Tag
accessible
- EssayOuch.
Environmental law is the sound a civilization makes after the burn—ouch without the flinch. This essay argues that the century-long failure to protect the living world was never a failure of caring but of loop speed, shows with control theory why a loop must close roughly eighty times faster than the harm it holds, and argues that the collapse of the understanding stage between 2022 and 2025 makes a planetary flinch buildable for the first time: reflex below, intention above.
- EssayWho closes the environmental protection loop?
Seven eras of the environmental protection loop—sense, infer, decide, act—from a thermostat with no one to set it to a valve that shuts the second a leak opens. The operators changed six times and the four jobs never did; the only variable that ever moved was how fast the loop closes, and for four billion years a bigger domain meant a slower one. The machine loop now being built is the first regulator off that line.
- EssayThe Missing Chapter of AI Safety
A verbatim term search of the five documents that govern frontier AI—OpenAI's Model Spec, Anthropic's Constitution, DeepMind's Frontier Safety Framework, Meta's Frontier AI Framework, and the EU AI Act—returns zero hits for watershed, aquifer, groundwater, wetland, habitat, emissions, conservation of mass, and conservation of energy. Argues that this is not an oversight but an unopened category, and sketches what an environmentally grounded system would commit to: disclosure rather than refusal, hard constraints drawn only from conservation laws, grounding in live measurement rather than recollection, and an auditable log.
- EssayThe Daylight
Every environmental law is a number standing in for something we care about. We care about a river a child can swim in; we cannot write swimmable into a statute, so we write a number instead. The space between the number and the thing cannot be closed, because a rule without a number cannot be enforced. For fifty years that did not matter much, because finding the space took a specialist, months, and money. A working environmental lawyer of twenty-seven years on what happens now that it takes an afternoon, and why the answer is to stop grading the paperwork and start grading the river.
- EssayPlanetary Dead Time: Overcoming the Hundred-Billion-Fold Control Gap in Environmental Stewardship
Every instance of environmental degradation runs a physical control loop—sense, transmit, understand, decide, act—historically hard-capped by the 39-bit-per-second limit of human language and the institutional friction it breeds, a structural delay named here Planetary Dead Time. The convergence of ubiquitous IoT sensing and machine-speed AI foundation-model inference has collapsed that bottleneck, letting environmental protection evolve from post-hoc forensic remediation into a real-time, planetary nervous system.
- BookBits Protect Its: A Children's Book
A picture book carrying the corpus's central thesis—Bits Protect Its—down to first principles a child can follow. It traces the hundred-year chain of discovery from Maxwell's demon through Shannon, Landauer, Bennett, and Wheeler to a single claim: knowing is cheaper than forcing, by law. And it introduces Jed's Angel, the planetary-scale defender that watches, thinks, and gently nudges the living world toward life.
- EssayNature Computes
Ten exercises, each takeable in under ten seconds, that make a single perception shift visible fast: nature is not just beautiful, it is processing information. From the two-bit genetic code in your thumb to the parallel computing of a leaf to the bond-bit asymmetry, the sequence ends where the corpus begins—information is far cheaper than force, so environmental superintelligence should use bits to protect bonds.
- EssayThe Energy That Doesn't Burn
An illustrated children's adaptation of Artificial Energy. For two hundred years humans powered the world with one trick—burning—while the leaf has harvested energy from free-energy gradients, without burning anything, for 3.5 billion years. Twelve pages walk young readers up the energy ladder to Artificial Energy: machines clever enough to choose which energy to catch, the twin sibling of AI.
- EssayVita Omnia: A Children's Book
An illustrated children's adaptation of the Vita Omnia letter. Across five spreads it tells young readers the three claims of the original: that for four billion years life was blind to what could destroy it and we are the first who can see; that you are not your atoms but the pattern they carry; and that the blessing to be fruitful and fill was never bounded by one planet. We are not the authors of life, but we may be its carriers.
- EssayA Walk You've Never Taken
Twelve verified physics observations, each takeable in ten seconds on a thirty-minute walk, ending at the bond-bit asymmetry. The most accessible on-ramp to the corpus's central claim: knowing where to put an atom is incomprehensibly cheaper than holding it there.