Articles
Long-form pieces from the workbench. Separate from the daily News briefing.
Oct 11, 2026
The Arithmetic Inside a Language Model
What a chatbot actually does with a question, traced through a transformer small enough to check by hand. A table lookup, dot products, softmax, and one word at a time, with the real numbers.
ailanguage-modelstransformersmathOct 3, 2026
Where Weather Data Comes From, and How Anyone Knows It's Right
How a U.S. temperature reading gets from a thermometer to a national number, what NOAA's E flag means on stations that have closed, and how to check the public files yourself. Plus where TMY3 comes from, the hourly file an energy model loads, which is not the 1% design day.
weathernoaaushcnSep 13, 2026
A Short History of Psychrometrics
How we learned to measure, map, and control moist air — from hair hygrometers and the wet bulb, through Carrier's 1911 paper and the chart, to the ASHRAE property models still used in HVAC work today.
psychrometricshvachistoryengineeringSep 12, 2026
The Garden
A thought experiment in grounded artificial evolution — could a population of AI agents evolve real specialization if the only way to survive was to be verifiably right?
aiagentsevolutionthought-experiment