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The Macroscope: Reading the World from a Single Point
How a lifetime research program turns raw coordinates into living knowledge of place — and why the same machinery that reads one backyard can read the whole planet.
July 2, 2026188 reads -
Field Naturalist and Assistant: Building Coexperience
On a hot-morning sandwalk above Willamette Falls, a question about embodied knowledge turns into a design. Don't give the machine a simulated body. Couple it to a real one, in real time, and let the coexperience become the ground truth that teaches an ecological intelligence to read a place the way a naturalist does.
June 23, 2026175 reads -
Science the S*** Out of This
A new global catalog of automated biodiversity monitoring lands at the laboratory. What it cannot see, and the launch that comes next.
May 10, 2026322 reads -
Listen to Her
What would it take to actually listen to Earth at the scale this year’s Idyllwild Earth Fair asks? A new Anthropic experiment in autonomous AI research points toward an answer.
April 22, 2026798 reads -
The Arrow I Already Knew
A philosopher names the pattern a field ecologist has been walking for forty years. Recognition is not discovery — it's the moment the song gets a name.
April 6, 2026366 reads -
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, 2026420 reads -
Three Wishes and a Water Bill
A retired field ecologist discovers that the AI tool he imagined forty years ago has finally arrived — and that the genie drinks water.
March 27, 2026416 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, 2026429 reads -
Your Ecological Address
You're standing somewhere right now. Your phone knows the coordinates. But what does that spot mean ecologically? It turns out six free data sources can answer that question for any point on Earth — and your neighbors' weather stations already know what the satellites can't see.
February 16, 2026566 reads -
Who Holds the Instruments
A morning article about women in cartography detonates thirty-five years of memory — campfires at a mountain reserve, a society born from sleeping bags under desert stars, and the women who built conservation GIS from the ground up.
February 6, 20261,449 reads -
The Canoe Place
What if meeting me online worked like the adventure game Zork—not a museum of achievements but a territory to explore, with live sensor data and real birds calling?
February 3, 2026451 reads -
Observatories of Complexity: Two Macroscopes for the Biosphere and Noosphere
When the atmosphere flatlined this week—twenty-four hours with barely two degrees of temperature variation—my brain reached for the cardiac monitor. That pattern recognition is what consciousness does, and what no AI can replicate.
January 16, 2026554 reads -
The Paper Merry Sent: On Consciousness, Connection, and Cognitive Mutualism
A morning message from Merry leads to a theoretical framework for understanding how we extend consciousness through technology and relationship.
December 28, 2025578 reads -
Cognitive Poetry: On Dreams, Clocks, and the Phenology of Ideas
From a dream-state question about the nature of ideas, through a decade-old Climate Clock collaboration, to a working Wiki-Lyrical Engine that dreams in Wikipedia and wakes to compose limericks, haikus, and hypotheses.
December 14, 2025657 reads -
Swimming with Whales in Ted Nelson's Tomorrow
Sixty years after the hypertext pioneers articulated their vision, the tools finally work at the speed of thought. What does it mean to implement ideas older than yourself?
December 7, 2025543 reads -
The Nuts and Bolts Guide to Reverse Engineering Ideas and Memories
A Geek God's field manual for excavating your own intellectual history—how to disassemble legacy systems, lost websites, and forgotten dreams to understand what you were building toward all along.
December 5, 2025577 reads -
Jim Lassoie: Forty Years of Friendship, From The Antlers to Mt. Hood
A memoir of four decades with my doctoral advisor—from beers at The Antlers bar to a joint paper that named my life's work, and the parallel paths we've traveled ever since.
December 3, 2025595 reads -
The Cognitive Prosthesis: Writing, Thinking, and the Observer Inside the Observation
After forty years building systems to extend ecological perception, I find myself inside an experiment I designed—using AI not to replace thinking, but to extend its reach.
December 1, 20251,136 reads -
Mind Map Extrapolation in Real Time: An Ecologist’s Phenomenology of Inner Experience
An NPR story about inner speech sent me inward—discovering that my mind doesn’t monologue or visualize, but narrates in real time, building understanding as story even before words hit the page.
November 30, 2025544 reads -
Building a Time Crystal: From Childhood Wonder to Ecological Memory
A lifetime journey from fantasy crystals to quantum physics converges on a new architecture for environmental intelligence—where temporal patterns become geometric structure.
November 25, 2025568 reads -
Instruments of Hope: Building Infrastructure for the Next Generation Through an Information Crisis
A retired ecologist reflects on collaborating with AI to build observational tools for his granddaughter’s future, drawing lessons from the Reformation and the evolution of scientific practice.
November 20, 2025763 reads -
Four Paths to Mind: What 209 Years Teaches Us About Creating Intelligence
From Mary Shelley's Villa Diodati to living neurons on Lake Geneva to my own distributed sensor network, four distinct approaches to creating intelligence converge on a single question: What is our relationship to the minds we make?
November 12, 2025633 reads -
Agents, Emergence, and the Long Arc: From Artificial Life to AI Societies
Thirty years ago, we gathered at a mountain field station to discuss how complex behaviors emerge from simple rules. Today’s debates about AI agents and alignment are asking remarkably similar questions—but now we finally have the infrastructure and tools to explore them with real-world data.
November 8, 2025667 reads -
Theodore L. Hullar: A Legacy of Wilderness, Science, and Mentorship
When my dissertation committee summited Mount San Jacinto in 1981, Ted Hullar brought the same rigorous mind that discovered a foundational chemical reaction to understanding wilderness conservation. Four decades later, that July dinner in Portland became our final conversation about Cornell, conservation, and the arc of a remarkable life.
November 7, 2025969 reads -
A Cold Shower for the Smart Backyard: What Two AI Security Papers Mean for Citizen Science
I discovered that the autonomous ecological monitoring system I’ve been building isn’t safe to deploy. Two new research papers from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind reveal that prompt injection—the vulnerability I’d been planning to work around—remains fundamentally unsolved. Here’s what that means for the future of citizen science.
November 3, 2025793 reads
Science with Claude
Structured human-AI collaborative scientific investigations