrush] Anna:...
A few days ago I wrote about my experience with MathML, and despite being somewhat positive on it in that post I've decided to stop using it for now. The problem is, it doesn't display for people who follow my blog through RSS on (I'm guessing) most popular RSS system. Here's a screenshot from my most recent MathML-containing post, on my...
In June the social dance I help organize decided to drop its requirement that people be vaccinated and boosted: Checking vaccination cards at the door requires an additional volunteer, is a hassle for attendees, and at this point the communities we draw from are overwhelmingly vaccinated. While we still recommend staying up to date on...
When I write posts I use raw HTML. Yes, the modern thing to do is probably Markdown, but HTML was designed for hand-coding and still works well for that if you don't want anything especially fancy. But what if you want math? Previously when I've wanted to do math I've written it out as fixed-width ASCII: e^(-7t) In my editor this looks like:...
When transit gets better the land around it becomes more valuable: many people would like to live next to a subway station. This means that there are a lot of public transit expansions that would make us better off, building space for people to live and work. And yet, at least in the US, we don't do very much of this. Part of it is that the...
I live in Ward 5 in Somerville, where there are two candidates running for city council this fall: Jack Perenick and Naima Sait. On Sunday both of them stopped by our neighborhood block party, and we got a chance to talk. As in 2021, the high cost of housing continues to be my primary concern for Somerville, and I asked them both what their...
Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook A few days ago I wrote about some math behind a scenario where you're trying to identify a new epidemic based on signals proportional to incidence, and ended up deriving: i(t) c(t) = k = ln (2) Td Where: i(t), is incidence ("how many people are getting sick now") c(t), is cumulative infections ("how...
In putting on a contra dance, it's standard for the caller to pick the dances and the band to pick the tunes. Since it's much more satisfying when the tune fits the dance, the band and caller confer briefly between each dance. For example, the caller might say they want something "smooth and pretty" or "energetic with a chunky A-part". Sometimes,...
We have an old dresser in our kitchen we use as extra cabinet space: As an old dresser with wooden runners, however, there's nothing to keep the drawers from being pulled all the way out, and falling with a crash. Which could be a problem, since we have an inquisitive toddler. There are various approaches for making drawer stops, but to figure...
I spend most of my working time in the terminal: I run my text editor there, run programs there, etc. I usually have my iTerm2 set up to display many narrow full height terminals. When I'm working with plots, however, I normally do something like: $ ./some-cmd.py plot.png && open plot.png Which pops up a Preview window with my plot, and then I...
There's a shelf in my dad's kitchen, about four feet off the ground. I remember when I stopped being short enough that I could walk under it: ouch! I didn't get a concussion or anything, but it was pretty unpleasant. My sisters and cousins also remember bonking their heads on it. I noticed my oldest was getting just tall enough, and started to...
Since coming across apple cider syrup last year I've been trying to figure out what sort of things to make with it. Cider donuts are traditional, but I'm not that much of a fan. Mixing it into whipped cream works very well, and makes a good sweet and tart filling or topping for baked goods. I've experimented with muffins, using it for a...
Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook Imagine you have a goal of identifying a novel disease by the time some small fraction of the population has been infected. Many of the signs you might use to detect something unusual, however, such as doctor visits or shedding into wastewater, will depend on the number of people currently infected. How do these...
We have a Facebook group for kid stuff, because if we post a mixture of kid things and other stuff FB's algorithm gets very confused about who to show our posts to. While my annual pictures posts mostly cover the visual side, the text posts are only on FB and I don't like that. So: here's the first ~half of 2023. (Some of these were from me;...
After having fun with cooking/drying plums last year, I decided to have another go this year. This time I compared two different ways of cooking whole plums: 140F for ~1.5d vs 350F for ~1.5hr. I was curious whether the higher temperature was better or worse. Maybe interesting flavors are lost with higher temperatures, or maybe they're lost with...
In Kingfisher Cecilia uses a condenser on her fiddle but combines it with effects pedals. This is a bit awkward to get working, and we've been using a Soundcraft Notepad mini-mixer. Unfortunately we had some issues recently where adjusting the input gain would make horrible scratchy noises: I thought I'd need to take the mixer apart to clean...
While I've only worked in biosecurity for about a year and my computer security background consists of things I picked up while working on other aspects of software engineering, the cultures seem incredibly different. Some examples of good computer security culture that would be bad biosecurity culture: Openness and full disclosure. Write blog...
I really like ceiling fans (big fan!) and we have them in most of the rooms of our house. About a year ago we also built loft beds for the older two kids bedrooms: Which offers a potential conflict: you don't want people and spinning blades to occupy the same place. While in that picture they look close together, they're not actually that...
A while ago I wrote about how I'd make freezer pucks: These work ok, but there are a couple issues: A large batch requires a lot of muffin tins Cleaning muffin tins is annoying It can be hard to get them out of the tins I've switched to a different system where I freeze a flat tray in a thin enough layer that I can break it easily: It takes a...
I get cold very quickly in the water, enough that unless it's close to body temperature I get chilled through within ~15min. This mostly wasn't a problem, because I'd take a quick dip to cool off and then hang out on the beach, but now that I have kids they (and I) want lots of swimming together time. When I touched on this a few weeks ago ...
My kids were thinking of having a lemonade stand, and in the past I've said that if they're doing it as a fundraiser we'll cover the cost of ingredients, but if they're doing it for their own money then they need to reimburse us. But how much should that be? The recipe they're using is approximately: 2C lemon juice 2C sugar Water Ice Plus cups to...
I recently got an old KitchenAid mixer from a friend. It's a k45ss, from maybe the early 80s, and the general advice I see is that with typical home use they should be regreased every ~10y. I ordered 4oz of food-safe synthetic grease and followed Mr. Mixer's YouTube guide (parts 1, 2, 3). With my phone playing the videos I followed along:...
After a lot of discussions online where people try to argue about where self-driving tech is going but seem pretty confused about where the tech currently is, I wanted to give a bit of an overview of the current state. There are two main approaches: taxis and personal vehicles. There are many companies that have gotten as far as testing with a...
Julia and I have an 8br two-family house in Somerville which we share with friends. The couple that has been living in the two-bedroom unit on the first floor is buying a house and moving out, and we're looking for new tenants. It's available for 2023-11-01, but we could potentially hold it longer for the right people. Would you be interested...
In With a Whimper: Depopulation and Longtermism, Geruso and Spears give the following argument for why most people who'll ever live may have already died: People are generally having children below replacement rate: 1.66 children per woman in the US, and total global annual births peaked in 2014. If you project this forward 300-600 years, annual...
It's common to look down on modern instruments as cheap imitations: the digital piano as an inferior piano, foot drums as an inferior drum kit. While this isn't wrong, as far is it goes, it's a very limiting way to look at these instruments. Instead of writing them off for their faults, it's a lot better to figure out what they're good at and...
I was recently reading Byron Barton's 1981 book, Building a House. While it claims to be an end-to-end overview of the process of modern (for the time) home construction, there are enough errors in the illustrations that I wouldn't recommend it as a basic text. For example, here's how they show installing a subfloor: There are several issues...
There are a lot of claims about how alcohol affects the body, and some sort of "heavy drinking is bad for you but light or moderate drinking is better than no drinking" is a common one. I've not paid a lot of attention to these, however, since non-drinkers as a group include a bunch of people who've given up alcohol due to health-related issues....
I got an email from a reader: I was wondering, like you said that jams make less sense in the world of easy refrigeration, do you think guitars make less sense when amazing MIDI keyboards are available now? It's a good question! In general, if an instrument becomes more capable then, yes, it's going to make more sense for people to play it...
When Lily as about three we were waiting at a crosswalk and traffic stopped for us. As we started across the street a driver that had been waiting to turn left misinterpreted the situation and, thinking traffic had stopped for them instead, tried to turn through our location. I tightened my grip and ran, pulling her through the air. The car...
Around Christmas 2021 I put together a big air purifier on top of our bookcase. Somehow I didn't blog about it or take a picture, but here's it in the background of a birthday: The basic idea was that I didn't have a good place to put a filter cube, commercial air purifiers were scarce, and a different configuration of filters seemed like it...
Our stove doesn't have a hood that vents to the outside, so when we're cooking something smoky we put a box fan in the window blowing out. I happened to have left my air quality meter running, and got a neat picture of how well this is working when cooking something very smoky: Here's the floorplan, marking the stove, fan, open windows, and...
Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook The largest source of publicly available genetic sequencing data is the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), a joint project of the US (NCBI), Europe (EBI), and Japan (DDBJ). Most relevant funding agencies and journals require sequencing data to be deposited in the SRA. I was curious how quickly it has been growing, so...
I was curious what our food spending looked like, so I tried to get a picture of what this has looked like over the past year. We have a good idea of our total spending: we buy most groceries on a house credit card so we can split it fairly, and if someone accidentally buys groceries on a personal card (or vice versa) we are pretty good about...
Sometimes people will talk about Chesterton's Fence, the idea that if you want to change something—removing an apparently useless fence—you should first determine why it was set up that way: The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by...
I currently control my rhythm stage setup with a USB keyboard. This works, except that my hands are often busy playing instruments when I want to change something. I already have a microphone in front of my mouth running to a computer, which I use for my whistle-controlled bass synthesizer: could I use speech recognition? Another way to look at...
A few days ago I asked for advice on how to make a cap for my MXR M222 talkbox. I got a lot of good suggestions, including looking for a matching rubber stopper, 3D printing with 95A TPU for flexibility, or turning something on a lathe and embedding a silicone O-ring. But then Paul Ganssle saw my post and reached out: he saw one of these on...
In the summer the kids don't need to be to bed so early and it stays light longer. When the weather's good we've been doing a lot of evening picnics at the beach. It's not too crowded (making parking easier), there's less direct sun (don't need to deal with sunscreen), and it doesn't conflict with the toddler's nap time. Often we go to Shannon...
Why is Google such a valuable company? More than half of its money comes from search ads: when people are looking to spend money it's very common that they use Google. Even slightly influencing spending decisions, with the scale of their userbase, lets them bring in massive amounts of money. They are a very successful intermediary. Right now I...
I have an MXR M222 talkbox that I'm pretty happy with, but when the tube is disconnected the speaker is very exposed: I'm worried about damage to the speaker, and would like some sort of cap to protect it. When I search for "MXR M222 talkbox cap" or similar I don't find anything. I wonder if it would be possible to make something? Measuring,...
The park closest to our house has a lot of "park toys". These are toys that people brought to the park for everyone to play with. They're usually somewhat broken when they show up, and eventually get thrown out when they're so broken that there's not much interesting to do with them anymore (which is hard!) This isn't something I experienced...
Relational speaking is a style that emphasizes flow and the relationship between subjects, rather than using pronouns to refer to entities in the discourse. It is appropriate for a wide variety of contexts, as it makes no assumptions about the gender of your referents. Relational constructions have always been a part of English: consider a...
I recently came across this tweet, screenshotted into a popular Facebook group: Here's a truth bomb: Take the U.S. city you're most afraid of, one with a very high murder rate or property crime rate. If it has any sort of public transit, it is still statistically safer to use public transit in that city at ANY time of day than to drive where you...
In playing for contra dances there are logistical and economic pressures that push for smaller bands. While the older larger bands would often include drumkits, if you're thinking about how to allocate roles among three—or especially two—people you're usually (but not always) going to do without a drummer. Even without a drummer, though,...
A few weeks ago I flew to Anchorage to play for the Dancing Bears Dance Camp with the Free Raisins. It was really fun to play with Amy and Audrey again, to dance to KGB, to meet people from dance communities all over Alaska, and to visit the farthest North I've been. Some pictures from the trip, with thoughts hanging off them. Now that I...
A few months ago I complained that the text version of the MBTA train arrival announcements include a not-needed-for-text "attention passengers" which delayed the key information to the second screen. I'm happy to report that they've fixed it! While the vocal announcement is still "Attention passengers, the next Red Line train to Alewife is now...
Around here the Juneberries and Mulberries are ripe. The berries are delicious, but a lot of people don't know that they're safe to eat. I like the mulberries best when they still have a hint of red, before they get too sweet. We've been walking over to the neighborhood tree with a stepladder every other day or so and enjoying them. Comment...
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Talking about ads online I would often get a response that as someone working in ads I was bound to support my employment. I'm now a year out from working in ads and very unlikely to return to the industry: with the economic bias removed...
I've been maintaining a spreadsheet of contra dance events for a while. With the end of the Dance Gypsy, and ContraDanceLinks going stale, however, people asked if I could convert this into something more usable. So! Here's trycontra.com/events: Initially it shows you all the events that it knows about. These are dance weekends, camps,...
Julia and I brought Lily to a contra dance for the first time when she was just a couple weeks old, and have continued bringing her (and now her younger siblings) occasionally as they've gotten older. A friend asked if I could write up something about the logistics of this, so here goes! Babies are generally pretty happy if they're right up next...
As we get into summer and covid levels continue to fall, a lot of contra dances are rethinking their approaches to masking. At this point contra dances are the only places I go that require masks, though they're also the closest I get to large numbers of people. Prompted by an initial search Harris shared with me, I used TryContra to get a list...
A few weeks ago after the community meeting with the Department of Children and Families I decided to run a survey to learn more about the range of ages at which people generally thought kids might be ready to do various activities without supervision. Stay home for a few hours? Play at the park alone? Take public transit? I put something...
After yesterday's post on my experience dancing to positional calling, Louise Siddons recommended I read her booklet, Dancing the Whole Dance: Positional Calling for Contra. Overall I like the it: it gives a good explanation of how to call positionally, with a lot of examples handling specific situations, and a lot of advice seemed like it...
In a contra dance when only some of the dancers should take an action, the caller typically identifies them by role: "Robins start a Hey for Four" (or "Ladies" with gendered calling). In positional calling, instead, the caller doesn't use role terms: "pass right shoulders to start a Hey for Four". While we often don't think of it this way, only...