Radon mitigation worked much better than expected in the end. Because of our house’s rather particular construction (wood foundation, two levels of basement, no way of venting from the lowest level), the installers were unwilling to make any guarantees about radon levels post-mitigation, but they needn’t have worried. Before installation we saw a long-term average of 550 Bq/m³ in the basement; levels currently hover in the single digits, sometimes a bit more if it’s raining, sometimes even zero. It’s the nature of radon that levels fluctuate a lot (before installation we saw levels under 200 and over 800), so the point is to look at the long-term averages, but regardless levels are now well under Health Canada’s do-something-about-it guideline of 200 Bq/m³. Mark as solved.

They installed the unit in our bedroom closet, opting for a slightly more powerful model that was still able to pull air from the lower basement level. It does make a bit of noise, so I’ve thrown an old winter coat over it (you can do that: the whole unit is sealed from the inside, which is kind of the point when pulling radon from under the house and venting it outside), but I’m looking into getting more permanent soundproofing in there, along with some closet organizers, since we had to pull everything down to the clothes rail out to make it fit. We’ve actually been doing a lot of reorganizing around here—among other things, moving my office next to the piano and the sofabed from the basement to upstairs so we have more guest capacity. The end is not quite in sight, but we have a sense of the new layout.

The quixotic quest to perfect the inherently imperfect

To mess around with old technology requires you to embrace imperfection.

On most of our typewriters, it’s inevitable that at least one or two keys are out of alignment. Usually the a and s keys: they’re frequently used letters but live at the edge of the keyboard (and type basket), so they hit the paper at a more oblique angle than letters in the middle of the keyboard. After a few decades of use (and our typewriters are anywhere from 47 to 109 years old), alignment issues are inevitable to at least some degree. Typewriter technicians could straighten them back up, but look at old typewritten letters and you’ll see plenty of examples of out-of-true letters, upper/lowercase misalignment, and worn typeslugs. Imperfections were part of the process, even in official correspondence.

If you’re the sort of person who’s gotten used to laser-printer perfection and a full set of Unicode characters, who uses every diacritic and ligature possible (which is to say: hi there), using a typewriter is a maddening exercise in compromise. The maximum number of typebars that will fit in a basket is limited, so the number of available characters is too. Typos are hard to correct, so error-free typing was a real skill (correction tape was a late kludge, as were lift-off correctable ribbons). Word processors are manifestly better than typewriters: they enable error correction and revision with much less effort, they require much less skill to use, and their output is regular and even.

Old technology is generally speaking imperfect, and is old for a reason. By which I mean it was superseded for a reason. Ballpoints were better than fountain pens: they didn’t leak, they used waterproof ink, and they could easily be used by the left handed. Compact discs were better than vinyl: more durable, more capacity, cleaner recordings. Quartz watches were more accurate and cheaper than mechanical watches.

What’s ironic is that vintage tech hobbyists can have a ferocious perfectionist streak. Not so much typewriter hobbyists, who know what they’re getting into when tinkering with machines old enough to collect retirement benefits. But I’ve seen fountain pen enthusiasts fret not just about the flow of ink or the quality of paper, but the number of turns a screw cap takes to open and close. I’ve seen watch enthusiasts dismiss the importance of a watch movement being, you know accurate, but lose their minds over misapplied hour indices and the seconds hand not quite lining up with the markers on relatively inexpensive watches. As for vinyl enthusiasts, well, to start with they’re a subset of audiophiles, so. The amount of care and worry they express about cleaning records—and you have to do it this way, not that way, or you’ll destroy your records—and having the correct stylus on a properly balanced tonearm (or you’ll destroy your records) makes me think that actually listening to music (which will eventually destroy your records) has gotten lost somewhere.

I can’t help but wonder whether the struggle and fuss, the quixotic quest to perfect the inherently imperfect, is the actual point—that tech that doesn’t require constant worry and maintenance fails to scratch an itch somehow. Hobbies are different: the care and attention is the point. Loving the things more than their function. If the function was what was more important, you wouldn’t waste any time with vintage tech that in the cold light of day is no longer fit for purpose.

My own relationship with vintage tech is increasingly about the realization that in order to spend less time online and reclaim my privacy, I have to learn to overcome my own perfectionist streak. I have a Timex mechanical watch that gains ten to twelve seconds a day, whereas my Apple Watch syncs to a time server. But the Timex does not collect data on my heart rate and gait or pepper my day with notifications the way my Apple Watch does. Setting that Timex every morning takes less than a minute, which seems like a reasonable tradeoff right now. And I should be fair to the watch hobbyists who think precise time doesn’t actually matter, because they’re actually right: there are no everyday situations where an offset of even a minute or two will make any difference at all (if that kind of discrepancy matters, you’re already late).

Which is the point: at a human scale, imperfections aren’t important. Clocks can be off by a minute or two without causing a catastrophe. Imperfectly typed documents with one or two hand corrections can still be understood. A few hisses and pops on a sound recording don’t actually block the listening experience. Computers need these things to be perfect; humans don’t: for humans, the failure mode of perfect is often just plenty good enough.

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

Now that it’s on streaming, I’ve finally seen The Mandalorian and Grogu. It isn’t a very good movie. There’s a general consensus that the movie is “inconsequential”—but that’s not because it doesn’t add to the nerd lore or has insufficient stakes. It’s because the movie is all incident—or rather, several incidents spliced rather imperfectly together—and no story. That said, it wouldn’t have needed many changes to work: if it had been structured like a Bond movie (and in fact it had a very Bond-like opening) and made up its mind who the antagonist was, if it hadn’t had the heel turn occur off-camera (that’s not a thing you tell, that’s a thing you show), if it had been more explicitly about Grogu’s growth into responsibility and set up the second half of the movie in the first. But because the movie couldn’t make up its mind what it was about, it wasn’t about anything at all. The result is a film that is less than the sum of its parts. Neat set pieces, but they forgot the something they were supposed to be in service to.

The first two seasons of The Mandalorian worked because the protagonist had a dilemma to resolve: in season one, choosing between his code and protecting the child; in season two, whether to let him go. Season three misfired because the personal dilemmas set up at the start—reuniting with Grogu and ending his apostasy—were resolved either in spinoff series The Book of Boba Fett or by the end of episode two, whereas they should have been the basis of the entire third season. Once resolved, there was nothing to propel their story forward, and the show wasn’t the same: they became supporting characters in what was ostensibly their own story because they no longer had any story of their own to tell. The Mandalorian and Grogu has not changed that.

The Map Room

• A roundup of mechanical, quartz and digital watches that use maps in their interfaces or turn themselves into mapping and navigation tools, without ever connecting to a GPS satellite or loading Google Maps.

• Generative AI tools have come to mapmaking, and I had some thoughts about that.

Miscellany

• Woo comes to musical pitch: AP reports on listeners turning to music tuned to 432 Hz for its purported healing properties. What they’re talking about is tuning A4 (the A above middle C) to 432 Hz instead of the modern standard of 440 Hz. That standard isn’t universal (Bösendorfers are reportedly tuned to 443 Hz at the factory) or particularly long-lived (435 Hz was used in the 19th century). For comparison, A♭4 at A440 is about 415.3 Hz, so we’re talking about much less than a semitone.

• The flexi disc, a thin flexible vinyl record that could be included with printed material, is the subject of an episode of Under the Influence, a podcast about the advertising industry: Apple Podcasts, CBC Listen. Cheap to produce and often distributed for free, or included in books and magazines, these things were everywhere (I had more than a few of them growing up; you played them by putting them on top of a regular record).

• Karl Schroeder’s Laika’s Ghost collects his Gennady Malianov stories, a sequence that began with “The Dragon of Pripyat.” He already had a collection in mind when I asked him about it maybe 15 years ago, when he was still writing these stories; later, he felt that the Russian invasion of Ukraine rendered the project—light stories set in the near future about a Russian-Ukrainian nuclear inspector—a bit too naive and irrelevant. I’m glad he’s published this collection anyway. (The title story is reprinted at Clarkesworld.)

• Relativity for retired engineers. “Scarcely a month goes by when I don’t receive an email, phone call, or manuscript from someone, more often than not a retired engineer, who has their own theory of relativity. These people have read something about Einstein’s theory of relativity, noticed that something about it doesn’t accord with their own intuition, decided that therefore Einstein must be wrong, and come up with their own theory which they are convinced must be right.” Let’s be honest: this is a case of physicists getting a taste of their own medicine.

• Maris Kreizman on how and why to cull your book collection. Some good criteria here; I’d add replaceability, i.e., a book that’s in every library and is unlikely to ever go out of print is safer to cull than an obscure title in a limited edition, regardless of any other consideration.

• Techbro billionaires claim inspiration from science fiction, but it’s a veneer covering deeply reactionary politics. Yes, this is what the Torment Nexus meme is about, but Ali Rıza Taşkale brings the receipts, and demonstrates that this isn’t just them missing the point of the stories they cite.

• Being a Luddite is fun again. “With hatred of big tech and AI hitting the mainstream, it makes a lot of sense that something like the Summer of Ludd would emerge in this particular moment. Everywhere I go, there is an overwhelming sense that the Silicon Valley experiment is on its last legs.”

• “I honestly do not know what life would be like without the notion of time. But I also wonder whether time wasn’t our most dangerous invention.” Paul Kincaid reviews David Rooney’s About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks (2021).

• Stanford has an extensive collection of piano rolls, and they’ve announced a web-based player to access them. “Pianolatron was inspired by the pianola, a player piano that allowed performers to control parameters such as speed and volume while a roll was playing. The app offers audio playback for Stanford’s scanned rolls in sync with a scrolling animation of their digital images.”

• Are raccoons evolving into pets? Two things appear to be true at the same time: raccoons are showing signs of domestication, and domesticating raccoons is a super bad idea.

• Extreme heat is threatening Italy’s cheese banks, which are facing increased cooling costs. The cheese banks hold hundreds of thousands of parm reg wheels as collateral while they age (up to three years), giving the producers a credit line in the meantime. “A blockchain-backed cheese loan collateral program” is not a string of words I ever expected to see.

• Do Amber alerts actually work? This piece looks at the numbers, which are helpful. I doubt this question would come up if we weren’t constantly getting them on our phones (in Canada they can’t be turned off; see my 2019 post, “Canada’s Emergency Alerts Are Broken by Design”).

• Remember toad-licking and hallucinogenic toad toxins? Here’s an excerpt from Kimon de Greef’s new book, The Ego Trip: A Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. (While the excerpt talks a lot about cane toads, psychedelic toxins have always been associated with a different species, the Colorado River toad, which I expect the book as a whole will go into. Seriously, don’t lick cane toads.)

(Title from “Please use AI” by Shawn Smucker.)