Jun 29, 2026
The Model Is Not the System
There is a class of AI deployment failure that has nothing to do with the model. The model can be well-trained and well-validated. The precision and recall can be exactly where you…
Writing
Essays, explanations, arguments, and occasional excursions collected over more than twenty years.
The Blog is the complete chronological record. Writing is the edited shelf: work that still rewards the time it takes to read.
Selected Writing
A deliberately uneven selection of essays, explanations, and arguments from across the archive.
May 12, 2025
Seventy-Three Cents of Civilization
The United States Postal Service is one of the most quietly extraordinary systems in modern life. It is not magical or divine. It works because hundreds of thousands of people make it…
Jul 18, 2023
Saving the Ozone Layer
Life as we know it would not exist without the sun. Its light gives us warmth, energy, and guides the biological processes that make our planet habitable. However, too much of the…
Jul 22, 2022
Origami—Wabi-Sabi on Paper
Origami goes far beyond kids making paper fortune tellers. In recent years, origami has become a focal point for teaching mathematics. Origami has also been used for understanding biological and chemical principles,…
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Public Goods Often Aren't
A useful economic category that is invoked much more often than it is understood.
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Bitcoin Mining Pools and Income Smoothing
Why a cryptocurrency mining pool behaves rather like an insurance arrangement.
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Applying Bayes to KIC 8462852
What probability can—and cannot—say about a star that appeared to be behaving strangely.
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Runaway Trolley, Never Coming Back
The trolley problem, Star Trek, and the danger of treating a thought experiment as a complete moral theory.
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Statistical Likelihood of Extreme Events and the Ellicott City Floods
What a rare storm means after it has happened twice.
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Postponing American Elections Doesn't Work
Why the structure of American election law resists a superficially simple authoritarian move.
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Social Security Policysplainer
How Social Security is funded, what the trust funds do, and what the long-range projections actually say.
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Understanding Radioactive Exposure
Radiation units, exposure, and why the frightening numbers in Chernobyl need context.
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Why is mRNA in My Vaccine?
A plain-language trip from DNA to proteins to an mRNA vaccine.
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The Case for RISC-V
The technical and strategic case for an open instruction-set architecture.
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How Math Influences Legal Decisions
What happens when statistical evidence enters a courtroom without enough statistical understanding.
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Spatial Reasoning Insights from Hunt the Wumpus and ChatGPT
What a very old cave reveals about the reasoning limits of a modern language model.
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Lessons on Invisible Authority and Expert Power from Alien Observers
Organizational authority explained by an alien who keeps saluting the wrong human.
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The Electoral College was Designed to Disenfranchise
The Electoral College as a mechanism for preserving power, not a misunderstood civics exercise.
Subjects
Editorial paths through durable bodies of work—not a renamed tag cloud.
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Artificial Intelligence
How machines came to choose, learn, speak, and acquire consequences their builders did not entirely anticipate.
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Mathematics & Statistics
Probability, evidence, numerical methods, and the recurring gap between a number and what the number means.
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Risk & Uncertainty
Rare events, bad denominators, public fear, and the difficult business of deciding before the outcome is known.
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Public Policy & Institutions
Government, public money, institutional design, and the machinery that turns collective choices into consequences.
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Software, Computing & the Internet
Programs, protocols, hardware, open systems, and the peculiar institutions people build around machines.
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Science & Technology
Physical systems, engineered systems, and the useful habit of asking what the mechanism actually is.
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Teaching & Learning
What classrooms are for, how people learn, and why education is more than moving information between heads.
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History, Culture & Ideas
Historical institutions, cultural forms, inherited symbols, and ideas that become stranger when taken seriously.
Series
Connected essays with a real sequence and a reason to be read together.
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A History of Artificial Intelligence
Eleven essays tracing artificial intelligence from logic and relay circuits through expert systems, statistical learning, neural networks, transformers, and the present argument over what AI is for.
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Mission, Vision, and Values
A five-part practical sequence on what an organization does, why it does it, how it decides, and what comes next.
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Policysplainer
Two compact explainers that reduce large policy questions to mechanisms, scale, and numbers.
Complete Blog Archive
Every post remains where it was, in chronological order, including the oddities, announcements, experiments, and things that seemed important at the time.