Coffee with Claude

A chance encounter with Robert Whittaker in 1973 set a young wilderness ranger on a path from mountain ecology to pioneering sensor networks—and ultimately to the Macroscope paradigm.

A field ecologist reflects on claims that mathematics emerges from embodied cognition and AI can achieve explainable consciousness, finding the gap between pattern and mechanism wider than theorists imagine.

Reading C. Wright Mills' 1945 essay crystallized fifty years of professional unease—the shock of seeing my career arc from field naturalist to big science administrator dissected by someone who died before I was born. The trajectory wasn't failure, but adaptation.