Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
34 min · 7,804 words
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
Burning Man Death Rates: A Short Lesson in Statistics
Summary: Three people died at Burning Man in 2026. This was about a quarter of what the crude national rate would predict (~12 deaths). Calculating the age-standardized death rate, we’d expect to see an average of 4.9 deaths. At this rate, seeing 3 deaths is not abnormal. However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors.
6 min · 1,389 words
A short note on the lunar terminator paradox: why the day/night boundary on the Moon looks sharper (or stranger) than everyday intuition about lighting predicts.
2 min · 529 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
Dynomight asks why the liver regenerates so well while most human tissues heal poorly, surveying biology, evolution, and regenerative medicine.
20 min · 4,636 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
The Millennium Problems for Biology
A proposed set of millennium-scale open problems for biology—framed as hard, motivating challenges analogous to the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prize Problems.
7 min · 1,615 words
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
Stars in the sky: The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites
A deep history of the classified URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH ocean-surveillance satellites—from 1970s origins through later generations—and what open sources reveal about them.
28 min · 6,327 words
Gregory Gundersen on engineering memory: how he trained to memorize the first 100 digits of pi, what techniques transferred, and what the process teaches about learning hard material.
6 min · 1,437 words
Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.
1 min · 319 words