Fall — my favorite season ‘cept for the fading of the light — has fallen here in Minnesota, and our thoughts are turning towards the question of what kind of winter it will be: easy or miserable.
My winter is coming triple mile markers loom, the first dead ahead: Will it snow by Halloween? Will it snow by Thanksgiving? Will it snow by Christmas? Answers to all three vary depending on the whims of Mother Nature and her unexpected offspring, Climate Change.
In the meantime, here we are again for another edition of Friday Notes.
Speaking of the varying weather, we’ve had a coolish summer with some unseasonably cool low points. Which — assuming temperatures are generally lower for whatever reason — might mean a winter that’s cooler than average. But if we assume summer had milder temperatures than usual, then so might winter.
The weather is almost as crazy as politics these days, so who knows what we’re in for. Snow tornadoes and land sharks wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
Take a gander at the high and low temperatures for June:
July:
August:
And now September:
In all cases, this year’s temperatures are the bold lines; previous years going back to 2013 are the faint lines. Red for the high, blue for the lows. (One is tempted to include “obviously” in that last sentence, but in fact nothing is obvious about assigning color to things. Physicists know that blue light has more energy than red light, so blue could stand for hot and red for cold.)
June, July, and August all had some notable cool periods. September had a longish cool period early in the month but was warmer than average mid-month. I’m looking forward to seeing October’s chart. We had some warm weather at the start, but it’s cooled off considerably lately (I finally turned on the furnace).
Focusing on last September:
Our average high was only just over +76 degrees (Fahrenheit, obviously), and the average low down around +59. (What I should do is compare averages and maybe standard deviations to previous years. More for the TODO list.)
§
Last time, I posed the mathematical question:
And asked for x and n. I’m sure you’ve waited breathlessly for the answer (it’s amazing you haven’t passed out).
And here it is:
Note that we get an equality that, given some n, gives us x. Which suggests there can be multiple values of n that give different values of x.
Let’s check out a few. Substituting for x in the equation above, we have:
Now, suppose n=3:
Or suppose n=4:
![\left({4}^{\frac{1}{3}}\right)^{4}\!\!=\!{4}\!\left(\!{4}^{\frac{1}{3}}\!\right)\;\;\Rightarrow\;\;{4}^\frac{4}{3}\!=\!{4}\sqrt[{3}]{4}\;\;=\;\;{6.349604}\ldots](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cleft%28%7B4%7D%5E%7B%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B3%7D%7D%5Cright%29%5E%7B4%7D%5C%21%5C%21%3D%5C%21%7B4%7D%5C%21%5Cleft%28%5C%21%7B4%7D%5E%7B%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B3%7D%7D%5C%21%5Cright%29%5C%3B%5C%3B%5CRightarrow%5C%3B%5C%3B%7B4%7D%5E%5Cfrac%7B4%7D%7B3%7D%5C%21%3D%5C%21%7B4%7D%5Csqrt%5B%7B3%7D%5D%7B4%7D%5C%3B%5C%3B%3D%5C%3B%5C%3B%7B6.349604%7D%5Cldots+&bg=f9fbf9&fg=000080&s=1&c=20201002)
How about n=5:
![\left({5}^{\frac{1}{4}}\right)^{5}\!\!=\!{5}\!\left(\!{5}^{\frac{1}{4}}\!\right)\;\;\Rightarrow\;\;{5}^\frac{5}{4}\!=\!{5}\sqrt[{4}]{5}\;\;=\;\;{7.476744}\ldots](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cleft%28%7B5%7D%5E%7B%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B4%7D%7D%5Cright%29%5E%7B5%7D%5C%21%5C%21%3D%5C%21%7B5%7D%5C%21%5Cleft%28%5C%21%7B5%7D%5E%7B%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B4%7D%7D%5C%21%5Cright%29%5C%3B%5C%3B%5CRightarrow%5C%3B%5C%3B%7B5%7D%5E%5Cfrac%7B5%7D%7B4%7D%5C%21%3D%5C%21%7B5%7D%5Csqrt%5B%7B4%7D%5D%7B5%7D%5C%3B%5C%3B%3D%5C%3B%5C%3B%7B7.476744%7D%5Cldots+&bg=f9fbf9&fg=000080&s=1&c=20201002)
And so on.
Here’s how to derive the equality. First, we divide both sides by x:
We rewrite the left-hand side to give us:
The x above and the x below cancel to give us just:
Now raise both sides to the power of one-over-n-minus-one:
The exponents on the left-hand side cancel, leaving us with:
Ta da!
Note that another way we can write the original equality (using the substitution for x) is:
![\displaystyle\sqrt[n-1]{n^n}={n}\!\sqrt[n-1]{n}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cdisplaystyle%5Csqrt%5Bn-1%5D%7Bn%5En%7D%3D%7Bn%7D%5C%21%5Csqrt%5Bn-1%5D%7Bn%7D+&bg=f9fbf9&fg=000080&s=2&c=20201002)
Which is a weird equation. The nth-minus-oneth root of n to the power of n is equal to n times the nth-minus-oneth root of n.
Twists my brain a bit. Note that there’s yet another solution because I didn’t say the answers had to be integers (let alone real). Answer to that next time (but please go on breathing until then).
§
Regular readers may remember my Smoke Alarm Saga — a tale of a bad service company. That story stretches from 2019 to an ending of sorts this year.
When last mentioned here [see Friday Notes (Aug 29, 2025)], the bedroom smoke alarm — the first one to fail — had become a zombie that, despite my “disabling and discharging” it, continued to complain about its stomach. I had it buried under a bunch of bath towels in the linen closet (which, as far as I know, contains no actual linen).
Recently, I checked on it and found it had at long last died the True Death. Poking its belly button produces nothing. The ordeal is over. They’re lined up on a shelf in my entryway waiting for the next time I visit the county recycle center.
Weirdly, I had a dream just last night (as I write this) that the zombie came back to life again. Something I had done produced unusual smoke and that somehow reactivated that smoke alarm and it started going off. The funny thing was the sense of here-we-go-again resignation in the dream. I wasn’t disturbed; just a little put out.
§
My mom used to make a delicious apple spice cake with a thick frosting that, for me, was even better than the cake. It was a basic butter and sugar frosting, but with brown sugar, and I’ve always loved the taste of brown sugar and molasses.
Sister didn’t like the frosting, so I always got hers. Double the pleasure! As an adult, I’d sometimes whip up a batch just as candy. It’s hugely similar to maple sugar candy (which I love). Over the years I got pretty good with the recipe:
- Melt brown sugar and butter in a saucepan.
- Add milk as the melt progresses.
- Remove from heat and add vanilla and confectioner’s sugar.
- Stir well.
- Pour onto cookie sheet (or whatever) and let cool.
Done right it hardens into a taste treat that melts in your mouth. It’s important to melt the sugar. If you don’t, the result is a gritty candy, as though it had sand in it. And don’t even think about leaving out the milk (which I have to buy special because I never drink the stuff). The lecithin in the milk is crucial for emulsifying the butter. As I found out the hard way, leave out the lecithin and the butter separates, leaving you a greasy mess.
[I know all the real cooks out there are laughing their asses off at me right now. Whatever else I am, I am most decidedly not a cook. 👨🏼🍳🤡😏]
It finally sank in on me that the melting sugar reminded me of how mom and I made fudge together. Melting the sugar was important for a smooth (non-gritty) fudge. I realized my concoction could be called a brown sugar fudge. For years I’d been wondering what to call it other than “My Mom’s Brown Sugar Frosting”.
I’m old enough that I still sometimes forget how easy it is to look things up now. “Just the other day,” it occurred to me to try to look up my Brown Sugar Fudge concoction. It’s no surprise that, once again, I’ve come nowhere close to an original invention.
Turns out that’s exactly what the stuff is often called, and it even has an official name: Penuche. Which I immediately used as the name for the hard drive (SSD, actually) in my new laptop.
So, rather than being some weirdo who eats frosting, I’m just enjoying a common form of candy — brown sugar fudge. I do have a sweet tooth. I’ve had more candy corns this fall than I’ll admit to.
§
Speaking of finally looking up something that’s vaguely nagged you for an answer for too long, those bumpy metal plates in sidewalks:
I assumed it was an aid for the visually impaired, a warning about the impending street. And, yep, that’s exactly what they’re for. Called tactile paving.
What I find fascinating about this (and many other things) is that there is a whole industry devoted to it. It’s a business that some people know all about — it’s their lifelong career. In our complicated world, one finds deep rabbit holes just about any place one looks.
It’s hard to ever be bored in a world like that.
§
Which is an interesting topic all on its own. It isn’t just all the interesting rabbit holes to explore that makes it hard to be bored. It’s all the jingle-jangle of distractions that abound in modern life.
The whole “touch grass” thing comes from people being overwhelmed by all the noise of modern life and finding it difficult or impossible to be bored even when they want to be.
And I think there is value in boredom, in letting your mind roam. I read an article recently that linked creativity with boredom. [Not the article in mind, but I did post about a related one. See Stillness and Solitude.]
Perhaps a better word is idleness. Boredom has a negative connotation. We don’t want to be bored or do boring things. But I think it may be crucial to carve out some space of idleness. [See Still of the Heart from back in 2012.]
§
Somewhat along those lines, the chapter quote from some book I was reading caught my eye:
I haven’t thought of Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) in a long time, but it seems even more on point today than it did 50 years ago. The shockwave has only gotten more intense. (I posted about it back in 2016 when Toffler died.)
§
Here’s a Fun Fact: The Moon is about 240,000 miles away from Earth (roughly 380,000 km, but the distance varies). It took our Moon astronauts (Moonauts?) about three days to make the trip. The point being that the Moon is pretty far away. It takes light from the Moon 1.3 seconds to reach your eye.
None of which is the Fun Fact.
What is, is that we could line up all the planets from Mercury to Uranus (including a copy of Earth) between the Earth and the Moon with room to spare. We can even throw in poor demoted cold Pluto (just not Neptune).
Here are the planetary radii:
- Mercury: 2,439 km
- Venus: 6,051 km
- Earth: 6,371 km
- Mars: 3,389 km
- Jupiter: 69,911 km
- Saturn: 58,232 km
- Uranus: 25,362 km
- Neptune: 24,622 km
- Pluto: 2,376 km
Double those to get diameters, add up #1-#7 plus #9 to get 354,648 km. The Moon’s closest approach to Earth (perigee) is 362,600 km. Neptune would push us beyond that, but not much.
With Neptune included, the total distance is 404,180 km, which just fits when the Moon is at apogee (405,400 km). So, at apogee, we can fit in all the planets (including a copy of Earth).
Space is big. Really big.
§
It appears that the mini-viral moment for my Babylon (Anime) post is finally over. I thought that early on, but there was a second bigger and longer wave. This time, I think the activity had died down for good:
In the space of about a year, it has become the third most-viewed post. (Which probably says more about the low traffic on my quiet little blog than anything else. Total views on the post are just 5,807.)
It’s just funny how it languished for three years almost completely ignored. Then, for reasons I’ll probably never learn, it went mini-viral for ten months. And that second wave is interesting, too. I’ll probably never learn what caused that, either.
What I find especially interesting is the notion that it might be due to the actions of one person who posted a link that set the whole thing off. And was the second wave caused by the same source or was it triggered by someone passing on the link?
§
In last June’s Friday Notes, I posted a chart like this:
It was prompted by that Friday being the 13th, and it got me curious how often I’d posted a Friday Notes on the 13th. Only once before was the answer reflected on that chart (May 13, 2022).
Recently, going over some Python files, I redid the code that generated this chart. And got a different chart (which also includes a few more recent dates). For one thing, this chart includes that June post, but other numbers changed as well.
The difference is that for the first version I went through the Friday Notes posts and transcribed the dates by hand. Obviously made a few errors. The second version queries the database I make from the bi-annual extractions (on the blog anniversary date in July and at the beginning of the year), I added a few dates by hand because that database is current only up to July 4th.
But my take-away remains even with more accurate data. There is a definite bias towards the latter half of the month. Which, as I said in June, makes sense. It’s later in the month when I realize I haven’t done a Friday Notes post for the month. It’s rare that I work far enough in advance on those to have one ready early in the month.
§
Why is this equation:
So hard for me to memorize? It just won’t stick in my mind!
It’s the general formula for solving a quadratic equation, and it’s typically introduced in high school algebra. I’ve never been able to remember it. I get the a, b, c all mixed up. In particular, I keep remembering the denominator as 2ac.
Fortunately, I don’t often need to solve quadratic equations…
§ §
Sometimes along the way there are cherished flowers to press in our memory books. I got one last month that I’m still smiling about and which will continue to warm me throughout, as they say, the days of my life.
Stay quadratic, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
∇
Logos con carne 
October 24th, 2025 at 11:49 am
“It’s hard to ever be bored in a world like that.” You nailed it – all this technology has led to the increase in anxiety and depression for so many. A boom to the “health care” industry.
Anyway- your Friday Notes? I look forward to. [when I have the time, 🙂 ] cheer
October 24th, 2025 at 1:18 pm
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoy them. They’re fun to write, too!
October 25th, 2025 at 3:27 pm
I am inspired to make an apple spice cake with penuche frosting!
October 25th, 2025 at 4:39 pm
Enjoy!
October 25th, 2025 at 6:05 pm
On that anime post, that number doesn’t seem bad to me. I sometimes get an alert from WordPress that I’m having a volume surge. Rooting around, it’s usually that someone shared a post on Reddit or somewhere similar. On one of them, there was an epic thread discussing it, but only on the other site. I thought about jumping in, but my Reddit account had been moribund for a long time.
Seeing the quadratic equation triggers a lot of painful memories. I never could remember it either, and never seemed to get a really solid grip on using it.
October 26th, 2025 at 8:58 am
I get those notifications sometimes, too. Usually, it seems to be someone who stumbled over the blog and stuck around checking it out. Usual low visitor count, but lots of pages viewed with only one hit each. If they read one of my About pages, that seems like someone exploring. I think many use the Random Post button because there’s no logic to what pages they view. No one ever comments, so I never know what the attraction is.
Lately, about half my traffic is from China — seemingly as many visitors as page hits, but I think that might be related to the internet in China or VPN or some such. Same jumping around the blog, though, so it feels like one person or one small group of friends or something. These days it could just as easily be someone training an LLM. A while back I was hit with a huge increase in traffic that went on for, IIRC, two days and then completely dried up. Pretty sure that was an LLM. Weird part was multiple views on individual pages. Hundreds in some case. Someone playing around with a web-scraper, maybe.
Heh, yeah, that quadratic equation. It’s meant to give you x from the canonical form of an order-two polynomial, ax²+bx¹cx⁰=0, where a, b, and c can be zero (and are allowed to be complex). It’s on my mind lately because I’ve been watching a math YouTuber who goes over various viewer-submitted math problems, and he resorts to that quadratic equation fairly often.
I’m liking Asher. I recently read Shadow of the Scorpion, Cormac’s origin story, and I’m about halfway through Line of Polity, the second Cormac novel. (The first one, Gridlinked, is on hold at the library with an estimated 14-week wait, so I thought I’d jump into #2.)
His structure gives me a mild case of whiplash sometimes, though. This may be an issue with ebooks — perhaps the printed versions have a blank line the ebook ignores — but he switches scenes from one paragraph to the next with no visual indication of scene change. He does seem to end each scene with a kind of flourish line or moment — very cinematic — and I get the sense he drops a clue into that first paragraph to help you realize the switch. But sometimes I’m halfway through the paragraph before I realize I’m in a new scene. If it’s deliberate, it’s … mildly annoying. But maybe it’s just the ebook dropping a blank line?
October 26th, 2025 at 10:17 am
I’ve been seeing the same surges, with the same suspicions. (Strengthened now that someone else is seeing it.) I’m surprised WordPress is allowing it. They have a history of chopping off content harvesting unless they’re in on the action.
I enjoyed Line of the Polity a lot more than Gridlinked. (Although several years passed between those reads, so who knows what I’d think of Gridlinked today.) I haven’t read Shadow of the Scorpion yet. I keep forgetting it’s there.
I had the same issues with scene breaks. I think it is ebook formatting. For his older books, it looks like they just took the print formatting and went with it. Occasionally I would see a scene break with three asterisks, and wondered why they weren’t doing that consistently. Later I learned that print books use three asterisks when the scene changes on a page break, but just a blank line otherwise. It’s weird though, because in some books the blank line seems to work. Maybe there’s a tag or something the newer books are using to clue the reader in.
One thing I don’t like about Asher’s scene changes, is he has a tendency to begin the scene with long mood setting descriptions where it’s not clear which character or thread we’re entering. Sometimes for pages. In the later books, it got to the point that I’d flip pages until I saw character names and could put what he was describing into context. A few times I just started reading from that point on. In his later books, he started putting the name of the viewpoint character at the break, which alleviated both problems.
October 26th, 2025 at 11:37 am
I was a little surprised WP allowed it, too. Generally speaking, spam has all but disappeared. I rarely have anything in the spam folder. It was last November, extended over three days, and amounted to over 12,000 views. Completely ruined my stats — I had to include code to filter it out.
I didn’t realize this until I looked at the Wiki page: Gridlinked is his first novel. I can tell Line of Polity has references to events in that book. The Cormac series does seem serial and probably best read in order.
Ah, I’ve seen those asterisks, and yeah, they do seem always at the bottom of a page. Nice to know it’s not just me getting whiplash. It is very cinematic. Smash cut to new scene. In my head I can see the camera holding on the last line or expression.
I tend to skim long descriptions if they seem mostly texture. The walking journey Fethan and Eldene make to get to the Underground on Masada is a good example. Lots of flora and fauna description that’s colorful and imaginative but plays no other role in the story. I often skim that looking for dialog.
I’m pretty much all in on ebooks but there is a huge variance in quality. I have one of Roger Penrose’s books that’s unreadable because (1) Penrose uses a lot of equations in text and standing alone and (2) the ebook was obviously made by OCR scanning and then not quality-checked. The text includes the old line numbers and page headings in the middle of text. Question marks replace many of his symbols or Greek letters. Just atrocious.
October 26th, 2025 at 2:17 pm
Looking at my stats, I’ve had a few surges in the last couple of months and appear to be coming down from one that peaked on Thursday. I rarely look at my stats, but if I did, I’d be pretty annoyed.
I think Asher had a couple of novels in the 1990s, but Gridlink was his breakout. It feels like his storytelling got better by Line of the Polity, but that might just be my biases.
I need to get more comfortable with skimming. I usually resist it in fiction because it throws me out of the story, but the alternative is just glazing over, reading with inner speech but not really paying attention. Skimming would be quicker.
I’m all in on ebooks too, have been since c. 2010, but yeah, sometimes the formatting sucks, particularly with older books. I’ve learned to request the sample and/or check the reviews for anything published before c. 2010 for formatting complaints, particularly in any book that might have diagrams, equations, or code. Textbooks in particular require caution. That’s where I’ve often seen the scanned pages you ran into. And for really old classic stuff, you often get much better fidelity from Gutenberg ebooks.
October 26th, 2025 at 5:38 pm
Gutenberg is pretty good. I’ve heard good things about Open Library but haven’t explored it. My library app so far is supplying my reading needs, and I’ve quite a list of ‘want to read’ books there. For a number of reasons, I’ve semi-vowed to not purchase any more books, videos, or music from Amazon or Apple. I’ve already invested enough in both of them, but especially Apple books and music, to be well stuck in their ecosystems. 😏
When I hit those description rhapsodies, I start skimming for what words stick out. Not even getting the gist of the paragraph so much as what it’s about. If it’s about describing something, skim on. If I’m in the mood, I’ll read some of it more carefully, but it really is just wallpaper. My comfort-level thing was an aversion to giving up on a book or movie. Still have it, but I’ve learned that if I’m really not enjoying something, I can be okay with just stopping. (And, frankly, the older I get, the more I value my time. Clock is visibly ticking down!)
I started this blog in 2011, and for 13 years it averaged just 39 views per day. Some years higher, some years lower. The last two years, the average has been consistently higher, about 107 views per day. No engagement, so I don’t know why. Just another blog mystery. About half the traffic is from China, whatever that means. The irony is that the last year or so I’d grown a bit weary of blogging and WordPress. Substack kind of revived my interest, and I considered moving my focus there, but recently I’ve decided I don’t care for Substack that much and have kept the focus here. I’m still active on Substack, but that may change.
October 26th, 2025 at 6:57 pm
I’m too impatient and too niche in my tastes to not buy from Amazon, but I do wish they had stronger competition. There are problems on the Kindle platform that should have been fixed years ago. And they’ve been taking steps to make their system more closed. The problem is the competitors just offer more of the same with a smaller catalog. The whole setup, from publishers to sellers, feels like it needs a radical challenge.
“Description rhapsodies” is a good name for it, since it’s often just self indulgence on the author’s part. The number of books and shows I DNF has skyrocketed as I’ve gotten older, for the same reason you note. Time is too precious.
My views on the blog for a long time were around 150-200 a day, with occasional spikes. Like you, my posting frequency didn’t seem to make too much of a difference. I haven’t paid much attention in the last several years, so no idea what it was before these surges.
Yeah, WordPress is another one that needed competition. They’ve finally been getting it from Substack and the other newsletter sites, but there are still things on WordPress that should have been fixed ages ago, like the stupid reply limit. And people shouldn’t have to ask the blog owner to edit a mistake for them. They have Fediverse integration, which is nice, but only because of a cool nerdy guy writing the plug-in.
I’m on Substack, but only as an occasional commenter. I reserved a site there years ago, but that platform creeps me out. Despite that, I was just about ready to start cross-posting there last year, when I stopped getting comment email notices, and there was no way to get support. The only thing available was a hard to find chatbot, which just regurgitated the documentation I’d already been over ad nauseum.
Eventually after several sessions, it told me that it had submitted a ticket for a human to look at it, but there was no ticket number or any way to check up on it. Several months later the notices just started working again, I suspect because of some code deployment just overwriting whatever was causing the problem. If someone ever did look at my particular case, they never told me about it.
So I’m keeping Substack at arms-length, at least for now.
October 26th, 2025 at 9:30 pm
Yeah, the variety the “big box” operations offer is hard to say no to. There are things I could only get from Amazon. We have a franchise around here called Total Wine that’s a big box liquor store. They have an unparalleled variety of craft beers, so I haven’t been in a local liquor store in a few years now. And I’m still using Amazon Music for streaming music.
There are still simple-to-fix bugs that I years ago reported to WordPress (and which they acknowledged as bugs). They still produce illegal CSV files, and you can still game your stats through the app. I gave up on them ever changing. I don’t know what the problem is. They clearly have a development staff. Why they can add features but not fix bugs is beyond me.
At least WP has a help desk. As you point out, help from Substack is essentially non-existent. I had the same experience with that damn chatbot. Claimed it would forward the issue to the developers. That was many moons ago. Crickets.
The longer I use Substack, the more bugs or mis-design features I find. Little things keep changing back and forth. Almost like it depends on what mood Substack is in. It seems widely believed that, if you don’t post at least weekly (ideally daily, I guess), the Algorithm tends to ignore you (which it seems to be doing to me big time). I won’t have anything to do with their aggressive subscription model, either, which I’m sure puts me bad with the Algorithm. Now there are badges by usernames indicating the user pay subscribes to other blogs. So, those without those badges obviously don’t subscribe to anyone.
All in all, I find myself liking Substack less and less. I find myself asking what I’m getting out of it and having a hard time coming up with an answer. I think ultimately, it’s just too distracting.
October 27th, 2025 at 1:18 pm
WP has gotten a little better in recent years on some things, but it only seems to happen when it becomes a competitive disadvantage. And overall it’s not enough. For example, I couldn’t download my subscribers until all the newsletter services made it a standard feature.
Unfortunately, CSV bugs may be a bit too niche for them to feel much pressure. And I guess comment reply limits are too. Although commenters being able to edit their own stuff seems mainstream. I’m surprised they haven’t addressed that one yet. Maybe there are architectural obstacles.
“Aggressive subscription model” is a good way to put it for Substack’s processes. I think of it like a high pressure car salesman, constantly trying to make the sale. And some of it is downright underhanded. I kept having people in my follows that I didn’t remember following, until I finally figured out that it was because when they followed me, and I followed the link in the message to look at their profile, I was automatically following them. As it turned out, a lot of those people I think had followed me without meaning to. Just seedy.
October 27th, 2025 at 2:42 pm
The only thing in their defense might be that there are no ads anywhere on Substack, so they have to make their money somehow, and it’s by taking a percentage of subscription fees. It’s inconceivable to me to expect anyone to pay for what I write on the internet, and I have some contrary notions about copyright on top of that. I’m not trying to be normative or prescriptive or lead by example. It’s just something I want no part of. Mo’ money, mo’ headaches.
Heh, yeah, I’ve given up on the CSV bug. Re-wrote my CSV parser to compensate. What interests me as a coder is that the bug exists at all. Wild ass guess on my part, but that WAG is that someone tried to write their own CSV parser rather than use one of the myriad well-debugged library modules out there (Python has one in its standard library). And when they wrote it, they didn’t read the standard very carefully. (The bug involves the misuse of double-quotes.)
The inability to edit one’s own comments is a biggie, though. I like that Substack allows it. It is ever true that the number of proofreads required to eliminate all bugs is N+1, where N is the actual number of proofreads performed. This rule holds true regardless of the value of N.
October 27th, 2025 at 5:03 pm
I have no issue with a revenue model either, although like you, I don’t want the headaches, at least not for my blog blathering. And as a consumer, I’m not too keen on the subscription model myself. I rarely get my money’s worth. And I’m too lazy and disorganized to remember to drop them later. But if others like them and writers can make money with it, good for them. My issues are with misleading and high pressure tactics.
With proofreading, I find that the 80-20 rule works decently. Each pass reduces the number of typos by a substantial margin, at least for the first three or four passes. After that, what gets me in trouble is the language twiddling I can’t resist while making those passes. Many of the typos people find come from those last minute revisions, the ones I make just before hitting Publish.
October 27th, 2025 at 6:51 pm
Yes, that’s another aspect of it for me, too. I can see buying a given work but not subscribing to everything an author puts out. I wouldn’t even subscribe to me!
November 21st, 2025 at 9:15 am
[…] went over the real answers last time but suggested there was yet another answer (because I hadn’t restricted the answers to any […]