It’s a hard time for knowing things. Making a show about epistemic confusion is the subtle uncanny meta game that is playing out living in a networked world.
It’s a completely different context than the daily world most of humanity lives in. Most of us live in some version of the past and act confused about why the world we remember so clearly isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to feel the moment.
So you try to live in the real world. You feel the weather and the geomagnetic storm rocks your body and uncanny sight of the dancing auroras would make anyone believe that we are small parts of creation. I watched the aurora in awe.
The universe was dancing with geomagnetic stormsReds and greens that feel not entirely of this world.
What grasp do we have of a material real as individuals that is also existing as part of a world. Do some of us make up more of a network? It is unclear how much of a public commons we can have on the open web. It’s a reorganization of the civics of our life. The things you wonder about under eerie glow.
Many have imagined an internet primarily accessed by bots and agents and not humans. There are many different interests at play when you consider what would change The regulators look to sooth public opinion that has been inflamed by a multimillion dollar public square information campaign technology that doesn’t even exist yet.
There are many players. The existing corporate interests have investments and their relationship to open open source models can occasionally be tense. We should we want to enable an ecosystem of compatibility. Still walled gardens are built.
Yesterday a severe geomagnetic storm hit Earth. I had been following its trajectory for a few days I think space weather is a fascinating topic.
Last year I was in Europe during a G5 event which is considered an extreme storm. It proved to be as unsettling as it was beautiful. Also migraine inducing. Just half an hour in the sun and I felt completely awful.
Naturally I wanted to tear the effects. I went out for a late afternoon stroll just as the storm first began to hit and I found myself in a rage over “this and that” as my vision flickered with red and green.
I thought I was so mad I was seeing red but I suspect the more logical explanation was that space weather affects us here on earth.
G4 (Severe) storm levels reached on 12 November at 0120 UTC (8:20pm EST)! Geomagnetic storm conditions are anticipated to continue into the night. Stay informed at spaceweather.gov for the latest. The included aurora images are of the aurora shining over northeastern Colorado.
I thought I was getting the auras that occasionally accompany a migraine for many people but now I’m not so sure. I rarely get visual disturbances in my migraines. Still our bodies run on electrical signals too. And I went outside just as the planet was getting hammered at the full severe G4 limit.
Alas after sunset I don’t take any particularly good pictures of the auroras that painted the skies though many others posted pictures from Montana.
I was focused on health needs from hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy to a stint in our 180F Finnish cedar sauna. The glory of nature’s night is best experienced without a phone and ideally sweating out the day. No need to try to capture a picture of the moment. I was in the moment
Later, as I went outside freshly oxygenated, sweated out and showered, most of the sky had cloud cover.
The night was uncannily still. We usually have a lot of nocturnal noises as we have a whole ecosystem of creatures on our property and out into the mountain range above us, but I didn’t hear a peep. The animals must feel the space weather as deeply as we do.
Thankfully today dawned (with me having had a poor night sleep as expected) with all our homestead creatures out and about on the pond from duck to muskrat. More solar activity is expected so keep an eye on the NOAA forecast.
A pair of MilFred Muskrats with one of our ducks photobombing in the background
It’s hard to say that there is a best part of living in Montana. If you like mountains, seasons and being outdoors it is hard to beat. One thing I particularly enjoy is how often people will come to our state either as tourists or for retreats with their companies and coworkers.
Alex and I drove down to Paradise Valley today to meet up with the founders of one of our favorite products. Having a company meetup in Yellowstone’s off season is a smart choice and as Montana citizens we love it when folks come to visit and center themselves and their work here.
A villain’s lair in Paradise Valley or a cozy lodge for discerning visitors to Yellowstone?
Daniel and Tristan have made one of our all time favorite and most used set of reading applications. The first is called Readwise. It’s hard to fully describe the product except to say that it makes you a better reader through your own highlights and notes.
I came into the application with more than a decade of highlights from my Kindle and found myself deepening my experience with all of my prior reading. It’s one of the best research tools a heavy reader can purchase and I was a very happy customer.
They didn’t stop there though. To make things even better, they launched a reader product which further cemented a virtuous reading. My highlighting, annotating and review cycle is now integrated with my reading and note taking across all my different content formats and sources.
Majestic vistas help us all feel wonder and spark creativity through nature’s beauty
Taking a few hours to drive through some of the most beautiful countryside in America and catching up with talented and passionate founders is an incredible way to spend a few hours.
The passion and care that Tristan, Dan and their team have brought to making reading an even better experience brings me so much joy. As a power user of their apps, and a voracious reader of all forms of written content from books to Twitter threads, I appreciate the incredible feat of product management they have pulled off. Making reading better is no easy task.
I don’t know what it is about election day in America, but it has ceased to be a joyful, exciting day for me. I wonder about the lost version of me who ever felt positively about elections.
Now it’s a day of dread and worry. And not even having day 69 in the post’s title can make an old internet native like me chuckle. Nothing about democracy in America feels nice. I have no idea if it ever will again. And I swear I am not a cynical person, just a very tired one.
The civics education I got as a child taught me to see Election Day as a momentous moment in time where the will of the people is heard and considered and eventually enacted.
And in my heart of hearts, I can’t really let go of that, no matter how much reality shows me otherwise. I’m not sure if will is even the right word for a collection of such a diverse array of individuals that make up the American population. What could we possibly will as an entity?
And certainly I understand that America is not literally structured in ways meant to showcase the preferences of the plurality of the people. I understand this to be a good thing even. We balance a lot in a republic and never did it terribly well.
Somehow we always persevered. And so you presume that America will keep on persevering because what else is there to do?
And now, in this very plastic, protean in-between time, all feels far too malleable. Boundaries that I never thought could be crossed have been crossed repeatedly. The fourth turning is upon us and my generation is woefully behind. The changing of the guards isn’t going well and the choices only seem to get worse.
And so to sooth my own soul, day in and day out, have something to say about the times I live in. All seventeen hundred and sixty nine of them. Even as nothing really seems to get better, I try to get better. I do what I can because I can do more than most, and even that is just never, ever enough. I take on more responsibilities because who is there if not me? If not us?
And so, all day, I have been dreading the results of a mayoral election in a city I no longer live in, in a state that was never my home, safely in the comforts of a county that isn’t having an election outside of a city which is having an election which will affect me though I have no say in it. It’s a bizarre state of affairs.
I’ll be impacted by a mayoral election in a city that I deliberately chose to live outside of because we wanted to be beyond its reaches so we could live as we like. Which is a fantasy as the mayor of Bozeman obviously has a significant impact on the residents of Gallatin County.
And I’ll have to wait to see if a candidate for mayor, who has one of the worst possible plans for housing growth that I’ve ever seen, succeeds in taking the town further in a direction that sunk my own hometown two states down the mountain range.
And there is nothing I can do about it, because I chose to live outside of the city limits so that I wouldn’t be affected by those very politicians whose decisions will obviously have a knock on effect to everyone around them.
There is no winning in a networked world where our interconnection increasingly feels like a Chinese finger trap. The more you pull away the tighter its grip.
Because of course I will be affected. If Bozeman can’t build more housing because no one can afford to do so thanks to bizarre water allocation scheme the entire valley will suffer.
And all this because we wanted to live somewhere we could chose to build as we like on our own land and keep a few chickens. Another reminder that there is no other choice if America falls prey to the many maladies that collapse republics. Whatever comes next will be faced head on by all of us.
And what feels like a lifetime ago, when Alex and I were searching for the perfect property on which to have our little homestead experiment, we were on our second scouting trip in the Gallatin County area when an almost impossibly perfect property went on the market.
I was particularly adamant about finding something that had its own water, and not just on a well. Ideally, something that had a stream crossing it. As silly as it sounds, you really are looking for a river that runs through it sometimes.
What we found was a farmhouse with a giant yellow barn that had a perfect pond fed by a mountain stream coming down straight from the canyon above us. It was honestly so perfect, it was a little bit terrifying to make the decision to offer on the house the same day. But somehow we had the guts to make the move and make an offer, and we got the property.
That pond has provided us with so much tranquility and beauty over the years that I almost can’t imagine why hesitated in the first place, except that the leap of actually doing the thing felt so enormous at the time. It was exactly what we had wanted to find, and with everything we had on our list. It is a treasure in all seasons.
Not that we fish in it, but trout do come down the stream as it flows year-round. We have a family of ducks, and during migration season, Canada Geese will often be attracted to it as well. Thanks to the stream that feeds it. It seems to be a thriving ecosystem even though we have quite a bit of work that we really need to do in order to deepen it and really let it breathe.
But clearly it can’t be doing too poorly, as we have found a new creature who has made a home with us. Over the fall, we have noticed that anytime we walked past the pond, a small mammal would splash and immediately disappear.
Now the temptation, of course, was to think that maybe we had a beaver as we found a dam. But this is as unlikely as finding river otters, although that would be a fantasy life to have such creatures nearby.
The Milfred Muskrat in what we hope will remain their home for some time.
For weeks now, we’ve been trying to quietly walk up without upsetting or alerting our new mammal friend as quite obviously we wanted to get a picture. They (or maybe it is just a singleton) had moved too quickly at every turn for us to ever get a good look.
But today, Alex managed to quietly snap a few photos of the muskrat, happily swimming about the pond. It’s been hard to see or hear anything but a quick splash as we go by, as they are so swift in their movements.
Muskrats are very effective swimmers, and ours is clearly a fine specimen who has decided our cat tails make for an excellent food source.
Now, they are allowed to be trapped over the winter if one has a permit. So perhaps it was Providence that allowed us to see our new neighbor today. I have no intention of letting anyone take our Milfred Muskrat away. So just know if you come across the property line for him or her, we will defend them vigorously.
But if you come visit and are very lucky, you too might catch a glimpse. And you too might fall in muskrat love like we have.
And they whirl and they twirled and they tango Singin’ and jinglin’ a jango Floatin’ like the heavens above Looks like muskrat love
It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.
It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.
Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.
We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.
Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder
In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.
He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.
The Far Side Computer Calendae
Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.
Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.
Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.
Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.
There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.
Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.
My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.
She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.
My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.
I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.
I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.
My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.
I had a few appointments in town today including two doctor appointments. I like to have my husband with me when the medical system is involved just in case I need a backup or level headed second opinion.
Afterwards we were able to catch a late lunch (nearly happy hour) at one of Bozeman’s trendy no seed oil spots. It being an odd hour for dining we could hear the conversations at the bar as the place was mostly empty.
A virgin Huckleberry margarita
There were two couples, one Boomer pair and the other geriatric millennials, who as it turned out both celebrating their anniversaries this weekend. The out of town Boomers had come for a Yellowstone and Tetons visit while the younger couple turned out to be local farmers in the valley and were excited to learn the tourists had something in common with them.
No one could remain competitive as cost inputs kept going up. Finding labor for smaller farms was getting more expensive and harder to secure. And land developers increasingly competed to acquire land piece by piece from older larger family farms who struggled to compete. We were full on eavesdropping at this point.
The husband in the young farmer pair was dressed just like Alex. He could have been Alex for how closely their styles matched. When he left for the bathroom, his wife said to the older couple how hard it has been recently.
Land he’d worked for years on a lease had just recently been sold to developers at an enormous markup. They understood the demand for housing but how could anyone continue to farm and make a living?
Between tariffs, labor costs and ravenous unmet demand for housing that could only be financed by large scale real estate developers the era of the family farm felt over. Only the big dogs could afford the costs and regulatory overhead.
We were finishing up our meal as we nodded along. Alex said to me “ok I know we don’t do this very often but I think we should pick up the meal for the younger couple.” Being on the verge of tearing up myself I couldn’t have agreed more.
I waved over the waitress and asked if this was possible. She seemed a little surprised “the whole meal?!” But it wasn’t a crazy amount. It was about $100. We sneakily paid our tab and theirs as quickly as we could. We didn’t want to make a thing of it. We just wanted to make their day a little better.
We got up and said to both couples that we couldn’t help overhearing it was both their anniversary weekends coming up and we wanted to wish them many more happy years together.
We thanked them both for keeping America fed and tried to casually saunter out before anyone noticed what we’d done. Hopefully this added a little cheer to their day. In a system as big and opaque and impersonal as America it can feel like there is nothing any of us can do.
So when you can do something even if it’s a small thing like picking up a meal we should do so. America is an idea but we are also a people and we stick together even if our elites make stupid decisions.
You might want bring towel though, as our handcrafted Finnish sauna will need some use before the cedar is completely smooth. Yes, that’s right, the MilFred family Yellow Barn now has a sauna. And she is a beauty. Just check out the view we picked for her.
Alex and the wonderful family who built the cedar sauna structure placed her under the back awning of the big yellow barn today. Wiring and electronics are underway as I write.
We’ve been slowly but surely turning our barn into our ideal wellness center both for our own use and eventually for the wider community as well. We are privileged with skills, capital and loads of very expensive personal experience with chronic illnesses.
So naturally as geriatric millennials it is always our instincts to turn our pain into something useful and also if we are lucky pay back the expenditures and turn a profit. Which we can then reinvest. It’s the circle of life for a generation who found the circle of life to be a tad more inflationary than expected.
The man of action putting the finishing touches on the electronics. We don’t have anything in our home systems connected to the cloud, so he built his own fully local controller with ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, RGBW LED controls UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit. You can snag the code on GitHub
In true MilFred fashion, we are building and testing everything all on ourselves. An n of 1 is good, an n of 2 is better, and if you’d like to test it out hit us up while it is a work in progress. Build in public and beta test with your friends.
Tucked under the awning of the barn so one can easily pop in from gym, HBOT or cold plunge to warm cedar comfort and mountain views
We’d like to ultimately build a space for healing, relaxation and training for those who prefer time tested modalities like heat, cold, oxygen and pressure.
Friends and family can come and test out our now very impressive range of equipment as we build this all out.
We have one of the few hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers available outside of hospital use in the region. You can pressurize to 2 atmospheres and set a range of parameters for a range of treatments. I use it for my inflammatory condition while Alex is treating the remains of long covid. You’d be shocked what pressure and oxygen can do.
Our hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber
If you want a work out get in some squat reps in our power cage, take a swing at the punching bag or lengthen your spine on our Pilates reformer. You can even climb around on the rock wall built into the the barn ceiling (not even kidding that is the work of the previous family).
If you are looking for a spa day you can have a sweat in the sauna, do red light therapy on your face, chill out on a PEMF mat, and hopefully soon take a dip in a cold plunge. Though if you are ambitious you can sprint across the front pasture and jump in our pond but I’ll warn you that the ducks might not love it.
The pond is fed by a creek that comes from the canyon above our house
The point being that we are building by hand and through personal experience something that improves our lives and others and that’s a pretty hot thing to do. Don’t worry, we will provide towels and robes if you do indeed take off all your clothes. Just come on over and try it out.
We are all us humans on the good ship Lollipop. I mean this as a stand in for Mother Gaia/Terra/Earth. We are all in this together right? Wrong? Who knows.
I happen to be on the America decks, so even if I can see the sea is perilous the orchestra is still playing. Maybe I’m rearranging the deck chairs. Is there anything that can be done to steer myself away from collision other than seeking a life raft?
It’s a kludgy metaphor but I am personally trying to move around several of my own ingrained adult habits with the hopes that I can change the direction of life for smoother sailing.
It’s hard to retrain your body after years of pain, compensating biomechanics and environmental factors beyond one’s control.
I’m putting on my life vest and trying to steer myself well so that I save myself and maybe in doing so save others.
If anyone has physical therapy videos they recommend I am working to retrain muscles that are compensating for my thoracic ankylosis. I also intend to go in person to physical therapy if possible.
And onto other topics less bleak than avoiding disasters, both personal and political, as you can indeed do more than you imagine to steer your own life here is some inspiration.
I enjoyed reading this piece on the rise of the online schizo and how to protect yourself as someone who is burdened with a strong case of apophenia. Worth a browse if you are concerned about your cognitive security online as no one wants to catch a Babylonian death cult meme virus.
I spend a lot of time on artificial intelligence policy thanks to my advocacy on Montana’s right to compute law as well general interest in enabling more people to maintain the level of control and access they seem appropriate for their own lives. The right to repair movement is the seed for a wider right to compute movement.
On that note Alex is building automation into the sauna being built and has put the code up on GitHub if you are into that sort of thing. You have a right to build things and own them and no one is forcing you to buy convenience if you would prefer to keep your data on your own servers. Even if it’s the data for your air conditioning or your sauna.
We’re building a sauna and I don’t like anything at home connected to the cloud, so I’m building my own fully local controller ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, even has RGBW LED controls UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit
There has been such a bleak mood on the timelines as Americans are once again locked into a cycle of agitation and propaganda driven by hyper persuasion A/B testing of rage bate as tragedy turns on the opportunism machines. So I’d like to share bits and bobs of good news in my corner of the world today.
Valar is audacious, ingenious and the kind of hard technical work I’d never seen anyone raise from his position as self taught young man. But what a challenge right? I was in. I believe in him. And boy do I look smart now.
If you want to watch an inspiring video with a Blackhawk click through. Kiewit is America’s 2nd largest power plant builder, with more active nuclear construction projects than any other company in North America. Utah deserved a win like this today.
Valar is incredibly grateful to the State of Utah, especially Governor Spencer Cox, DNR Executive Director Joel Ferry, EOD Director Emy Lesofski, USREL Director Jaron Wallace, and all our local partners in beautiful Emery County.
Chaotic portfolio founder, and once and future Montana guy, Sam Hogan has a good synopsis of CogSec 101 in times of tension that I thought I’d share as a teaser for introducing his fantastic compute company Inference.Net
He gives good being online advice and his company Inference.net (yes disclosure investor) just started sponsoring a new podcast about the culture of San Francisco.
It’s called Member of the Technical Staff. It’s a fun hang with perennial grist for the social mills topics like where are the girlies in San Francisco. It’s a hang for a subcultural issues relevant to understanding living in a boomtown while building.
In local Montana news, we have had national influence with our work supporting the Frontier Institute and its indefatigable leader Kendall Cotton. Must be something about this Rocky Mountain boys that we love. He’s proving you can just do things.
I’m thrilled to report that two model bills that we’ve pioneered in Montana were officially adopted as ALEC model policy. This means that state legislators from across the country who look to ALEC for ideas will be prompted to introduce their state’s own Right to Compute Act (recognized as the gold standard for state tech regulation) or Private Property Protection Act (a cutting edge approach to zoning reform focused on housing affordability).
We’ve officially become a national policy leader – a big deal! We’re a small state, and a small team here at Frontier Institute, but we’re making a huge impact thanks to supporters like you.
And that supporter like you? Heck yeah those supporters are me and Alex. .
You two can just do things as our boys Isaiah, Sam and Kendall have shown. You can build nuclear reactors, run decentralized inference compute markets and create new models, and even change your state’s policy with better laws that become models for the entire nation.
