Life 2025

Created/Modified: 2025-12-24/2025-12-25

My years often have themes, at least in retrospect.

This year's theme was the futility of talking, the utility of doing, I think.

In the face of the rising tide of fascism in the US and authoritarianism at home--and if anyone thinks neither the Carney nor the Eby governments have authoritarian ambitions they haven't been paying attention--I made my voice heard as much as I could: wrote my MP, MLA, Premier, ranted and railed on social media, all that. I got out to the odd protest, and wrote a song that was sung at one I didn't attend.

I also wrote about and talked to people about clean indoor air, N95s, how to actually implement science-based infection control policies instead of the anti-science cos-play that physicians who are ignorant of fluid mechanics, aerosol physics, and HVAC technology insist on.

During the federal election I pushed against vote-splitting locally and saw a Conservative get elected in a three-way vote split.

None of my talking had any discernible effect, beyond maybe a slightly higher rate of more aerosol-safe behaviour among my local cohort. That's more more than nothing, but it's mostly people who would probably have leaned toward following the science and protecting their own and other people's well-being regardless.

So that was a lot of my time wasted.

I write in part to give myself an opportunity to reflect formally on what I believe and why, and in that sense nothing I wrote or said was completely without value to me. It just wasn't of any great value to anyone else, which is too bad.

In the mid-range between talking and doing I shifted my books off Amazon and onto Kobo, which did have an effect: it reduced my sales from almost zero to actually zero. That wasn't a big surprise. Kobo has a tiny fraction of the reach that Amazon does. It's e-book only, so no paper copies of my books are available any more, except locally, and Kobo is only about 25% of the Canadian e-book market, and a tiny fraction of the global market. But still: my books are available to anyone who wants them, and I'm divorced from Amazon.

I also dropped my Amazon Prime membership and reduced the number of times I ordered from Amazon from about 50 in 2024 to less than 5 in 2025. I live in the rurals and it's easy to get Amazon-dependent here, but it turned out to be much easier than expected to decouple. The few remaining orders were mostly medical necessities I could not source elsewhere despite considerable effort. So if you're worried that moving away from union-busting, fascist-supporting Amazon to buy direct from sellers, don't be: it's easier than you might think, and will probably cause you to spend less, more locally, and more thoughtfully, too.

I didn't write any fiction and wrote very little poetry over the course of the year. The coming year may include a little poetry, especially for children, but I think I'm largely done with the whole making my poetic voice heard thing. We'll see.

Doing was better.

I built a skin-on-frame canoe that was very loosely based on the Geodesic Aerolite Snowshoe Traveller design, apart from being wider, deeper, using a different construction technique, and some different materials. Her name is "Learning Curve" for a reason.

This was a great experience in every respect. I learned or refined a wide range of woodworking skills and am now using her as intended: as a platform for testing out various ideas for moving her through the water. First up--beyond a simple canoe paddle--is oars, which I'm still working on. Next will be a small sail, the maybe an electric outboard with solar panels.

My goal was to build a boat that was tough enough to paddle locally in most conditions, wide and long enough to sleep in so I could explore the coast without landing more than I felt like, and light enough I could put her on top of my car. I achieved all of those goals, and more: I can pick her up with one hand. She's not the prettiest thing afloat and has a few oddities in form and figure, but she's still delightful to take out on the water.

My wife is a painter, and I'd promised to start work on a studio outbuilding for her after the boat was in the water, and that too is coming along nicely. She's an architect by training, so the design is done, and the first lot of materials are sitting in the driveway under a tarp waiting for the rain to let up long enough for me to actually start building. Even though it's a relatively small building it won't be a short project, but I'm happy that we've gotten it underway.

I also did a bunch of experimentation with the RPi Zero and RPi Pico computers. The latter is a C-programmable micro-controller with a separate assembly language for programming its input-output system, and is just great fun. I still have a "rural robotics" project slated for some future date, as cleaning the gutters and whatnot is just the sort of job a robot should do.

Taking over for human thought is not the sort of thing robots should do, but apparently that's where we are these days. I'm not an anti-LLM zealot: I've heard from multiple people I respect and trust that they are using them for everything from pedagogy to coding assistants. But those people--and this is important--were already experts in their chosen fields when they started to use LLMs as tools.

The problem I have with LLMs--apart from the copyright violations used to train them and the environmental cost of running them--is two-fold. The first is that they enable poor decision-makers to make poor decisions far more rapidly than before, from "authors" and "artists" generating slop novels and painting, to businesses filling up their git repos with unmaintainable code and replacing controllable, measurable human processes with hallucinating automata. The second is that the Ponzi economy of the leading "AI" companies is going to produce a crash that will make the 2008/2009 meltdown look like the Thai Baht crisis of 1998.

Unsurprisingly, talking about this has been futile. But on the other hand, judiciously doing things in the Ponzi market has produced very good results for me this year, and promises to continue to do so next.

My other doings for the year include creating the board book whose picture heads this post, and writing a draft of either a long essay or a short book on Bayesian epistemology. I'm also studying statistical mechanics, a subject barely touched on in my formal education as a physicist, which is in aid of my work on the fundamentals of quantum theory, which continue to enhance my understanding of the subject, although of doubtful use to anyone else.

So the short version of this year is I argued against fascism and in favour of science and clean indoor public air, and I built a boat and made a book, and at the end of the year there is more fascism, less science, and no clean indoor public air, but I have a book and a boat.

I am not--despite popular opinion to the contrary--a complete idiot. Therefore when something fails to work for long enough I realize that doing more of it is probably a waste of time. Most of the talking I did this year was a spectacular waste of time, and most of the doing this year was pretty rewarding.

Ergo: the coming year will involve more doing, less talking.

Doing things is also good for me physically. I've gained strength over the year from walking with a good friend, working on the boat, and strength training, and it feels good to be able to move well and lift and carry and build. I"m old enough to realize that these things will not always be possible, and am working to maintain them for as long as I can. I've hit some of the physical targets I had for 2025, and think I have a good chance at doing OK in 2026, so long as I continue to avoid covid and flu and god knows what else.

I will always be reading, learning, and writing. I am now a grandfather, and what writing I do is more likely to be focused on books for children than wasted on adults. I'm keeping an eye on nasal covid vaccines, some of which promise broad-spectrum sterilizing power, and if any becomes available anywhere in the world I'll be on the next plane. And until then I'll still wear my KN95 and keep my home UV and filtration systems running when we have guests.

Life is short. My aim in the past decade has been to fill mine with the things that bring me joy. That's not always easy. It's not even always possible. But to the extent that it is, I am. And that is enough.