Essays & Prototypes
Deep dives on the things I can't stop thinking about.
Long-form arguments on policy, society, physics, technology, space and engineering.
Federal law is full of fixed dollar amounts and ages that stay the same for decades or follow a price index that drifts. Congress should tie dollar amounts to median income and ages to life expectancy. A free national payroll service would supply the timely data to do it.
A large school places a child in a same-age crowd far larger than the social worlds people lived in for most of history. The ranking inside that crowd is hard to leave. It often shapes how a person sees the self long after school ends.
A working adult in the United States must carry many separate responsibilities at once. Some are required by law. Some are optional on paper and mandatory in practice. Schools do not teach these responsibilities. The load is regressive.
Physical law shows structures that also appear in software. These include sharding, aggregation, and information limits. This post presents the case, the strongest objections, and what remains.
You're being pointed at data centers for water use while golf courses, sod, almonds, and lawns use orders of magnitude more. If water were the real concern, that's where the boycott would be.
We already know how to build sealed habitats. The harder problem is trusting the people inside them with systems that can kill everyone — the same reason your phone doesn't run on a nuclear battery.
Detection of synthetic media is not a lasting solution. A lasting solution is cryptographic provenance at the time of capture. Each year of delay leaves more of the historical record without a checkable origin.
Meaningful space travel isn't just an engineering problem. At interstellar distances, it's a biology problem — longevity and radiation repair — and we're not treating it that way.
A product requirements document describes an idea. A feature branch can show the idea. This post examines that difference, and the software architecture that makes the second option possible.
Small working apps that test an idea by letting you use it.All prototypes
A turn-based colosseum battler inspired by the Final Fantasy VII Battle Arena: one fighter, five bouts and foes that get tougher every round.
A pixel-art browser adventure: explore caves, fight monsters, mine ore and sell it in town to buy better gear.
Interactive world and US maps of how many hours a year are comfortable for outdoor work: mild, dry and not muggy, with every threshold adjustable.
An interactive skill tree of childhood development, from first smile to first job, for tracking each child's progress at their own pace.
An educational revenue simulator: change income tax brackets, tariffs and excise taxes, and see roughly how much the federal government would collect.
An interactive six-axis radar (spider) chart that turns a scorecard into a shape you can compare at a glance, and explains each axis on demand.