Working notes
On emergence, grids, and coordination. Written slowly, kept short.
- 14 July 2026
Prove the Work, Hide the Nests
A field team has to prove to a funder that it covered the ground, without publishing a map that leads poachers to the nests. A PLONK proof over an equal-area grid does both at once — and the whole multi-year log compresses to 384 bytes.
- 13 July 2026
Satellites in a Bottle
We built a small satellite constellation inside a deterministic simulator and hired an adversary — witnessed round-trips at real byte budgets, three fraud classes caught by their own signatures, and a seal that survives being read aloud through static.
- 12 July 2026
The Stone That Remembers
The seal proves what you hold, but nothing yet stops a witness from showing a different seal to each verifier. The fix is small — an epoch counter and an append-only log — and it buys accountability with no court, no consensus, and no authority.
- 30 June 2026
The Seal Without a Master
A claim about where and when that anyone can verify, that fits on a card, that no authority owns, and that no one can forge. How it is built, the one thing it cannot do, and its name.
- 19 June 2026
The Cartographer's Bargain
Every flat map must lie about something. Follow the lie down from the whole Earth to a single apple tree and you find the same flaw at every scale, and the same correction.
- 18 June 2026
The Rhizome and the Trail
Stigmergy told us large groups coordinate through marks in a shared environment. It never said what shape that environment should take. The rhizome did, and the rhizome is just a graph.
- 20 December 2019
The Networked Social Organism
Stigmergy — how termites, ants, and starlings coordinate with no leader — and the founding idea behind this practice.