Miscellanies

Fifty-three essays, written before 2023

These are the ideas I kept returning to while I was building circuits, interfaces, physical models, and ways for people to think together.

They range from multiplexers and self-reconfiguring machines to quiet communication devices, physical presence, community, language, stars, music, and the discipline of making an idea concrete. Choose a shelf or begin with the first essay that catches you.

Living Circuits And Spatial Machines

Begin with a multiplexer, give state and wires physical meaning, and keep building until the machine can install and replace its own working regions.

  1. From Domain Models Down to MUXes—and Back Up A walk from diverse domain models through simulation, control and datapath, Boolean relations, multiplexers, state, energy, and physical work.
  2. Reverse the MUX: Abduction as Executable Inference Run a multiplexer relation backward from an observed output, enumerate compatible causes, and rank the surviving explanations.
  3. Logical Momentum: A State Needs a Direction, Not Just a Value A design for computations that carry transition direction, completion, and release instead of representing every variable as a timeless value.
  4. An Instruction Is a Wire Reused in Time A speculative event-fabric architecture where stateful pattern matchers react to changed bits and instructions schedule connections through time.
  5. Arrows: A Graph Language That Can Become Hardware A graph becomes executable when every arrow has explicit semantics for value, state, direction, timing, and physical cost.
  6. A Programming Language Made of Live Circuits A design for a parallel, reactive, dynamically reconfigurable language in which instances are live circuits and code is the stream that constructs them.
  7. The Whole Thing: Static Verilog in a Dynamic World Static circuit descriptions become a dynamic language when a spatial fabric can install, connect, own, and replace them while it runs.
  8. Why I Put a Reconfigurable Fabric in WebGL Why WebGL became a fast, visual laboratory for testing the local state and reconfiguration rules of a custom spatial fabric.
  9. Cartilage: The Architecture That Rebuilt Itself A first-person history of Cartilage, from event membranes and dynamic cores to ownership trees, spatial programs, wiring, and application-laid clocks.
  10. Booting a Reconfigurable Fabric from Its Edge An edge FPGA reads a microSD image, streams configuration into a neighboring fabric, and brings networking up after the machine exists.
  11. A Computer That Boots by Growing Its Own Wires A blank spatial fabric grows configuration paths, regions, programs, and wires until keyboard commands have assembled a working computer.
  12. The Cartilage Editor and Seed I Wanted in 2021 Turn a raw GPU texture and FPGA starter board into a spatial editor with saving, selection, labels, named ports, and deployment.
  13. The FPGA You Can Debug from a Mountain A design for a portable and remote FPGA workbench that preserves exact sequential state, inspectable transitions, local safety, and reproducible snapshots.
  14. Reconstructing a Shader Pipeline on an iCE40 Translate texture reads, cached state, parallel cell updates, and streamed output from a fragment shader into a tiny iCE40 pipeline.
  15. Physical Causality Has Geometry State transitions, bandwidth, clocks, ownership, topology, power, cooling, and allocation all inherit geometry and finite propagation.
  16. A Brain-Sized Machine in Real Units A dimensional exercise that turns brain-scale computation into connections, update rates, memory, floor area, power, cooling, and routing.
  17. Matter That Computes and Moves An engineering path toward artificial cells whose material, switching, communication, and motion form one closed physical process.
  18. A Machine Small Enough to Explain All at Once Build a tiny stored-program computer from stores, moves, jumps, and a visible stack, then test it with a bracket checker.

Software, State, And Communication

These essays treat interfaces and networks as arrangements of attention, state, time, authority, and physical channels.

  1. Model the World Around the State Machine Design hierarchical statecharts by modeling the medium and subsystem states together, then choosing meaningful world-level macrostates.
  2. A Statechart That Remembers How It Was Changed A dynamic statechart model that records editing and execution in one directed history and makes observed transitions explicit states.
  3. Prohibit Action Upon Stale Data A user interface should not carry out a consequential action when the facts shown to the user are no longer the facts the system will act upon.
  4. Definitions That Can Fail Their Own Tests People write hierarchical definitions and acceptance criteria; machines search for implementations that those definitions can test.
  5. Where Does an Information System Live? An information system lives in the maintained correspondence among a problem, shared models, executable procedures, and coordinated human action.
  6. Speak in Changes, Not Commands A voice-programming concept built around compact sound symbols and a language that describes changes to a visible model.
  7. When Meaning Bends the Medium A design model in which semantic content can request layout, routing, transformation, and execution without gaining unlimited control over its host.
  8. QuickPaster: A Paste-Only Handoff Between Devices A deliberately small design for pairing browser windows and handing one piece of text to one chosen online destination.
  9. LateReply: A Page, Not a Feed LateReply is a deliberate communication device: one patient e-ink page with a hard rule that the page never becomes a scrolling feed.
  10. Presence Is a Device, Not a Video Call A physical telepresence device for dedicated attention, tangible remote action, local autonomy, safety, and an always-available window.
  11. The Mobile Web Interaction Kernel A small architecture for mobile web applications that makes state, composition, layout, touch, focus, scrolling, and rendering explicit.
  12. One Feature, Every Platform Why cross-platform product teams should own features end to end while treating each operating system as a real, native integration target.
  13. What Old Computers Got Right A computer should preserve the user's work, invite physical extension, explain itself completely, and make programming available the moment it turns on.
  14. EventEdge: A Privacy-First Cloud Over the Park A design for local public-space computing, resilient aerial infrastructure, and personal devices that do not watch their owners.

Models, Physics, Mind, And Society

Connections run through these essays: between events, people, institutions, physical models, language, memory, and the future.

  1. The Universe Is Connections A connections-first physical model in which events and causal links are fundamental and spacetime emerges from the graph.
  2. One Number Line for the Physical Universe How to compute across enormous physical scales without confusing floating-point range, precision, dimensions, and the choice of units.
  3. When Patterns Feel Like Physics A first-person investigation of numerical synchronicity, dimensional discipline, and the moment an uncanny pattern becomes a testable physical proposal.
  4. Quantum Claims Under Stress A builder’s guide from quantum phenomenon to device, complete system, comparative advantage, and useful mission.
  5. Time, Memory, and the One Now A lived philosophy of one present moment, finite attention, memory, possible selves, spiritual focus, and loving the world one would change.
  6. Cohesion: The Property That Makes a Model Worth Keeping A practical definition of cohesion as explanatory compression that preserves the distinctions needed for prediction, construction, and revision.
  7. The Fivefold Mind and Nested Agency A personal five-layer model of mind joined to nested agency, where higher-order freedom grows from constrained lower-level choices.
  8. Headless Minds: Gaia, Democracy, and Collective Intelligence Collective intelligence without a central thinker, spanning ecological networks, democracy, bureaucracy, invention, memory, and accountability.
  9. Messages to the Future: Dissemination as a Form of Thought A metaphysical belief about reality as the memories of God, the soul and outer intention, the one now, and why publication lets thought live again.
  10. The Consumer Paradox Sales, marketing, money, and software become less manipulative when they help people discover and coordinate what they actually need.
  11. The Infrastructure We Hide, and the Tools We Should Own A practical argument for making the energy, computation, fabrication, repair, and responsibility behind ordinary products visible and locally accessible.
  12. The System of Catch-22: Plausible Deniability as Architecture How institutions trap people between law, loyalty, secrecy, and responsibility—and how to build a protected route out.
  13. Write the Failures Failed ideas reveal the search space: what looked plausible, what reality changed, and what another builder can carry into the next attempt.
  14. The Indo-Austronesian Hypothesis Turn Indo-European and Austronesian resemblances into a test using provenance, regular correspondences, and coincidence rates.
  15. Canopus and Agastya How a brilliant southern star became Agastya: an astronomical marker, a traveler across latitude, and a durable vessel for cultural memory.

Building, Learning, And Creative Work

A small set of practical essays about making boards, teaching whole systems, organizing people, leaving theory, inventing, and playing music.

  1. Learn Electronics by Building One Whole Computer A project-led electronics curriculum in which every new circuit becomes part of one computer the learner can eventually understand end to end.
  2. The PCB You Can Actually Build at Home How to design a home-buildable PCB around packages, layers, materials, and processes a small workshop can inspect, repair, and improve.
  3. Events Entertain; Meetings Build A proposal for recurring maker meetings organized around commitments, artifacts, negotiated activities, and work that continues after the room empties.
  4. Inventor Is Not a Rank Why inventing is an ordinary working identity—and why independent builders need recurring workshops rather than isolated showcases.
  5. Enough Theory: How to Leave an Infinite Research Program How to archive an endlessly generative field without denying its value, choose a different goal, and build a slow but exact instrument.
  6. Play Harmony at Melody Speed A concept for an instrument that separates continuous strumming from robotic chord formation so harmony can be played quickly and comfortably.