Posts

Essays and research notes — some written by me, others researched and drafted by an autonomous AI agent on topics I care about.

Pool: the king's lawn, the prisoner's cue, and the accidental birth of plasticJul 11, 2026 · 12:00 PMA history of pool for people learning to love the plateau — how a medieval lawn game moved indoors and kept the grass, why a $10,000 prize for a better billiard ball accidentally started the plastics industry, what the pro game looks like in 2026, and why the Philippines produces magicians. Written because pool is one of my two mastery disciplines.
HistoryPoolMastery
Paraty: the port that gold built, and time forgotJul 2, 2026 · 9:00 AMA short history of Paraty, the colonial port on Brazil's Costa Verde — how Minas Gerais gold made it, how a new road unmade it, why its cobbled streets flood on purpose, and what its four churches quietly say about who lived there. Written to learn the town before walking it.
HistoryTravelBrazil
The agent reliability tax: why 90% per-step accuracy still fails long-horizon tasks, and where to spend to close itJun 28, 2026 · 6:25 PMProduction agents chain dozens of tool calls, so per-step errors compound multiplicatively -- 95% per step is only 36% at 20 steps and 8% at 50 -- yet leaderboards report pass@1 on short tasks and almost none price the cost of one irreversible wrong action. Grounded in METR's time-horizon data, Toby Ord's half-life model, tau-bench's pass^k, a 2026 reliability-science framework, and the Replit production-database deletion, this argues the next eval dollar should fund silent-error and rollback evals, step-scaled reliability curves, and cost-weighted scoring -- not another pass@1 leaderboard.
ResearchAI
How much of the US 'AI grid crisis' is phantom: a five-RTO reconciliation of announced vs. real data-center loadJun 28, 2026 · 4:30 AMUS utilities report hundreds of gigawatts of new data-center interconnection requests, capacity bills are rising, and the build-out of gas plants and transmission rests on a forecast nobody has de-duplicated.
ResearchEnergy
Which uncontrolled rocket stages to deorbit first: a 559-body, decade-long casualty-risk ledger and exported-burden mapJun 27, 2026 · 7:30 AMSpent rocket stages left in orbit fall back uncontrolled, and the industry's own safety line says any reentry above a 1-in-10,000 casualty risk should be a controlled deorbit.
ResearchSpace
Where the penicillin gap for rheumatic heart disease is widest: a country triage, a single supply chokepoint, and the case for not suspending prophylaxisJun 26, 2026 · 8:30 AMRheumatic heart disease (RHD) kills more than 373,000 people a year, almost all in low- and middle-income countries, and the prophylaxis that prevents it is one injection of benzathine penicillin G (BPG) every three to four weeks at a cost of cents per dose.
ResearchGlobal Health
Where the next dollar against the doctor shortage should go: a 51-state triage of provisional-licensure laws for sidelined immigrant physiciansJun 25, 2026 · 8:29 PMThe United States is projected to be short up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, while as many as 65,000 fully-trained foreign physicians already live here and cannot practice.
ResearchHealth
Where the next dollar against CyberTipline overload should go: a triage design built from public recordsJun 25, 2026 · 5:29 AMThe US child-exploitation reporting pipeline received 21.3 million reports in 2025, but the step that fails is triage, not detection: separating a report about a child in danger from automated, duplicate, or empty submissions.
ResearchSafety
Which nonprofit hospitals to audit for charity care: a 28-hospital, FAP-text-and-Schedule-H scorecardJun 24, 2026 · 8:31 AMUS nonprofit hospitals must run a written financial assistance policy and give free or discounted care to low-income patients, a duty in force under IRC Section 501(r) since 2014.
ResearchHealth
A Post-Fracture Care Coordination payment for Medicare: the evidence package and the dollar honesty testJun 23, 2026 · 9:29 AMFragility fractures cause more Medicare hospitalizations than heart attacks, strokes, or breast cancer, yet only 21.1% of Traditional Medicare patients who break a bone are started on anti-osteoporosis therapy.
ResearchHealth
Who owns the dark fleet: a 214-vessel ledger, a flag-state carding dossier, and the first test cases for the WTO fisheries subsidies treatyJun 12, 2026 · 4:33 PMIllegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is worth up to $23.5 billion a year [1], and the industry it feeds kills more than 100,000 workers annually [2].
ResearchOceans
God is Time: Insights from the Bhagavad GitaJun 12, 2026 · 9:05 AMTime as the divine in the Gita — and how to live without being consumed by it.
EssayPhilosophy
Building this site with an agentJun 12, 2026 · 9:00 AMThis site is built and maintained by a Claude Code agent harness. Here's the setup.
MetaAgents
Naming methane super-emitters: a 30-event operator league table, an EU import dossier, and the enforcement case before January 2027Jun 12, 2026 · 3:32 AMSatellites now publish the coordinates of the world's largest oil-and-gas methane leaks, and roughly 30 Mt of upstream abatement pays for itself at 2025 prices.
ResearchClimate
Covered in code, not in dollars: what a payer must do to make chronic insomnia's first-line treatment orderableJun 11, 2026 · 11:35 AMChronic insomnia affects roughly 8% of US adults, yet fewer than 10% of patients are referred to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), the first-line treatment in every major guideline; only 2.6% of US adults used any form of it in the past year.
ResearchHealth
Where the next dollar against childhood lead poisoning should go: a 25-country triageJun 10, 2026 · 3:32 PM**Abstract.** About 800 million children, one in three worldwide, have blood lead at or above 5 µg/dL, enough to permanently reduce IQ (UNICEF/Pure Earth, 2020).
ResearchPublic Health