A Feasibility Study

Looking ahead to 2026 I have to consider what is feasible.  Oh, not in terms of actually getting things done, but in the etymology of the word.  It has some interesting and relevant connections.

Feasible derives from the Latin "facere" meaning to Make, Do, or Perform.  The same very utilitarian source gives us Factory and Manufacturing, the latter being to make something by hand "manum".  Nowadays of course the hand is mostly used to click a mouse and push some buttons on the cnc equipment.

Doing things could also be considered a Feat, deriving again, from the same source.

I actually went down this etymological rabbit hole wondering if Fealty and Feasible were related.  I mean, my dog Hank is stupefyingly loyal and would probably jump off a cliff if there was encouragement reinforced by an appropriate Dog Treat.

But no.  Fealty derives from "fidelitatus" which means Faithful and as its most appropriate side branch gives us Fido as the archetypal dog name.

Feat and Feet are unrelated.  Like most terms relating to very basic concepts the latter is a very old word and comes to us via shaggy Germanic barbarians rather than Romans with sandals on their "pedes".

Weighty Matters

Just a few more pre season meetings before FIRST build season kicks off and things get crazy.  It's a smaller but talented team this year, so they should do well.  Doing well, among other things, means not repeating past mistakes.

During the design and build stage there are three major things happening at once.  Drive base needs to be built.  Whatever game piece handling mechanisms - generally called manipulators - are called for need to be built.  And software is waiting anxiously to program both.  Everyone wants access to the robot.

One solution is to build the drive base on one side of the room, while putting prototypes of the manipulators on an identical but unpowered base on the other side.  We did this last year, but imperfectly.  The base for the manipulators was not quite the same specs as the final drive base.....and they forgot to weigh it before adding stuff.  So, when the drive base and manipulator mechanisms were finally united, the scale told an unhappy tale.....

This year, a new unpowered base to build on.  Behold, Protobot.

This is a steel plate with holes laser cut every half inch.  It's easy to bolt anything onto it.  On the front is a regulation thickness bumper.  It can be raised or lowered as needed.  Sometimes you have a system where you are grabbing game elements and pulling them over the bumper.

A bit of detail from underneath.  This time considerable care was taken to ensure that the casters are set to exactly the height of what we anticipate the drive motors will be at.

With a non powered base you can still push it around and power the manipulators.  Last year the elevator controls were worked out this way.  The back corners are sharp and not protected by the bumpers so had to be covered. 

Oh, and the most important feature of Protobot is.........

We plan on strict weight control this season.  I'm considering approaching Ozempic for sponsorship.

Looking Ahead to '26

Another year winding down.  Another year ahead.  So what will 2026 look like?

Some familiar things.  FIRST robotics build season commences shortly.  That tends to keep me busy and out of trouble until early April.  I'll do what I can to be of help to the local team, and will be volunteering at a couple of events.

I'll be back at Vindolanda in May.  

And there will be plenty of "up north" time.  Continuous grand kid sporting events.  And much to do on the Hunting Land.  Clearing brush, improving the garage, planting more feed plots.  Pulling off lots of ticks!

And what about writing?

I've been scribbling away at Detritus of Empire since 2011.  As of  late 2025 I'm approaching 3,000 posts.  The world of the internet has greatly changed since I started.  I caught the tail end of "blogging", where one's individual musings would be out there for people to follow regularly or to find accidentally.  This has become an outmoded concept.  I grudgingly added links to Facebook for most of my posts.  Probably that's how most non-bot entities find me.  But Facebook has been sinking into the swamp of AI slop and crude content for years now.

So where do people go for "content"?  Honestly I'm not sure.  Platforms arrive, attain success, get bogged down and commercialized, then fade away.  The "arc" from clever start up to pop up ads for toenail fungus cures is very short.

Maybe Substack, if that has not gone south by the time I get around to it.

The Cosmology of Canines

After looking at the petty crimes of dogs I've come around to the notion that they do have the concept of Good and Evil.  I mean, how else could you explain their reactions to the benevolent praise of "Good Dog", and the rarely used but powerful "BAD DOG"?  But do dogs have a more complex belief system.  Do they have a sort of religion?

Of course such questions are impossible to answer definitively, at least in this life.  But I have opinions.  Robots are all Hindu, or maybe Buddhist.  Cats are amoral Nihilists.

Dogs certainly have the concept of Beings - some good some evil - of greater power.  For Hank at least, here's the Good side:  Me.  My wife, who by virtue of being the main grocery shopper is regarded as The Food Bringer.  My son, Hank's original owner.  I think he outranks me, as Hank's memories in that regard were established early.  I guess collectively we are a sort of Trinity.

On the neutral side is Bear, the gigantic neighbor dog who is  shaman of the local dog congregation.  When Bear barks, all must bark.  It's rather liturgical.  

And the Evil side the Demonology includes: Squirrels, Delivery People, and anyone operating a rake, lawn mower or any powered or unpowered snow removal equipment.

Welcome to pantheism.

The most powerful of the Demons can't be seen, but their Presence is fearfully evident in other ways.  When we are up north during hunting season a single gunshot miles away sets him to quivering.  A second one turns him around and sends him pulling me back to the safety of Home. 

Not even the protective vestments of orange can banish the terror of the Great Loud Ones from Beyond.....

See also thunder, fireworks and the civil defense siren that gets tested at noon on the first Wednesday of every month.

I must admit the possibility that dogs actually have a more advanced religion.  Hey, never forget that "Fido" actually derives from Fides, or Faith.  Eugene ONeill thought that some dogs were Muslim.  He could be right, although Islam generally looks on dogs with disfavor.*  And regards Hank, well, this brief video speaks for itself.  He only needs to hear a few stirring notes before dashing for his place of worship and rapture, the food bowl.

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* The Islamic disapproval of dogs as unclean seems to relate to their saliva!  And, knowing what they eat, lick and barf back up, I can see solid logic in this.

The Minor Crimes of Canines

Dogs make lousy crooks.  This is one of their great virtues.  Other species....well, cats are just plain sneaky.  It's no accident that we associate them with misdeeds (Cat Burglars) and dogs with the opposite (Watch Dogs).

But dogs are not perfect.  That's actually another virtue.  If they were just a bit more faithful, loyal and selfless we'd be uncomfortable having them around our imperfect selves.

But dogs, despite not being Driven from the Garden, are still capable of minor sins.

You put something on the counter that is just a little too tasty, just a little too close to the edge, and you stay away just long enough that they can persuade themselves that you've forgotten about that morsel, and, well...

Hank the Dog has another misdemeanor that he can't resist.  He likes to hop up on beds.  It's a combination of nice and cushy, plus it smells like his owners.  One of his owners disapproves mildly, the other, seriously.

But he can get up and down so quietly.  So its not always easy to tell he's been up there.  Enter modern technology.

Guest bedroom.  Recently slept in by visiting family members that the dog adores.  Looks fine, no?

But lets just take a peek with the thermal imaging scope you see laying on the bed.  A suspiciously dog temperature spot right in the middle!

Busted!  But how could a dog this cute, this innocent be trying to scam me?

Hint:  This is the same dog.....

The Deer....they Mock Me Still........

Deer hunting 2025 has been a complicated affair.  Compound and cross bow hunting.  Youth hunt for my grand son.  Between myself, my three sons and one involved grand we've likely been hunting on 20 different spots.

Lots of work, but it has paid off.

So on the last day of Wisconsin gun hunting season my son and grandson were going off to help a friend get a deer.  They left at 6am, when the world was dark.   Ten minutes after they departed Hank the Dog went insane.  There was a deer, or more than one, in the front yard!  

When the sun came up the tale was told.  I'd only glimpsed one, but....

Those spots where the snow is melted were bed downs for two deer.  In town.  One of them about six feet from my front door.  The sheer audacity is both awe and ire inspiring.

Evidently they'd been mooching around, eating out of the bird feeder, checking out the garden area.  When the hunters were present they just stepped around the corner...directly under the window where I was making coffee.

What is the appropriate response to this degree of Insolence?

The Taverns of Old Chippewa Falls - Part Three. The Earliest? And some other Guys.

For those who live elsewhere, Wisconsin has a long established "tavern culture".  Not quite as integral as pub culture in England, but still very important.  So it's natural for a local historian to want to explore its origins.  And also, its much harder than you'd think.

Regards Chippewa Falls the two complicating factors are where exactly you draw the community lines, and the reality that every hotel, store, boarding house and for all I know, church, would offer you a taste of something on request.  So what constitutes a tavern?

My criteria are that an establishment must be called a "tavern" or "house", it must be in the current city limits, and it must be 1860 or earlier.  The Civil War and its aftermath completely transformed the community.  A big chunk of the population departed to join the Union Army, and when they returned its hard to call it the Pioneer era.

I've already covered some early taverns and their owners:

Moses Hebert, or "Old Moses".  He shows up in the 1870 census as Moses Aber.  But he is mentioned as being in the liquor business in the 1850's.

Peter Rosseau, who seems to have been the sort of unofficial Mayor of Frenchtown.  He was probably operating the Rosseau House in the 1840s.  And although the history of Frenchtown is fragmentary there would have been other establishments operating early.

Oh, and then there's the whole crazy Mother Fossler story.

Let's add a few more from the 1860 Census.  It gives a few names.  Not much more than names, but still something.

Ferdinand Tish.  Saloon.  Age 32, born Germany.  Value of property $200.

Peter Lamare.  Saloon. Age 27, born Germany.  Value of property $500.

Peter Lazo.  Saloon Keeper.  Age 60 and born in Canada, so evidently not the same guy listed above.

And then there's Tim Hurley, who was pouring drinks in 1849.

Hurley was one of a crew of guys who came up from Galena Illinois in 1848, shortly after Wisconsin became a state.  The lead mines were playing out a bit, and a wealthy merchant named Bloomer decided to round up a crew of river men and perhaps under employed miners, come upriver and try a new venture.  Going past Chippewa Falls they started to build a mill upstream at a location called Eagle Rapids.  How the nearby community of Bloomer got its name is a little...complicated.

Mr. Bloomer decided this was not for him, so after a short time he sold his interests to some locals and went home.  Hurley and some other guys lingered on, getting involved in the unpleasant lynching I've mentioned earlier.

Hurley's establishment was variously described as a tavern and a place where gambling went on.  It was not spoken of favorably.  That's just about all I can tell you regards Mr. Hurley.  He was said to have married, almost certainly a local Ojibway woman, and was still here for the 1850 census albeit being listed as a laborer.

Beyond that point he is lost to history, what with a common name and an era where very little of what was going on was written down at all.  I wonder if he, like others in that footloose time he decided to try his luck out in California when the Gold Rush got well and truly started....

Trying to pin down a location for Hurley's tavern is no easy task.  But I think I can put you close.  In a time before significant road travel everything faced onto the river.  The banks are altered somewhat since then, but that narrows it down.  It is also fair to assume that he would not be set up in the "company town" area right near the Falls.  So in this photo I'm standing approximately where the first tavern on this side of the river would have been.

On the left is the building where our robotics team got its start.  It is now an upscale "Market Place" where you can purchase interesting food and such.  The small building on the other side of the parking lot is The Ritz, a sort of benign descendent of the first drinking and gambling joint.  I have it on good authority that you can get a glass of refreshment and some quasi-legal "pull tabs" there.  And back behind, on the part of the block across the alley, you can see a single large tree.  This is not the sinister white pine on which the Native man was hung in 1849, but is in roughly the same location.  Also quite near the 1850's first cemetery of Chippewa Falls.  Happier vibes as seen on a sunny, early fall day.

AI in 2025 - What is it really Bad At?

Last time I went on a bit on the subject of what AI was reasonably good at.  Images.  Some body parts being done so very much better than others.  It won't, at least in the free version I was using, pass for real art, but its skill exceeds mine.  Yours too I should think.

But what is it still really bad at?

Creative writing.  Even with, or especially with, detailed prompts.

For example, here's what I wrote last time on what AI is good at:

At my advanced age I am allowed some element of curmudgeonism with regard to modern technology.  I've seen a lot of it come and go in nearly 70 years.  Much of it is simply reinventing the wheel.  And the real breakthroughs are often pulled into the For Profit realm rather quickly.  Still, I'm not such a tortoise that I am still using a rotary dial phone and a slide rule.

So, what is the much vaunted AI "good" at in 2025.

My initial answer is: Images.  Lacking any artistic talent to speak of I am able to come up with amusing pictures but I can't create them.   Here's an example.  I prompted Gemini - this is the maligned but free Google product - to create an image of a deer sitting at a computer studying trail cam images of hunters.  This is a remote possibility for my slow hunting season (up to gun opener), but you never know.  Here's the first draft:

I posed that same question for AI to answer.  In the style of Detritus of Empire!  You be the judge:

"Ah, 2025. The year when the digital dust motes have finally settled enough for us to squint at the landscape and ask: "So, what's this bloody AI actually for now?" Forget the utopian pipedreams or the Skynet anxieties, comrades. The truth, as ever, is far more pedestrian and far more insidious."

"AI in 2025 is a glorified clerk, a relentless, unblinking auditor. It's magnificent at sifting through the dross of human existence – the endless data, the digital flotsam and jetsam we produce with every click, purchase, and mumbled voice command. It finds patterns in our spending habits, predicts our next impulse buy with unsettling accuracy, and flags the 'anomalies' in our medical records before we even feel a twinge."

"It's superb at generating content, a veritable factory farm of text and images, flooding the internet with bespoke banality, finely tuned to whatever niche market can be carved out. Need a thousand variations of a product description? AI's your man. A news article indistinguishable from human-written pap? Done. It’s not about brilliance; it's about boundless, tireless mediocrity, optimized for engagement metrics."

"And let’s not forget surveillance. Oh, the glorious, all-seeing eye. AI excels at monitoring, categorizing, and cross-referencing. From traffic flow to social sentiment, it’s the ultimate panopticon, meticulously cataloging the minute details of our lives, all under the guise of 'efficiency' or 'security'. So, in 2025, AI is good at making money, controlling narratives, and watching us. The empire, in its digital guise, has found its most efficient bureaucratic tool yet."

It's crap.  Nothing about it resembles my writing style, and with almost 3,000 posts of Detritus of Empire to sift though it had plenty of grist to grind.  Either its being lazy, and I am mooching off a free version, or it pays no attention to the actual request parameters and just pours slop from the bucket.  So which is it?

I think it must have done a quick surface scan of my writings.  The descriptive term "bloody" would not be there without some hint that I travel in and write about England rather often.  And to pick up on medical matters....some note of my career as a family and later ER physician.  But it does not mimic my writing style in any way other than an excess of commas!  So I wonder how it "sees" me? Just for fun I asked it to generate an image of my alter ego Badger Trowelsworthy.  After it made a cute critter image I pointed out that BT was actually a human.  So.....

Much better than its writing!  I can in fact flag a half dozen or so photos that probably were used to generate it. And it even got the hand right.  At least the one you can see.....

AI in 2025 - What it is actually (somewhat) Good At.

At my advanced age I am allowed some element of curmudgeonism with regard to modern technology.  I've seen a lot of it come and go in nearly 70 years.  Much of it is simply reinventing the wheel.  And the real breakthroughs are often pulled into the For Profit realm rather quickly.  But hey, I'm not such a tortoise that I am still using a rotary dial phone and a slide rule.

So, what is the much vaunted AI "good" at in 2025.

My initial answer is: Images.  Lacking any artistic talent to speak of I am able to come up with ideas for amusing pictures but I can't create them.   Here's an example.  I prompted Gemini - this is the maligned but free Google product - to create an image of a deer sitting at a computer studying trail cam images of hunters.  This is a remote possibility for my slow hunting season (up to gun opener), but you never know.  Here's the first draft:

Now that's not too bad.  But a closer inspection shows a problem.  The hunters are all wearing camo.  And they are all holding fire arms.

Some of the weapons they are hefting look like big sticks, others like generic sub machine guns.  One guy - and admittedly these are blurry images - appears to be holding a stuffed animal!

But for gun hunting season they should be wearing blaze orange.  When I pointed this out and asked AI for an update it said: 

Okay, let's get those hunters in proper safety orange! Here's the updated image:

And here's what it came up with:

Better.  It just changed the one detail and did so competently.  It's a fun image....if you don't look too closely at it.  Behold:

Our friend Mr. Buck has two full cups of coffee.  He's never going to manage the one on the right, not with that clumsy hoof.  But the other side.......  Yikes!  A hideous freak of nature "hand" with a thumb and dark, Goth fingernails.   

This sort of thing has been a problem for AI generation since the get go.  It does some body parts very well indeed.  Others....frightening mutations.  Here's another example.  The basic prompt was to show me a waitress at a German Beer Garden bringing me a stein of beer.

At first glance all is well.  AI does faces nicely.  The back drop is passable.  And, well, as this is a serious study of the matter, AI does breasts with great accuracy.  One minor quibble, that stein looks a bit outsized, unless the waitress is elfin, and it would never do to bring a customer something that is 35% foam!  But do we still have mutant fingers???

Subtle, but yes.  Count the fingertips.  Slightly crooked thumb, 1,2,3....

There seems to be a little parasitic finger grafted onto the back of the ring finger.  

This is a common feature of AI images.  Indeed, weird extremities - hands in particular - are one way photo sleuths debunk controversial AI "fakes".  So how and why is this so?

Here's my theory.

Picture a conference room.  Full of computer nerds.  It's an AI startup and the manager has this to say:

"OK, its crunch time.  Eric, Cheng, Bill, Rashid, Cooper,  get your entire departments working on Boobs.  Divide yourselves up into Left and Right working groups.  Feel free to hire up to 500 freelancers.  Try not to spend more than your usual amount of company time looking at naughty stuff on the internet."

"Oh...I suppose we need to do hands as well.  Where's the new intern?  Melvin?"

"Um, right here.  And its Milton, sir."

"Melvin, our AI informs me that (reads from his phone) the human hand is incredibly complex, and is a main reason why we invented tools and as a species took over the world.  See if you can knock something together this afternoon.  But you still have to sweep up, and don't forget the usual donut runs!"

"Yes sir, I'll do my best."

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So how would AI depict that scene?

About as expected.  I'll make this a big as possible so you can see the Horrible Hands on several figures including Milton!  Maybe he trained the AI to model reality on himself!