Trying out a couple concepts. Writing about nature, tech, poetry, mathematics. Providing safe arbour in a darkening forest.
I am feeling the passersby of information I am invoking cloudless blue sky beloved astronomer Patient for nightfall I am considering how alchemy Is a matter of sufficient energy How entropy is a matter of rearrangment How simple we lay it I am settling into a former self My lord how it relaxes me How much I need to be here Peaceful dwelling contour
Being amongst Swaths and swaths of antiquity Is the deepest relief I am As ignorant, as nameless, As collective, as individuated, As proximate to slivers of knowledge As anyone here I can sit, anonymous awe, and breathe
Ramble of work I believe very little in destination Not some grand conviction Just the evidence of experience Stuck in meander
Relief of being somewhere unknown Place of no pretense No face to put on Tension giving way Some final sigh dropping expectation Into the slowest, kindest aimless walk Eyes panning, absorbing Little joys
I trace a flightpath portion - Luminous bird, underbelly Saturated in sunset I recall my childhood hand Palming a flashlight in the dark, My own transparency Glowing orange through
Looping split of a rush (Crack a window) spilling apologetics Instructional essentials, ESSENTIALS I will utterly distract myself Utterly (momentous) fleeting Lavish confession
I have not had a winter to emerge from - Nothing for years and years and years Slow, slow, sudden, wild springtime Glorious as anyone says Bud-green, branching, blooming They do this every year? Stoic, stoics all. I'm in awe. I'll drop into the lateral bands soon It'll all surprise me again, soon They do this every year
Devising clocks, calendars, Unsettling shapes of time Boundary-laden Weighty items Atomized Totemic miseries and mercies
Keep it light, loose and bizzare One is all I need (I can encrypt a zoo) Like a precondition, forests were first. Giambattista saw wandering giants as A trope and a genre Foreign, tragic. Chaotic imagination that is the focus And locus of poets. We engage and encourage With perfect contempt, nostalgia for utopia. I seldom dislike doing nothing. I am concerned less with truth than reality On…
Artless rummage, material Gymnast Flipping, flipping through scraps Needy, needing a firm hold Choice in slippery grasp
Lacewing, snowdrop Wanting an imprint, Delightful curl on a vinerung Wintry, brittle on the slat Loose huddle of intention Something (meadow breaker) to regard
Crossword Heatmap Inspiration : Curiosity initially around what the most common crossword layout is. Kinda morphed into wondering about distributions of empty spaces and letters. Description : I downloaded some crossword data from Saul Pwanson . I focused on the NYT crossword which has had two variations for its history, the 15 x 15 daily and the 21 x 21 Sunday version. For each version, I tallied…
Over the past decade I've lived in 14-ish apartments, 7 cities and 3 countries. It's a lot of movement. There's all kinds of pros / cons with so much change. But I think my favorite part has been the repeated opportunity to wander. I love to be aimless, love the feeling of discovery. After our latest move to another city, I'd been trying to find fun things to do with my 1 and 2 year old kids:…
Rising Temperature Inspiration : Desire to learn some more about LLM outputs and the 1:1 temperature mapping to the warming globe was a salient analogy for things melting down Description : I repeatedly asked an LLM to complete the sentence “Climate change is _____ at +[0 - 2.5]°C". And each time, I increased the LLM's response temperature (increases randomness) from 0 to 2.5 . This maps…
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. - Mary Oliver, wonder of a poet That quote tumbles around my mind some nights. Makes me think about the last decade, the next decade. Who I can still be. Makes me think about all the poems I've written. Maybe 1 out of every…
Creature: beloved, bumpy, Interleaving thing Beside you, groundling, A moderate rest. Intimate, clever life.
Wavy thrum, splendid Blueish afternoon Torso's grassy imprint Eyelids oscillating scales Of exhaustion (exhalation) Wind and treeshade Mimicry Noisy, noiseless and very, very welcome Slow heart and a lovely wait
Of the after-fold Shadow and shadow-dog Approximate likeness Same except - a pattern (Certainly not mine) Triangles in image, even In cobblestone vanishing Finely attuned, seeking Rhythms, puzzles, variant chords Gnawing, ancient knack
I, you (we) cast lives Into gaps of printed words We brush flows over aging pigment Narrative creatures that we are Movement, movement We need motion, arcing, Action to freedom I want to tell us (you) A story in perspective, a new story In perspective (How clear you have been) Cleared and estranged There are traces and notes, Compelling notes And many, many echoes
Fingerprint grooves pinning Forcing a needle forward Delicate, etching slice Luminous pressure Pushing a pathway A form of future Intended
Shaggy watershed, blankets of firs And blurry pines, cosine slopes With a sunny, windy chill
Silence never felt creative Noise Noise did its part Clambering nonsense finding the spirit
Whether I worry or wonder or wear regret I fold in the revel of the repossesed Were I laughing or living or laying awake I'd offer my love, my rivery fate
I visited some familiar trees Saw the old footholds, grips, Stretches, contortions and cradles. I imagined my forest seats Leglocked and body balanced I remembered these lithe and lovely wooded homes Movements Of lively springing Climbing, gliding, silent things Wind in the weeds I was guided, had strength to follow Blessing of youth My wild, scattered heart
Farthest seat from the front Folded into bright pages of Sketched patterns Recombining, calibrating Edges and curved entries An implicit care Ears absorbing a room A type of translation
I have a couple of young kids (6-month old and 2 year old), so my days of burning time watching NBA games is long gone. I still try to keep up with the league, though. And during these 2025 playoffs, I follow along by intermittently refreshing the pages on Paul Martinez's excellent website: plaintextsports.com Since all I can focus on are the game stats periodically ticking, I started noticing…
Around 2020, I noticed beige website design popping up. And when I started my digital garden in 2023, I chose that direction. My favorite examples of the genre pair up classic / vintage serif fonts with illustrations. I think the idea is simply to evoke old books and human writing. In the past couple years, led by Anthropic, a handful of LLM-related websites have co-opted the design style. Their…
A round, tumbling sort of breeze, Spilling tops of sand mounds, Filling pockets. A mile out, the foaming break. Mute. Periodic. There is nobody between. Almost nothing. Wallpaper waves, right to left. Thousands of watery divots.
Do the mountains know they are slowly drowning? Do the birds care? Will the clouds remember When they gather somewhere else?
From a balcony (lazy perch), My eyes wander out, And lose sight of little. Far greens and further blues. Scenic dissolution.
Miles into the wheeling - Cross of a problem Looking like a loop. You can't help but retrace A stretch. Memorial glitch, Or vision. Glimpse Of the next time And the next
Climbing Trees Inspiration : The incredible trees that I've had the luck to climb in my life Description : Wanted a place to collect some of my favorite trees. Living in Northern California for about a decade, I was able to free-climb a bunch of redwoods, pines, oaks, and fruit trees. I also added in some favorites from my time in Puerto Rico (flamboyan) and Texas (live oak). There's nothing quite…
Cistercian Ciphers Inspiration : (1) The Hungarian-monk-founded Cistercian school I went to in Texas and (2) the code and cool project page on Cistercian numerals by Ákos Nikházy Description : It turns out the Cistercians (an order of Catholic monks) created a numeric system that could represent the numbers 1 - 9999. The ciphers have nice symmetry and, with some practice, become quick to read. I…
Island Peakscapes Inspiration : A series of beautiful maps created by Chaney Swiney , composed with excellent colors, typography and framing Description : Felt like this was such a cool type of map that I wanted to try my hand at it. Focused on some of the islands that mean the most to me. I think the original maps were made in Natural Scene Designer by starting with a Distance Mask effect. I…
Image Sampling Inspiration : The fascinating, sometimes disorienting, image processing by the Japanese artist Kensuke Koike (see image below) Description : So much of the statistical world involves building a model: reducing reality to a more manageable number of dimensions. Even the billions of parameters in the largest LLMs are a simplification of the sheer complexity of reality. I think the…
Line Drawings Inspiration : (1) The beautiful, mazelike, single-line drawings by the Polish architect and engineer Wacław Szpakowski (2) the serenity of Japanese zen gardens and (3) these kinetic art sand tables by Sisyphus Description : Wanted to make something slow and peaceful, developing on the page. Each animated drawing is a single, uninterrupted line. And all the drawings are vectorized…
Childhood Dictionary Inspiration : My little 1-year-old walking around, discovering brand new sounds and words and formulations - really cool to transcribe some of her original words : ) Description : There are thousands of known languages out there which is incredible. Watching my kids learn to speak, it's fun to imagine the literally billions of fleeting dialects that children all around the…
Direct Etymologies Inspiration : The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology edited by C.T. Onions - such an incredible 1800's name Description : Word origins fascinate me, and I wanted to discover the etymologies of all the words I write here on my website. Some words are simple - the word area in English comes from the word area in Latin. Some words are thornier - the word unbelievably is forged…
Polygon or circle? Inspiration : The limit of a regular n -gon as n → is a circle. <p><b>Description</b>: In the physical world, a perfect circle does not exist and cannot be drawn. In the world of pixels and perception, however, there is some point at which our eyes no longer discern the <i>n</i>-gon. I think, for this graphic, I see a circle around the <i>85</i>-gon and up. Very dependent…
Coalescing Text Inspiration : Exhibit at Musée de Tahiti et des îles Description : Just wanted to have fun animating letters, trying to come up with something interesting, slow, evolving. Maybe evoking synaesthesia? The colors of the letters (graphemes) correspond to the categories of ARPAbet consonants / vowels (phonemes) in the legend below. The mapping of graphemes to phonemes comes from some…
Overgrowth There are dim pockets in the woods, quiet places. Tree bark coursing with ants, crumbling branches, dark and humid. There's an allure to their stillness, unmistakable smell. Organic residue and soft ground. Forests tolerate them for years, decades - sites of latent resurrection. In the meantime they are mapped by those within. Eerily calm as they writhe, toil. Decay is a series of…
I kindle a kind of kinship King in knitted koi
Lost or never held, abysmal Dispersal, ragnarök dream or dreamt. Coins flew through my palms, Ghost that I was or will be, heavy Floorsmoke pushing out the door.
A curious, unkempt absorption, Logs chopped, soaked and ragged, Untimely, and no type of kindling. Plaster sinews brought Yard by yard by yard, lengthy yield, Remittance of thatchery. Every time I care less, or less, or less, I am met by a wilderness (Kinetic) My body, Lithe animal dropped, Sharp or soft or Heard and felt and endless. Lifetimes could be there in the Collision, In the yielding.
Trained mind, grooved, Finding and finding again Pathways, turns, all known.
Hollow pain, Back locked in a shallow angle, Buckled tendons, Collapsing left knee, Sharp jolt, Eyes driven shut.
Billowy whiplash of a life tethered, Knifed free. Windstream Rippled fabric, far, far to a Dip, violent dive Into choppy waves
Spokes in revolution, Inordinate time, numerical sign Switch-switch-switched Backed up - no - reversed (no) Illusion of frame. Revered, referred, stored - Steel never stolen, un-shared. Brake often broken, padlocked To post, subterranean platform Click, walk, click, walk, click, click click-click Missed it, tired, flat out of breath Bumpy lean, pressed cloth Off kilter with a close ratio No…
Variety is a trick of reconsideration. This was not quite that, Even if it could have been, Or tried to be. It either changed before, Or you changed it after. Alteration or departure.
I want to wield clarity, motion, Unburdened scythe-grip I want to be mid-field, certain, Sweating In the churn of unearthed minutiae