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UofWinds 442, Week 30, 2026: Flow, Area woman can't stop talking about heat pumps, family and friends are worried, Getting Off with the Luddites


Good morning. The cats have been fed and scratched (more about that later) and the kids are still sleeping. The oppressive heat and smoke have lifted from where I live and the weather feels like a blessing. I don't have many plans for the weekend except for playing another day of Earthborne Rangers, which I started last week. And making popcorn... I make myself a large bowl of popcorn every Saturday.

I am also going to set aside some time to work on my secret project! Not sure when it will be ready to launch, but you can be assured that I will let you know.

Flow


Earlier this week, I read this post on mastodon that accompanied a delightful short video of a very small owl that runs up to an outstretched human hand in order to get delicate scritches over its beak and eyes:

I love how we evolved from a social grooming species and now have the ability to use our long dexterous fingers to perform a variety of complex tasks. However we've retained such excellent grooming skills from our ancestors that animals will willingly seek out our scratches. If you ever question the meaning of life and why you are here, just remember that somewhere there is an animal that needs your scratchies.

Readers, this light little pick-me-up struck me as absolutely profound.

There is an established ritual to my mornings in which one of my cats will wait for me to sit down and drink my coffee, and then will nudge me until she gets her morning scritches. I had never considered this moment as a social grooming ritual but of course it is.

That being said, I think I was primed for this particular realization because I had just seen the delightful animated movie Flow. You might remember some press coverage of the movie when it came out a couple of years ago. It was that Latvian movie made entirely from the open-source software called Blender, which is normally employed for video games.

I think it's best to go into the movie knowing as little as possible. While the story resolves, the mysteries of its setting are never explained. I don't know if you have to be a cat-lover to fully appreciate the work and artistry that has gone into capturing the movements of the animals in the movie, but I suspect it helps. Also if you are worried about the welfare of the animals depicted and want to be assured of their survival, you can check the film on Does The Dog Die? website before you watch.

Area woman can't stop talking about heat pumps, family and friends are worried


Last year I visited a lot of car dealerships when my husband and I were out shopping for an EV to replace our 2000 Ford Focus Station Wagon, and one of the things that struck me was how unprepared and unenthusiastic the car salesmen were in their efforts to sell us their EV options. The number of times they were unable to answer our basic questions was very telling. Despite them, we bought an EV.

Shopping for a heat pump to replace our 30 year old air-conditioner from HVAC companies who still do most of their trade installing and replacing methane furnaces (natural gas is methane + stinky additive for leak detection) has been a much worse experience. I was shocked by the salespeople who had no real interest in looking at our home's vent capacity before prescribing a much larger capacity heating source... which would not fix our existing temperature issues.

Heat pump systems generally supply a greater volume of airflow at lower temperature compared to furnace systems. As such, it is very important to examine the supply airflow of your system, and how it may compare to the airflow capacity of your existing ducts... If the installation is a retrofit, the existing duct system should be carefully examined to ensure that it is adequate.

If you take anything away from today's newsletter, please remember that most HVAC companies will sell you a furnace that is way too big for your quarters.

Look, I don't really want to become another Area woman can't stop talking about heat pumps, family and friends are worried, so I'm just going to try to get it all out now:

Getting Off with the Luddites


The subtitle of Sarah Thankam Mathews' essay “Getting Off with the Luddites” is “Hanging with NYC’s tech-critical youth cultural front”. It is one of those subtitles that really could act as the title of the piece.

... in the fall a couple people mentioned New York City’s “neo-Luddite scene” to me. The things I read to find out more were mostly trend pieces about Gen-Z phoneless parties and the use of dumbphones, but in their interstices I could hazily perceive something more: a loose coalition of likeminded young people who, in the last couple of years, began to organize around divesting from Big Tech, spending less time online, and connecting with one another. In November, my partner, somehow both highly offline and in the know, sent me the link for a Luddite event titled “Should We Get Off?” advertised on the listings website RedCal. The panel promised a moderated discussion about “tech hopes + fears” that was open to all regardless of orientation toward Big Tech; its hand-drawn flyer featured a recumbent figure asking “touch grass or touch glass?” It would be held in the basement of a Midtown mall that Friday night.
I went. I was curious and open-minded, but also, maybe, a bit arms-folded.

I enjoyed this essay very much. Perhaps it fell into my favour because I am also frequently thinking about how and what to fill in the spaces in our lives – ahem – in my life – that is currently spent scrolling. Mathew's essay is largely observational reporting and being in NYC, there is a whole scene neo-luddite events for her to report on.

I will say that there is another essay that I was hoping to read instead. I would love if someone would share a comparison of the Situationist uprising in Paris 1968 with the neo-Luddite movement of today. Both can be understood as reactions to the Society of the Spectacle that make us feel like we are only observers in our own lives. These movements appear to be similar but I don't understand enough about what happened in 1968 to know if these events are the same or just look similar.

There is still time to dedicate August to being a Summer of Ludd.

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