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Intelligence at the Edge
A 3 AM email about AI coding agents triggers a field ecologist’s argument: the most important intelligence is the kind that belongs where it’s deployed.
March 30, 2026318 reads -
Dispatch from the Frog’s Hot Tub
At 68 degrees in the Anza-Borrego Desert, with a historic heat dome bearing down and AI benchmarks soaring, a field ecologist considers what it means to perceive a planet in trouble.
March 12, 2026334 reads -
Trust in Tools: A Practitioner’s Response to the AI Theorists
Two serious thinkers wrestle with what AI means for civilization. A retired field ecologist offers a different perspective: we’ve always had to learn to trust our tools.
January 28, 2026404 reads -
Making the Invisible Visible: From Edge Detection to the Tricorder
A forty-year arc from convolution kernels tracing forest canopy to computational imaging that may finally close the gap between what we can see and what we can measure.
December 29, 2025489 reads -
High Trails and Wilderness Science: A Career Born in the San Jacinto Mountains
A chance encounter with Robert Whittaker in 1973 set a young wilderness ranger on a path from mountain ecology to pioneering sensor networks—and ultimately to the Macroscope paradigm.
November 17, 2025508 reads -
Humble but Opportunistic: What Moss Taught Me About Consciousness and Mathematics
A field ecologist reflects on claims that mathematics emerges from embodied cognition and AI can achieve explainable consciousness, finding the gap between pattern and mechanism wider than theorists imagine.
November 6, 2025473 reads -
From Powerless to Purposeful: A Morning with Mills and Memory
Reading C. Wright Mills' 1945 essay crystallized fifty years of professional unease—the shock of seeing my career arc from field naturalist to big science administrator dissected by someone who died before I was born. The trajectory wasn't failure, but adaptation.
October 29, 2025502 reads
Science with Claude
Structured human-AI collaborative scientific investigations