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Practical notes on web design, brand identity and content, alongside longer research essays on design, cognition, AI and how systems hold together.
Observation Lock Points: There Is No Observer Outside the Process
Reality does not need observers to keep transforming, yet some of the configurations it produces hold a perspective for a while. I propose a process-first account of where those perspectives come from, a name for the moment one forms, candidate measures for finding it, and the tests that could prove the idea wrong.
The Variance Penalty: Bodies Aren't Content Calendars
I set out to argue that women lose focus half the month and the feed punishes them for it. The research took the first half of that sentence apart and made the second half stronger.
Image Inflation: The Death of the Image Has a Bibliography
A video essay says images are losing their power to signal status. I checked its claims, found one inflated number, and traced the century of theory it never names.
Character Maintenance: The Egregore in the Safety Dataset
A video claimed Anthropic had mapped the demons inside its AI. I checked, expecting the usual inflation. The wildest word in the claim turned out to be a row in the paper's own tables, and the discipline the paper describes turned out to be one I already practice.
The Adjudicator Problem: Why Designers Perform Certainty
A one-page essay from 2008 tells scientists that feeling stupid is the job. It works because an experiment eventually answers. Design has no experiment, and what fills the gap is the confidence of whoever is presenting.
The Obedient Layer: What a Style Gate Actually Removes
A style rule strips the AI register's vocabulary completely and leaves its rhythm untouched. I set my eleven published essays against machine essays in the same genre, and on sentence rhythm I could not tell the two piles apart. This is also the essay where I withdraw most of my own earlier numbers and explain why.
The Thirst Trap: Glassmorphism and the Science That Doesn't Hold Water
The story says frosted-glass UI whispers to a million-year-old part of the brain that just found a river. I shipped the aesthetic and repeated the story. Then I traced its evidence chain: four links, one load-bearing study, and a replication that came back empty.
The Architect Layer: The Part That Stays Mine
Most days I work with a model in a second window: it drafts, I decide what's any good. The cognitive science of focus, intuition, and insight is really a description of the expensive part, the part worth keeping when a machine can do the cheap part.
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Occasional notes on websites, branding and content, plus longer essays that test the ideas behind them. No fixed schedule.