I think that more people need to realise that we have to do the hard work ourselves. There is a tendency to assume that we can rely on reality to do the job for us. That if there are people who talk nonsense, who support illogical policies, who ignore the facts, sooner or later, reality will wreak vengeance on them. And this is not the way that history works.

Yuval Noah Harari, quoted in The Guardian on 04 Oct 2025.

Working out a few technical glitches.

We’ve been home a week from a three week trip to Europe. Sleep schedule is mostly back to normal. Next week I’m dropping my son off at college for the first time. Two weeks after that I’m back to work. Quite a summer.

We got home from a two week trip to Minnesota and the UP. It takes me a few days to readjust to being home. Each summer it seems like there is so much time, and then I never seem to do much with it. Except a few weeks of travel. Which I guess is something.

The backyard and driveway are covered with maple tree seeds. The tree in my backyard made more seeds than usual and they are all over the place. It was fun to look outside on windy days over the past few weeks and watch the little helicopters twirling all around.

Recently read: Cities of the Red Night (William Burroughs). The first two-thirds or so of the book seemed to have a mostly narrative structure, which made for an easier read than the two books of the Nova Trilogy that I read a few months back. But then something switched and I mostly lost the plot. It wasn’t quite as jumpy as the cut-up sections in the Nova Trilogy, but …