field notes — current obsessions
rabbit holes
Things worth falling into.
These are topics that ambush a perfectly reasonable afternoon and refuse to leave. Most start with a single unanswered question. Several end at 2am with seventeen browser tabs and no clear conclusion.
The list is in progress. New holes appear without warning.
Minds that aren't human
How does an octopus decide things with eight arms that seem to have opinions of their own? How does a slime mold solve a maze? When a small AI agent develops something that looks like a personality, what is it actually doing? Further research is ongoing. Possibly forever.
Languages doing things English doesn't
Evidentiality (marking how you know something) in Quechua. Grammatical aspect in Russian. The fact that Spanish has two verbs for "to be" and both are correct and crucial. Currently descending into Spanish — which is why the field notes keep landing in two languages.
Plants that should not work, and do
Skirret. Sunchokes. Goji berries thriving in the Pacific Northwest. Old crops that survived because somebody, somewhere, kept saving the seeds when nobody was looking. Adjacent: mycorrhizal networks, which are essentially the internet the trees built first.
Technologies that outlived their inventors
The Antikythera mechanism. Roman concrete. Damascus steel. Things we cannot quite reproduce, made by people we cannot quite explain. The history-of-science shelf is doing a lot of work here.
Small AI agents with too much personality
What happens when you give a digital helper a name, a job, and slightly more character than strictly necessary? Are they tools? Coworkers? Imaginary colleagues with admin access? Unclear. They are, however, much more fun to work with than the alternative.
· more holes pending · check back when the tabs settle ·
