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This morning's warm rain bringing mist Japan adapted a calendar from China in the late 17th century that segments the year into 72 microseasons.

Last summer, on one of my Bella rides, I howled.

I have been building a lot with AI, specifically Claude Code, for the past few months.

i Note This is one of two versions of this essay — read the academic version.

i Note This is one of two versions of this essay — read the general-audience version.

The number of great films in the cultural canon is almost innumerable to count.

The 2006 German film The Lives of Others tells the story of a couple and the Stasi officer tasked with surveilling them in 1984, six years before the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The below prompt is something I add to each conversation I have with LLMs/AIs that isn’t a coding chat.

Sunrise on the trail One of the things I’m enjoying is watching the slow changes that occur when walking the same trail morning after morning.

In order to change, consistency is required in the form of rituals or systems.

Eric Markowitz writes in his article “What brain surgery taught me about the fragile gift of consciousness” over at Big Think: We tell our daughters that kindness is the most important thing in the world.

A lot has been written about the huge leap forward the different AI models went through in late 2025.

Snow beginning to melt and stream running clear.

This is a fascinating concept: Crime as a Service (CAAS).

It was 20°C today.

What is it about the Mona Lisa?

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. ~ Edsger Dijkstra See also AI Discipline and Predictability is banality.

Denny Crane: You know, the best part of my marriages has always been the first day.

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.

Do we over-complicate our relationships by adding or considering our fears and insecurities into an already complex dynamic?

The meteor belt remains in its circular orbit but occasionally a comet lets loose from some unseen force.

Often, to gain that which we desire, we must behave in an opposite or in a counter-intuitive manner to obtain the object of our desire.

As Kathryn Schulz remarks in her conversation with Ezra Klein (“Our Lives Are an Endless Series of ‘And’”), “Grief is an amazing lens.

The notion of self is a strange one, isn’t it?

Life is pain.

You should be a different person after active learning.

If we do not, how can we live a full life?

Both in my HES religion coursework (on the “Three Peas (Ps)”) and in other writing on Kundera, there is the idea of proleptic rationality, which is akin to faith.

Our raw emotions and thoughts aren’t our personality, though they are often conflated as being so.

From one writer on relational stability: Goal of relationship is to create a space for both people to have full range of emotions and be cared for, not to manage each other into having nice feelings all the time In unstable relationships, you are “convinc…

The past two courses at HES have allowed, even encouraged, use of AI, or rather LLMs.

One writer on learning puts it well: we need to “experiment, reflect, adjust” in order to learn how we learn.

Thinking hard and deep about concepts and ideas requires focus and concentration.

A recent study tested college English majors and their inability to distinguish between figurative and literal language, and the inability to process prose even with access to their mobile phone (emphasis mine).

A very real consequence to meditating so regularly, albeit for short durations at a time, is that life becomes bigger and more whole because it has become easier to experience the full range of emotions, without losing myself in them or giving into the si…

Reading through a recent guide on zettelkasten practice (section 2.3.3), one notes that we can highlight information in Zotero and have the highlighted bits automatically added to a Reference Note.

Hackers, the 1995 film, treats high school students like adults, as opposed to the infantilization of teenagers now.

The Enshittocene, coined by Cory Doctorow, is the “perfect breeding ground for the worst practices in our society.”

One writer described AI as a “mediocrity machine” — the culmination of reducing attention spans to short tweets, IG stories, and fast TikTok videos.

Because something hasn’t happened before, does not mean that it won’t happen in the future.

I asked someone out a few Fridays ago.

01.

Dan Harris and Sam Harris, in conversation on the podcast Making Sense, discuss how we can feel compassion for Trump if you disagree with his policies and actions.

There’s a weather phenomenon called blood rain, which happens when a cloud of dust merges with a storm, where the dust mixes “with the rain, causing it to appear red or rusty orange as it falls.”1 Footnotes ‘Blood rain’ to make muddy mess in Spain, Portug…

When “AI” popped into the common parlance a few years ago, I was initially skeptical and cautious, which stemmed from my experiences as a software programmer.

✦ Tidbit Stream of consciousness writing here, folks… Ten minutes to write is a surprisingly difficult proposition to fulfill.

A friend emailed me yesterday, explaining her conflicting feelings about visiting the country of her birth.

I can’t take a compliment to save my life.

Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve - Colorado When I turned forty-five last year, in late August, I had just arrived home from a week at The Strenuous Life Retreat.

I’m not much of a bath woman.