Friday Notes (Jul 3, 2026)

After taking May and most of June off from blogging (in fact, from anything involving sitting at my computer), I tried to jump-start myself by putting out five posts at the end of June. The more eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I put out only three.

I intended a Monday post about movies I’ve seen lately followed by a TV Tuesday post about TV shows. But both days passed without posts because reasons — mostly ennui, to be honest.

But I am motivated to put out this early-in-the-month Friday Notes post because it’s the last post of my 14th year blogging here; tomorrow is the 15-year anniversary!

Part of what stalled me Monday was an utterly enervating weather change. The Twin cities are at 45° latitude — exactly halfway between the north pole and the equator. We’re also far from any large temperature-moderating body of water. As such, our weather is subject to the whims of the jet-stream. It can pull cool, dry Canadian air down from the north or warm, moist Gulf air up from the south.

We’ve had such a mostly pleasant spring because we’ve been seeing a lot of that sweet northern air. On Monday, though, that tide turned in a big way:

As they correctly say, “It’s not the temperature, it’s the (damn) dew point.” Whether the “damn” is included is directly correlated with the dew point at the moment. There are two things to watch out for:

Firstly, the closer the dew point is to the temperature, the wetter the air feels. If the temp is low, it feels cool and clammy. The higher the temp, the more swamp-like and oppressive the air feels.

Secondly, even with ten or more degrees of separation between temperature and dew point, dew points above 70 — let alone above 75 — are especially oppressive. The air feels hard to breathe, almost like trying to inhale water (which is effectively what’s happening; you’re mildly drowning in water vapor). More to the point, it increases how hot it feels due to lack of perspiration evaporation.

Being both stubborn and in love with open windows, and because the change from Sunday’s nice weather to Mondays’ wretched swamp was so rapid, I was caught “out in the rain” so to speak. I thought about turning on the A/C, but I stubbornly refuse to run it until July. (And hope to be done with it by September.)

Bottom line, all I could do Monday was lie on the couch in front of a fan and read. I had no desire to post. And having missed Monday, it was easy to skip Tuesday.

I know part of what I’m experiencing here is a desire for a change. In particular, a change away from the online world, but maybe even a change more towards real-world pursuits. Per the old expression, “I need to get out more.”

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Speaking of the weather, as already covered, June’s was pretty nice overall:

Average high/low of 80/60 provides nice warm days with cool nights for sleeping. The middle of the month even featured a bit of sweater weather. And note that 90+ peak on the 29th. Definitely the most miserable day in a while.

There was another 90+ day, the 10th, but it wasn’t anything like the 29th:

(Note the vertical scale difference.) The dew point was reasonably low, so the perceived temperature remained pretty close to the actual temp. Got a little sticky mid-day, but the evening was pleasant.

Overall, June was a bit warmer than average in the first third of the month and a bit cooler than average for the rest, only getting nasty at the very end:

The variation is more apparent with this chart showing the difference in the daily temps from the 30-year average:

We even had some “heating degree days” (HDD) in June — days when many people might turn on the furnace (or just feel a little chilly):

The chart shows the number of degrees above or below 65°. Mostly, we had cooling days (especially on the 29th), but we actually had chilly enough weather mid-month to at least put on a sweater.

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I’m getting weary of what I’m fairly convinced are mass raids by someone training an LLM. The negativity comes largely from this:

The bar chart of blog page views from the last 30 days. The damn spike reduces the days with typical traffic to insignificance. It really annoys me and emphasizes that this amounts to a kind of theft (depending on the intended end-use of the LLM).

That spike happened on June 30, one day after the miserable weather day, so I was not in a receptive mood. This has been happening a fair bit this year. In this case, there were 3744 page views but only 351 visitors. As recently as May 30 there was a spike with 2550 page views and 282 visitors. And then May 17 with 2126 views and 172 visitors.

Clearly a single visitor is responsible for viewing a lot of pages in a short time. There’s no way a single visitor is viewing almost 400 pages in an hour:

In contrast, on February 5 and 6, there were 4086 views with 2200 visitors, and on February 12 there were 3512 views with 3226 visitors. In these cases, I suspect those doing the training may have had a bank of IP addresses.

The most infamous example happened in November of 2024 [see A Blog Invasion? and the follow up at the end of this Notes post]. Long story short, over three days, November 19–21, I had 12,227 page views but only 242 visitors.

What’s annoying is that the spike suppresses the typical daily stats until it finally scrolls off the chart. The May 30 invasion had just scrolled off, and my stats had just returned to normal, and then, bang, I get hit again on June 30.

I think, at the least, people training LLMs should ask for our consent. They should at least have to ask if they can use our entire body of work.

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I’ve often used the Kylo Ren line from 2017’s The Last Jedi (aka Star Wars VIII):

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

A sentiment I’ve expressed often. I don’t have energy for the rearview mirror. The present takes most of it, and what’s left over is for the future. Learn from the past, of course, but let it go; let what you learn become a part of your present and future.

So, New Rule: You only get to be nostalgic if you’re [1] over 90, [2] sitting in a rocking chair; [3] smoking a pipe.

Given my love of the quote, it was with some amusement I noticed something in this recent scan I made of a “xerox” I made of a long-ago Letters to the Editor I wrote that was printed in the local paper:

I moved out of Rosemount in 1997 when I got married. I don’t recall when I stopped taking the daily newspaper, but it was certainly years before that. My guess is that this is early 1990s, possibly even late 1980s.

In part this shows I’ve thought this way for a long time, but what’s more interesting to me is that I’ve attached the sentiment to the Kylo Ren quote and forgotten how far back it goes for me.

Which seems well aligned with the sentiment.

[There is a contingent of fans who collectively intensely dislike Rian Johnson because he wrote and directed The Last Jedi (which they collectively are Deeply Offended by). While I don’t have anything positive to say about the Star Wars sequel trilogy (episodes VII, VIII, and IX), it doesn’t rise to Offending Me because I never was that into Star Wars.]

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I bought a townhouse (rather than a condo unit) because I like having some of the sense of having land without the burden of actually owning land (or the property, for that matter). And I was very lucky to find this place; it’s perfect for me. [See Scenes from a Walk and Walking the Dog for pictures.]

The local bald eagle, if flying overhead, might look down to see this:

Minus the colored rectangles highlighting the individual homes in my unit (upper left). Not shown are several similar units across the street from me (above the upper road).

Each unit has six homes. Imagine a six-pack of soda (or beer). Take the middle two cans and lay them on their side between the four end cans (two on each end) such that the top and bottoms align with the edges of the six pack:

That’s the basic structure of our units. The corner units are multi-story with small footprints, and the two middle units are single-story with roughly twice the footprint. I like the layout because I can get a breeze flowing through my place by opening windows on both ends.

In the eagle-eye view above, I’m the blue-shaded home. My driveway is next to the driveway for the green-shaded home. The couple who live there own large trucks that don’t quite fit in their part of the driveway. Well, they could if they tried, but they don’t, so his big Ford ends up taking about nine inches of what is technically my driveway.

Which, other than the rare occasions I have a group over and they are edged out from being able to park two cars in my driveway, isn’t a problem. As far as my day-to-day use, he’s not blocking me in any way. Just ever so slightly offending my sense of personal space and boundaries. Neighbors and fences. Grin and bear it.

But now I have slight offenses on all four sides.

The people across the street have a large passenger van with a very loud electronic reverse gear beep. Now that I have these hearing aids, it’s really loud and startles me every time. And they seem to back up out of their driveway slowly, so it goes on for a while. That first beep is always the worst. I keep thinking some alarm in the house went off. That’s two.

The woman in the orange-shaded home next to me has a pair of dogs that she doesn’t walk so much as take them just outside to do their business. Which, fine, whatever, but the one dog barks are nothing the entire time. Every few hours outside my office window. At least, for a small dog, the bark has a good bit of bass, so it’s tolerable. But seriously, exercise some control on and responsibility for your dog. That’s three.

Lastly, the folks in the unit across the lawn (directly below me in the picture) have decided to have their balcony porch light be on all night long. It shines directly into my bedroom window. Not into my eyes, but there on the wall and shining outside. I want to look out into darkness, not some bright LED bulb.

And that’s four. North, east, west, and south. All minor annoyances of little consequence (no real consequence), but damn. And honestly, it’s that damn light that bugs me most of all. What are they thinking? It seems so very thoughtless to me.

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This pie chart:

Is part of why I think we’re not likely to find intelligent life in the galaxy. A simple answer to the Fermi Paradox is simply that, contrary to the common science fiction notion that the galaxy teams with alien life, intelligent life is incredibly rare.

I have for a long time found compelling the idea that, assuming at least a half-dozen circumstances with at least 1-in-10,000 odds are necessary, intelligent life has to be extraordinarily rare. Given the premise, the math is inescapable:

The thing about 1-in-10²⁴ odds is that there are only 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. The visible universe (all the galaxies we can see) amount to 10²² stars, so it’s conceivable that we’re the only intelligent life in our universe. At the least, we’re likely it in this galaxy.

Part of the rarity is the scarcity of Earth-like planets, though our techniques for detecting exoplanets does struggle to detect them, so the sample is definitely biased.

Still, it’s one more bullet point in the argument.

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This Substack Note:

Apparently, the notion expressed in the headline above is a current that is being noticed lately. Gurwinder’s response is right on the money.

What’s tragic, and I suspect has much to do with where we find ourselves today, is that we live in a world of growing ignorance of history, literature, and the critical thinking of the past. All of which form a normative body of information about being human. The lack of that background sends us increasingly towards being mere animals.

Even if intelligent life is more common than my math suggests, perhaps the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that it’s rarely intelligent enough to get out of its own way.

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Stay not annoying, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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