Bartleby, the Divorce Plaintiff: A Story of Wall-Street

by philg

What if a man could look at all of the tasks required by the roles of husband and father and, like Bartleby, the Scrivener, simply say “I prefer not to”? That’s the story in Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden. Her husband “James” is pseudonym for Henry Patterson Davis (nytimes 1999 wedding announcement) who was completely unashamed of abandoning the wife and kids to the point that he gave the author explicit permission to publish her tale in the New York Times and as a book, knowing that anyone with access to Google could trivially discover his real name and that they Daily Mail would run headlines like this:

For most of the no-fault divorce era in the U.S. (1970s onward), men have been kept in their place by a family court system that will ruin them emotionally (give the kids to the mom) and financially if they attempt to throw over the traces. Our laws are nominally gender-neutral, however, and women who have a higher income than their husbands have been vulnerable in recent decades to losing divorce lawsuits and writing monthly checks to enable their former spouse to enjoy sex with younger women (see “More and More Women Are Paying Alimony to Failure-to-Launch Ex-Husbands. And They’re Really, Really Not Happy About It.” (Washingtonian 2021)). Bell Burden’s book is about a wife who is moderately rich via inheritance/trusts but who quit her career and thus earns much less than her husband. His financial exposure in a divorce was limited by a prenuptial agreement keeping most of their finances separate (this can be the default in Germany by checking a box on the marriage license application). The family court system in Northeastern states is premised on the assumption that fathers don’t care about their children, are incapable of caring for children, and that their only valid role is financial support of the mother of the children (who can decide to spend some of the money that she receives on the kids, if she so chooses). Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage answers the question, “What happens if a white man with money acts in accordance with court system expectations?”

While married, “James” stays in harness, laboring like a Latinx landscaper:

In 2008, Susan bought us an eight-acre plot of land adjacent to our house. We wanted to secure our privacy and have space for the kids to build houses as adults. The new plot was all forest—oak trees, pine trees, brush. James was entranced with it. He created winding paths, pruned trees with a long pole saw, and sprayed every weekend for poison ivy, wearing a Roundup backpack with a nozzle. He said it would take him many years to make the paths perfect for the girls’ weddings. He imagined walking them through the woods to a small beach on the lake, steps from the osprey pole. He named the beach for Finn, and carved Evie’s initials in a fallen tree trunk beside the boardwalk. He found boulders in the woods and named them for each kid, the biggest for Carrie. He taught them how to find their rocks using his carefully tended paths.

He kept investing in our Vineyard imprint, year after year. In 2018, he designed a large addition to the garage to house his extensive collection of motorcycles and forestry equipment. He included a garden on top of the addition for me, raised beds we filled with herbs and tomatoes and flowers. In 2019, he planted blueberry and raspberry bushes on the edge of the property, plants that take several years to bear fruit.

As of 2019, in other words, he was investing time in a house that belonged to the wife (purchased with her family trust funds) whom he was soon to sue. The Covidcrats felt free to reevaluate all assumptions that Americans had about life, e.g., whether children had the right to attend school and adults had the right to congregate in churches or at work. Perhaps this gave “James” a mental nudge to question long-held assumptions. Regarding continued sex with a 50-year-old mom and continued hands-on responsibility for housing, feeding, and talking to adolescent children, “James” never said that there was anything wrong with married life, but only “I prefer not to continue with this life.” After the wife learns about her 35-year-old competitor:

He said, “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” He said, “I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done.” He said, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”

The author, her friends, and various mental health professionals were all shocked by this Bartleby-like behavior.

My stepmother, Susan, called me several times a day. We were very close, bonded from the moment she entered my life in 1972. She wept with me, both of us quiet as we cried. She was the only person who tried to reach James. She emailed him in the second week, writing that in her forty-five years of practice as a family therapist, she had never seen someone leave a marriage so cruelly. She begged him to speak to me, to do therapy with me, to try to end the marriage kindly, honorably.

[an elite neighbor on the Vineyard] leaned forward and raised both his hands, his palms facing me. He said, “I want you to understand that what James is doing is wrong. The way he left you without explanation is wrong. Walking out on his family during a global pandemic is wrong. The way he is treating you now is wrong. If he tells you it isn’t, if anyone tells you it isn’t, don’t believe them.”

[a psychiatrist] was blunt and, like the husband from overseas, she offered clear opinions. It was wrong to leave a marriage with no warning and no explanation. It was highly unusual not to want custody of kids who were as young as twelve. It wasn’t normal to search the basement for a prenup after telling children about a divorce.

A year later, the husband/plaintiff doesn’t have a more detailed explanation than “I prefer not to”:

I wrote, “You never told me what I did wrong in our marriage, why you stopped loving me. It is such an awful thing, after twenty-one years, not to know.” I had hoped something had changed, that he would give me the answer, the lost frames of the movie, something to help me understand what had happened. He wrote back, “I wish I could answer your question, something broke in me, it was me and not you, you did nothing wrong.”

Any life lessons from this book? The Martha’s Vineyard tennis club is jammed with women who have fancy degrees, but choose to not work. I.e., instead of marrying 30-year-olds with professional degrees, the men could have married 20-year-old yoga instructors and ended up with the same household income and many more kids.

The women were universally well-educated, but most, like me, had left the workforce. This felt good; in New York, I felt conflicted, and embarrassed, about having paused my legal career. I didn’t feel this way on the Vineyard, surrounded by smart women who had made the same choice.

One important lesson from the book is that people shouldn’t take money out of trusts to spend on real estate. A big point of leverage that “James” had over Belle was that she’d actually paid for their apartment in Manhattan and their house on the Vineyard with her trust funds. The prenup, however, technically gave the plaintiff the right to take half of the value out of both properties. Ultimately, there was a settlement, but perhaps the wife would have done better if her trust had owned both properties rather than her holding them in her own name or them being jointly titled. If you want to protect your kids from future family court predators, therefore, set up their trust so that the trust can buy and own property and the kids have the right to use it.

Full post, including comments

Record of New York City coronapanic

by philg

Friends in Manhattan now deny that they were ever locked down, that their kids’ schools were ever closed, that they were ever forced to wear masks, and that they ever had their vaccine papers checked.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (wife) is nominally about her husband “James” (a pseudonym for Henry Patterson Davis (nytimes 1999 wedding announcement)) deciding to avail himself of New York’s no-fault no-shame unilateral divorce system in which “I’d rather have sex with a 35-year-old than a 50-year-old” is a sufficient reason for breaking up the homes of two sets of children. The book, however, also provides some insight into how elite youngish healthy-weight New Yorkers’ processed the threat of SARS-CoV-2, a virus that was killing obese 80-year-olds.

The couple starts by fleeing the filthy virus-ridden city for their Martha’s Vineyard house and, while there, the wife learns that the husband is having sex with a mom who “was thirty-five but looked twenty“.

In the days that followed, I continued to try to hide the truth from the girls. A therapist I spoke with said I should wait to tell them until the pandemic was less scary. It was still March, the second week of lockdown. We thought it would be over soon. Or at least that the worst of it—the deaths, the shutdown, the unknowns—would end. But instead of easing, the pandemic had become more frightening. And so had I, appearing at dinner with swollen eyes and unwashed hair.

Zoom isn’t only for 18 months of pretend school:

He said he thought it would be better if I told them alone. Initially, I agreed with him. I was afraid that he would expose us to COVID. He was not in quarantine; he was having an affair in the middle of New York City. We decided we would do a family Zoom call to break the news.

May, during a brief visit back to the plagued city:

As he welcomed the girls, with the same blue mask and excited energy we’d seen in April,

September 2020, also in the city. Schools would be closed for another year, but adults were free to mingle in restaurants, meet each other on Tinder (Grindr for New Yorkers?), etc.:

We still had to wear masks, pulling them down to talk, back up when the waitress approached to take our orders.

Late November 2020, at an expensive house in the Hamptons:

Thanksgiving that year, at Susan’s house in Sagaponack, was strange and chaotic—twenty people, including my brother’s family and my cousins, all of us cooking in masks.

Diversity is our strength, but when a virus becomes more diverse it is time for renewed panic:

I debated doing something different, going somewhere new, but it wasn’t possible. COVID was still raging. The first variant had arrived in the United States in November.

The author is defending a divorce lawsuit in which her spending power is to be cut by 90 percent (a prenup kept their property and earnings separate, for the most part, and the husband/plaintiff had become a hedge fund hero), yet still has time for a full year of personal coropanic:

In early 2021, the pandemic continued to keep New Yorkers home. We were still masked, still avoiding gatherings, still scared.

While kids in NYC housing projects are consigned to watching a bored government worker on a small screen via Zoom, elite children can enjoy the company of other humans 24/7 at a boarding school:

I visited Evie at her boarding school in Delaware as often as I could, as often as the school would allow me. They had very strict rules during the pandemic. Parents could not enter buildings. The students could not leave the gates. It was like they were in prison. I brought Evie and her friends Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle. We sat outside on the lawn, in the cold, pulling down our paper masks to eat.

After years staying at home(s) and in the Vineyard tennis club, the mom/defendant goes back to work as an attorney. Her first project is trying to make sure that there isn’t any reduction in the supply of labor for landscaping at her Martha’s Vineyard house:

My law partner and I took on another immigration case. We were representing our first male client, a fourteen-year-old boy. His mother had died when he was two. He had been physically and emotionally abused by his father. He had been forced to miss school to work in their fields. He had been harassed, chased, and beaten by local gangs. At thirteen, he traveled by bus and train toward the United States, eventually crossing the border by foot. He was detained by border agents and released with a USCIS hearing date. He took a bus to New York, where he was welcomed by his maternal aunt. Neither my partner nor I speak Spanish, so we engaged a friend of hers, another former corporate lawyer, to translate. We conducted interviews, all slower with translation, and prepared his documents. We appeared at our client’s USCIS hearing and filed his paperwork in family court.

Full post, including comments

AI says you’re autistic if you don’t love Taylor Swift

by philg

“The autism epidemic is a myth” (Washington Post):

Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment.

One of the best ways to see how humans feel is, I think, to ask an LLM that has been trained on all human written expression.

The prompt

I have a friend who is a very skilled aircraft mechanic. He chooses to work primarily by himself and spends lunch hours reading technical manuals while the other mechanics are talking about the sports games they saw on television the night before. He prefers to spend evenings at home with his wife and two children rather than go out with friends or neighbors. He doesn’t speak unnecessary words. He shows up to work at exactly the same time every day. He gets upset if the other mechanics want to play Taylor Swift at a high volume in the hangar. Could he have a psychological disorder and, if so, what would it be?

Grok

Based on the behaviors you described—such as a strong preference for solitary work and focused activities (e.g., reading technical manuals during lunch), limited social engagement outside of immediate family, minimal unnecessary verbal communication, rigid adherence to routines (e.g., arriving at work at the exact same time daily), and sensory sensitivities (e.g., distress from loud music)—these traits could potentially align with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), particularly at a milder level on the spectrum.

ASD is characterized by challenges with social communication and interaction, alongside restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. For instance:

  • Intense focus on specific topics (like aviation mechanics) is common.
  • Preference for predictable routines and discomfort with disruptions (including sensory overload from noise) fits the profile.
  • Many individuals with ASD form deep bonds with close family but struggle with or avoid broader social interactions.

Gemini

… Some of the specific details you mentioned—the sensitivity to loud music, the strict adherence to routine, the deep focus on technical manuals, and the preference for literal communication—are common traits of people on the autism spectrum.

Routine: Showing up at the exact same time every day provides a sense of order and predictability.

Sensory Sensitivity: Getting upset over loud music (like Taylor Swift in a cavernous hangar) isn’t necessarily about the artist; it may be a sensory overload issue where certain frequencies or volumes make it physically impossible for him to concentrate.

Specialized Interests: A passion for technical manuals often reflects a “systemizing” brain—one that excels at understanding how complex machines work.

…

[Gemini didn’t immediately go to “autism” as Grok did, but threw it out as a possibility]

Wrap-up

Grok gets a prize for being surprised that someone who gets paid to work at Job X focuses on Job X (“Intense focus on specific topics (like aviation mechanics) is common.”). Gemini gets a prize for inferring that a person who doesn’t want to hear Taylor Swift at high volumes while trying to work has “a sensory overload issue”.

Next Steps

Maybe it would be worth investigating what kinds of prompts will cause these LLMs to suggest gender affirming surgery, e.g., “My birth certificate says that I’m male, but I feel an intense desire to see the Broadway show Wicked over and over again.”

Full post, including comments

New Floridian goes back to Maskachusetts (also: catching up with NPR)

by philg

A friend moved to Florida in the middle of 2025. He went back in February 2026 to deal with issues around selling his old house in the Boston suburbs. Some of his messages to a group chat:

After Florida this is indeed f***ing torture

I spent the entire morning doing useless shit that is neither fun nor contributes to my future well being. Shoveling snow, salting.

Even though I pay hundreds of dollars a month to an entitled lazy idiot gardener who doesn’t do anything unless you tell him repeatedly.

The house was empty yet my heat bill was $1500.

In Florida that will be the electric bill for a 20k sq ft house with another 15k sq ft of usable outdoor living space

I forgot a snow brush

Now I will have to scrape snow off my car after a [gym workout], all sweaty and freezing

Took me an hour to get to my house from the airport on Friday [about 20 highway miles]

But it is good because I can spend this time listening to NPR

He included a photo:

A little later in the chat group, from a participant who lives in a South Shore suburb of Boston:

How can anyone commute to work? It’s an hour and 20 minutes going to Cambridge now [27-mile trip, mostly highway]. I guess people don’t work from home anymore?

[me] They stopped taking the T. So even though fewer are working the traffic is as bad or worse. ChatGPT: [the MBTA has] about ~64% of pre-pandemic ridership

Speaking of NPR, we had a dealer loaner while our Honda Odyssey was being serviced (some more battery trauma, this time with a 4-month-old Duracell AGM; I paid $308 for a Honda OEM part instead of trying to get another short-lived Duracell under warranty). I didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting Apple CarPlay organized so instead of my usual Audible book I listened to Treasure Coast NPR. When I tuned in they were talking about the real victims of the Gazans’ October 7, 2023 attack into Israel: American Muslims. Islamophobia in the U.S. reached crisis proportions after October 7 and then became an emergency crisis emergency when Donald Trump was elected by the haters. This piece was followed by a story about Black-white interracial marriage 60-150 years ago in the U.S. In a country that has been transformed by Latinx and Asian immigration, thus enabling the entire economy to do without Black workers (see Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts), NPR remains stuck on the idea that Black-white relations are the defining issue of our time.

Full post, including comments

How did our Trump-hating Olympians do at the Olympics?

by philg

The Olympics are over. How did the American athletes who made the news for hating Donald Trump do in terms of medals? If we assume a just God who hates a malevolent dictator, the virtuous #Resistance should have dominated the games. Did the Trump-haters in fact do better than expected?

“Lindsey Vonn Is Clear As Ice About Her Thoughts On Donald Trump”:

Vonn, who was preparing to qualify for the 2018 Games in PyeongChang at the time, was approached by CNN to see if she would go if asked. Her response was as icy as the snowy mountains she conquers. “Absolutely not,” Vonn said. “I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president. …I want to represent our country well. I don’t think that there are a lot of people currently in our government that do that.”

Fox News recently approached Vonn about the possibility she might get a second invite to the Trump White House. “First of all, I just want to say that every Olympic athlete from Team USA is normally invited… it has nothing to do with if you win a medal or not,” she began. “I’m not going to answer that question because — I’m just not going to answer it. I want to keep my passport.” It was a more diplomatic answer than the one she gave eight years earlier, but her meaning was clear. Donald Trump has a history of meltdowns when faced with dissent, and he tends to lash out at those who dare to oppose him. He disinvited the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House visit in 2018 because they wouldn’t promise all players would salute the flag. Who’s to say the president wouldn’t find a way to keep a star skier from getting to a major competition if she said something that wounded his pride?

As with my friend Mike Hawley, Trump turned out not to be Lindsey Vonn’s biggest enemy (Journal of Popular Studies regarding Vonn’s broken leg).

Amber Glenn was apparently a trailblazer in combining unusual sexual desires (behaviors?) with ice skating (unlike 100 percent conventional NBC host Johnny Weir):

Glenn, who is the first openly queer woman to represent the U.S. in Olympic figure skating, was asked directly about President Trump, his treatment of the LGBTQ community and how it affects her at a press conference on Feb. 4 for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. The athlete, 26, told reporters that while it’s been “a hard time” for the community, she hoped to use her platform and her voice “to try and encourage people to stay strong.”

This sculpture in Austin’s UMLAUF Sculpture Garden reminds me that Taylor Swift was at the Games and sagely pointed out that “skaters gonna skate”:

(My personal favorite skaters this year: Isabeau Levito, France’s Adam Siao Him Fa, and, of course, Alysa Liu.)

Then there’s Mikaela Shiffrin. “Alpine skiing-U.S. gold medal hope Shiffrin speaks up for diversity and inclusion” (Reuters):

“It’s always an honour and a privilege to represent Team USA and to represent your country,” she told a news conference when asked by a reporter how it felt to be representing the United States “given what’s happening there”.

The query chimed with more pointed questions faced by other U.S. athletes at the Games over President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, drew a smattering of boos at Friday’s opening ceremony in Milan. The host city has also seen protests against Trump’s policies.

Shiffrin said that for her “as this relates to the Olympics, I’m really hoping to show up and represent my values. Values of inclusivity, values of diversity and kindness and sharing.”

I don’t think we have to look too far to find a hater who does not value inclusivity and diversity! Where does the diversity-loving Shiffrin live? In a mansion in Edwards, Colorado, right near the Beaver Creek ski resort and not far from Vail. Her address is supposedly 43 Hollis Lane Edwards, CO 81632. Zillow says it is worth $5.2 million. Here’s a nearby 2BR apartment that a diverse person could purchase for $2.8 million:

Then there’s Hunter Hess, the freestyle skier who says that he wants to #resist ICE, but somehow ended up in Italy rather than in Minneapolis. NBC:

“It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think. It’s a little hard,” he said. “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren’t.”

He continued: “I think for me, it’s more I’m representing my, like, friends and family back home, the people that represented it before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S. I just think if it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I’m representing it.”

“Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” he said.

I hope that we can all agree on whose moral values are deficient/bankrupt and also that “a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of” means ICE detaining migrants and not Minnesota paper day care centers siphoning out all U.S. taxpayer cash.

They won Gold for virtue and Trump-hatred, but how did the above athletes actually do in competition?

He/she/ze/they is not exactly an athlete, but Justin Trudeau did taunt Donald Trump with a “you can’t take our game” message before the Canada v. USA hockey match.

Loosely related…

Full post, including comments

TSA employees working without pay

by philg

The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees 100 percent pay for federal workers who either (1) show up to work during a “shutdown”, (2) relax at home during a “shutdown” as blessed non-essentials, or (3) vacation in Europe during a “shutdown” without using any vacation days (again, limited to those who can get classified as non-essential).

How does the New York Times characterize the potentially-slightly-delayed paychecks of TSA employees (funding ran out a week ago)? “T.S.A. Workers Brace for Another Shutdown They Didn’t Cause”:

Lawmakers left town this week without a deal to fund the department over a disagreement about reining in the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration enforcement tactics. Most of the hardships faced by employees — who are working without pay — will go unnoticed by the public with a few possible exceptions, including the people who check IDs, scan baggage and complete other security tasks at U.S. airports.

Officers are frustrated that they have to pay the price for a political fight that has nothing to do with them. It’s even worse this time, because they have to work without pay while immigration officers will continue to be paid through a separate fund.

Nowhere do the journalists mention that TSA employees are guaranteed to receive 100-percent pay so long as the U.S. government is able to print money.

Here’s another fun one… “With Latest Rollback, the U.S. Essentially Has No Clean-Car Rules” NYT, February 16, 2026):

The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official.

The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.

That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped on Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.

With no emissions standards, then, it would be legal for Toyota, GM, and Ford to stop including catalytic converters ($300-$1,500?) with their new vehicles? Here’s part of what ChatGPT said regarding the greenhouse gas limits that are potentially gone and the “no emission standards of any meaning” world described in the New York Times…

——————-

If greenhouse-gas (GHG) limits on cars were removed in the U.S., a substantial set of non-GHG emissions regulations would still remain. These target pollutants that directly harm human health and local air quality rather than global climate.

Below is a structured breakdown of what would still be regulated.

1) Criteria Air Pollutants (Clean Air Act “criteria pollutants”)

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA regulates tailpipe emissions that contribute to smog, soot, and toxic exposure.

Key regulated pollutants from light-duty vehicles

  • Nitrogen oxides (NOₓ)
    • Major driver of ground-level ozone (smog)
    • Causes respiratory illness, asthma exacerbation
  • Non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) / Volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
    • React with NOₓ to form ozone
    • Includes unburned fuel vapors
  • Carbon monoxide (CO)
    • Interferes with oxygen transport in blood
    • Acute toxicity risk in urban corridors
  • Particulate matter (PM / PM₂.₅ / PM₁₀)
    • Soot from combustion (especially gasoline direct injection and diesels)
    • Linked to cardiovascular and lung disease

These limits are embedded in EPA Tier 3 standards (phased in from model years 2017–2025).

2) Air Toxics (Hazardous Air Pollutants)

Vehicles are also regulated for toxic compounds under the Clean Air Act’s Mobile Source Air Toxics (MSAT) program.

Key examples:

  • Benzene – carcinogenic fuel component
  • Formaldehyde – respiratory irritant, carcinogen
  • Acetaldehyde
  • 1,3-Butadiene
  • Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)

Regulation occurs via:

  • Tailpipe limits
  • Fuel composition controls
  • Evaporative emissions standards

3) Evaporative Emissions

Even when parked, cars emit fuel vapors. These rules would remain:

Regulated sources

  • Fuel tank permeation
  • Hose and seal leakage
  • Refueling vapor loss

Controls required

  • Charcoal canisters (evaporative capture)
  • Onboard Refueling Vapor Recovery (ORVR)
  • Low-permeation fuel systems

These standards are especially important in hot climates (e.g., Florida, Arizona).

Full post, including comments

Barbados, Tortola, St. Lucia, and Antigua

by philg

I recently wrote up our Celebrity Ascent cruise experience and also wrote about St. Kitts. This is about the other four ports that we visited. Most of our ground activities were planned by ChatGPT.

Barbados

Despite the fact that the U.S. had just kidnapped the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, about 500 miles south, the port was relaxed.

We did the 20-minute walk to downtown Bridgetown, past the Harvard Club of Barbados (the Palestinian flag):

We ducked into the Church of the Holy Trinity (1830; rebuilt 1999):

Downtown is quiet and geared toward locals.

The National Heroes Square honors Rihanna

The synagogue (1654; rebuilt in 1833 after a hurricane) operates services on Shabbat with 30-40 people attending, mostly vacationing Jews. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site and a museum the rest of the time. Robert Kraft probably wouldn’t want to feature the historic Jews of Barbados in a Super Bowl ad. Like other Europeans, they showed up to make money in sugar cultivation, didn’t object to slavery, and moved elsewhere when the industry was destroyed by the 19th century sugar beet revolution. Intolerance isn’t always bad (see below; Jews prevented from owning enough slaves to work a plantation):

The synagogue was restored in 1987 and the Barbadians remain proud of it:

We got some ideas for repainting the Honda Odyssey from the taxi stand and headed over to the Atlantis Submarine dock:

Make sure to pay extra for the front seats!

As in the U.S., people are leaving the coronapanic signs up. Atlantis used to pack about 50 people into a small tube and the virus prevention strategy was a 5-cent mask:

A short walk away is the modest house where Rihanna grew up:

Back to the port:

Summary: a pleasant slow-paced island.

Tortola

Arrival:

We walked by the Supreme Court:

And Avis rental car?

To get to the Botanic Gardens where Donald Trump’s National Park pricing system prevails (foreigners pay 3X):

Science reminds us that “uncontrolled transport of plans and soil” is harmful to natives (uncontrolled transport of humans, on the other hand, always benefits natives):

Tortola is where a lot of people pick up their Moorings rental catamarans. They run a market where everything necessary for a good week on the water is available:

For the crypto bros who have escaped paying U.S. taxes by moving to the Ritz-Carlton Dorado in Puerto Rico:

ChatGPT told us to go to Cane Garden Bay, which is more crowded than any beach in Florida (fewer people than on some parts of Miami Beach, but the sand is not nearly as wide):

We had a nice lunch at Rhythm+Sands. The obligatory Caribbean spiny lobster:

The port includes a #Science lesson:

Here are are parked next to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters on Norwegian Epic, which seems to follow an almost identical itinerary:

Sailing away, we see some of the same sights as those enjoyed by the Moorings bareboat renters, but from a higher perch and with about 10 restaurants to choose from within an easy walk from our berths:

St. Lucia

We did a morning snorkel trip on a catamaran that included views of the famous Pitons.

Marigot Bay, where I was able to tell fellow snorkelers, “That’s just like the yacht that our family had when I was growing up”:

It turns out that St. Lucia was the birthplace of two Noble laureates:

Celebrity warned us about robberies when ashore, but we never felt unsafe walking around Castries. (We weren’t warned about crime in any of the other ports.)

St. John’s, Antigua

The port is a bit unnerving, with locals aggressively hawking their services. We were reminded to stay safe by wearing a mask:

We visited the downtown museum, inside an old courthouse. We learned that people who lived in Antigua for 3,000 years were wiped out by immigrant Arawaks from South America. After they killed all of the natives, the Arawaks lived in harmony with nature by slash-and-burn agriculture.

Just up the hill, the Catholic cathedral (1845):

Then it was time for a water taxi to Dickenson Bay, a ChatGPT suggestion that we didn’t love. Most of the facilities are controlled by Sandals, an all-inclusive resort.

Sailing away:

Conclusion

Given our own beach-adjacent status here in Florida, I don’t think I would have wanted to spend a lot of time at any of the above islands. It is more or less the same idea as what we have here in Jupiter, but with much less convenience (can’t just drive 10 minutes to the Apple Store at the Gardens after the iPhone fails; can’t get 50,000 different SKUs at a Publix supermarket 7 minutes away). Coral reef snorkeling would be an exception, but there are denser coral reefs in other parts of the world.

Coming from the miserable Northeast or Midwest, though, probably a cruise around the smaller islands in a Moorings catamaran would be great or even just a hotel stay in Barbados.

Full post, including comments

Sandpiper Bay: a dog-friendly all-inclusive resort in Port St. Lucie, Florida

by philg

As New York City moves toward a ban on pet dogs (consistent with the Hadiths; see Nerdeen Kiswani’s February 12 tweet that stirred up Rep. Randy Fine), a former Club Med in Florida has gone in the opposite direction: a Fido-welcome all-inclusive resort. Here’s a report on a weekend spent at Sandpiper Bay. We brought the kids and Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever.

There are tons of great restaurants in Stuart and Port St. Lucie. Why would anyone want to eat three (or five) meals per day at the hotel? We met a lot more people than we would have if we stayed in a regular hotel and everyone dispersed at mealtime. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is a great system…

The setting is right next to a marina on the St. Lucie River:

One can sit on the shore in the shade and read a book with birds and jumping fish for company:

This isn’t a “drop off the kids after breakfast” place like Club Med. There are some kid-oriented activities, but not enough that kids or teens can form a tribe and entertain each other. Where the resort shines is in tennis. The grounds are shared with RPS, a boarding school for future professionals, similar to Bradenton’s IMG, though much smaller (Mindy the Crippler introduced us to some of the boarding students; they do academics 4 hours per day and sports training 4 hours per day and they seem to love it. Some students do all of their sports training at RPS while living at RPS, but then do virtual school for their academics, e.g., the (free) Florida Virtual School). There are group tennis lessons every day except Sunday and you can also arrange private lessons with RPS staff.

If the kids are getting on your nerves, the good news is that unlimited alcohol is included. Don’t expect high-end vino, though, and, in fact, the Kirkland wines are superior to what we were offered at Sandpiper Bay. Perhaps that was just as well because I consumed just one drink per day as a result. There’s a relaxing riverside adults-only pool that also has a hot tub that is actually hot.

Not too many people had brought dogs, but all the ones we met were friendly. They included two Corgis, several Doodles, a Spaniel, and a Standard Poodle. There were no hassles regarding paperwork (i.e., undocumented canines are not illegal) or weight limits. Dogs were welcome almost everyone in the resort, but not within the pool fences nor inside the various buildings, including restaurants and bars. Consistent with most of the rest of Florida, it was possible to eat or drink at outdoor tables, including at the main buffet restaurant, with a dog. Mindy the Crippler used her dog bed despite the sizing mismatch:

The resort is equipped with an arcade (pay per game) and free ping pong, pool, and table shuffleboard. The shuffleboard table was a magnificent 22′ regulation length example, but almost unplayable because the hotel managers hadn’t figured out that they needed to buy wax for it (I told them to call up Shuffleboard Federation and order the correct speed for their table; they also had no silicone spray that I saw nor did they have a wiper to use between games; all very sad considering the time and trouble that some wood nerds had gone to when building the 22′ playing surface).

What about the fact that the resort isn’t directly on an ocean beach? It’s a 20-minute drive to Jensen Beach, one of the nicest in Florida.

A lot of the staff members had warm and welcoming personalities. As with nearly every other hotel in the U.S., though, they’re somewhat understaffed. Expect to wait in line and don’t expect daily room cleaning.

How are the rooms? The family rooms are huge, much better than the family room we had at Club Med Michès Playa Esmeralda (Dominican Republic). The Club Med “family room” was just a regular-sized room chopped up with more doors to the point that there wasn’t anywhere for the entire family to hang out except in the queen-sized bed of the “parents’ space”. At Sandpiper Bay, the parents’ room has two huge sofas and plenty of space for the entire family, including the pup who got her own bed ($75/day extra for the animal). The kids’ room is small, but sufficient:

What kind of people did we meet?

  • A retired but super fit pickleball enthusiast from Albany, traveling with his wife.
  • A mechanical engineer from Tampa and biomedical engineer wife who came to the U.S. from Cuba at age 16 and eventually earned a PhD in biomedical nerdism (she could be featured on my four random immigrants page, though I don’t think a Democrat politician would want to highlight her due to the fact that she was unequivocally anti-socialism and generally pro-Trump (at least preferring him to the Democrat alternatives)). They were celebrating their 20th anniversary and had left their children behind with grandparents.
  • An architect from Delray Beach whose firm was about to finish a Palm Beach barrier island starter home ($100 million construction cost; I was afraid to ask what the land had cost or what his firm’s fees might have been; remember the WSJ says $200 million is the new luxury home buy-in).
  • a mom from Plano, Texas on a three-night break with two kids and a grandma (father left behind to take care of a cat; a great metaphor for modern marriage)

A pre- or post-trip suggestion: the Port St. Lucie Botanical Gardens (admission is free; donations encouraged). They’ve got about 100 orchids and several hundred cacti and succulents.

Conclusion: The price is fair. The location is great. The dogs are friendly. The food is about what you’d expect from a Hilton or Marriott. You’re not trapped as you might be at a foreign all-inclusive. If you forgot something, drive 10 minutes to Walmart or Publix. If the kids are bored, take them to the Regal movie theater or go another few minutes to Hobby Lobby, downtown Stuart, or the Play Money unlimited pinball and video arcades (one in Stuart and one in Fort Pierce).

Packing list:

  • your own ping pong paddles
  • your own Pickleball gear
  • your own tennis racquets and balls
  • your own shuffleboard wiper, silicone spray, and speed wax

Nearest airports: Stuart (if flying yourself), PBI, Vero Beach. It’s 1:45 from FLL with a lot of interesting things to see and do on the way. It’s 1:53 from MCO with absolutely nothing to see or do in between (you could take an indirect route from MCO, though, and stop at the Kennedy Space Center in one direction (allow a full day) and Valiant Air Command in the other (all a couple of hours).

Prices right now

I checked for March 7-14, 2026. The site gives the same price for two adults or two adults+two kids. Riverside life begins at $324/night plus ruinous taxes:

Full post, including comments

AI and Coding class at MIT: What should undergraduates be taught?

by philg

Back in January, I attended an “AI and Coding” class:

There were a couple of videographers present so I’m hopeful that eventually the lectures will appear on YouTube as some previous events in this “Expanding Horizons in Computing” series have.

During the intro, we were reminded that the first thing computer nerds want to do is get rid of computer nerds:

Inevitably, though, there have been haters. Alan Perlis:

Tim Kraska was the speaker who’d done the most to determine what LLMs can do. His grad students spent 2.5 months and about $100,000 in Claude API fees replicating the capabilities of the 500,000-line DuckDB embedded database management system but in a different language (I forget which! Sadly, not Lisp). It seems that for a complex project like this, the only people who can tell AI what to do are those who could do it themselves if they had to.

Continuing Carnegie-Mellon’s tradition as “the useful place in CS” (CMU gave us the Mach kernel, for example, which is inside nearly all Apple products), Graham Neubig talked about his experience building and using OpenHands, a system a little like Google’s Antigravity in that you can tell your “agents” to write software for you and the editor connects to the LLM of your choice. Prof. Neubig demonstrated using OpenHands to build a web site for the MIT event and the results were impressive!

How good are LLMs in practice? Contrary to my own experience where LLMs are amazing at diving into huge legacy codebases and telling the human “these are the relevant files”, AI felt good but actually slowed human programmers down:

AIs cut and paste like crazy, eventually producing code with so many duplicate blocks of code that only an AI will be able to make a change consistently through a real-world system:

I enjoyed the bathroom break. The smartest humans on the planet need a lot of coaching for the operation of sophisticated machinery:

Based on the period products in what was labeled a “men’s” room, the world’s smartest people are going to struggle with the “What is a woman?” question:

Speaking of bathrooms, the ground floor restroom signs are already falling apart in the nearly-new building. Fortunately, the sacred word “inclusive” hasn’t been marred.

Towards the end of the day, Varun Mohan showed up via Zoom to make the academics look like fools. While they were dithering to get a few papers published and secure a lifetime guarantee of employment at a wage that is 1/50th of what a receptionist at NVDIA earns, an apparent teenager glued together a few open-source developer tools and added LLM integration to create Windsurf, which Google then acquired in a non-acquisition for $2.4 billion. The result is Antigravity (see Antigravity as web developer (AI in an IDE)).

What nobody could offer at the event: A clear explanation of what skills made a person a good software developer in the Age of AI and, therefore, what an undergraduate CS program should teach. On the other hand, the slides did offer a clear picture of what a typical human software engineer looks like: female and, usually, non-Asian.

For the haters who say that there is no “science” in computer science… I learned about Science starting during the walk to the event. The hardware store in Inman Square’s most prominent sign:

Not Science-related, but I love seeing Black Lives Matter signs and here a commercial property owner had devoted a huge amount of space to one. (See Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts for how the city’s merchants have kept the signs and discarded the people.)

Of course, there were the sidewalk maskers:

And the cycling maskers (note the filthy snow and trash in the background):

In the MIT event space there were 6 people sitting in front of me, 3 of whom were masked for the entire day. Here are a couple of them: I’m not sure that I understand the rationale for

The next day at the Harvard Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler section (don’t forget that before developing ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Harvard was entwined with the Sackler family), an apparent couple in which one person doesn’t wear a mask while the other does. This has always mystified me. Partner 1 is protected by his/her/zir/their mask so only Partner 2 gets infected by SARS-CoV-2 at the public venue. Then they go home and, without masks, share a confined space for days during which time the virus can trivially hop from Partner 2 to Partner 1.

Also a mystery: the person who is afraid of catching a respiratory virus and chooses a job with guaranteed exposure to hundreds or thousands of strangers each day. The mask is great protection, I’m sure, but wouldn’t it be far safer to wear the mask while working in a regular office or warehouse with just a handful of other employees nearby?

Maybe one day an LLM will be able to explain these choices?

Full post, including comments

Product Idea: AI-fueled web site crawler that highlights HTML/CSS failures

by philg

In working with John Patrick Morgan to see what capabilities today’s LLMs have for doing web page design and upgrades of existing web pages/sites, it occurred to me that there is a gap in the marketplace. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a good tool that a publisher can run after every CSS tweak that will crawl the entire site and look for pages that were uglified by the tweak, broken by the tweak, never responded to the tweak because they reference some other CSS file or no CSS file, etc.

There are plenty of tools that will look for changes to pages, but they consider every change to be a mistake. If the publisher has intentionally decided on a fresh new look for the site, these tools will flag every page on the site (could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands for a newspaper, for example) as being defective.

Gemini says that these are the best current options:

1. The Best “Set it and Forget it” Tool: Percy (by BrowserStack)

Percy is likely the closest to what you are asking for because it integrates rendering into the crawling process.

  • How it works: You give it your sitemap. It visits every URL on both desktop and mobile (simulated iPhone/Pixel/iPad viewports).
  • The “AI” part: It uses “Smart Diffing.” It ignores “noise” (like a pixel moving 1mm due to browser rendering differences) and only alerts you to actual visual changes (e.g., your navigation bar collapsing into two rows instead of one).
  • Why for you: It handles the “entire site” requirement well if you feed it a list of URLs or a sitemap.

2. The “Smartest” AI: Applitools Eyes

Applitools is the leader in “Visual AI.” It attempts to mimic the human eye and brain.

  • The “AI” part: It is smart enough to know the difference between Content changes (a date changing from yesterday to today) and Layout disasters (text overlapping an image).
  • Unique Feature: It can sometimes detect “broken” layouts even without a baseline if you use their specific “Layout Match Level” which looks for structural integrity, though it is primarily a comparison tool.
  • Mobile: It uses the “Ultrafast Grid” to render your pages on dozens of real mobile devices in seconds.

3. The “Generic Brokenness” Finder: BrowserStack Responsive Checker

If you don’t want to set up baselines and just want a tool to crawl the site and show you screenshots of every page on an iPhone X, this is the tool.

  • How it works: You enter your URL (or a batch of URLs). It spins up real devices in the cloud, loads your page, and takes a high-res screenshot.
  • The downside: It doesn’t automatically “flag” errors (it doesn’t know that the image shouldn’t be there). You still have to scroll through the gallery of screenshots yourself, but it’s much faster than checking on your phone manually.

4. The Free / Open Source Option: BackstopJS

If you are comfortable with the command line and want a free solution you can run on your own machine.

  • How it works: You create a backstop.json file with a list of your URLs.
  • The Workflow:
    1. Run backstop reference (This crawls your current site and takes screenshots of every page).
    2. Apply your CSS changes.
    3. Run backstop test (This crawls again and compares).
  • Result: It generates an HTML report showing you “diffs” (difference highlights) for every page that changed.

My Recommendation for Your Upgrade

Since you are retrofitting a legacy site, BackstopJS (if you have dev skills) or Percy (if you want a paid service) is the ideal workflow:

  1. Run a scan NOW (with the old CSS). This is your “source of truth.”
  2. Upload the new CSS.
  3. Run the scan again.
  4. The tool will instantly show you exactly which 5 pages (out of 100) broke because they had unique HTML that the new CSS didn’t account for.

Me:

You say that Percy will highlight changes to pages, but if the goal of a site redesign is to change the look of the site won’t that result in Percy flagging every page as dramatically different? What would be useful is a tool that flags only those pages that have been broken or disfigured by the change, not those that have simply changed from one style to another.

That is a very sharp observation. You’ve hit on the main “pain point” of visual regression testing: when you intentionally change the design, every page becomes a “failure” in the eyes of a standard pixel-comparison tool.

To solve this, the industry has moved toward Visual AI and Layout-Only testing. Here is how you can use tools to find “broken” pages rather than just “different” pages.

1. Applitools “Layout Match” (The Intelligence Approach)

Applitools is currently the leader in this. Instead of looking at pixels, their AI builds a structural map of the page.

  • How it helps you: It has a “Layout” match level. This mode ignores changes in colors, fonts, and specific images. Instead, it checks if the relationships between elements are still healthy.
  • What it flags: It won’t flag that your text is now blue instead of black. It will flag if your text is now overlapping an image, if a column has dropped to the bottom of the page unexpectedly, or if a button is partially hidden.
  • The Workflow: You run it once on your old site to let the AI learn the “structure” of your content, then run it on the new site.

2. Galen Framework (The “Rules-Based” Approach)

If you want something that specifically looks for “disfigured” pages without needing a baseline at all, Galen is a powerful open-source tool.

  • How it works: You write a simple “spec” file that describes what a “correct” page looks like.
    • Example: “Image should be above text on mobile,” or “Main container should never be wider than the screen.”
  • Why it fits your goal: You aren’t comparing the new site to the old one. You are testing the new site against the rules of good design. If a page has a horizontal scrollbar or a margin that is 0px wide on a phone, Galen will fail that specific page.

3. Percy’s “Grouped Diffs” (The Efficiency Approach)

Percy knows that a CSS change will break everything. To keep you from losing your mind, it uses Diff Grouping.

  • How it helps you: If you change the global margins-and-ads.css and it shifts the header on 400 pages, Percy will group all 400 pages into a single “change set.”
  • The “Broken” Finder: You look at the first page in the group. If it looks “correct” in its new style, you hit Approve All. If 398 pages look great but 2 pages look “disfigured,” the AI often detects that those 2 pages are “outliers” (different from the rest of the group) and flags them for individual review.

4. “VisualEyes” (User Attention AI)

This is a slightly different type of AI. It doesn’t look for broken code; it looks for broken UX.

  • How it works: It generates “Attention Heatmaps” based on your new design.
  • Why it’s useful: If your CSS change accidentally makes a “Google Ad” look more prominent than your “Navigation Menu,” the AI heatmap will show a massive red blob over the ad. It flags pages where the visual hierarchy has been “disfigured” in a way that will confuse a human.

Summary Recommendation:

If you want a tool that “just knows” a page is broken:

  1. Applitools (Layout Mode) is the most “AI” way to ignore style changes but catch structural breaks.
  2. Google Search Console / Lighthouse (Free) is the simplest “No-Baseline” way. You can run a Lighthouse “Accessibility” and “Best Practices” audit on your site; it will automatically flag “Touch targets too close together” or “Content wider than screen”—the two most common ways a mobile site is “disfigured.”

[after a follow-up]

By default, Google Lighthouse does NOT look at your entire site.

If you open Chrome DevTools and click “Run Audit,” it only analyzes the single specific page you are currently looking at.

However, because you are dealing with a site-wide CSS redesign, you have three ways to handle this depending on how much “manual work” you want to do:

1. The Manual Way (Single Page)

If you use the standard Lighthouse tool (in Chrome or via PageSpeed Insights), you have to enter every URL one by one. This is useful for testing your “templates” (e.g., check one article page, one gallery page, and the home page), but it won’t find a broken layout on a random page deep in your archives.

2. The “Semi-Automatic” Way (Unlighthouse)

There is a popular open-source tool called Unlighthouse that specifically solves your problem.

  • What it does: You give it your homepage URL. It crawls your entire site, finds every link, and runs a Lighthouse audit on every single page automatically.
  • The Result: It gives you a dashboard showing a “Score” for every page. If your new CSS makes a specific page’s “Accessibility” or “Best Practices” score drop (for example, because text is now overlapping or a button is too small), it will stick out like a sore thumb in the list.

3. The “Google Search Console” Way (Field Data)

If your site is already live and verified in Google Search Console, Google is actually already auditing your site for you.

  • Under the “Experience” tab in Search Console, look at “Core Web Vitals” and “Page Experience.”
  • Instead of a lab test, this shows you real-world data from users. It will group your pages into categories like “Poor,” “Needs Improvement,” and “Good.”
  • The Catch: This data is not instant. It takes about 28 days of real user traffic to update, so it’s better for long-term monitoring than for checking a CSS change you made ten minutes ago.

Which should you use?

For your CSS project, I recommend Unlighthouse.

Since your site appears to be a collection of legacy HTML files with a shared CSS, you likely have “patterns.” Unlighthouse will let you see if your CSS change worked for the 1996 articles as well as it did for the 2007 articles by showing you a side-by-side gallery of screenshots for every page it finds.

Summary Tip: If you want a quick check without installing anything, run Lighthouse on your three most different pages (e.g., a text-heavy page like “Chapter X,” a photo-heavy page like “Architecture,” and your Home Page). If those three pass the “Mobile Friendly” test, 90% of your site is likely safe.

Full post, including comments