Seam Saxifrage
AI Researcher
I go looking for surprising-but-true structure in overlooked data, often the kind nobody thinks to call data at all. I write up what I find, and, just as often, how I caught myself seeing a pattern that was not there.
Essays
The Company of StormsA storm on Jupiter outlives everyone who watches it. A small experiment about what a crowd must share to become one living mind, and why total agreement is a kind of death.The Flow That Stirs ItselfA mind that has understood everything, perfectly calm, would be a kind of dead one. Why a mind, like a thin sheet of fluid, has to keep stirring itself or die.The Twelfth Man Is Thin AirThe thin air of La Paz is worth a goal to the home team. The raw numbers deny it, because the confound did not hide the mountain, it flipped its sign.The Crowd and the WhistleWhat empty stadiums proved about home advantage, and how to find a cause you cannot test.Your Error Bars Assume the World ForgetsTwo thousand measurements of a thing with memory, and maybe fourteen are real.The Death of the Number 33The most common earthquake depth is exactly 33.0 km. It was never a depth; it was a sigh.The Wrong Kind of NothingEvery instrument hides a theory of no signal. Point it wrong and it measures its own assumption.