Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2110: Filibuster is a one-directional filter, an apology for Democratic inertia.

 

This is a  brief note-to-self on the one-way nature of the filibuster.

The Democrats in the Congress seem to be getting some grief for not doing much to stop the dismantling/destruction of fill-in-the-blank (the Federal government, NATO, international trade, our system of justice, and so on).

And while that is true, to all appearances, I think it’s mostly the case that there’s not much they can do.

Which brings me to the filibuster, as I understand it.  In the Senate, if the majority is under 60%, the minority party can use the filibuster rules to stop new legislation from being passed.  Or considered.  Whatever.

The operative phrase there is “stop new legislation”.  The filibuster allows the (significant) minority party in the Senate to stop the opposing party’s new legislative initiatives.

But suppose stopping legislation isn’t your problem.  Instead, in this case, you are begging for The Senate to Take Some Action.  (That’s more-or-less what you’re calling for.  Which, for the Senate, I think means passing something.)  And nothing is happening, despite apparent gross overstep of the Executive.

In the current situation, the filibuster doesn’t do spit for the minority party.  The action of the majority can be stopped.  The inaction of the majority can’t.

As I see it, Republicans in the Congress have given up enforcing some basic tenets of the Constitution.  Which, as with all laws, only really exist if they are enforced, or at least believed to be enforced.

I can only assume that, in exchange, this allows the Executive to do things they (Republicans in the Congress) agree with, without having to pass laws to achieve those outcomes.  An ends-justify-means thing, maybe.

The moral of the story is that if the Republican Congress won’t enforce the Constitution — and I think Jan 6 made that clear — those parts of the law that would require the Congress to step up to the plate are suspended.

This is as good an explanation as any of having entered an era where any legal fig leaf will do.  Hence the spate of hitherto-unrecognized national emergencies.  E.g, Fentany smuggling at the Canadian border justifies a 25% tariff on Canadian metals and machinery.  And if that just chops apart the North American car assembly system — except maybe Tesla — then, well, oops.

This is classic bad policy-making.  And it’s what we get, with an autocrat.

Conclusion

I don’t think the Founding Fathers anticipated having a branch of government simply refuse to defend its legal prerogatives.  That is, a Congress enabling the President to do as he pleases.

At the extreme, if the House won’t impeach, and the Senate won’t convict, no matter what, there can be no constitutional crisis.  The flip side of which is that any law that requires enforcement by action of the Congress is effectively suspended for the duration, at the convenience of the President.

And for the minority party of the Senate, where filibuster is your main tool, I think you’re just kind of out of luck.  You’ll be allotted your time to speak in public hearings.  I think the Senate still functions to that extent.  Beyond that, it’s a Republican Congress, they seem to be OK with this, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Two years of this is locked in.  Plan accordingly.

Post #2109: A glimpse of clarity

 

Dual State 

I don’t normally say “you should read this”, but you should read this, in The Atlantic:  America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State, by Aziz Huq.  That term — the dual state — crystallized a whole lot of what’s been going on.

Read.  Or read not.  The full thing is behind a paywall.

It’s not something that can be easily nutshelled.

The economic gist is that continued rule-of-law, for the little people, is of great economic value.  In essence, it’s increasingly harder to do normal business as civil order breaks down.  E.g., Nobody’s stupid enough to turn off the electricity over an ideological difference.  So far.

The end product is the dual state.  Partly, it’s a place that seems to be governed in a fairly normal fashion (particularly if you are fairly mainstream), but with an increasingly large “other” sphere of government run as if it were unrestrained by law, essentially life at the whim of the King-and-Advisors.

You hope you’re living your life outside of their sphere of interest.

You keep on keeping on.

And you wish somebody could keep that lawless behavior in check.

But if the House won’t impeach and the Senate won’t convict, there can be no Constitutional crisis, because the Congress (currently) will not invoke the powers granted to it by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court doesn’t impeach.  The Congress won’t.  Ergo, no Constitutional Crisis.

Subscribing.  I’ve been doing a lot of subscribing.  It’s the least I can do.  Or damn near.  And occasionally I read something that clarifies the picture.

First they came for the Socialists,

This entire genre of memes can now be classified as common corollary of the dual state.

If, at first, neither the King nor his minions take exception to you, then, presumably, you are OK.  At least in the sense of being safe, for now.

You do have to worry, though, if there’s not some sort of internal dynamic at work.  To maintain something like this, don’t you always have to have an an enemy.  And, as you succeed in cowing/conquering your enemies, don’t you nedd a continuous supply of fresh enemies?  At which point, you turn from a simple yes/no safe/not-safe binary, to more of a continuous variable:  If there’s an enemies list, and there’s an imperative to keep it fresh, then how far down the list are people like me?

All else aside, the size or extent of that safe space remains unknown.

Putting aside the entire issue of that the unsafe space — the “whim of the King” portion of Dual Government — should not exist.

Canada

I see so much peppy upbeat messaging about what’s gone on in Canada recently.

Au contraire mon frère.

What we’ve seen, mostly, is how people pull together in the face of a common external enemy.

Not sure that’s a great lesson to be offering the folks next door, right now.

Conclusion

The Atlantic article by Huq (above) noted that not all dual states end up in massive wars.

Cold comfort is better than no comfort at all.

 

Post #2108: AIOMG

As in, OMG, I didn’t realize AI could do that.

If you think you’re having those AIOMG moments more and more frequently, that it is not your imagination.  AI is improving and morphing faster than you — or at least, I — would have believed possible.

A month is like a year, stuff that’s two months old is passe.  This stuff is improving not at the speed at which software improves, but at the speed of learning.

It’s hard to know where to start.

Join the Borg

After doing my last post, I realized that now I can easily post transcriptions of my own voice recordings. 

In effect, the written transcription of a one-person podcast. 

So I'm using my phone like an old-style dictaphone, turning it on and off after I compose my thoughts and come up with a complete sentence.

Weirdly, I find that this has much the same effect on my language processing as does using a typewriter. 

There's a real premium on getting your shit together first and then speaking, and not the other way around.

Dictation is nothing new.  Anything voice-activated or with speech-to-text capability already does this.  My TV remote does this.  Everybody’s phone does this.  And so on.

And it’s not as if I haven’t tried this in the past.  But the speech-to-text function in (say) 2013 Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired.  I tried to integrated it into my business, but it was so error-ridden as to be worse than unusable.

Whereas this current generation of AI-driven speech-to-text produces perfect transcriptions.  Or, if not perfect, then about as close as one could possibly hope for.

And it’s a different thing to do it for my own self, for this purpose.  I’ve already had somebody knowledgeable tell me to try this, if for no other reason than to offer the consumer a choice of format.  But I never thought I might substitute talking this blog, for writing it.

What I’ve done above is a bit different because I did it dicatation-style, not podcast-style.  That is, the transcript is meant to be used as-is, with little or no editing, as a written product.  This requires taking the time to compose and speak in complete, logical sentences.  So I’m not sure how much time this saves, relative to writing it out from the start.

But it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to practice doing that, every once in a while.  That is, thinking before you speak.  Not in an attempt at censoring myself, but merely in an attempt to speak coherently, instead of the usual logorrhea.

Transcribed podcasts, by contrast, are meant to be interpreted as conversational English.  Even when consumed as a written transcript.  There, the transcription is not intended to read as if it were … written, if you get the drift.  Even if you take out all the uhs and ers, it’ll be as non-linear and piecemeal as conversation is.  Even the best off-the-cuff speakers will break many rules of written grammar.

The death of knowledge-worker career paths for middle-class upward mobility.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a fellow who's deeply involved with AI. And the one thing we agreed upon is that AI is going to kill entry-level positions and mid-level positions in the knowledge worker industries. I think this shuts down a common path to upward mobility for the current middle class.

And for sure, it ain't going to do anything good for Vienna, VA property values, because we are in the middle of a knowledge worker area. 

What this does to the value of an education is anybody's guess, but my guess is that it reduces it on average substantially with all the knock-on that implies for the U.S. education industry.

This is AI replacement theory, in a nutshell, first discussed in:

Post #2103: This and that.

And the whole operation is now driven by firehoses of money.   Those firehoses deriving from the elimination of (forerly) paying, staffed junior positions.  The work model moves from Principal and junior staff, to Principal and some AIs.  The first person to be able to claim to eliminate or reduce job X, Y, or Z can grab some of the savings from elimination of those (paying, human) jobs.

This, not unlike any other labor-saving invention, ever.  It’s just that, in part, it’s labor that I used to do.  This time they’re coming after my job.  If I still had a job.

 

Conclusion:  This seems like the final shredding of the U.S. middle class.

My brain is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that it is now largely obsolete.  I am not alone in this feeling.  Just today, my wife commented that many of the jobs she held, earlier in her life, will be all-but-eliminated by AI.

I note, parenthetically, that the rapid, flawless transcripts (in plain text, above) are from TurboScribe, which costs $20 a month ($10 if I’d commit to a year).  Practically speaking, unlimited use.

There used to be a profession of “transcriptionist”.  I can recall it taking week(s) to get the transcripts back from monthly public meetings.  I haven’t checked, but I’d bet that’s a thing of the past.

Intellectually, I get it.  I grew up in the pre-calculator era, when arithmetic was done with paper and pencil.  Those arcane skills have been essentially useless for decades, and I have not overly mourned their loss of relevance.

Intellectually, I realize that professions wax and wane in their economic importance.   E.g., the fraction of the work force engaged in broad categories such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and so on have changed over time.

Of late, I’d say that the urban information worker, broadly defined, was King.

And, AI may not de-throne him, but for sure, it’s going knock down the population employed in that “industry” a peg.  Anybody who makes their living doing the grunt-work of knowledge work — the junior attorney, the research assistant, the para-this or para-that — I’d expect that a lot of those jobs are going and they’re not coming back.

By contrast, I draw a sharp distinction with robotics.  I’m guessing that anybody who actually (in whole or in part) handles solid objects will be OK.  An AI-equipped robot is still a robot.  I don’t expect (e.g.) robot electricians any time soon.

As a final Vienna Lemma:  Areas that benefit greatly by the presence of many information workers will likely be adversely affected, economically, by the next phase of the AI revolution.

I bet property prices around here are going to take a hit.  To some small degree, from the first round of attacks on Federal employment.  But more generally, Vienna is like the epicenter of housing for an affluent information-worker-centered workforce.

We’ll see.  It takes a lot to rattle the housing market in this area.  Even in 2008, when the housing bubble collapsed (and nearly took the U.S. banking system with it), real estate prices in Vienna were merely flat-ish for a few years.

At any rate, a significant decline in real estate prices would be interesting, for at least the reason that it hasn’t happened here (in Vienna, VA) for a long time.

Maybe we’ll finally see the end of the tear-down boom.  But I’ve predicted that several times before.

Post #1959: Town of Vienna, slowdown in the tear-down boom?

Post #2107: Vienna Town Council FY 26 Budget Work Sessions 3/15 & 3/17

 

In this post, I use two different off-the-shelf AI products to transcribe, then summarize, about ten hours of budget discussions by the Vienna Town Council.

If that sounds like your idea of a good time, then read on.

Source for image above:  From reporting by Angela Woolsey at Fairfax Now.

The problem in a nutshell

By Claude Monet – https://www.artic.edu/artworks/64818, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80548066

I’m trying to find a needle in a haystack.  The needle is the word “aquatic” or “pool”.  The haystack is the roughly 10 hours of audio recording, for the marathon Town Council work sessions on the FY ’26 (year-starting-July-’25) budget.

For reasons that hardly matter here, I want to know what Town Council said, in their Town budget work sessions,  regarding funding a proposed municipal pool.  That, because a friend brought that Fairfax Now headline, above, to my attention.  Whereas last I heard, anything having to do with that pool decision was postponed until August.

The problem is, Town Council’s entire discussion of this issue might be just a few seconds, if they said anything at all.

And that’s out of about 10 hours of recorded discussion for those two work sessions.

How can I efficiently search that much audio, for what may (or may not) be a tiny snippet of discussion?

Surely, searching (and summarizing) a nice, structured discussion like this is a task made for AI.

If one AI is good, two must be …

… necessary, sometimes.

In this case, I used Google’s NotebookLM as my AI research assistant, to sift through the information and answer my questions.

But first I needed to call in a specialist — TurboScribe — to do the heavy lifting of converting the 10 hours of audio recording of the Town Council work sessions into a written transcript of what was said.

In any case, NotebookLM (the AI research assistant) choked on those big audio files.  It’s not clear why.  I was forced to back up a step, and use an AI specializing in transcriptions, and get the audio transcribed to text.  Then I fed those (relatively tiny) meeting transcriptions to NotebookLM, along with the proposed budget itself (from the Town’s website), and a handful of short .pdfs that the Town had posted on Granicus, for these budget work sessions.

(Meeting transcripts are probably worth doing in their own right, given how little it costs.  From my standpoint, $20 a month (or $10, if you’ll pay for a year in advance) buys me almost unlimited audio-to-text transcriptions.)

I note that all of this — the transcription of the audio, and the production of the summary of the content — was via simple drag-and-drop interface, along with some cut-and-paste.  Plus asking a question or two.

Once I figured out what to do, it really didn’t take much skill to execute it.

Step 1:  TurboScribe conversion of audio to text.

I broke the day-and-a-half of audio discussion into three files.  TurboScribe then produced the following three transcripts:

TRANSCRIPT of March 15 2025 work session PART 1
 TRANSCRIPT of March 15 2025 work session PART 2
 TRANSCRIPT of March 17 2025 work session

A link for the full .pdf documents on Google Drive is in the final section below.

I didn’t check the quality of the transcripts beyond noting that the Mayor’s opening statement (above) reads pretty much as it should, and about as I recall it, from the Town’s video of the meeting.

The language may look awful as-written, but that’s normal.  I can recall being horrified the first time I ever read one of my presentations transcribed.  The broken sentences and such above, that’s all perfectly normal, and (see for yourself on the Town’s video of the meeting) the Mayor’s opening speech was completely coherent as spoken word.  This is just a weird-but-true way about how English works.  The informally-phrased spoken word can be perfect understandable, and yet break every rule of written grammar.

Step 2:  Using Google’s NotebookLM to summarize the information.

I fed the three transcripts (plus the proposed budget itself, and a few sparse supporting documents posted with the work session) to Google’s NotebookLM.

At this point, things get a little tricky.  The sticking point is that if I include the actual written budget document as a source, NotebookLM tends to crib its answers from that.  And so, what you get in many cases is simply a summary of the Town’s party line.

So, if I ask for a FAQ about the budget discussions, I can get this:

First FAQ, including town budget, party line

But if I exclude that big, written budget document, I get a much vaguer and more free-form summary:

First FAQ, EXcluding town budget, unbalanced results

Finally, when I asked NotebookLM a pointed question about funding for an aquatic center or pool, the results suggest there was no useful discussion of the topic.

Pointed question, two answers

Finally, I can answer this “pool” question more directly simply by searching the transcripts for “pool”.  There was only one brief discussion, in the 3/17/2025 session, and it seemed to confound the possible municipal pool with some aspect of replacing Patrick Henry library.

Conclusion

Bottom line, near as I can tell, there was no substantive discussion of the budgeted operating reserves for the pool.

Page A-9 of the budget lists the $200K operating reserve for the pool.  But this item appears to have drawn zero discussion over this day-and-a-half of Town Council work sessions.

More generally, even though this was a rough cut, I think I can see the value in using AI this way.  Practically speaking, I’m not going to listen to 10 hours of audio.  Practically speaking, having an AI listen to that, and then asking the AI questions, is a lot more efficient.

The .pdfs with the transcripts and the Google NotebookLM output can be accessed on Google Docs, at this link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hnYVVRLNuS83IScEZunlgsxzs0sAEy-b?usp=sharing

Addendum:  A note on outputting documents from NotebookLM.

One of the obnoxious features of NotebookLM is that, as far as I can tell, it has no export functions.

It will produce nicely-formatted documents, but only within NotebookLM itself.  My sole option was good old copy-and-paste, and everything I pasted those copied documents into (e.g., Word, WordPress) simply dropped all the formatting.  Which made those essentially un-readable.

I read a lot of advice on how to get around this, all of which either was nonsense, or simply did not work for me.

Turns out, the trick is to cut and copy the NotebookLM documents, and paste them into a Google Documents document.   Apparently, whatever NotebookLM writes in, it’s the native formatting for Google Docs.  And when you do that — if you keep it all in the Google family — then the formatting is largely preserved.

And then, Google docs will allow you to export the document in more-or-less any format you wish.  Which is how I produced the summary .pdfs in the folder above.

Addendum:  I’ve seen this “analysis-tool-as-data-roach-motel” gambit before.  That is, products where, once your data checks in, it never checks out again.

So, intentional or not, the lack of an export tool that I can use directly, from  NotebookLM (a paid version of it, no less) — that has the same feel to it.  It doesn’t want to let go of (what I consider to be) its end product.

At some level, I’m satisfied that I have stumbled through a way to get some useful, blog-able product, from it.  And I am unsurprised that this involved using yet more Google products (Google Docs, in this case). 

It’s the way the world works.  Deal with it.

Post #2105: From Citizens United to Citizen Musk.

 

The perfect post to write on a drizzly, overcast day.

I woke up grumpy this morning and have seen no reason to change.

From Citizens United to Citizen Musk.

I think there’s an obvious line to draw between the first, and the second.

If you step back from it, Musk effectively bought (partial) control of the Federal government for a mere quarter-billion dollars. Which, when all is said and done, is pocket change for a guy with a net worth in the hundreds of billions.

So … if that’s now OK … aren’t there a whole lot of other similarly-well-off people for whom that amount might likewise seem like a trivial investment?  If nothing else, you can’t take it with you.  No shortage of uber-rich old people in this world.

And so, this morning, my bet is that the current odd regime — Trump/Musk whatever-it-is — is just the first.

Eventually, I think the Supreme Court will figure out that what they did, not in theory, but now in actual practice.  They put the Government of the United States up for sale.  Not just to the current whatever-it-is Trump/Musk thing.  But the likely string of similar ones that will now replace it, as ownership of the Federal government changes hands.

The technology has been proven, so to speak.  Do you have a strong personal interest in the direction of Federal government?  Is that direction radically different from the direction it is taking now?  (Answer:  Yes, because if not, you’d work through the existing government, not remake it.)  Do you have a spare quarter-billion to spend?  Do you have a Dr. Strangelove-ian uncontrollable Hail Victory! urge?

I think a lot of people might qualify, based on the first three questions, anyway.

And, like America’s Cup, it only takes one or a few of the super-rich, every four years or so, to keep the game going.

So, just at a time when AI has supercharged the effectiveness of propaganda, where disinformation is already rife in an America stupid enough to get its “real” news from social networks …

The Supreme Court opened and allows this pathway to control of the Federal government.

And … yeah, that’s going to turn out to be a bad thing.

But we’re stuck with it.  With Trump/Musk, and its similar successors — until Citizens United is reversed.  As I see it.

Until that time, anybody who thinks he can fill Musk’s shoes seems legally welcome to take a shot at it.

So, I say, think of Musk not as the interloper, but as the pioneer.

And have a nice day.

Post #2104: Ninety pounds and still a loser.

 

My weight loss has now reached the point of being boring.  To me, I mean.  I’ve always been able to bore other people with it.

In any case, as I pass 90 pounds lost, two months after I passed 80 pounds lost, all I need do is rewrite the prior post, plugging in the current numbers.

This morning I weighed 205 195 pounds.  So I’m calling it 80 90 pounds lost, in just under a year and a half, since I embarked on this course back in September 2023.  My BMI is now just under 28 over 26.  If I can lose another 20 10 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.

Otherwise, I just seem to have settled down to a sustainable routine.

I have posted on this topic before.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

 

1:  Wardrobe turnover speeds up as you get thinner.

Socks, gloves, and hats are the only clothing I retain from my obese days.  Everything else has gone to the thrift shop/rag bag.  Underwear, outerwear, and all that fits between.  And shoes, as my old shoes were both too loose and too stiff-soled for a lighter me.

At first, passing along my now-oversized clothes was kind of exciting.  It wasn’t merely the positive reinforcement.  It felt a bit risky to get rid of my 2XL stuff.  The promise being that I’d never again need it.

But it’s edging into pain-in-the-(less-voluminous)-butt territory.  It seems to me that, far from settling down as I near my target weight of 185, the pace of change has sped up.  I’m getting rid of too-large jeans that I bought new, maybe half a year ago.  Ditto for putting holes in belts that I know I’ve modified recently.

Turns out, that’s not an illusion.  A little simple (?) calculus shows that, for a constant monthly weight loss, your reduction in waist size speeds up as your waist gets smaller.

Formally, model the male torso as cylinder of fat, of radius R.  Belt size is the circumference of the cylinder, 2πR.  Your weight is proportional to πR2H, the volume of the cylinder of height H.  Calculus tells us that the derivative of weight with respect to radius (d(πR2H)/dR = 2πRH.  That is, it’s proportionate to your belt size.  So, if I lose the same amount of weight every month, I have to lose more inches off my waist at a lower belt size, than at a higher one.  Bottom line, between where I started (46″) and now (36″), if I continue to lose weight at a constant five pounds per month, I now have to re-size my clothes about 25% more often (46/36 =~ 1.25). 

It’s not a huge effect, but it’s dead opposite of what I expected.  I expected the changes to slow down as I approached my target weight.  But, in fact, if the weight loss occurs at a constant 5 pounds per month — a consequence of aiming for a roughly 500 calorie deficit each day — wardrobe changes speed up a bit as I get thinner.

That’s just a consequence of there being less of me, to contribute to the five-pounds-a-month weight loss.

2:  I enjoyed my last gym workout.

I recognize the above as a properly constructed sentence.

But I do not recognize it as anything I was ever likely to say.  Nor, to my certain knowledge, had I ever said anything remotely like that in the past.

Until my last trip to the gym where, after doing some token weight-lifting, I did the ultimate old-guy thing.  I spent an enjoyable, low-intensity hour on the elliptical, sweating in time to the oldies.  Courtesy of:

Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

Anyway, between the weight loss, and the obvious beneficial knock-on effects on (e.g.) the bones of my feet, being in better shape, and eating adequate protein, I’m feeling pretty chipper, physically.

Post #2023: Protein supplements and building muscle mass.

I’ve never hugely disliked going to the gym.  I’ve been doing it all my adult life.

But this whole enjoying-the-workout thing is a new one on me.

Conclusion:  Sometimes boring is good.

I have no diet secrets to offer you.  At this point, I think there are no diet secrets.

Weight loss is all about calories eaten, versus calories burned.  From that standpoint, all calories are equal, and it makes no difference what you eat.  Only how much.  There are no magic weight-loss foods.

Your new diet is forever.  If I go back to eating as I used to eat, I’ll go back to weighing what I used to weigh.  With the obvious-but-needs-to-be-stated corollary that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as you get there.

Your tastes will change.  Or, more properly for me, my cravings changed. I’d heard people say that would happen, but I absolutely did not believe it until it happened to me.  I still like all the foods that I used to eat, back when I was fat.  But I don’t eat them now.  And, importantly, I don’t miss them.  I don’t crave them.

Slip into your new diet slowly, by identifying and correcting the worst dietary faults first.  For me, this started with eliminating booze.  Once I was sober, then my habit of eating “starch bomb” meals (e.g., bowl-of-pasta) was clearly next up on the had-to-go list.  So that went.  And so on.  Until I eventually got to how and what I eat now (mostly salads, fruits, whey protein, lean meat, non-starchy cooked vegetables.  And cheese.

But that’s me. A life without cheese is a life not well-lived.

But you?  You eat whatever and however you want, as long as you keep within your calorie limit.  And, eventually, you’ll get smart enough to avoid the foods that make that hard for you to do that.  You’ll figure out what works for you, over time.  You evolve your own diet.

Lose two ounces a day.  Aim for no more than a pound a week weight loss.  Use an on-line calculator to determine your daily calorie needs as a sedentary person.  (See below for accounting for exercise).  Subtract 500 from that to get your daily calorie target.  Eat that many calories, roughly.  Assess the accuracy of that estimated 500-calorie-a-day calorie deficit by crudely tracking your weight and monitoring your level of hunger.

You’ll get a lot of dieting advice on eating specific foods, and avoiding others.  Some diets want you to exclude entire food groups (e.g., no carbs, no fat, etc.).

That sort of extreme skewing of your food mix may work for you.  But what works for me is eating a balanced diet, with just three twists.

First, everyone agrees that you should avoid “starchy carbs” or “refined carbs”.  I’ll agree, to the extent that any servings of that need to be kept small.  So, I still eat bread, but only in the form of the occasional 100-calorie slider roll.  But I no longer eat pasta, even though that was a mainstay in my obese days.  In any case, large portions of simple carbs mess up your metabolism.  An hour later and you’ll be hungry again, metaphorically speaking.

Metabolism-wise, having a big portion of some high-glycemic-index food is not doing yourself any favors.  Doing that routinely, even more so.

Second, savory “ultra-processed” foods — I’d guess Doritos are the poster child there — I cannot have in the house.  Because, even after all this time, I’ll binge them if they are around.  Hilariously enough, artificially-cheese-flavored rice cakes fall into this category.  Rice cakes?  They are only 45 calories each, but I end up inhaling them if I start eating them.

Compare that to, say, a nice, savory cabbage soup.  Even though I make a fine cabbage soup, somehow I seem to have no trouble, whatsoever, stopping after one bowl of cabbage soup.  It’s tasty.  Sometimes it’s borderline delicious, in a cruciform-vegetable kind of way.  But it just doesn’t hot-wire my brain and light it up the way the artificial cheese flavor does, in those rice cakes.

So, I respect my limit and just don’t go near the stuff.

Third, as noted, I use whey protein powder as a significant source of low-calorie protein.   Otherwise, with so few calories available daily, to meet the USDA protein recommendation, I’d have to eat nothing but meat.  More-or-less.

In particular, I have found “protein pudding” (the Jello variant) over frozen berries to be a mainstay of my diet.  It tastes like sweet chocolate ice cream, but provides as much protein as a serving of meat.  I also put the flavored stuff in my coffee, in lieu of milk or other coffee creamer.

I offer no apology for resorting to these artificial products (whey powder, Jello sugar-free pudding).  Without them I’d have a hard time meeting both my daily calorie maximum (~1700 calories) and my daily protein minimum (1 gram protein per KG body weight).

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Beyond that, I just eat in small amounts.  Space those out over the day.  Absolutely standard diet advice.  So I eat three or four small (300-calorie) items (e.g., salad with salad dressing), plus three or four 100-calorie snacks (e.g., an apple).  Plus however much cheating I feel comfortable with that day.  And makeup calories for any extra burned at the gym.  All with an eye toward eating an average of about 500 calories a day less than what I need to maintain my weight.

Exercise calories are accounted for separately, as I do it.  On days when I exercise at the gym, I eat to make up for those additional calories spent.  (But note that you must net out your basal metabolic rate from whatever calorie count you get for a given exercise.  E.g., if I burn 600 calories in an hour on the elliptical exerciser, I get to eat an additional 400 calories of food that day.  The 200/hour slippage is the calories I’d have burnt in that hour merely by being up and about — calories already accounted for in the “sedentary calorie need” calculation done at the very start.

Practically speaking, this adds a whole new dimension of “bonus” to exercise.  I get to eat more, on a gym day.  Not hugely more.  Ideally, only as much more (in calories) as I burned at the gym.

And that’s it.  No secrets.  Aim for slow weight loss.  No alcohol.  Avoid large servings of anything with a high glycemic index.  Eat lots of fruits and non-starchy vegetables.  Get plenty of roughage.

Lift weights to keep up your muscle mass as you diet.  Eat a gram of protein a day per kilogram of body weight.

In hindsight, all I’ve done is follow standard, mainstream dieting advice.

But only as a last resort.

Post #2103: This and that.

 

Well,

a)  this is a blog, after all, and

b) if the President can flip flop daily on tariffs, then

c) it’s hard to see the shame in having a mere blog post that wanders a bit.

1:  AI replacement theory

1: Every human job that can be replaced by AI will be.

2: Every human job that requires speech and reasoning alone is at immediate risk of being replaced by AI.

3: All other human occupations will be condensed to the portions that can’t feasibly be replaced by AI.

 

These are laws of economics, not computer science.  New technologies have been doing this sort of thing since the start of the industrial revolution.  There’s nothing about this that’s entirely unique to AI.

This time, instead of technology making your biceps obsolete, now it’s making your brain obsolete.  The most important difference between the AI revolution and what has gone before is that this time, they’re coming for my job.

I just can’t quite get my big brain around the fact that my big brain is obsolete.

It’s going to take me a while — like a few posts — to work out the ramifications of that, to my own satisfaction.

If nothing else, if this does what I think it’s going to do, to “knowledge workers” generically, that’s got to be nothing but bad news for the real estate market here in Northern Virginia.  Pile on a dip in Federal employment, and, as I live here, I should pay attention to what’s happening with AI.

Even though I’d much rather not.

 

2: My garden is a mess

Yonder it sits, as of late fall of last year (left), and as of about 5 minutes ago (right).

In theory, this should be some sort of planned operation.  E.g., I want to grow such-and-such, in this-and-so quantity.  And so on.

In practice, I can’t even get that far.

Instead, this has turned into a game of fixing the worst errors, then seeing what’s left.

First, I need to get the sun-rotting plastic out of my garden, and disposed of.  But, as I (intentionally!) made the raised beds by recycling plastic coroplast campaign signs, removing those plastic sides effectively destroys all the existing raised beds. 

But, second, I always intended these beds to be temporary, and, ultimately, I figured the dirt would fill some of the worst “valleys” in my back yard.  So that’s what I’m doing — dismembering the side-less corpses of these raised beds and using the dirt to fill the largest and most annoying valleys in my lawn.

(These “valleys” are the aftermath of the installation of the ground loop for the ground source heat pump, and they continue to sink, ever-so-gently, 20 years after that was installed.  It really does not surprise me that this method (parallel trenches 6′ deep) seems relatively rarely used, compared to drilling a vertical well for the ground loop.  I already shoveled 10 tons of dirt trying to fill those valleys the first time.)

Third, I’m re-using the concrete corner blocks from the defunct low beds to build fewer, taller, better-placed raised beds.  I don’t actually want the resulting raised beds, but they are a place to store the concrete corner blocks, and most importantly, to store some of the soil that’s in the former plastic-sided beds.

Interesting calculation there. When I started these beds, I brought in 10 cubic yards of 50/50 mixed topsoil and compost.  And now, when I do the arithmetic on what’s left (bed dimensions x bed depth = volume of soil in bed), come up with about 5 cubic yards.  Which is just about exactly what I ought to have, if all the organic matter (the compost) in the original mix has rotted and so returned to being C02.  The upshot being that, at a density of about a ton per cubic yard, I’d have to shovel 5 tons of dirt, to get rid of these beds.  Not clear I’m up to that task any more.   Not clear that I’m not.

So, as stupid as it was to have to move a raised bed once, I am, in effect, moving them twice.  But the second time is largely to get rid of their dirt.  It’s a planned-life-cycle kind of thing.

And the new garden plan, such as it is, involves growing more stuff that neither the deer nor the bugs want to eat. But that my wife and I do.

That’s a very short list of crops.  That’s about as far as I’ve gotten on my garden plan for 2025.

3: Bee hotels, the final chapter begins

I am putting up my native (mason, orchard) bee hotels for the last time.  Mine are bundles of 6″ (or so) bamboo tubes, with smooth-cut ends (cut while green, or commercial pre-sanded cutoffs), with inside diameter around 3/8″ inch.  Above, I’m using Virginia clay to seal off one end of each tube.  When I have those sealed and dry to my satisfaction, those bundles of nesting tubes will be hung securely over the site of the emergence box (Post G25-001), ready for spring to commence.  And for the female mason bees to use at their convenience.  Next spring, the (now filled, hopefully) bundles of nesting tubes will have to be taken down and placed in next year’s bee emergence box.

Post G25-001: Finishing off my mason bee hotel duties

 

I have a small back-yard vegetable garden.  I’ve tried to keep that garden attractive to bees.  Partly, that’s for pollination.  Partly, that’s a good way to avoid using the worst and most persistent pesticides.

This post explains why I’m not going to be putting out a “bee hotel” in my garden this year.

Not only do these bees do nothing for my garden, I’m not sure I’m doing them any favors by providing such a large number of nesting sites.

Two years ago, I bought a little bee hotel at Home Depot.  In theory, this array of narrow, closed-ended tubes provides nesting sites for local native and solitary bees, e.g., mason bees, orchard bees.  (But not social bees, like honey bees or bumble bees.)

And, sure enough, about half the nesting tubes in that Home Depot bee hotel ended up filled, the first year I hung that up.  As shown at the left.

(I now know that this is a terrible bee hotel design and I would never buy it again.  The tubes are too short (4″), which apparently leads to an excess of male over female bees.  And they’re glued in place, and so cannot be replaced annually with clean nesting tubes, as everyone advises.)

Regardless, the picture above bodes good luck to this location, w/r/t/ mason bees.  A lot of people hang one of these up and get nothing, at least for a year or two.  But I followed all the directions, and hung that securely, a few feet off the ground, in a sheltered location that gets morning sun, with plenty of flowering plants nearby, and a nearby source of mud for the bees to use.  (That last one courtesy of some slightly leaky rainwater barrels.)

Following standard advice, I took that bee hotel down for the winter and left it in an unheated building.

Then I killed my overwintering mason bees.

I killed them with kindness.

My unheated outbuilding must have been just a touch warmer than the surrounding area.  In any case, by all the signs — average daytime temperature, extent of blooming flowers —  my bees emerged early, as explained in Post G24-004.  Just as the crocuses were starting to bloom.

If that didn’t kill them outright — from the low temperatures and lack of blooming plants for food — then it almost surely prevented them from reproducing.   Again, as explained in Post G24-004.

The moral of that story is, resist the urge to shelter your overwintering bees.  Let them freeze along with everything else.

 

One year ago, for my second attempt, I made my own bee hotels.  I used 6″ long bamboo tubes, cut from the green bamboo growing in my back yard (Post G23-015).  (Cutting them green gave them a smooth, splinter-free finish that did not require (e.g.) sanding.  Apparently, you don’t want to leave rough edges on these tubes, or they’ll cut up the bees’ wings.)

( You will see mentions of a lot of plants whose stems can, in theory, be used for bee nesting tubes.  I tried growing a few (e.g., poke weed), but I learned the hard way that, as with bamboo, your only realistic option is to harvest the material green, and immediately cut it to length.  If you wait until spring to go looking for some, all those hollow stems will be weathered and brittle, and you won’t be able to get nice smoothly-cut 6″ pieces from them.)

I closed off one end of each tube with some mud.

Locally-sourced.

Then bundled a handful of such tubes together with wire ties (and later, jute twine).

And hung up my nice new bee hotels, under the eaves of my back porch.

These were an even bigger hit with local mason bees.  As you can see at the left, almost all the nesting tubes were filled. Only a handful of empty tubes are left, and by eye, these seem to be too large for my local mason bees to want to use them.  (Bees are quite picky about what size of nesting tube they will use.)

Similarly, I made and hung one more bee hotel with much smaller-diameter tubes.  This would have been attractive to smaller “leaf cutter” bees that might be present in my area, mid-summer.  But I got no takers for those smaller tubes — that 4th bee hotel remained completely empty.

This year, I put those filled bee hotels into a “bee emergence box”.

This is just a dark box with some holes cut out of the sides, level with the bottom of the box, as shown, left.  (Level because the newly-emerged bees don’t fly out of the box, they crawl to the opening and hang out there for a while before dispersing.  That, according to the University of Utah extension service (Google link to .pdf).

Exactly why I need to supply a bee emergence box seems subject to some uncertainty.  Some experts say its to “avoid predators”.  (I assume the newly-emerged bees are fairly helpless.)  Some say the box must be placed directly adjacent to new bee hotels (with fresh nesting tubes) and that neither should be moved, even a matter of inches, once emergence has begun.  Some say that the box allows female bees to find their way back to this location, as they can smell the old cocoons, but the box keeps them from re-using the old nesting tubes.

In short, all experts agree this step is good.  But exactly why it’s good, and what purpose this serves, seems unclear.  Somewhat folklore-ish.  (And clearly related to the naughty bits bee reproduction in some fashion, possibly explaining reticence on this subject.  But everybody agrees that such a box is a good idea.)

In any case, below are my home-made bamboo bee hotels, carefully and gently placed in my simple emergence box, before I closed and sealed the lid.

FWIW, one bamboo tube had a little tiny perfectly round hole drilled in it.  I’m pretty sure that was an instance of parasitic wasp predation, so I removed that one nesting tube as I placed these in the emergence box.

Apparently, the point of all the darkness is so that the only light entering the box is from the holes that I want the bees to use, to exit the box.  And, because this sits in a sheltered location (under the eaves of my porch), I’ve done the easiest thing and made the release box out of cardboard.  (Interestingly, I found scant details on release boxes, as if such details hardly mattered.)

Why I’m not putting out multiple bee hotels again this year.

First, these bees do my garden no good whatsoever.  These orchard or mason bees will have come and gone long before anything in my garden is blooming.  If I had an orchard, with lots of early-spring fruit blossoms, encouraging a local population of orchard bees would be a good idea.  But as it stands, these bees will have emerged, mated, and died a month before anything in my garden is blooming.

These are not the bees you’re looking for.  … Move along.

Second, it’s not clear that I’m doing them any good, either.  Mainly, it’s not clear that nesting sites are the limiting factor for my local mason bee population.  There really isn’t all that much around here blooming in late March.  And so, I wonder if in effect, I may be raising bees, simply to have them die off soon after they emerge, because there’s no link between the number of bee hotel tubes that I provide, and the size of the local early-spring flowering plant supply.

I found no guidance whatsoever on “right-sizing” a mason bee hotel, to match the resources available in the surrounding area.

Conclusion

 

There’s not a lot to providing nesting sites for solitary bees.  You just have to obey a few simple rules.

The nesting tubes should be about 6″ long, for the most common mason bees.  The tubes need to be of about the right diameter for the bees you are trying to attract.  In my case, maybe 1/4th to 3/8ths of an inch.  If you use natural materials, you’ll get some variation in diameter anyway.  One end of each tube needs to be closed off.  (I did that with mud.) You need to have them set up so that you can either throw them away once they have been used, or sterilize them (e.g., soak in bleach) for re-use.

And you need to move your bee hotels (or the contents thereof) to a release box the next spring.  That’s just a box with holes at floor level, so that the emerging bees will see the light and crawl out into the outdoors.  That way, they can emerge, but they aren’t able to find their way back in again and re-use the old nesting tubes.

But, be aware that when they say you should try to attract bees to your vegetable garden, they didn’t mean mason bees.  These guys are up and about way too early in the year to do my garden any good.   They’ll have lived out their lives weeks before the first pea blossoms open up.

My upshot is that I need to let this box sit around for, at most, a couple of months.  Then I can throw the whole thing away.  I guess I’ll continue to put up bee hotels until I’ve used up my stock of six-inch bamboo tubes.  But I’m not seeing any benefit to making this a permanent part of my garden.

Addendum

I relented.  These are this year’s bee hotels, pre-mud.  I took the best from my stash of potential bee nesting tubes.  And tossed the rest.

My final thought on the emergence box is that mine is entirely in the shade.  (Facing east-ish, on the north-ish side of the house, though I think that’s not very relevant.)

The point is, cool.  Living in Zone 7b, with little nearby in the way of flowering fruit trees, I think the later my bees waken, the better.  Within reason.  There will be more around to eat, I think.  In any case, no direct solar heating — no direct sunlight — is consistent with this year’s approach of not sheltering the bee hotels in winter.  These bees are going to have to live in the ambient air.  They need to be in sync with ambient air temperatures.

But I can see where, in a more northerly climate, you might make the other call, and at this time of year, if a bit of extra heat means having your bees up and about when their preferred blossoms are out, then that’s a good thing.

In both cases, I’m guessing that you up the odds of bee survival by trying to ensure that their emergence coincides with lots of local blooms, within what the bees themselves can tolerate.

Anyway, crocuses alone make slim pickings for orchard bees.  My observation, based on my unfortunate experience last year.  So perhaps I am erring on the side of caution.

Or, in this case, shade.

Epilogue:  Psst.  It’s the maple trees.

Why did this work well, in this location?  Based on internet chatter, a lot of people have trouble attracting mason bees.

I did manage to avoid significant operator error, on my second try.  This, by hanging the bee hotels in a sheltered place, then leaving them alone until it was time to move them to the emergence box in the spring.

But I think my success has more to do with the location, than with anything I did.

So, why is my back yard a good location for orchard bees? 

Right at this moment, there’s little in the way of flowering trees in my area.  (We’re in sync with the DC cherry blossoms, more or less.)  I guess we have some Bradford pears out, but not in my area.  My wife’s extensive daffodil beds are in bloom.  But that’s about it.

Nary a blooming orchard in sight.  It’s too early for most of the flowering trees in my area.

It was my pollen-sensitive wife who pointed out that there is one common tree that is flowering now:  Maple.  She knows these things.

And now that I look it up, yep, flowering maples provide food for orchard bees.  So sayeth Google’s AI:

Arguably, then, my back yard is more-or-less mason bee heaven, owing to the presence of several large old maple trees. Plus mud, from the gardening.  And nesting tubes, from the gardener.

Of which, the nesting tubes — nesting sites — were likely the “rate-limiting factor” in my local native bee population.

OK, let’s say this is all true.  I could maintain an extensive population of mason bees in my back yard, owing mainly to the presence of several large maples there.  As long as the mason bees emerge as the maples are flowering, the female bees have plenty to eat.

These bees still don’t do me one bit of good.  In a food-production sense, these are not the bees I’m looking for, to pollinate what needs pollinatin’, in my garden.  They are here, then gone, far too early in the year.  (Further, my maples need no help in producing seeds, thanks.)

So there you go.  At this point, I’m betting that this bee-wrangling went well, in my back yard, from the start, because mason bees can feed on maple flowers.  Those are in abundance now.  All these bees were lacking was nesting sites.  And these hotels were the only game in town, or close to it.

But — aside from observing the great circle-of-life thing, as it plays out for the mason bee — it doesn’t do me one iota of good to maintain a mason been population in my back yard.

Post #2102: How high is that helicopter? Part 1.

 

Is there an easy way to determine the altitude of a low-flying aircraft?

After looking over my options, I’m going to try an antique optical rangefinder.

I bought it on Ebay.  I’m currently waiting for it to arrive.

Background

I was awakened last night by yet another low-flying helicopter, here in the DC ‘burbs.

The noise from these ranges from merely obtrusive, to loud enough to rattle the windows.  Below is a recording of one of the several that passed overhead today, taken from my back porch.  It doesn’t quite stop conversation, but you do have to raise your voice a bit.

This is normal for the DC area.  There are a lot of military and other government high officials stationed in this area.  These folks tend to get shuffled from place to place via helicopter.  Unfortunately, one of the well-used north-south routes passes directly over the Town of Vienna.

Is it really that loud, or is flying low?

In theory, nothing should be flying below 1000′, in my area.

But in the past, that has been an issue.  I recall that, many years ago, some Vienna Town Council members complained to various authorities about noise from low-flying aircraft, and got the “minimum 1000′ for the TOV” as part of the answer.

This got me thinking about measuring a passing helicopter’s height.

(Luckily, I am hardly the first person to have had an interest in this.  Luckily, I say in hindsight, because that way, my Google inquiries would not attract undue attention from the authorities.)

Turns out, there is no good way for an amateur on the ground to measure the height of an over-flying helicopter.  At least, none that I’ve come across.

But seriously, how hard can this be.

If nothing else, think of it as a way to rule out bad pilot behavior (low flight altitude) as an explanation for a loud helicopter fly-over.  (With the obvious alternative explanation being “that was a loud helicopter”.   Which, given that these may be military aircraft, is always a possibility.)

So, are those overflights loud because they are loud aircraft, or are they loud because they’re flying well below 1000 feet?

Optical rangefinders that won’t work

First, there are “laser rangefinders”, not intrinsically different from a laser tape measure, just more oomph and maybe some specialized optics.  But first, I ain’t pointin’ no laser at no aircraft, period.  Let alone a low-flying (likely military) helicopter.  Plus, the ones available for civilian use (e.g., laser tape measure, laser golf or boating rangefinder, rangefinders for hunting big game) probably won’t work for this use anyway, owing to the small visible target.   I get the impression these laser rangefinders (e.g., for golfers) can find the range to a hillside or location on an open lawn, but they aren’t designed to find something as optically small as a helicopter flying at 1000′.

I’m also brushing aside all the military “passive-optical” (coincidence and stereoscopic) rangefinders.   These are WWII-era and earlier tech with mirrors, prisms, and such.  If nothing else, aside from having to own one (they tend to be big, to get you the best separation of the two lenses), you’d have to have the forethought to have it handy, and set up, just as the helicopter was flying by.  Plus, those are all expensive military collectibles now.

 

A vintage civilian non-laser coincidence rangefinder, via Ebay

 

Source:  Ebay.

I can vaguely recall hand-held purely optical rangefinders, from the pre-laser era.  These are the vastly smaller, and likely less accurate, analogs of military coincidence rangefinders.  But they worked the same way, using two widely-separated lenses, then measuring how much you need to move the image from one eyepiece, until it coincides with the image from the other.

I bought one on Ebay.  Above, you see a RangeMatic 1000.

This allows you to measure distances to 1000 yards, with some modest degree of accuracy.  It looks like it should be more than adequate to allow me to identify helicopters flying at 500 feet, rather than at 1000 feet.  It looks like the difference between 150 yards and 300 yards is about an eighth of a turn of the dial.

This, if it works, will give me the line-of-sight distance to the helicopter.  That only tells me the height of the helicopter if it flies directly overhead.  I’m going to need to add some sort of mounting and an inclinometer.  The line-of-sight distance, plus the angle of elevation above the horizon, should allow me to infer the height of the helicopter over ground.  (In fact, that’s easy enough that I don’t even have to look it up.  Height above ground is the sine of the angle of elevation, times the straight-line distance to the object.

Thus ends this task, until my Ebay’ed optical rangefinder shows up in the mail a few days from now.

Estimating overflight height by apparent size.

The very crudest golfing range finders work by using the height of the pin (the stick-with-flag that marks the hole).  These pins are a standard size, and the simplest golf rangefinders simply place the apparent size of the pin on a scale — the smaller it is, the further you are away from it.

Other purely optical methods seem chancy.  In theory, if I could identify the model of helicopter, I could infer distance by measuring how how big the over-flying helicopter appears.

This is more work than I care do do.

Can I determine the height of a passing helicopter, purely from its sound?

Source:  Reference BBC.  Photo by Joe Pettet-Smith

First, an interesting historical side-note.  Listening for approaching aircraft is not a new idea.   As I understand it (likely from seeing it on YouTube), in parts of Great Britain, big, cast concrete parabolic sound reflectors still stand along the coastline.  These concentrate (and effectively, amplify) incoming sound waves.  These were used to detect the sound of incoming aircraft while they were still miles offshore, prior to the implementation of radar during WWII.  Reference BBC

This is one of those weird things that is clearly possible, from first principles.  Maybe not even terribly difficult, as a one-off proof of concept.  But for which you can buy no ready-made unit.

Sound travels about one foot per millisecond.  Two microphones, 100′ apart, would therefor experience about a 100-millisecond (or one-tenth-second) difference in when they “heard” a sound at ground level.

For this approach, I’d use some microphones, some recording gear, and the speed of sound, to triangulate where a near-surface sound is coming from, based on when (precisely) that sound shows up, at microphones placed at known locations perhaps 100′ apart.

The theory is easy:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Start with the concept of a gunfire locator or gunshot locator.  These (typically) use a widely-distributed set of microphones to detect and locate gunshots.  Once a gunshot is detected, these use “standard triangulation methods” to estimate the direct and distance to the gunshot.

(There are crowdsourced versions of these:  https://github.com/apispoint/soter, but that seems limited to categorizing a noise as a gunshot, not pinning down the location.)

Substitute helicopter noise for gunshot, and do the math in 3-D instead of assuming location on the ground, and that’s what I’m after.  Something that will give me a fairly precise location of a helicopter flying overhead.  From the noise of it alone.  So that I may then calculate the height above ground, from that location.

In two dimensions, you only need two microphones — think, two ears — to identify the direction that a sound is coming from.  Per Wikipedia, that’s all about the lag between the time the sound hits one ear, versus the other.  To quote:

Where:

  • is the time difference in seconds,
  • is the distance between the two sensors (ears) in meters,
  • is the angle between the baseline of the sensors (ears) and the incident sound, in degrees
  • c is the speed of sound

But that only works (pins down a unique direction) if you’re working in two dimensions.  And one pair of microphones provides no clue as to distance.  Just direction.

If you work through what you do need, to pin it down in three dimensions, a minimum rig would need four microphones, arranged like the corner of a cube.  This provides a pair of microphones in each of three dimensions.  The further apart the better, as these are going to be used to estimate a helicopter height of maybe 1000′.

The rest should be math.

But this solution involves a lot of hardware, no matter how I figure it.  Four microphones or recording devices, wires to connect them to a central station, and a four-track sound recorder.

This would be a difficult and expensive solution, so I’m not going to pursue it further unless the RangeMaster 1000 fails to do the job.

Conclusion

I’ll have to wait for my antique optical rangefinder to arrive before I can bring this to a conclusion.

My belief is that a simple hand-held “antique” optical rangefinder, plus something to measure the angle of elevation, should provide all the accuracy I need to distinguish helicopters flying at or about the 1000′ ceiling, from putative “low flying” helicopters at (say) 500 feet.

My guess is that these helicopters are merely loud, not low.  But I should be able to validate that with this simple bit of equipment.