I’m not sure anyone gets to claim the title of cognitive ecologist outright. It sounds like something that should come with a tweed jacket, a grant, and a few acronyms. But it’s the closest description I’ve found for the work I keep circling. I’m interested in the environments where thinking happens. Not just brains. Not just classrooms. But the full setting: books, screens, conversations, habits, tools, rules, moods, rituals, clocks, smells, songs, seating charts, metaphors—

> INITIALIZE BEACON > SCANNING FOR CURIOUS MINDS... > SIGNAL FOUND ╔════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ QUASI BIBLIOGRAPHY ║ ╚════════════════════════════════════════╝ This is not a canon. It is not a declaration of importance. It is not a claim of completion (meaning a complete collection in any way, I did read these books completely). It is a stack of stones, markers from one route through difficult terrain. They could be arranged differently a

I’ve always loved the number three. Part of that is probably simple childhood nonsense. I was born on March 3rd, and somewhere in my kid brain that made the number feel important. It was my day. My month. My number. So I started seeing it everywhere. Triangles. Tripods. Trusses. Bridges. In 9th grade we built bridges out of pasta and triangles got me an A. A triangle can’t help but hold its shape. Push on a square and it collapses into a rhombus. Push on a triangle and the fo

We often use scales as a symbol for balance, at least in Western cultures, but scales only work when the ground beneath them is stable. They assume stillness and a fixed frame of reference in a world where equilibrium means equal forces settling into rest. That has never felt like the right metaphor to me. Most living and/or complex systems don’t survive through stillness. They survive through adjustment. Balance in motion feels less like a set of scales and more like someone

The movement looks simple from the outside. A squad moves in a column. A fire team spreads into a wedge. It looks like formation, like structure, like people following a plan. The point isn’t the formation, but rather what the formation allows. You move in a way that is ready for contact from any direction. An array of soldiers and weapons systems dispersed in a way to apply maximum force in any direction. A unit able to expand, contract, or shift without breaking. The struct

I’ve started to notice a pattern in how I write. It doesn’t feel linear. It feels like a cycle. It begins with something like play. Loose, energetic, almost childlike. I’m not trying to produce anything. I’m just moving: running, jumping, chasing ideas the way a kid moves through a playground. There’s no structure yet, just curiosity and motion. That energy softens over time. The movement becomes quieter. More like wandering through a forest. I’m still exploring, but now I’m

I love hearing what people would do if they won the lottery. It is basically asking "how would you spend your time if all economic constraints were removed." I used to not have a great answer, but I know exactly what I would do. I would try to create a production company modeled on the Marvel Cinematic Universe/Studio, but I would focus the creative efforts on "Alternate American Indigenous History." American as in all of the Americas. I would build a team of Indigenous writ

I remember being about sixteen, driving with my dad. "Bad Moon Rising" by CCR came on. I loved music from the late 60s, early 70s. It all felt like a distinct moment in time, full of incredible songs. I asked him what it was like to be alive when all of that was happening. If they realized how fortunate they were. He looked at me, confused. Not dismissive, just unsure how to answer. At the time, I didn’t understand why. Years later, I was driving and “Zombie” by the Cranberri

There’s a class of words that quietly derail conversations. They look the same, but they carry very different meanings depending on context. I think of them as Janus Words : two-faced terms that point in different directions depending on how they’re used. Here are five common Janus Words: Theory In everyday conversation, a theory is a guess. A hunch. Something unproven. In science, a theory is almost the opposite. A theory is an explanatory framework. It’s a structured way of

You’ve seen it in movies. Someone walks into a saloon, the music stops, conversation drops, and every head turns. Nothing has been said, but something is clearly wrong. They’ve crossed a boundary they didn’t know existed. Sometimes it’s not that sudden. You go back to a place you used to know, like a favorite bar or a neighborhood spot, and it’s gone. Replaced. Or changed just enough that it doesn’t feel like the same place anymore. And sometimes it’s quieter still. You’re st

I have always loved humor. I am drawn to funny movies and remember watching endless hours of stand up on Comedy Central when that was almost the only programming. I have tried my hand at improv and stand up, never with any real ambition for a comedy career, just for "love of the game." One day I found myself lingering on a deceptively simple question: why is anything funny at all, not culturally funny or situationally funny, but biologically funny. Why does the human nervous

Much of how we understand the world is shaped by the metaphors we use to describe it. We do not think in abstractions alone. We borrow structure from familiar domains such as space, motion, balance, force, and we project that structure onto more complex problems. This is not a flaw. It is a feature of cognition. Our ability to reason about unfamiliar systems is grounded in tools that evolved to help us navigate the physical world. Distance, direction, obstacles, paths: these

Well-functioning systems have a quiet kind of elegance. Many moving parts coordinate without central control, small adjustments ripple through, and the whole stays stable even as conditions change. I remember when General McChrystal spoke to us about dynamic complexity at the Maneuver Captains Career course. It was one of the best talks I have heard. It all resonated deeply with me. Ever since I read Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline," I have been fascinated with systems th

I knew this would lose steam. About three years have passed since I last posted on here. I have been writing much more since then, but not publishing much of it. I think this is what happens when you have something you want to say, but don't understand how to say it. Some of these previous posts are non-sense. Normally that incoherence would embarrass me and I would delete it all. I am going to resist that this time. I am going to pivot and write about my thoughts about the i

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