From Cribbage to Civilization

Morning routine. SESIG with Jim at Imagine Coffee. Lunch with Karen. Book club rescheduling. Exercise routine. Walked to the grocery store. Yin yoga. Evening conversation with Bob about technology and civilization. Watched Formal Logic and The Avengers.

A day of wide-ranging discussions and physical preparation

Events and activities that occurred on Tuesday, January 27, 2026

SESIG at Imagine Coffee brought just Jim and me together for a wide-ranging conversation. The smaller gathering allowed topics to wander freely across domains without the usual time pressure.

Perfect!

Lunch with Karen at Taco Vino covered recommendations and rare achievements. She mentioned The Bear as worth watching and brought up Heather Cox Richardson's work. The highlight: Karen achieved a perfect 29-point cribbage hand, the rarest possible score in the game. She also asked to be added to the Philomath Salon distribution list, which I happily did later.

The book club required rescheduling after Rajeev reported feeling sick. The new schedule for Artificial Intelligence reading stretches from February through April: Part 1 in the week of February 8th, with subsequent parts spaced through mid-April. Peter and Larry both confirmed the revised timeline works.

Exercise checked the boxes: three 45-second planks, fifteen bird-dogs, five stretches, and fifteen curls. A walk to the grocery store added movement to the afternoon. Yin yoga in the evening continued the physical preparation for New Zealand.

The evening conversation with Bob ranged through fascinating territory. We discussed rental cars and fireplaces, then pivoted to whether wood burning produces more or less CO2 than oil heating—a question that demands actual math rather than intuition. Technology and innovation led to questions about wealth disparity and how businesses react when they realize their customer base holds values they find objectionable. The Overton Window came up as a framework for understanding shifting acceptable discourse.

Bob shared Dario Amodei's recent essay "The Adolescence of Technology," which frames our current moment as a developmental stage requiring guidance rather than pure restriction. He also recommended Peter Mulvey's TEDx talk on why intelligent life hasn't contacted us and Robert J. Sawyer's novel Calculating God—both exploring how different civilizations might approach fundamental questions about existence.

The day closed with Formal Logic and The Avengers, a study in contrasts between careful reasoning and cinematic spectacle.

The thread connecting the day's conversations—from Karen's perfect cribbage hand to Bob's questions about civilization and technology—was the pleasure of ideas explored without agenda. Small gatherings allow topics to breathe, to wander into unexpected territory, to land on questions worth sitting with rather than rushing to answer.