The Incident of the Mouse in the Night

 

The Darrow Road To The Hilly South

I was in college when I first read the works of Matsuo Basho in translation. Basho was a 17th century haiku poet who basically spent the last years of his life wandering around, looking at stuff, and writing poems. The kind of guy who struck me as a great role model.

We have had a long cold winter here in the Northland and I spent some of those cold winter days and nights looking at maps and thinking about places I might wander once the weather was better. One of the things I spotted on the map was a thin line headed south, something called Darrow Road with looked to be a less busy route winding south toward Pattison Park. The name "Darrow Road" put me in mind of Basho's most famous work THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH. Someday, I thought, I will ride the Darrow Road and perhaps, like Basho, be inspired to write poems about it. Today was that day. I set forth right after breakfast.

Leaving behind both the city and the village of Superior, I turned left on County Road C and soon came to Darrow Road. It is a tiny, hilly road with a bit of pavement that soon turns to gravel. A good road for poetry.

Darrow Road goes south.

I bet Basho would ride here

if he had a bike.

Thin lines on a map,

often best for bicycles.

Roads less travelled by.

Pavement and traffic

are east and west of this road.

Gravel grinding south.

Much water in the valley

but the hills are mostly dry.

Yin, Yang, here and now.

White horse watches me,

his brown pony companion 

is less suspicious.

Liquid must flow down

but evaporates upward.

I must coast and grunt.

As I near the park, I see a fox sprint across the road. I don't get a picture, but I do get this poem.

The fleeting fox was

too fast for my camera,

but we were both here.

At the park, I see some noisy swans.

White swans on the lake.

Trumpeters not quite in tune?

Certainly not mute.

Although it has been a dry, cold winter without too much snow and we've had the first fire warnings of the season issued, the combination of snowmelt and recent rains has swollen the rivers. Little Manitou Falls and Big Manitou Falls are flowing quite briskly.

Heavy rains storming

miles away and days ago

are still falling down.

Water once more white,

the snow waited all winter

to flow free today.

When I turn for home, I recognize that a south wind had been urging me on all day. I'm reminded of something my cycling coach said to me years ago.

Tailwinds don't exist,

you either have a headwind

or you're feeling strong.

I don't go back via Darrow Road, opting instead for the slightly more civilized (paved) Country Roads B, A, and C. I take one last photograph to remind me of this hilly day.

Cresting another hill,

I stop, rest, and photograph

the road leading home. 

 

I'm The Motor

Although I have several bicycles, the one I am riding most frequently these days is my custom Bike Friday Companion, a bike I built in 2015, the year I started working at Bike Friday as a Service Mechanic. Being a folding bike, it looks different than a lot of bikes and I'm frequently asked if it is an e-bike. If the question is asked in that way, I just say "No" but often the question is posed as "Does that thing have a motor?" and I reply "Yes, it does and you're talking to it!"

More than a few times the person I am talking to will then launch into an unsolicited spiel about how great e-bikes are. Either they have one or they have a pal who has one and by golly I should get one because they're really great. I just smile and nod and wait for them to wind down and usually manage to exit the conversation by saying something like "Well, so far I'm doing OK using my legs."

What I don't bother to tell these enthusiastic folks, people I think of a "E-vangelists", is that I was a bike and e-bike mechanic for years and in fact under encouragement/pressure from Alan Scholz, my boss at Bike Friday, I converted my Bike Friday to e-assist and rode it that way for several years. After I retired, I realized my e-bike was my least ridden bike, so I converted it back to being a fully human-powered machine. And now I'm riding my Bike Friday more than ever.

E-bikes have their uses and the tandem trike that Christine & I call Daisy really does need a motor to make it a practical vehicle. But I still prefer riding my bike to driving Daisy. 

E-bikes have gotten a lot of folks riding who can't or won't ride an un-assisted bike and that is a good thing. If your e-bike trips are replacing car trips, that is wonderful. If an e-bike is helping you keep riding or keep up with your buddies, that is also a fine thing. Literally, more power to you. And if your e-bike has changed your life it is natural to want to talk about it. But don't waste your breath trying to convince me that I need to get one. I don't.

For my day to day life, I don't need more power. An e-bike is a complication I don't need. I like using my own power to get places. I go as fast as I need to go. I like the exercise and I like the quiet. So far at least, I'm the only motor my bike needs and my little non-e-bike is my favorite way to get around.

Theodore Sturgeon and AI

 Theodore Sturgeon and AI

In 1957, the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon was challenged by a critic who said that "90% of science fiction is crud." Sturgeon did not dispute the critic's conjecture but expanded it, noting that "90% of science fiction is crud, but then, 90% of everything is crud." This thought is now widely referred to as "Sturgeon's Law".

Sturgeon wrote various non-cruddy things including novels, short stories, a couple of Star Trek episodes, as well as ghost-writing the Ellery Queen novel THE PLAYER ON THE OTHER SIDE. In addition to his work, he was friends with Kurt Vonnegut and Vonnegut based a recurring character in his novels, an obscure science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, on Sturgeon. Today, Kilgore Trout is more remembered than Theodore Sturgeon. So it goes.

Sturgeon's Law is still remembered and quoted and I think it contains a powerful caution for today's world, a world where the captains of industry assure us that AI will make everything so much better. I have my doubts.

An important thing to remember about AI is that is Artificial Intelligence. We tend to gloss over the first word and believe the second one. We want to believe that code had understanding and insight, but it is an illusion of intelligence. It is pattern recognition and feedback loops processing huge data sets. AI can do amazing things, like scan millions of mammograms and detect previously unrecognized correlations, literally saving lives through early cancer detection. But that is not intelligence.

Now the AI hypsters and true believers (and even the best AI can't distinguish between the two) will tell you that they are very close to achieving AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). AGI will know everything about everything because it has read everything, looked at everything, and found the patterns we puny humans have missed. It no longer matters that is artificial because it is supremely intelligent. I still have my doubts.

Because 90% of everything is crud, these large general data sets contain a lot of crud. And now we have hit the point where much of what is in these data sets has been skimmed from the Internet and as any child can now tell you, the Internet is not exactly a great source of reliable information. But wait, it gets worse. The internet is now being flooded with AI crud, the stuff that mimics good information. And that is being skimmed and fed back into the models. See the problem? We've built a crud concentrator.

This isn't a theoretical future problem. It is already happening. AI companies that have been using AI to write more of their code, are finding more and more examples of "hallucinations", the AI industry's clever rebranding of what we used to call errors, bugs, or lies. In several high-profile instances, next generation AI code has had to be rolled back when it proved to be less reliable than the previous version. And AI is unfortunately quite good at writing code that is inscrutable to humans. So now we have huge code bases that neither computers nor humans understand. That doesn't seem like a secure foundation for the future. It is the kind of thing science fiction writers have been warning us about for decades. I think it is time for us to listen.

A few words, a few birds, and no frogs

 

Independent Bookstore Day at Foxes & Fireflies

Saturday, April 25th 2026

Independent Bookstore Day at Foxes & Fireflies

Today is Independent Bookstore Day and when Christine and I hiked over to Foxes & Fireflies, we found the place was packed with bookish folks. It was actually a bit too crowded for relaxed browsing, but it is certainly good to see the store doing well. Maria and Dave, the store's owners, confirmed to me that this is their busiest day of the year. In the year and half since the store opened, they've expanded their inventory and their open hours and soon they may outgrow their current, very cool space.

Foxes & Fireflies is a Superior success story. Our small city still has a local paper (Christine & I subscribe to the electronic version) and Maria Lockwood is a reporter there. A couple of years ago she was doing a story on Superior's small business incubator program which is based out of an ornate old building on Tower Avenue that used to be the local post office. The incubator provides space and mentorship to folks who want to start a business. Uffda Kombucha started in the basement of the old post office and has since moved to a larger space a few blocks north on Tower.

In the course of doing her story, Maria enrolled in the program and she, Dave, and their daughters decided to pursue the dream that became the Foxes & Fireflies bookstore. The store is currently housed in what had been the lobby of the old post office. Maria and Dave still have their "real" jobs but somehow between the two of them and their daughters they now manage to be open 7 days a week.

Foxes & Fireflies has both new and used books for sale and some of the used books are books I've traded in. Today, I traded three in, bought a book of poetry, got an amazing book of old maps for free, and also bought a sticker for Christine which really sums up our lives. The sticker reads "I don't have my ducks in a row... I have squirrels and they are everywhere."

The map book contains pictures of the antique map collection of retired journalist Willy Stern, who lives in a cabin on the shores of Lake Nebagamon. Stern provided wonderful, wry commentary on each of the maps. I read the book this afternoon and I learned and laughed a lot. A lot of the old map makers invented islands in Lake Superior to please their sponsors and many of the map makers copied each other so some fictions got propagated for centuries. And then there are the interesting omissions. As an ex-Duluthian and recently minted Superior chauvinist I was amused by a pair of 1899 coffee trading cards that on maps of both Wisconsin and Minnesota named Superior but not Duluth.

I'm a NeoLuddite

Apple recently released a new laptop, the Neo, at the surprisingly low price of $599 ($499 if you are a student) and it is, by most accounts, a wonderful machine. If I was in the market for a new laptop, I would be giving serious consideration to getting a Neo, but I'm the guy who types most of his pages on old typewriters, takes pictures of those pages and blasts them out to the internet. Yes, I do have a laptop that works just fine, an old Chromebook that I bought for $35 from eBay that I have running the Raspberry Pi desktop on top of a Debian Linux operating system. I was a nerd before most folks knew what nerds were, so I don't need Apple or AI doing my thinking for me.

But Apple's Neo got me thinking about a tool I used to have, a unique laptop that was also called the Neo. I had one when we lived in Eugene, but I got rid of it in the great purge before we moved to Superior. But it a handy little device and I realized I kind of missed it, so I found another one on eBay and bought it. I'm typing on it now.

The AlphaSmart Neo weighs two pound and runs for months on 3 AA batteries. It has a simple monochrome LCD screen and a pretty comfortable keyboard. It is basically designed to create and edit text and that's it. No web browsing, email, or other distractions. You can have eight different text files active and swap between them quickly with a single keystroke. It does have a built-in spell check that you can add words to and a thesaurus function that I pretty much don't use.

But the neat trick that the Neo does is that when I connect it to my phone or computer via a USB cable, the other device sees the Neo as a keyboard. It is far easier to type on the Neo than it is on my phone. Mostly what I do is compose a document on my Neo, spell check it and fiddle with it until I like it. Then on my computer or phone I open up whatever app is going to receive the document and hit the SEND key on the Neo. The Neo then blasts the whole document across the wire and the app just thinks I'm a darn fast typer.

I do have a Linux app that lets me send files back to the Neo if needed, but mostly I use the Neo for text creation. I don't have to bother with an AC adapter for it because the batteries last virtually forever. The screen is actually great outdoors, easier to see in sunlight than any modern color screen.

I'll still keep typing on my typewriters, I think the printed page discipline is good for me and I get to play around with my stamps, but I'm rolling the Neo into my writing routines. The Neo is definitely handy for creating longer texts.

I've been called a Luddite, but my skepticism of technology comes from a pretty decent understanding of technology and using the tools that work best for me. I guess you could say I'm a NeoLuddite.