Articles – Dan Q

My Polyamory is Boring

I was chatting to JTR about our shared experiences of being openly polyamorous¹ bloggers. Both JTR and I observed that it’s something that we don’t write about often.

We don’t say much about it… even though it’s probably something that, to some readers, would seem interesting and unusual. And also, perhaps, still sufficiently “taboo” that they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking us about it outright, either.

Why is that?

In my case, the single biggest reason that I don’t often write about it is… I think my polyamory is kinda boring!

A family of two white men with beards and one white woman sit at a picnic bench in a barn, alongside their two (blurred) children. They're holding baps with sausages, bacon, or eggs in, and surrounded by canned drinks and takeaway coffee cups. A tote bag nearby gives away that they're at the cafe of Diddly Squat Farm. — From left to right the adults you can see are: (1) me, (2) my metamour² JTA,³ and (3) my partner (and his wife) Ruth. On each side of her are our two school-aged children.

It’s boring… because it’s established

Part of the reason I think it’s boring is because, well, it’s far from novel! We’ve been doing this for the vast majority of our adult lives:

I’ve been in (only) nonmonogamous relationships for about 25 years.
The three of us – Ruth, JTA and I – have been together for 19 years
Of that, we’ve been cohabiting for 15 years, co-owning property for 13 years, co-parenting for almost as long

To me, this arrangement just feels like everyday life. We all know where we’re at and what we’re about, and we’re by now fuelled by long-established Old Relationship Energy⁴.

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous

The second reason my polyamory is boring is because it’s free of drama; free of scandal; free of titillation.

We don’t go to swingers parties. We don’t have a dungeon in our basement⁵. We don’t revel in jealous chatter or gossip. We don’t spend most of our time naked. We’re not doing some kind of cuckoldry thing. We’re not doing this as part of some kink or fantasy.⁶

We don’t spend lots of time negotiating boundaries or handling jealousy or working out who needs an STI test: if you catch us discussing something, it’s much more-likely to be how we handle our savings account or who’s taking a kid to their swimming lesson or when’s least-inconvenient for everybody for the car to be serviced. Y’know: boring stuff!

We also only very-rarely “date” outside of our polycule⁷.

I’m confident that we attract a little gossip from the “school mums” or the nosy neighbours in our quiet rural village. But mostly, I suspect, it’s of the “hey, having a third parent around sounds super convenient: how can I get that?”⁸ type.

The same adults and children pose in a colourful escape room, with padlocked boxes and banks of light switches visible amongst cat toys. — We’re boring because we’re fundamentally just like any other family. Except with one more adult than is typical.

I love that my polyamory is boring!

Don’t get me wrong: I love that our relationships are unexpectedly-boring.

It’s a reflection of our stability and our commitment that the rest of my trio and I are a comfortably predictable. A perpetual landmark in the eyes of our families, friends, and children. We’re just part of the furniture. Just people, doing our thing, plodding along like everybody else.

Yes, Ruth gets to have a husband and a boyfriend. Yes, we’re all both “in a relationship” and “available to date”. Yes, our kids are raised by three parents (which I personally think is a huge advantage to them, and I imagine that they’d agree). But that’s where the excitement ends. We’re just regular-old common or garden humans.

So that’s the main reason I don’t blog about my polyamory. It’s just not that exciting. Sure: I could talk about how we organise our shared finances or who sleeps where on any given night or how we decided which adult does which part of the school run on which weekday… but it’s all pretty dull. And it’s frankly the kind of thing that any monogamous couple could talk about just as well!

Most successful long-term relationships are boring. Stability and consistency are not exciting.

But if I’m wrong…

…then tell me! There’s a comments form below⁹: ask whatever you like!¹⁰

And if nobody comments… then I’ll know that I’ve convinced you. I’ll know that I’m right. That my relationship structure, however uncommon, isn’t actually that interesting:

My polyamory is boring. And that’s great.

Footnotes

¹ Polyamory: the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners with the knowledge and consent of everybody involved. I’ll try to keep a glossary going here in the footnotes for any less-commonplace terminology.

² Metamour: the partner of your partner.

³ I apologise that my metamour JTA’s name is literally one-character different from that of JTR, a completely different person with whom I had the conversation that inspired this post. It annoys me to have to type it, so I’m sure it annoys you to have to read it.

⁴ Old Relationship Energy (ORE), or Established Relationship Energy, is the contented kind of relationship happiness that comes with time, and trust, and familiarity. It contrasts New Relationship Energy (NRE), which is the buzzy, loved-up kind of excitement common to new relationships and sometimes called the “honeymoon period”. These concepts are common to many relationship styles (and, indeed, the transition from NRE to ORE can be a source of challenges for some relationships), but they’re more-often talked-about in polyamorous circles because their impact is more widely-felt. For example: observing your partner experience NRE with somebody new and remembering when you and they shared the same can be a source of friction or jealousy… or a source of compersion (vicarious joy at somebody else’s love), depending on the people, timing, context, and more.

⁵ If we did have a basement sex dungeon (which we don’t), it’d have long ago become a swimming pool when our house flooded earlier this year. Sigh.

⁶ No shade thrown if you are a drama-queen nudist swinger with a sex dungeon and a cuckoldry kink. More power to you. All I’m saying is that’s not us, and therefore – by comparison – we’re pretty boring.

⁷ Polycule: a network of romantic relationships, or the people within those relationships, that are all connected to one another. The simplest polycule is arguably the dyad: two people in a relationship together. There are probably two possible configurations of three people: a triad, where each party is romantically involved with each of the other two, and a vee – a “V-shaped” polycule where one person is in a relationship with two others, who are not in a relationship with one another. Letters of the alphabet are useful to summarise other polycule shapes too, like an N-shaped or O-shaped quad or a W-shaped or A-shaped quintet, but of course there are many other ways you can permute the people and relationships when you’ve got this number of participants. Some polycules are huge (and, usually, loose, with the most-peripheral people possibly less-likely to be in direct contact with one another); others are relatively small. There’s a philosophical argument that can be made either way about whether a single person is a polycule-of-one.

⁸ I’ve got to admit, triple-parenting is convenient, sometimes. I have an enormous deal of respect for solo parents because that shit is hard. Two parents is simpler, but three… three sometimes feels like playing on easy-mode. Not always – kids will quickly learn which parent is the one to appeal to if they want an extra half-hour before bedtime or you to buy them a new book, for example, and having more parents gives them more ways to do that! – but sometimes.

⁹ Don’t want me to know that it was you? You can ask anonymously, if you like. But you do need to type in something that looks like a believable email address to ensure you get past the spam filter. Here’s some throwaway anonymous email addresses if you want one.

¹⁰ So long as you’re not a bigot or an arsehole, you can ask whatever you like and I’ll try to answer. Tell me that I’m living in sin or that what I’m doing is bad for my children or that we’re cheating on one another and you’ll find that you don’t make it through the moderation filter.

I Hate (Most) Keyboard ‘Fn’ Keys

Duration 12:55

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Hi, HackerNews! Please be kind/friendly! I’d love to hear your experiences of these (IMHO horrible) keyboard features, whether good or bad. Drop me a comment or join in on the thread over there.

In my living room¹ is an ageing Windows media centre PC, which is connected to the TV and principally used for Jellyfin, Netflix, Nebula, Steam, and the like. For convenient sofa use, I’ve equipped it with a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo.

A slim Microsoft all-in-one keyboard and touchpad, in British layout, alongside two game controllers. — The keyboard is, for the most part, *fine*. You wouldn’t want to type an essay on it, but if you’re searching for a YouTube video it does the job.

Unfortunately, the manufacturers of this keyboard decided that it needed a dozen extra functions, and repurposed the F-keys F1 through F12 for these purposes.

It was nice that they gave dedicated keys to volume control/toggling muting – we use those all the time. And there are three other dedicated keys in the top right which we never use… so there was clearly capacity for a little extra. And they still they felt the need to do… this:

Close-up of the F4 key, showing a 'moon' icon. Of the other visible function keys, F3 shows 'fast forward', F5 shows 'hourglass', F6 shows what appears to be an illustration of a supercollider spinning up, and so on. — That `F4` key has been repurposed as a “sleep” button. This poses a problem.

I don’t want any of these “special function keys. Occasionally, I suppose, I might need one², but mostly I’d just like F1 through F12 to remain the multi-purpose, context-dependent keys that they have been since they first appeared in 1965.

And so, because I don’t want to hold Fn every time I want to press an F-key for its intended purpose, I used the arcane shortcut Fn+Caps to “lock” the keyboard into “standard” mode, where multipurpose F-keys remain multipurpose F-keys unless I hold down the special magic button that transforms them into rarely-used single-purpose special function keys.

But here’s where the problem occurs. If the batteries get changed, or if the keyboard gets turned-off for an extended period, or sometimes – seemingly – just randomly… that function-lock gets switched off.

And I’ll grab the keyboard and, to quickly quit Steam Big Picture or a Jellyfin Client or something, I’ll press Alt+F4. Which will send the “sleep” command. And because this computer’s a bit older, it’ll hibernate.

Instead of closing one application, which is what I intended, I now have to wait upwards of a minute for the old box to finish copying all of its RAM into a file, and shutting down, and then booting up again (in response to my repeated and frustrated hammering of the space bar), and then loading everything back into RAM… just to put me back where I started³.

What’s most-frustrating is at F4 is the only key with such a time-consuming and annoying function. If I accidentally paused some music or opened the system settings or did whatever-the-hell the icon on the F6 key is supposed to mean, that wouldn’t be so bad. But man; the three or four times a year that this catches me out are just aggravating enough to piss me off without being quite bad enough for me to do something about it⁴.

Close-up of a WASD keyboard with Pride rainbow keycaps, focussing on its Menu/Fn key and the handful of media keys it supports (which are primarily the Pause, Insert, Home, Delete, End, Page Up and Page Down keys). — This is the WASD Code keyboard on another of my computers⁵, showing how a `Fn` key can be done *right*.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

My WASD Code gets it right by resigning the effects of all double-duty keys to minor conveniences only, and making them the secondary functions of the keys to which they’re attached. I use these volume control buttons and they’re fine⁶.

My Keychron K10 gets it right by having the double-duty keys mirror those of the Mac it attaches to⁷: again, all minor, low-impact functions that are easily and quickly un-done. Also, when you lock it to traditional F-key mode it stays that way, even if it’s disconnected and left unpowered for an extended period.

Close-up of Mac-style double-duty function keys F9 through F12, for fast-forward, mute, volume-down and volume-up respectively. — I had one of those Macbooks with the stupid LCD screen in place of keys, once, and I hated that “feature” and was glad to see it disappear (although occasionally I still see it on other hardware): who the hell wants a hardware keyboard that they can only use by *looking* at it? This is a much saner design, and I appreciate how easy it is to switch it to “normal” mode⁸.

These keyboards – which are my daily drivers – show that an Fn key can be done right.

Here’s what “doing Fn right” looks like, to me –

Where keys do double-duty, it’s a low-impact and quickly reversible operation, so there’s little cognitive load or delay in correcting any mistakes.
The default state is the traditional key function, or if that’s not the case, switching mode is easy (doesn’t involve looking up an underdocumented shortcut or installing a proprietary driver).
When you switch the default state, it stays switched and doesn’t swap back to factory defaults just because of a loss of power or other arbitrary and unrelated trigger.

Sadly, a great number of keyboards get their Fn key implementations wrong. And I hate them for it.

Footnotes

¹ By which, right now, I mean the living room of the Chicory House, on account of my actual house being busy having its underfloor foundations torn up.

² In particular, this keyboard lacks dedicated page up/page down keys, and I don’t mind pressing Fn+F11 or Fn+F12 for that. And maybe once or twice I’ve used Fn+F2 for pause/play. But other than that, they’re completely pointless.

³ Yes, I’m fully aware that I could just disable all sleep/hibernation functions at an OS or even BIOS level. But at the time I remember that, all I want to do is get back to watching the latest episode of Star City or something.

⁴ I mean, except for write this blog post, I suppose. But for that I blame Terence Eden, who put the idea in my head with a recent poll.

⁵ And why yes, I do have Pride keycaps in place of my function keys, why do you ask?

⁶ The volume control knob of the mechanical it replaced, a Das Keyboard 3, was better, but you can’t have everything.

⁷ The Keychron itself is super versatile and OS-independent: it’s easily toggled between layouts and even comes with spare keycaps to make it “look like” your preferred operating system, assuming that unlike me you don’t routinely use around three different ones in a typical session.

⁸ Don’t get me started on Apple’s other UX decisions like “natural scrolling” which makes no sense whatsoever on a mouse… but – unlike every other operating system I’ve checked – won’t let you configure a different scrolling orientation on a mouse than for a trackpad: both have to be kept aligned in MacOS. Argh!.

So Unbelievable it Sounds Like you Googled It

“To Google”

When it first appeared, Google Search was a breath of fresh air. Simple, powerful search that Just Worked. It’s little wonder that the phase “to Google” something became synonymous with “to search for” something.

Somewhere, Google lost its way.¹ Perhaps the latest example of that is the injection of AI into every search²:

I’ve been to the cinema a few times lately so I’ve seen the Google AI ad that inspired me to make this parody… a lot.
Music by Dead Tubes Foundation (click to unmute/mute).

Apparently the kids these days don’t “Google it”. At least, not in their colloquialisms: they’re still probably using the search engine.

They say that they’ll “search it up”.

And this presents us with an opportunity:

Let’s reclaim the phrase “to Google”

I was inspired by a blog post by Mr Scribs (itself inspired by a Fediverse conversation), discovered via Bubbles:

We should turn the verb use of googling into an insult.

Example: “That’s so unbelievable it sounds like you googled it.”

Mr Scribs, in a good domain

I love this, and I’m absolutely going to start using it. “To Google” can absolutely transform from meaning “to search for, using a Web search engine” to meaning:

to seek knowledge in a lazy and convenient way, without regard for its accuracy
(“I Googled from a guy at the pub that 5G caused Covid”)
to acquire information that can’t accurately be sourced or verified
(“don’t quote me on that, though: I Googled it”)
to prefer an answer to a question that’s mildly more-convenient for the asker, even if getting it was ethically problematic
(“pass me the jump leads, I’m going to Google one of the hostages”)

DeGoogling is so… 2010s. Let’s make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb, in a way that better represents what it means to continue to buy in to the ever-increasingly toxic Google Search ecosystem.

Footnotes

¹ Maybe it was then the Search-Chrome-Analytics trifecta that positioned the company as both the assistant to, and the adversary of, the users. Maybe it was when they dropped “don’t be evil”. Maybe it was when they stopped listening to users, or when they stopped listening to their own developers. Maybe it was when they helped sterilise the Web. Maybe it was AMP and they way they abused their monopoly to force it down everybody’s throats. Maybe it was when they killed (insert your favourite service here). Maybe it was when they started enshittifying Android. Make your own mind up.

² Yes, I’m aware that some other search engines include AI summaries in results, too. But they all seem easier to turn off… and I’m yet to see a cinema advertisement about the fact that they do it for anything other that Google Search.

F-Day plus 113

It’s been a hundred and thirteen days since the flood that wrecked our house, and we’re told that repair work will start imminently. Like: as soon as next week!

So today I returned to the house to try to disassemble my sit/stand desk. An enormous and heavy thing that was constructed in-situ, it survived the flood without significant damage but is sort of hard-to-move for the purpose of getting it out of the way of the folks who’ll hopefully soon be repairing walls, floors, electrics and the like.

A large, L-shaped office desk with thick motorised metal legs lies on its edge, upright, in a bare concrete-floored home office. — This way up. For now.

Unfortunately it proved just too difficult to disassemble the beast. I’d anticipated that it would be able to be easily separated into two major pieces – the “top”, and the “frame” – but the guy who built in for me¹ made some creative decisions about the placements of the controllers and the motors which has meant that the two now can’t be separated without taking the whole thing apart into a lot of tiny bits.

I’ll speak to the builders when they come. Maybe a floor can be laid elsewhere in the house and then the desk, which I’ve collapsed as small as its little motors will carry it, can be moved onto the newly-constructed floor so that it’s out of the way here.

Close-up of tiny sockets on ribbon cables within the housing of a laptop. — Wowsa, these are some tiny connectors!

So I got started on my other hardware task of the day: attempting to repair Ruth‘s laptop. It’s reporting via LED codes a graphics fault and its screen isn’t coming on, and the most-likely cause it an un-seated signal cable. So I picked up some teeny-tiny screwdrivers (my usual ones all being packed in boxes) and had a go.

But no dice; I’ve reseated the cables and it’s still sad, so I’m guessing it’s an actual issue with the screen. Sigh.

Two for two on hardware failures today. I should go back to writing some software. Fortunately; there’s lots of that that needs my attention too, this weekend!

Footnotes

¹ Who – I suspected at the time and of which I’m now even more-confident – might well have been high when he assembled it. There’s some wacky choices here, plus he’s drilled several holes on the underside that he then didn’t actually use!

The “ChangeNames.co.uk” Scam

👋 Hi! If you came here after going to ChangeNames.co.uk, congratulations: you just dodged getting scammed.

To actually change your name for free as a British citizen, without giving your personal information to scammers (or anybody else who doesn’t need it!), I suggest you use FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too!

I help people change their names

As a British citizen, you can change your name for free. That’s the entire premise behind my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, which since 2011 has helped thousands of people change their names¹ for free and without a solicitor.

Screenshot showing FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. — It’s a pretty useful website, if I say so myself.

I aim to run the most-ethical service of its type:

As noted, it’s completely free and collects no personal information whatsoever.
It’s funded out of my own pocket so it doesn’t need to depend upon advertising.
It’s open source so anybody can inspect my code, or run it themselves, or even set up a “competing” copy (so long as they give away the code to that, too)!
I try to answer every email I receive from anybody who’s having difficulty with the process.²

Scammers will barely help you, but they will steal your data

Others, however, don’t.

I’m not talking about all the paid-for services. Some of them provide a useful service, albeit one that you don’t strictly need to pay for. I’m not a fan of those that try to market themselves as “official”, though, because that just feels like fraud. No, I’m talking about a level of sliminess that goes well beyond merely charging somebody for something they’re entitled to for free.

Like… let me show you an email I received today:

I tried to visit their website but it looks like they haven’t even bought the domain name they’re advertising, yet. Just for fun, I’ve registered it and set it up as a permanent redirect to this blog post³.

Their TikTok channel exists, but it’s not at the URL they provided. So far, so incompetent.

Gotta admit, their video production quality’s better than mine… even if the content isn’t!

Both their YouTube and TikTok channels provide a link not to their “website” but to a kit.com page that asks for some personal details with the promise of a deed poll at the end of it.

When you fill in the form – and obviously you shouldn’t do so using real information – you get added to a marketing email list and a handful of other mailing lists get pushed at you.

Kit.com require double-opt-in confirmation for mailing lists, but the email tries to trick you into clicking the button, saying that clicking the “confirm your subscription” button “help us know you have received the deed poll and everything works”. In reality, they’re just trying to legitimise their spamming.

And what do you get out of it after all this? A hyperlink to a publicly-accessible Google Drive folder called “Deed Polls”[sic]⁴ that a more-ethical outlet could have just linked to in the first place. it contains a couple of Word documents that require you to delete a ton of underscores in order to type your own content in.

Oh, the the templates are full of mistakes. Here’s one (there are others!):

Of all the scammy free deeds poll services I’ve seen, ChangeNames is the worst

What we’ve got here is…

a marketing scam pretending to be a deeds poll service,
being run ineptly, e.g. marketing using a domain name they haven’t yet purchased and providing broken links to their own social media,
that are using unethical techniques to harvest personal information,
in exchange for a deed poll template that’s riddled with errors. 🤦

But the really insane thing about this whole scam is that a human being found my video about my own (superior, ethical) service FreeDeedPoll.org.uk… and then figured that they’d email me to see if I’d like to pass some traffic to their (inferior, unethical) competitor.

That bit… that’s the bit that blows my mind.

Footnotes

¹ I can’t tell you exactly how many because I make a deliberate effort to collect no personal information, without which I’m unable to pin down a specific number. But I’ve had many hundreds of emails from people who’ve changed their names, and have anonymous statistics to suggest that the number is almost-certainly in the tens of thousands, maybe in the low hundreds of thousands.

² I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve become pretty familiar with lots of relevant parts of the laws about not just names but adjacent areas like citizenship, residency, gender identity, information protection, and parental rights, and I’ve been able to point many people towards satisfactory conclusions when they’ve had more-challenging name changes.

³ It might not be working yet, depending on the state of DNS propagation, but it’ll get there in a day or so I reckon.

⁴ The plural of deed poll is, of course, deeds poll, but one could hardly expect these clowns to know that.

Converting ISO Country Codes to Flag Emojis

Today I learned something that is probably already well-known in some circles… but I hadn’t noticed it before and it made me go “wow”:

There’s a really simple algorithm for converting ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes into the emoji representations of the flags of those countries.

I made an interactive to show how it works (enter a two-letter country code!). There’s a longer explanation below:

Non-interactive widget demonstrative conversion of two-letter ISO country codes into emoji flags.

Here’s the essence of the algorithm:

Take the two-letter country code, e.g. FR for France.
Get the character code of the uppercase variant of each letter: so F becomes 70 and R becomes 82.¹
Add 127,397 to each of them, so now F is 127,467 and R 127,479.
Render the unicode characters at those codepoints: F turns into 🇫 and R turns into 🇷.
Concatenate those characters and you get the emoji of the flag: 🇫🇷

I’ve often find things that are wonderfully clever about Unicode, but this might be my new favourite.

func countryEmojiFlag(countryCode string) string {
  cc := strings.ToUpper(strings.TrimSpace(countryCode))
  if len(cc) != 2 || cc[0] < 'A' || cc[0] > 'Z' || cc[1] < 'A' || cc[1] > 'Z' {
    return ""
  }
  return string([]rune{rune(cc[0]) + 127397, rune(cc[1]) + 127397})
}

My actual implementation was Go, rather than JavaScript², as part of a side project this weekend. Here’s the function I came up with.

Today was also the day that I discovered that while SU is a reserved 2-letter ISO 3166-1 designation for the Soviet Union, the flag of the USSR is not a registered emoji. But if it were, we can work out what codepoint it’d be at! So I can type this – 🇸🇺 – here, safe in the knowledge that if that emoji comes to exist in the future, then you’ll be able to revisit this blog post and see it!

You know what: there might be a game in these country codes and their flags somewhere. Like: a game where you have to get from one country to another: like, say, from the 🇨🇰 Cook Islands (CK) to 🇧🇯 Benin (BJ). But you’re only allowed to change one letter at a time and you have to land in a real country. I think the fastest route between those two takes three steps, e.g. 🇨🇰 Cook Islands (CK) to 🇹🇰 Tokelau (TK) to 🇹🇯 Tajikstan (TJ) to 🇧🇯 Benin (BJ)… It’s probably a bit easy though: I haven’t yet found any that require more than three moves and most can be done in just two.

It gets a lot harder if you require letters to only be changed to an adjacent letter, but this variant makes some permutations impossible. Maybe there’s an optimisation puzzle in the style of the Travelling Salesman problem? Or maybe by mixing in geographical restrictions such as an inability to visit a certain continent that would make it more challenging and fun? Just brainstorming here…

Footnotes

¹ An alternative way of thinking about it is that you’re taking the number of the letter in the alphabet – e.g F=6, R=18 – and adding 64 to each. Here’s why, and why it’s beautiful.

² I don’t get to write Go often, and I seem to get rusty at it quickly, but I enjoy the feeling of writing something so raw and yet so clean.

Wikipedia @ 25: Carl Person

Duration 5:55

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To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Today’s random article: Carl Person
Today’s topic: Carl Person

Just sometimes when you’re playing the “hey, Wikipedia, give me a random page” game, you get a hole in one. That’s what happened today when I landed on the article for… Carl Person.

Carl Person, an older white man with receding grey-white hair, wearing a smart three-piece suit, leans against a planter in an marbled ornamental garden. — Whatever else you can say about him, he looks pretty dapper in a suit. Photo courtesy Carl Person, used under a Creative Commons license. Knowing that he *has* a Wikipedia account (which he used to upload this photo), I took the time to browse the article history and check for any obvious signs of tampering, sockpuppetry, or other foul play, but it looks reasonably clean.

Yes, Person is his actual surname. Speaking as a person with a stupid name, it pleases me to find people whose names probably cause them at least as much trouble as mine does. Wikipedia wasn’t any help at understanding where the surname Person comes from (and Carl himself isn’t even noteworthy enough to appear on the list of “notable people with that surname”, it seems).

However I did enjoy discovering jazz saxophonist Houston Person (which sounds like the beginning of a news headline about somebody from Houston!) who once released an album called… Person to Person! Excellent. Also, actress and filmmaker Marina Person whose documentary about her father, filmmaker Luis Sérgio Person, was titled simply Person. I think the name might be related to Swedish surname Persson – literally, “son of Per” – where Per is a Scandinavian variant of Peter. This probably means that there’s a “Per Person” somewhere in the world, and I want to meet him.

Anyway: back to Carl. He trained as a lawyer and spent the 1960s working in a variety of corporate law firms. These included the one for which Richard Nixon was a partner, during that period after Nixon failed to get elected as Governor of California and announced that he was retiring from politics… only to come back six years later to be elected president and, well, you know the rest.

The interesting bits of Carl’s career came later.

After the American Bar Association endorsed the concept of a paralegal in 1967, Person founded the Paralegal Institute, a name that’s so-polluted with people using it that even the closest-named Wikipedia article seems to be talking about something similar… but different. (This seems to be pretty much par for the course in the American paralegal system, though: did you know that a “certified paralegal” and a “certificated paralegal” are two completely distinct and non-interchangeable things?)

A brown-skinned woman sits at a desk surrounded by binders of paperwork. — Paralegals! All of the work; a fraction of the pay!

Anyway: other things he did as part of his legal career were –

Represented other members of The Teenagers (then The Premiers, because confusingly the band changed their name to “The Teenagers” when they got older) in their efforts to reclaim shared copyright of their 1956 hit Why Do Fools Fall in Love from lead singer Frankie Lymon and Gee Records.
Represented playwright Mark Dunn in his successful claim that The Truman Show was based upon his 1992 play, Frank’s Life, whose script he’d previously attempted to sell to Paramount.
Helped Ralph Anspach (whose book I read before writing this 2013 blog post!) in his appeal against a ruling that Anspach’s board game Anti-Monopoly was derivative of Parker Brothers‘ stake in Monopoly: the appeal was successful at least in part because Person and Anspach were able to prove that Monopoly was, itself, derived from Lizzie Magie‘s The Landlord’s Game. (Fun fact: this was the second time Carl successfully took on Parker Brothers; the first being the Masterpiece case, representing Christian Thee!)

In 2012 Person put himself forward to be the Libertarian candidate for the presidential election, losing out to Gary Johnson (who had in turn switched sides after he realised he wasn’t going to become the Republican nominee). Gary Johnson eventually got 0.99% of the popular vote, almost breaking the 1% barrier that only 33 third-party candidates have ever achieved in US history.

Not a bad bit of reading for a hole-in-one article.

Wikipedia @ 25: Cirrothauma Murrayi

Duration 7:29

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Today’s random article: Cirrothauma
Today’s topic: Cirrothauma murrayi

My random landing page today is a genus for which there’s only a single species, so I hopped over to that species’ page.

And what a species!

Orange-pink octopus with a long web skirting between its tentacles and a distinct butterfly-shaped elongated shell from its head. — Somehow it looks more like an alien than octopodes normally do! Drawing produced by Carl Chung in 1910.

This is the blind cirrate octopus (cirrothauma murrayi), a species found beneath the oceans all around the world but at such a depth that they’re not well-understood. We’re not even sure whether the specimens we’ve studied represent a single species or two separate species!

The Latin name comes from oceanographer John Murray, best known for his Challenger Expedition from 1872–1876, but whose four month North Atlantic Oceanographic Expedition in 1910 – which he self-funded – was the first to find this unusual species. It was described by Carl Chun, whose previous claim to fame had been the discovery of the (also amazingly alien-looking) vampire squid, seven years earlier.

(The vampire squid is its own amazing thing: did you know that it turns itself inside out to evade predators, exposing the inner surface of its spiked tentacles? Also it can spit glow-in-the-dark mucus to dazzle an attacker.)

You can tell it’s a cirrate octopus by those fins on its head. Cirrates are one of the two major families of octopodes: they’re the ones that do have a pair of mini strands dangling off each sucker on each tentacle, but don’t have an ink sac. They’re also notoriously fragile, and when we’ve pulled them up for research purposes they’re often in poor condition by the time they’re on the surface… and that’s especially true for deep dwellers like the blind cirrate octopus.

As for blind: well – it’s got eyes… but those eyes don’t have lenses. As a result, they’re probably able to tell light from dark but probably can’t make out the particular shapes of objects. (This is a great example, contrary to claims of irreducible complexity in the eye by proponents of “intelligent design” of an eye with only some of the components that seem essential to a fully-functional organ that still provides value for its host!).

Speaking of which – do you know how cool the eyes of an octopus are?

Vertebrate (left) and cephalopod (right) eyes have several distinct differences which suggest different evolutionary origins. In cephalopods, the retina (1) is routed in front of the nerve fibres (2) that connect to the optic nerve (3), meaning that cephalopods do not have the “blind spot” (4) that vertebrates do.

Like all cephalopods, they have no blind spot because their retina is in front of the nerve fibres instead of behind them.
Like squid and possibly cuttlefish, they can differentiate the polarisation of light. (I believe that sheep and goats can, too!)
Their pupils automatically rotate to stay horizontal, no matter which way up they are!

There’s some debate about whether or not octopodes and other cephalopods’ eyes evolved from a shared ancestor or are an example of convergent evolution, and the arguments for both are really interesting.

Of course, our friend the blind cirrate octopus is, umm… mostly blind. Very different from other octopodes.

As I said, we know so little about it! We don’t know what it eats (we think it probably eats whole shellfish). We don’t know how it breeds. We don’t know how commonplace it is or whether its environment is under threat.

But what we do know is that it’s a freaky-looking thing from way down deep. Thanks, Wikipedia, for telling me about this strange beast. Let’s see what you have to share with me tomorrow!

A Selfhosted Static Site Editor

My 12-year-old was interested in learning some HTML and CSS and making her own website. If she were anybody else I’d point her at something like Nekoweb as a starter host because their web-based (VSCode-based) “Nekode” text editor makes writing your first static site simple.

But I’ve got a NAS sitting at home on a fibre connection, so I figured: I might as well just host something similar here.

Here’s how I did it:

1. DNS

I pointed her domain at my static IP, plus a subdomain for the “backend” interface. Suppose her site would be at example.net (and www.example.net) with the admin interface at admin.example.net: my DNS configuration might look like this:

@     10800 IN     A 172.66.147.243
www   10800 IN CNAME example.net.
admin 10800 IN CNAME example.net.

2. Caddy

I’ve got a Caddy webserver acting as a static server and a reverse proxy already, so I just added a new static site with a configuration like this:

example.net, www.example.net {
  root /volumes/example.net/public
  encode gzip
  templates
  file_server
}

The templates directive means that, if/when she wants to, she could use Caddy’s built-in SSI-like features. Or if she decides someday she’d prefer a static site generator then I can sort her out with shell access or something.

It probably wouldn’t be much harder to set up something like this from scratch on e.g. a Raspberry Pi: Caddy’s fast and easy to get set up.

3. Editor

I used the OpenVSCode Server Docker image to provide a browser-based VSCode interface in which she could edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript and drag-drop files from her local machine. I’m using Unraid on my NAS so I didn’t have to think much about running a new Docker container, but I guess that if I did then I’d have typed something like:

docker run -d \
  # 7890 is the port on my NAS that I'll proxy Caddy to:
  -p 7890:3000
  # /mnt/user/example.net is the path on my NAS;
  # /example.net is where it'll appear within VSCode:
  -v "/mnt/user/example.net:/example.net" \
  # this tells OpenVSCode-Server to mount the directory to begin with:
  -e OPENVSCODE_SERVER_ROOT=/example.net \
  gitpod/openvscode-server

Now all I needed to do was point Caddy at it. For the time being I simply restricted access to only “computers on my local LAN”, but it’d be easy enough to add authentication using basic auth and/or client certificates if she wanted to be able to work on her site from elsewhere:

admin.example.net {
  # Restrict access to 192.168.* LAN:
  @allowed {
    remote_ip 192.168.0.0/16
  }
  # Proxy permitted folks to the container:
  handle @allowed {
    reverse_proxy http://nas:7890
  }
  # Block everybody else:
  handle {
    abort
  }
}

That’s literally all it took to put together a web-based editing environment that publishes directly to a static website. And because it’s on my own infrastructure, it’d be trivially easy to modify it in the future if she decided to go in a different direction, e.g. a PHP site, or continuous deployment from a repo, or static site generation from a shell.

That’s all!

Here’s a test site I threw together using exactly this stack, demonstrating the entirely browser-based editing workflow (not shown is drag-and-drop to upload, but I promise that works too!):

F-Day plus 97

It’s been 97 days since our house flooded and we had to evacuate. We’re now living medium-term in a “chicory house” a few minutes drive away, but there’s still plenty of reason for us to return frequently to the disaster site that is our actual house.

Today, for example, JTA and I went to show around some contractors who will eventually, we hope, be able to install new floors, skirting boards, remove and replace a wall, rebuild the kitchen, fix the electrics…

It’s been over three months since we had to move out. With the drying-out complete, it’s finally time to begin planning to start scheduling the start of the repair work that needs doing. What a painfully-slow process!

The day after the flood water receded, I took this photo while we were assessing damage – you can see the tide marks left by the water:

That picture shows part of our piano, which took in a lot of water and was significantly damaged. It’s off at a nice piano hospital right now being repaired, and I miss it much more than I expected.

After playing maybe ten minutes a day almost every day for years, I routinely get up from my desk to stretch my legs or heat up my lunch and my fingers itch to plink-plonk away at it. Of all the hundred inconveniences of our temporary living situation and everything that goes along with it, that’s the one that bites most-frequently. It’s a strange sensation.

But all the builders and the insurance company and everybody else seem confident that they can get us back into our home in the Autumn, and certainly by Christmas, so there’s something to look forward to. A light at the end of the tunnel.

Wikipedia @ 25: Yousuf Karsh

Duration 6:52

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Today’s random article: Karsh (crater)
Today’s topic: Yousuf Karsh

The planet Mercury is covered with impact craters, which isn’t surprising because it has no atmosphere to slow down incoming meteors nor significant active tectonic or erosion processes to conceal them once they’re created. In 2015 the IAU ran a competition to name four such craters: the winning entries resulted in the naming of the craters Carolan, Enheduanna, Kulthum, Rivera, and Karsh.

Karsh crater on Mercury, on the west side of the larger Rembrandt crater. — The Karsh crater is about 180km wide, which is approximately comparable to… your mum.

This crater is named after Yousuf Karsh, who’s sufficiently famous that I’d actually heard of him, which was an unusual result from hitting “random article” on Wikipedia.

But in case you don’t know who Yousaf Karsh is – or if, like me, you just wanted to learn more about him – then you’re in luck!

Monochome photo, presumably taken using a mirror, of a balding man operating a box camera. — Selfies used to be a lot harder in 1958.

Yousuf Karsh was an Canadian-Armenian photographer who took principally portrait photographs, some of which you’ve almost-certainly seen already. He photographed a huge number of famous and significant individuals of the 20th century. Like this one:

Monochrome photograph of Sir Winston Churchill. — *“Oh yes!”* No wait, that’s the *other* Churchill’s catchphrase.

That photo, taken in 1941, is titled The Roaring Lion, and it’s got a story to it.

Winston Churchill posed for his photograph on his way out from delivering the “some chicken! some neck!” speech to the Canadian parliament (you can see his notes from the speech tucked into his jacket pocket). He had his trademark cigar in his mouth, but Karsh wanted it gone. He asked Churchill to remove it, but Churchill refused, and Karsh went ahead to take the photograph anyway. But then at the last second, Karsh said “Forgive me, sir” and snatched the cigar directly out of the Prime Minister’s mouth.

“By the time I got back to the camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me,” said Karsh later, of the expression on Churchill’s face. But it’s that expression that he captured with the camera, and that would go on to be described by the USC as a “defiant and scowling portrait [which] became an instant icon of Britain’s stand against fascism.” Absolutely iconic.

Churchill himself said, after the picture was taken, that “you can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” Hence the portrait’s name.

Or how about this picture of the Marx Brothers in 1948:

Chico, Harpo, and Groucho Marx. — Karsh became known for his use of harsh lighting to pick out the fine details of his subjects’ faces, which I think is especially clear in this picture.

Or how about this fantastic photo of the then Princess Elizabeth, aged 21 or 22, before her accession as Queen Elizabeth II:

Princess Elizabeth sits comfortably in an upholstered chair. — “So long as Daddy manages to die before he has any sons, I’mma get me so much ~~Empire~~ Commonwealth.”

Here’s some things I didn’t know about Yousuf Karsh, though:

Being born to ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire could have been a death sentence in itself for young Yousuf. Ottoman and later Turkish Nationalist authorities and paramilitaries deported, confined, or murdered hundreds of thousands and quite possibly over a million Armenians, who they saw as a threat to their national identity (among other candidate causes).

Karsh and his family travelled with a Kurdish caravan to Aleppo in Syria in 1922, and a year later his parents took advantage of a humanitarian scheme to transport displaced Armenians to live with relatives in Canada: the then 15-year-old who “spoke little French, and less English” and “had no money and little schooling” moved half way around the world to live with his uncle.

Yousuf’s uncle was a photographer and taught him the essentials of early-20th-century photography technology and techniques, before sending him to apprentice in Boston under John H. Garo, a fellow Armenian whose studio hosted the still-running Boston Camera Club. He worked in the USA for a time then returned to Canada, opening his own studio in 1932. When his brother Malak was able to join him in Canada in 1937, Yousuf helped Malak break into a career in photography too: a career that would probably have been better-known were it not for being in the shadow of his older brother!

I don’t know whether he’d care about having a crater named after him or not. But he’d probably have been more proud of the legacy that lives on in the Karsh Award, given every alternate year by the City of Ottawa for outstanding artistic work in a photo-based medium.

Wikipedia @ 25: Necker Island

Duration 12:41

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Today’s random article: Here & Now (Pop Shuvit album)
Today’s topic: Necker Island (Hawaii)

As I observed… what…? 15 years ago, it’s easy to get lost down a series of Wikipedia links and have to use the back button to remember how you got there. That’s very much what happened to me today.

My random article for the day was about Here & Now, the second album of Pop Shuvit, a Malaysian hip hop/nu metal band most-active from around 2002 to 2011. I listened to the album; the title track’s pretty good, and I enjoyed Old Skool Rocka and Put ‘Em Up too.

Here & Now album cover, featuring black and white line art of the band and fans in front of a cityscape. — I dig the album art. I *think* the one holding the skateboard is bassist ‘AJ’; which ties to the next part of my journey…

The band take their name from a skateboarding trick called a pop shove-it, presumably using the different spelling to aid their ability to protect their copyright on it.

And this is the point at which I briefly got lost in the depths of Wikipedia’s article about skateboarding. A pop shove-it, you see, is apparently a combination of an ollie and a shove-it, which still sounded like a foreign language to me, so I had to read up on both. Here’s what I learned:

An ollie is when you stomp down on the back of the board to make it jump, while sliding the front foot forward from the midpoint to keep it somewhat-level and stop it flipping “over”. This results in the entire board jumping while remaining almost-horizontal, while the skater flies just above it.
A shove-it is when you rotate the board 180° laterally, so that the “back” end of the board becomes the “front” and vice-versa: so the board ends up landing and its wheels roll the opposite direction they did at the start of the trick, but the board and skater carry on moving forwards. It’s done by giving the board a bit of a kick to start it rotating and then landing on it with enough pressure to stop it rotating again.

That’s a terrible explanation. Here’s a terrible diagram from Wikipedia that probably doesn’t help either: (you’ll want to find a video if you really want to understand it, but that goes beyond what’s available on Wikipedia, so I’m not sharing it as part of this blog series!)

Diagram illustrating the foot positions and board rotation of a 'pop-shuvit'. — I note that the creator of this diagram chose to spell the trick in the same way as the band name. Diagram courtesy of GoSkate.com, used under a Creative Commons license.

The pop shove-it was originally called the Ty hop, after its inventor Ty Page, a famous skateboard in the 1970s also known by the name “Mr. Incredible”.

I could list some of the other fifty-plus moves he’s credited with inventing (like the pay hop, daffy or yeah right manual, and the toe-spin 360), but it’d probably only be fun and interesting if I mixed-in a few fake ones I conceived of myself (like the nip trip, double pipe-tail, and the indo 180).

Skateboarding had been around since at least the 1950s and had exploded in popularity in the 1960s, but a major part of the reason Ty was able to invent totally new tricks in the 1970s was the result of a two new innovations that took off at that time:

Polyurethane wheels, invented by Frank Nasworthy to supplant the use of hard steel wheels (commonly used by rollerskates at the time) or clay composite wheels. Steel wheels were fast and smooth-running, but because they’re hard they provide little grip, which makes stunts harder to control. Clay composite wheels were softer and easier, but wore out quickly, needing to be replaced after as little as seven hours of skating. Polyurethane gives a best-of-both worlds, giving a long-wearing but soft-enough-to-grip surface to the wheel from a material that was rapidly becoming cheaper to manufacture.
The kicktail, invented (and patented) by Larry Stevenson, is the curved-up bit at the end of a board, so named because it originally only appeared at the back of a board (although Larry cleverly obtained a separate later patent on double-kicktails: one at the front and one at the rear – the front one is sometimes called a kicknose). A kicktail makes it much easier and safer to lift a board by stamping down on it, or else can make it possible to get more lift with a similar level of ease, compared to a completely flat board.

Close-up of a red wheel on a skateboard. — Who knew there’s so much terminology in a skateboard‽ The wheel is attached to a *truck* which is attached to the *deck* of the board. Cropped from the original by Suyash Dwivedi, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ty Page helped promote the kicktail as part of the Makaha Team, sponsored by Stevenson’s company MAKAHA Skateboards. And here’s where I jumped into a whole different rabbithole.

At this point in history – as skateboarding was just beginning to come into its own as a sport – there was an enormous intersection between surfboarders and skateboarders, many of whom would surf when weather and tide conditions were right and skate when they weren’t.

Larry Stevenson was such an individual. On his way to his deployment in the Korean War, he stopped at Hawaii where he found a particular beach to be excellent for surfing. That beach, which would eventually give its name to his company, was at the town of… Mākaha.

Tropical golden-sand beach with people playing in the waves. — Gotta admit, Mākaha Beach Park looks pretty lush. Photo courtesy Nicolai Edgar Andersen, used under a Creative Commons license.

One thing I found interesting while reading about Mākaha is that it’s the home of Kāne’āki Heiau, Hawaii’s most-completely restored heiau. Heiau are temples of the indigenous religion of Native Hawaiians, a polytheistic and animistic belief structure itself seemingly related to earlier Māori practices brought over by Polynesian seafarers from 800 CE onwards.

According to tradition, heiau were built by menehune, mythological two-foot high dwarves who lived in the deep forests and hidden valleys, far from humans, and came out at night to build structures and dig fish ponds. The concept is comparable to the European idea of brownies or hobgoblins, in particular the pre-Christian idea of these spirits as being helpful to humans so long as they’re treated with respect.

Painting of a diminutive man carrying a fish almost the same size as himself out from the sea. — *Menehune with Fish* by David Howard Hitchcock, 1933. Menehune were said to especially enjoy eating bananas and fish. Fun fact: the sparsely-populated Wainiha Valley was declared by census in 1500 to have a population of 65 menehune.

Pressure from Christian missionaries in Hawaii from 1820 onwards led to the neglect and destruction of most heiau, except for the most-remote of them. One such remote temple was the standing stones on Necker Island (see: we got there eventually!).

Necker Island is named after Jacques Necker, France’s finance minister at the time that the first European explorer – Jean-François de Galaup – sighted the rock. We don’t know what ancient Hawaiian peoples called it, but reverse-engineering Hawaiian chants passed down by oral tradition that include descriptions of islands has led the Hawaiian Lexicon Committee to assign it the name Mokumanamana, which means “pinnacled island”.

A rocky island protudes from the waves. — Necker Island as photographed in 1969 by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

We also don’t know when Necker Island was last inhabited, but it seems that its poor thin soil is likely to have prevented permanent settlement. However, there’s evidence that its caves were used for human habitation from time to time, and some have been used as tombs. Even landing on the island is difficult on account of its sheer stone cliffs around its edge (which is part of the rim of what was once a volcanic cone).

A line of rocky standing stones with sea birds perching on many of them. — Researchers recognise that the structures on Necker Island represent an earlier iteration of Hawaiian religion than other heiau and some use the Māori term *marae* to refer to them. Similar structures are found in New Zealand, for example.

But do you know what archaeologists found on Necker Island, amongst the standing stones? Menehune figurines, carved out of basalt, one and a half to two feet tall. Tales in the oral traditions of the natives of the island of Kauaʻi describe Necker Island as the last refuge of the diminutive builders after they were chased off the main island by the newly-arrived Polynesians.

A carved stone figurine. — Where are the stone figures right now? Well this one, and another one, are in the British Museum. Because of course they are.

In the way that was long-traditional for European empires exploring the culturally-important sites of distant lands, many of the artefacts found on Necker Island aren’t there any more. But the standing stones are still standing, and human remains that were removed and put into a museum have been returned and re-buried, at least.

So that’s Necker Island! Which I learned about because Wikipedia randomly chose me an article about an album by a Malaysian hip hop band, whose name derives from a skateboarding trick that’s possible thanks to an invention by a man whose skateboarding company was named after a surf-friendly Hawaiian beach near a town that has ruins of a temple allegedly built my mythological dwarves who are said to have lived there. It’s been quite a journey! I wonder where tomorrow’s will take me.

Wikipedia @ 25: Lake Baikal

Duration 5:35

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Today’s random article: Baikal seal
Today’s topic: Lake Baikal

The Baikal seal is a species of “earless” seal that lives exclusively in Lake Baikal in Siberia. It’s one of only a tiny number of species of seal that spends its life only in freshwater: others, like the much more-widespread harbour seal (that I’ve occasionally seen around the UK), for example, can and will swim up rivers to hunt but mostly live in saltwater. But not the Baikal seal.

A group of Baikal seals bask on a rock. — These Baikal seals are just chilling on a rock near the Ushkan Islands. Photograph courtesy Nina Zhavoronkova, used under a Creative Commons license.

The Baikal seal is confined just to this one lake. Which sounds like a small area until you realise quite how large Lake Baikal is. The seventh-largest lake in the world, Lake Baikal is just a little larger than Belgium, but that really doesn’t do justice to its true volume, because it also happens to be the deepest lake in the world. It’s so deep that a fifth to a quarter of all the surface freshwater in the world is found in this one lake.

If you count frozen water in the ice caps and glaciers too, then Lake Baikal still contains about fifth of all the fresh water on Earth. That’s just amazing.

It’s quite so deep because it’s a rift lake: it sits close to the boundary between the Eurasian and Amur tectonic plates, which are shearing away from one another. For the same reason, there are volcanic hot springs deep in the lake (although the lake itself is so massive that they have no measurable effect on its overall temperature). There’s a lot of not-fully-understood geology going on in the region, despite active research going back over a century.

Clear water over a pebblebed. — The clarity of the water in the lake is also noteworthy, getting up to 40m of visibility in the winter. Photo courtesy Xchgall, used under a Creative Commons license.

The Baikal seal isn’t the only species unique to the lake. It’s also home to a kind of fish called the omul, a salmon-like fish that’s long been part of the cuisine of the area.

It’s used to make raskolotka (known as stroganina elsewhere in Russia): thin slices of the meat cut almost to the entire length of the fish’s body and served as frozen curls. The particular shape of a traditional skinning Yakutian knife, which is sharpened to a curve on one-side and left flat on the other, is especially suited to this task, apparently:

Slices of a large fish being whittled off with a traditional knife. — You can see how the shape of the knife is particularly suited to making these long, thin strips. Photo courtesy Cholbon, used under a Creative Commons license.

Lake Baikal also hosts the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope, whose acronym BDUNT makes me think of bundt cakes. Which – Wikipedia tells me – nobody’s certain of the etymology of!

Anyway, the neutrino telescope is an SK-variety neutrino detector, spotting neutrinos zipping through the Earth when they just-ocassionally interact with the water, resulting in the creation of a high-energy electron or muon and the resulting short burst of Cherenkov radiation. Operated from the surface of the winter ice, the experiment aims to search for evidence of relic dark matter in the sun, among other astronomical phenomena.

Scientists work around cranes atop a frozen lake. — I wonder what impact all the fish and seals have on the detection equipment? Photo courtesy Bair Shaybonov, used under a Creative Commons license.

It’s all interesting, but if there’s one thing I’ll take away from this daily deep-dive into a random Wikipedia topic, it’s this photo of a cute young Baikal seal:

A young seal with large eyes lies on its belly on an ice sheet. — Those big eyes! 😍 Photo courtesy Per Harald Olsen, used under a Creative Commons license.

I wonder what tomorrow’s random Wikipedia article will bring me! If it’s interesting, I’ll share it with you!

Wikipedia @ 25: Yo-Yo

Duration 8:31

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Today’s random article: Marcus Koh
Today’s topic: Yo-yo

One of the things I’ve discovered over my past few days of hitting “Random Article” on Wikipedia is that sometimes you get something that’s worth writing about. But more often you get something worth reading but not writing about. But more often still you get something that doesn’t interest you at all, and you just need to click “Random Article” again.

And that latter category is the one I thought I was in when I discovered Marcus Koh, who’s a Singaporean yo-yo enthusiast who came first in the 1A division at the World Yo-Yo Contest in 2011. The page almost felt like a stub… but then I started clicking and found myself learning much more about yo-yos than I ever thought possible.

Like… I knew that the yo-yo was an old toy, but I had no idea how old.

Drawing showing a woman playing with an early form of the yo-yo. — This 1791 image allegedly from a French fashion journal. The French usually called the toy a *emigrette* at the time, but the 1888 republication of this image in *Le Costume Historique* called it *Joujou de Normandie*, so who knows.

Obviously there’s a lot of pictures from around the end of the eighteenth century, which is when they became popular in Europe. In the English-speaking world at that point they were known as “bandalores”, which I think is a nicer name than “yo-yo”, frankly.

But their influence was clearly felt much further away and much longer ago than this.

I mean, here’s a 1770 watercolor from Northern India that clearly depicts something that, despite being held in two hands, is definitely something-like-a-yo-yo:

But we can go further.

If you lived in Greece in around the 5th century BCE and were serving wine to your guests, the popular drinking vessel to use was a kylix. Kylikes were pottery cups basically the shape of modern wine glasses but much more squat, having a wide bowl atop a pedestal that tapered outwards. Unlike modern wine glasses, though, they had handles, and these handles were used to play a game called kottabos: once you’d finished your wine, you’d use a handle to “flick” the sediment from your wine (I guess fining/clarification agents weren’t a thing yet?) at a target in order to win a cake or something.

Sounds pretty gross for whoever had to clean up afterwards, if you ask me.

Anyway: oftentimes the inner bowl of a kylix would be decorated. Depending on the kind of party you were throwing you might have a nautical theme where everybody finds a different kind of boat at the bottom of their cup when they drain it… or for a more raucous party perhaps you’d get out the cups where the faces at the bottom all had genitals hidden in them. That way, somebody gets surprised to find that at the end of a drinking session they have a penis in their face (I’ve certainly had parties like that before, if you know what I mean):

Interior of the Bomford Cup, a kylix with a face at the bottom whose nose is distinctly shaped like male genitalia. — I guess that these were the Ancient Greek equivalent of shot glasses with swear words etched into them?

What I’m saying is… the Ancient Greeks liked to play drinking games, and they liked drinking vessels with pictures on. Which makes you look at the “Greek culture” of fraternity houses in a whole new light.

But the pictures weren’t always either (a) boats or (b) crude, of course. They could be anything. Here’s an example of the bottom of a kylix that was probably used as a drinking vessel in or near Athens around 2,500 years ago:

Boy playing yo-yo. Tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix, ca. 440 BC. — What the actual fuck? That boy’s *clearly* playing with a yo-yo in a picture painted before the Parthenon was built!

It’s not just novelty earthenware that tells us that the Ancient Greeks had the yo-yo, by the way. We’ve found actual examples of them made from bronze or terracotta, although archaeologists suspect that there were many more wooden variants that have been lost to time.

I guess it’s true that it’s a toy that just keeps making a comeback. Every few centuries it gets reinvented and improved, I guess! “Modern” yo-yos got their relaunch in the 1920s, when Pedro Flores (a Filipino businessman whose time in his birth country spanned a previous story) brought to the USA a toy that had been popular in his homeland but seemed to be mostly-unknown in the States. The name apparently derives from a Tagalog word that means “come-come” or “come-go” or something similar. He produced both traditional “tied-on” yo-yos and “slip-string” varieties that allowed the toy to “sleep” – to spin-freely at the end of its string – which unlocked a diversity of new tricks.

From here on, the yo-yo saw surges in popularity every 20 to 40 years. The full article’s worth a read because unless you’re a complete yo-yo nut I can guarantee there are things in there that you didn’t know.

I was also very interested in the article about the “Eskimo yo-yo”, which I’d love to see somebody operate! It’s basically a bola of two weights attached to a stick using strings of two different lengths, and the trick is to get them spinning in opposite directions but using only one hand. That sounds amazing!

I also got briefly distracted by clackers, a hyperlink-adjacent childrens’ toy that lends its name to the excellent lawsuit title United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls, which is going right up there in my list of favourite Wikipedia page titles alongside Salmon chaos, List of lists of lists, Thinking about the immortality of the crab, 2022 United Kingdom government crisis (disambiguation), Pope John numbering, and Pentagon pizza theory.

Built In Obsolescence

This post contains and links to (clearly-identified) AI-generated content. As remains the case, none of my writing on this blog was generated by AI.

Imagine my excitement to learn that Pagan Wander Lu just dropped a new EP, Built In Obsolescence. And then imagine my horror to discover that it’s actually produced by P-AI-gan Wanderer Lu; an AI that’s been given PWL lyrics and some artistic direction.

Wot.

AI-generated EP cover of Built In Obsolescence by PAIgan Wanderer Lu, showing a neon digital outline of Andy. — The album art’s clearly also AI-generated, and that’s… well… you know. At least this robot hand has got the correct number of fingers.

Nothingness is what silicon dreams

My younger child’s been getting into PWL in a big way lately. As a result of this, I ended up making time for a careful re-listen to a lot of the back catalogue. This in turn inspired a blog post last year in which I mentioned that Checker Charlie‘s observations about humans replacing their work with machine effort feels increasingly prophetic in the age of generative AI. That’s something I didn’t see in it when I first reviewed it 13 years prior.

I’ve played with AI-generated music a couple of times myself, of course, mostly as an academic exercise. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that it’s hard to avoid bumping into it in the “real world”.

Early efforts at AI music were pretty unconvincing, always sounding a bit auto-tuney, frequently struggling to stress lines in the right places, and tripping over themselves when they try to do anything even remotely more-interesting than a simple repeating melody atop a predictable chord sequence. But they’re getting… shall we say… “better”, and there have been times nowadays when I’ve gotten some way through a track before realising that I’m listening to AI.

At least PWL’s being honest about it and declaring at the outset that this is AI-generated art. There’s plenty of folks using AI to generate content online and not declaring it, which is pretty awful¹. Anyway: in this EP the AI’s moderately well-concealed and listening casually to most of the tracks I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been told².

Is there life enough in these chords?

So I listened to the EP. Three times.

The cover of Checker Charlie, I’m sad to admit, works. It’s got the feel of early-nineties pop, full of synths and saccharine, but instead of insipid lyrics about love it benefits a lot from Andy’s lyrical prowess. It’s a bouncy bop that would be forgettable if it weren’t for the excellent story told by the words is, I suppose, what I mean to say. And, of course, it’s the song that would have made me think about this. Anyway: I enjoyed it and would absolutely listen to it again, and I don’t know what that says about me, about the song, or anything else.

Uncanny Valley doesn’t work as well. Musically, it feels like a new artist in 2012 drew inspiration from their dad’s new wave albums but wanted to make it sound more like Carly Rae Jepsen was collabing with Daft Punk. And the result is kind-of…flat? Could I even say… soulless? It feels like it might have been the B-side of their cover of Chemicals Like You, which rolls out next in the same vein. Twice was probably enough for these two.

Repetition 4 is among my favourite – let’s say top 15? – Pagan Wanderer Lu songs and the AI’s cover of it starts so strong. It finishes pretty strong too. The voice it’s chosen shows only a hint of uncanny-valley-autotune and it wails plaintively. The most human-made bits – the lyrical themes of fighting for creativity against your own struggles as a vulnerable and flawed human “machine” – remain solid. I really expected to love this one! But by the time we were half way through the song it felt… musically-repetitive. You know when you get a pop cover of a classic song sometimes³ and you feel like the cover artist… missed the point somehow? That’s what this feels like to me.

The repetitions of “we are all machines… for dancing” in the original felt meaningful and real; a human’s cathartic resignation to pleasure in the simple things we all enjoy, despite the challenges of life… but the AI cover adds this kind of doo-woppy backing vocals that subtract, rather than adding to, the meaning. I’m not saying it ruins it – it’s still a fun and bouncy version of a great song… but it’s one of those covers that leaves you longing for the original.

And then there’s the “unaligned version” of Uncanny Valley. I’m not sure if the introduced distortions in this version are AI-generated or not. They don’t feel like the kinds of “creative” choices that any AI I’ve played with would make, so I suspect this represents a closer human intervention in the AI’s process: humans imitating machines imitating humans, perhaps? Anyway: the change doesn’t add anything for me.

Had this been produced entirely by a human, I’d say that EP consists one one track I’d add to my everyday playlist (the cover of Checker Charlie), maybe one or two tracks that I “wouldn’t necessarily skip” if they came up on a random shuffle while I wad driving… and the rest just feels too much like “bad cover” vibes.

And that’s as much of a review as I’m willing to give, for the reasons touched-upon below.

Building the engines of our own defeat

I continue to have several issues with the widespread use of generative AI, and in particular I have problems with it being used in the production of art. Those are partially mitigated by it being used by an artist to remix their own work, and partially mitigated by the transparent declaration of the use of AI by the publisher both of which are true in this case. But many issues (ethical, environmental, etc.) still remain.

Perhaps the biggest of which in this case is my concern that we’re using automation wrong.

As a child, I was optimistic about a future in which machines would take away the boring and repetitive work that humans do, leaving us free to pivot to experimental and experiential roles: the joy of working hard in the quest of discovery and of creativity. But instead, the predominant popular use of generative AI is to replace exactly those things, leaving humans only with an increasing amount of drudgery, review, and fact-checking. Where did we go wrong?

Don’t get me wrong: I love that Pagan Wanderer Lu has created this EP. Taking art that he’s created, whose concept touches on the concepts of AI… and feeding them into an actual AI for reinterpretation is transformative. It’s worthy of discussion as a piece of art in its own right. And the result is… well, some of it’s good, and other bits are okay.

What I don’t like is what it represents: the wider societal issue of the mainstream use of these technologies that have enormous unsolved problems.

So I guess… I appreciate the cognitive dissonance of enjoying a peice of music and disliking what it means?

Footnotes

¹ Whether or not the side-effect of undisclosed AI-generated content “poisoning the well” for future AI training is a good or bad thing remains an open question, in my mind, but it’s certainly a real phenomenon. You know how we salvage the wrecks of ships sunk before the atomic age because they’re untainted by man-made radioactivity, which makes them useful for special purposes? It feels like the Internet before the explosion in generative AI may provide a similar cultural resource for future AI training, if you see what I mean.

² And assuming I wasn’t already familiar with the artist, who doesn’t usually sound like an auto-tuned female singer.

³ I don’t have a specific example so I hope this is a universal experience!

It’s boring… because it’s established #

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous #

I love that my polyamory is boring! #

But if I’m wrong… #

Footnotes

Podcast Version

Footnotes

“To Google”

Let’s reclaim the phrase “to Google”

Footnotes

Footnotes

I help people change their names

Scammers will barely help you, but they will steal your data

Of all the scammy free deeds poll services I’ve seen, ChangeNames is the worst

Footnotes

Footnotes

Podcast Version

Podcast Version

1. DNS

2. Caddy

3. Editor

That’s all!

Podcast Version

Podcast Version

Podcast Version

Podcast Version

Nothingness is what silicon dreams

Is there life enough in these chords?

Building the engines of our own defeat

Footnotes

It’s boring… because it’s established

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous

I love that my polyamory is boring!

But if I’m wrong…