Even in Kyoto

Saturday was the Head of the Housatonic Regatta in Indian Wells State Park, in Shelton, Connecticut. We were very fortunate to have fantastic weather and some good, clean, competitive racing. It was late by the time we made it all the way home, but the drive back was all through lovely fall foliage.

Sunday morning I played online Scrabble with friends, then S and I headed out for some bike errands and for the first Coffeeneuring ride of the 2026 Coffeeneuring Challenge. One of my research students had told me about Professor Java's Coffee Sanctuary. But first, we went to the Home Despot and S purchased a storage bin where I wasn't sure he'd be able to put that in his bike trailer, but he figured out a way.

Professor Java's Coffee Sanctuary was in a strip mall, it felt very much like home/an earlier-generation coffeeshop. The walls were covered in art and other paintings by local artists, available for sale. We had a quesadilla and panini for lunch, plus a brownie/chocolate cake, plus a fancy raspberry rooibos tea / latte drink. We bought enough cat litter at the pet store that S had a couple of close calls trying to brake and stop on some of the descents on the ride home. Also, it was rainy.

I was supposed to go to rowing practice this morning, except the regatta continued on Sunday for our youth athletes, and apparently with all the rain our boat trailer and truck got stuck in the mud. A $500 towing fee later, and the truck was freed. We learned that another rowing club pitched in to help get our trailer and others unstuck this morning; our head coach will go back down to get it tomorrow morning. So, no rowing practice this morning after all. I tried to keep sleeping and had weird dreams instead.

I'm backlogged on photos again. Busy times.

This year my rowing club got an entry for a Women's Senior Master 4+ at the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston. The Head of the Charles bills itself as the world's largest 3-day rowing event, but no matter how you bill it, it's a big and prestigious regatta. The organizers try to balance between strong competition but openness to the rowing community through a qualification and lottery system.

Boats that finish in the top half of the event the previous year get an automatic invite to come back and compete again the following year, and each event is seeded according to the previous finish order. Boats and crews that finish in the slower half, or that didn't compete the prior year, may get entries through the lottery. That's how this entry came about.

A lot of thought has gone into this entry. In the time I've been part of the club, we've had a number of youth entries, and I also raced in the 1x representing our team. I've had other teammates race the 1x or put in a 2x entry, but none of the above has ever felt like a team endeavor. That all made me conclude that the only way the Charles would ever feel like a team undertaking would be if we put in for a 4+ or an 8+ (oh, you can also buy your way in with a "Director's 4x" entry, but we don't have that kind of money, and even that event is filling up really fast). My personal thinking is that it's really hard to get a full 8+ worth of adults together to train consistently, so when our coaches expressed a desire to get crews to the Charles, I encouraged the 4+.

Getting the entry then kicked off a selection process. We had a team meeting at the start of the fall season to talk about team goals, and a general plan was developed to prepare. The plan included completion of an erg fitness test piece (20 minutes, rate-capped at 22 strokes per minute), plus coach evaluation of athlete skill, commitment, and promise of improvement.

Last week, Coach M asked me if I was still serious about wanting to be considered for the Charles 4+. I told him that I like to make boats go fast, so if it's determined that the goal for this entry is to make the boat go fast, and I'm a good candidate for doing that, put me in. And so now I will find myself once again at that starting line in the Charles River Basin a week from Saturday.

The other thing that happened this year is that the German rowers that my teammate L and I raced with back in 2022 got in touch with me in March or April or something: they also wanted to come back to race in the Charles again. As things shook out for them, it turned out they have a complete lineup, they just needed some help with procuring a boat, oars, and a coxswain. Thankfully, with my team's entries this year, we're in a position to help out this German crew with those elements. I see that as part of our general duties as rowers - to extend hospitality and goodwill to rowers traveling from afar. So it will be good to be there at the Charles to help support them. They're an older crew and this is likely to be the last time they travel out, so there will be some closure as well.

In any case, with crew selection getting finalized just at the end of last week, we only have a limited number of days to practice together in our racing lineup. A challenge is that some of us in the boat generally attend our club's morning practice times, whereas others generally attend our club's evening practice times. For this week, coaches recommended the following practice sessions: Monday evening, Tuesday morning, Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, Friday morning.

And so, last night we pushed off the dock for practice as the sun went down and the light faded from dusk to dark. Biking home, I was reminded of the days when I took evening pottery classes in Troy, then biked home rather later than I like. This morning I found myself somewhat uncomfortably awake 10 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, so I got up and got ready and had a couple minutes to snuggle with George before it was time to head out.

Temperatures dropped overnight, but the skies were clear, so in the morning darkness we could see the moon's crescent and the brighter stars. As we pushed off the dock, the moon coughed up a star; by practice's end, the sun was up and it was time for another day of work.

Now, mallorys_camera has far more opportunities to take wonderful Art Photos of the Walkway Over the Hudson. However! Her photos never feature...MY family members!

Here's my mom and two of my aunts, setting out to stroll most of the way across the Walkway. It was a beautiful fall Saturday morning, so the Walkway was bustling.



A stranger offered to take our photo. She was in an incredibly good mood, and so were we, all things considered! The sun was shining, the air was fresh, and from 212 feet above the Hudson River, you can admire so much of the surroundings and feel like royalty for a moment.



I found this bit of infrastructure interesting:


We didn't get to see this in action, but apparently there's some sort of cable car that can bring passengers up to the Walkway?

After a picnic lunch, we headed back to the AirBnB to get ready for my cousin L's wedding, hosted at a lovely farmyard-turned-venue right along Rondout Creek.

During the ceremony itself, we were requested to silence and stow our smartphones, so I mostly just have photos of the general scene.

Which was utterly lovely. L and N got so lucky, because the prior two weekends were both quite stormy. Saturday afternoon was sunny, but neither too hot nor too cold. PERFECT weather for a fall wedding!

As soon as we got there, one of my aunts pointed out two garter snakes that were very curious about all of the arriving people:



Another aunt and I arranged for some Nose to the Grindstone photos, because we like puns, the more the merrier, they don't have to be fancy ones, basic ones will do.



The ceremony occurred underneath an old (American) sycamore tree, with Rondout Creek in the background:



I've never been to a wedding with quite the same sort of tension and suspense as this one.

The tension and suspense was related to the seating arrangement.



These pews are on something of a slope. One of my uncles sitting behind me declared my row to be the one most likely to tip forward and tumble. It was like doing a wall-sit during the entire ceremony. At one point, apparently we collectively discovered we were all leaning forward slightly too much, and we corrected back by several inches. Disaster averted!

But! The bride looked elegantly beautiful, the vows were sweet, and soon enough it was time for cocktail hour and family photos!

This photo below is of a family friend (L), my cousin A, and her mom C, neither of which like having their photos taken or posted on social media. But YOU can enjoy seeing them, because they are hilariously well-coordinated and without having planned any of it in advance!



I spotted some interesting ducks in the creek, but heck if I know what they are, and you can't really tell because they're too far away in this photo.



The wedding dinner happened inside this beautiful old barn. WOW did people do a fantastic job of cleaning up the barn for fancy occasions!





Just look at that excellent joinery, and also the small cluster of mud-dauber nests on that joist overhead!



An artistic friend drew the menu. I don't know who supplied the flowers, but they were also entirely in keeping with the family aesthetic.



After the sun went down, it got a bit chilly, which made it even more fun to join in with all the dancing.

Then Sunday morning, a leisurely breakfast with my aunts and uncles, then back on the road to all those everyday responsibilities in Albany.

The first of this fall's series of talks on climate change was yesterday evening. My mother and S were intrigued enough by the general idea of an academic talk on climate change that they came to campus yesterday afternoon for an office picnic dinner before attending the early evening talk with me.

The speaker for this first talk was one of my colleagues from the Philosophy Department, who also happens to be the organizer of the talk series. She had us engage in time travel. Specifically, we traveled ahead to the year 2040, to take a look at a vision of the future that is the best possible vision for that future.

One of the main ideas behind this time travel is that humans are quite good at imagining apocalyptic futures. Just think of how many movies are based off of this concept. We humans find it harder to imagine positive futures. The trouble is that our overactive apocalyptic imaginations can often short-circuit the inspiration and force of will required to take needed action. It is important to have a positive vision to hold in mind and work towards.

In our case, the future that we traveled to was located at our very same campus. There were a couple of rules about how we talked about what we saw when we arrived in 2040. We could speak by saying, "Here in 2040..." And we could respond to each other using the language of "Yes, and..." In other words, it was not an occasion to shut down the ideas or imagination of our fellow time travelers with regards to our vision.

We observed a ton of interesting things about our future campus. To name just a few:

-The campus was much quieter with regards to the sounds of motors and combustion engines. Leaf blowers in particular were long gone.
-You could hear much more birdsong. More of the food eaten on campus was also grown on campus, and there weren't as many giant grass lawns.
-People weren't spending quite as much time on electronic devices, a lot of stuff was carried out using simpler tools - pens, paper, books.

I noticed that in 2040, our campus had expanded the campus housing, to include a wider range of housing types, including family housing, and a number of faculty members now lived on campus. There was also childcare available right here.

Other people noticed that the busy road out in front of the campus had been replaced with a trolley system. We were still pretty easily connected to the neighboring towns, but people weren't using motor vehicles nearly as much, so much of the existing parking had been converted to other uses.

-

Personally, it was powerful just to have the time and space to imagine, and talk. Most of the audience for this talk was made up of faculty colleagues from across the institution, although there were a couple of students also in attendance. Maybe the future would have looked different if we'd had more students there. It was also interesting to hear my mom talk about what she thought about, in 2040. She's about to turn 80; she thought about how grown up her grandkids will be by then (nearly 30 years old!!).

It's also interesting to think: I think we had to do this activity as a group. I would not have been able to time travel nearly as easily if I attempted it on my own. I don't think I would have had the same thoughts if it had just been me trying to think.

I'm glad to have colleagues who have set a high bar for these climate talks.

This is mostly so I can clear out browser tabs, rather than for the purpose of starting conversations. These are all generally paywalled NYT links, sorry.

The Red Queen in American Healthcare: Battle of Hospital A.I. vs. Insurer A.I. Is Pushing Medical Costs Higher.

The blessings and curses of physicians using AI tools to practice medicine (opinion piece).

Kenyans Did College Students’ Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived.. An underground industry dries up.

Early Data Indicates an A.I.-Generated Drug Could Slow Aging (So, at least one of many examples of how these tools can be useful. But note, this specific agent still needs to be tested more extensively before any firm conclusions can be drawn).

Here's something I have questions about: can people developing these AI models really confidently say that their models aren't illegally accessing information they aren't supposed to access? Especially after multiple high-profile documented cases where models given certain tasks have broken out of containment and hacked into things they aren't supposed to be hacking into?

I share this mathematician's feeling, that it's a little deflating to get word that an AI model has solved a problem they've been working on for well over a decade, and to then also have more questions than answers about whether the model accessed work that was supposed to be private.

That's not the only such case. More fuel for this fire. I'm pretty sure that the corporate responses in these cases is just blanket denial as a strategy, because even if it turns out they're found out later on, stalling tactics make it more likely that the other guys get found out first.

Meanwhile, lots of human people are trying to continue doing science without pay, which is admirable but depressing (though I might share this particular story with my students, because we just talked about the endosymbiont hypothesis, and I have also done science out of hotel rooms).

So let's comfort ourselves with the best of the best footage of adorable and beautiful microscopic living things.

I just figured I should write something, even if it's a boringsauce update.

To some extent I feel like I don't even know why I'm this busy.

But if I stop and think about it, I DO know. For instance, most of yesterday was given over to writing a manuscript review for a review article. My review was due yesterday, and I just had to conclude that I needed to just bust it out rather than sitting on it any longer, because what I produced was not going to improve with age like a fine wine or cheese. But getting the review finished involved wading around in the scientific literature a whole bunch, because I needed to make some points about how the manuscript really needed to be improved. Fun.

Then we had some Fall Pomp and Circumstance in the form of the 800th anniversary of the Death of St. Francis, and one mustn't rush the Pomp and Circumstance.

And teaching and grading and research and meetings all take time and aren't constantly fascinating, but that's why this is a paying job, the work still needs doing.

It has gotten chilly in the mornings this week. We had hints of fog yesterday, and actual fog this morning, this morning's fog being of the variety where it crept in while we were already out on the water. We made it back safely to the dock, at least. I'm definitely trying to just appreciate the time out on the water while we still have it, because I'm going to blink and it's going to be the end of October, I just know it.

My mom's due to arrive in town tomorrow afternoon, and the house is a total disaster area.

We did it! This year's regatta was smaller than the prior 2 years, but in a lot of ways, that was great. Fewer logjams at the docks, a smoother schedule overall.

I wound up being the announcer, which was...well. I had no brain by the end of the day. Realize I was both managing the announcing and also helping where I could with putting out fires (can't run around as freely when announcing, but I had people I could strategically deploy, and I did).

There are some things that are kind of annoying about our existing regatta operations, and those things continued to be annoying. It was annoying that they were annoying, but we had to live with it. However! Our participants all had a pretty darned great time, even despite the rain and chill.

The biggest misadventure of the regatta was a four-person boat (quad) that was full of some exceptionally enthusiastic kids. They apparently misunderstood and thought that the race course headed towards the north, past the warmup section, so they charged up to the north, and made it all the way to Troy before a safety launch with a 9 hp engine was able to catch up and flag them down and point out that they'd gone way past the starting area (like, 5 km past it for a race that's only 3.2 km long), and the start was down there in the other direction.

Then when they got headed in the correct direction, they apparently rammed into a section of the shoreline that juts out a bit, and broke their boat's bow section. The boat still floated, they just didn't have a bow anymore. So they got escorted by other safety launches all the way back to the dock. I was impressed that their coach managed to retain an air of calm, through it all. But, I mean, nobody got hurt, and our first aid station only handed out a couple of band-aids and a whole bunch of hand sanitizer. We'll take it.

It's very hard to start the week this tired and behind on everything, however.

A lot of teaching work is time-consuming but not particularly new and interesting. I guess that's why they pay me the big bucks!

In the background I'm working to get ready for our annual home regatta. Just picture lots and lots of squirrel herding. The weather forecast is looking wet, bleah. But it's a water sport, so we'll carry on. I need to dig out the umbrella hat collection. And about 20 other things.

I'm still thinking about all those heat deaths in Arizona. The book I'm reading right now (What if We Get It Right?) includes an interview with Jigar Shah, who was director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Biden Administration. (BTW, the paperback edition of the book apparently includes more recent follow-up with many of the people interviewed, so it contains commentary on things that have happened during the current US administration). In the interview, he talked about a California initiative to incentivize fabrication of ADU's with solar and energy storage built in. While it's still costly, it's far less expensive to build homes with alternative energy in mind from the get-go as compared to retrofitting existing homes.

That got me thinking about how many of the heat deaths in Arizona could be traced to mobile home parks, with a major contributor being that those parks often handle utilities in nonstandard ways (e.g. lack of individual meters, bills simply split among all residents), and tend to experience power outages more frequently than are experienced at other home sites.

So it seems like the way to help people in those spaces would be to create programs to provide more direct energy autonomy. I wonder who has crunched the numbers on how much that sort of program would cost vs. how much might be saved via a reduction of visits by emergency services.

Edit: See, e.g., https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260225824580/en/Mobile-Home-Power-Launches-Initiative-to-Deliver-Solar-Energy-Relief-to-Californias-Manufactured-Home-Residents

It is lovely to be here with a group of my rowing teammates. We did make it over to Atlas Stationers, and technically they did have stamps, they were twee Japanese ones, not quite what I was looking for but ah well.

We spent the afternoon doing a test row with the equipment we are borrowing, which was very useful especially for coming to understand how narrow Bubbly Creek is.

Thanks to jet lag I might fall asleep before 8 pm!