jefftk

When I pitch people on far-UVC they often ask about in-duct UV. How about putting UV inside your HVAC ducts, where you can safely blast the air with cheap toxic wavelengths. Unfortunately, it's rarely a good approach. The biggest issue is that most people don't have ducts. They're common in...

While I was traveling Julia asked me: why is Anna saying her fiddle practice is only two minutes? In this case, two minutes was the right amount of time! Anna (10y) and I had been fighting a lot about practice. She'd complain, slump, stop repeatedly to make adjustments, and generally...

Damon Binder recently wrote up an argument for prioritizing air filtration over far-UVC for pathogen control: > UVC and filtration are close substitutes—both deliver effective air changes per hour, both reduce airborne pathogen concentrations by the same amount per eACH—and on current pricing, filtration is cheaper. There's a lot of...

A friend observed a pattern where contra dance events seem to be pairing older and younger callers. I looked over my notes for two-caller events in 2025 and saw [1]: * Two older callers: 33 events * One of each: 30 events * Two younger callers: 4 events Seems pretty...

When I write about things like storing food or medication in case of disaster, one common response I get is that it doesn't matter: society will break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff. This seemed plausible at first, but it's actually way off. Looking...

Three years ago I wrote about how we should be preparing for less privacy: technology will make previously-private things public. I applied this by showing how I could deanonymize people on the EA Forum. In 2023 this looked like writing custom code to use stylometry on an exported corpus representing...

I made a new major mode for emacs: mixed-html-mode. Or, really, Claude Code made one at my direction. It does syntax highlighting in HTML files with inline CSS and JS. I had two goals, which weren't met by any mode I could find: 1. Does not freeze, flash, or stutter,...