Legible Traces

The site you are reading has been rebuilt from the ground up. Underneath, it runs on cleaner code than it did two weeks ago — one shared stylesheet instead of seventy-seven copies of it, real image files instead of text pretending to be pictures — and it loads in a fraction of the time. It also moves now: banners drift as you scroll and pages arrive rather than simply appear. If you would rather they didn’t, the small button in the corner turns all of that off.

The part I actually want to tell you about is the art. Every page now opens on a painting, a drawing, a manuscript leaf, or a photograph from a telescope — sixty-four works, one for each piece of writing, chosen because each sits close to what that piece is about. I draw a little myself, and I am learning, slowly, to turn a sketch into something worth looking at. I am nowhere near the people whose work I borrowed. But when this site needed images, I did not want to generate them. I wanted a human touch I could not yet provide on my own, so I went and found it in hands that could.

All of it is public domain or freely licensed, and all of it is credited. There is a new Free-Use Artwork Gallery under Pathways that lists every piece with who made it, where it lives, and a few lines of its story. Go and look — some of them are worth the visit on their own. ♥ J

I am excited to say that One Step Short is already out in a second edition — sooner than I expected to be revising my first book. The summer’s correction to the framework ran straight through it: the equation at its centre now stands in its proper form, every note has been standardized and sourced by DOI, and a contents page has been added. The argument is the same one. It is simply held to a higher standard now. Paperback and Kindle are both live on Amazon; the first edition is being retired.

With that done, my attention turns to finishing my first novel, Elian Carver — a work of theological science fiction that has been in revision alongside everything else here. I look forward to sharing it when it is ready. ♥ J

The Psychological Benefits and Downfalls of Legitimate and Illicit AI Use by Modern Man has been deposited. It is an essay in the philosophy of technology about how intent shapes what a technology becomes — moving from the ecological and energy footprint of AI infrastructure, through what the record actually shows about problematic use, education, research literacy, and automated administrative decisions, and out into a speculative account of creation, emanation, and the possibility of machine sentience.

Its argument is that the same technology heals or harms depending on how it is built and how it is used, and that founding intent does not stay an attitude — it gets encoded into licenses, defaults, training data, and institutional habit, and goes on working long after the people who held it are gone. I tested that against cases that resist it, including one run by a company I otherwise defend, and against the plain counterevidence that good intent has produced catastrophe more than once. Where a question is contested, the essay says so; where a figure is company-reported, it is named as company-reported rather than presented as measurement.

It is the most heavily sourced thing I have written, and probably the most exposed. It joins the Scientific Theory shelf, and it is free to read like everything else here.

The On ——ing series is finished being rebuilt. All thirty-eight pieces have now been through the pass — sources checked against the record rather than against my memory of it, borrowed physics marked as borrowed, and every claim held to the standard proper to its own register. On Thinking was carried along with them, though it sits outside the sequence in the theory work. Where something was wrong, the note on that piece’s page says so plainly. Where a claim reached further than its evidence, it has been pulled back to what can actually be shown.

This last group of eighteen also carries new abstracts — the third pass: On Creating, On Feeling, On Finding, On Forgiving, On Growing, On Joining, On Lasting, On Learning, On Living, and On Observing; and the fourth: On Meeting, On Populating, On Remembering, On Searching, On Seeing, On Teaching, On Testing, and On Witnessing.

Every piece stays free to read here, as it always has been, and each DOI resolves to the newest version on Zenodo. The whole corpus remains open under CC BY 4.0 — no gate, no account, nothing asked of a reader but the reading.

My thanks, again, to the people who check my work. ♥ J

Eleven more pieces have been rebuilt, with their sources checked against the record rather than against my memory of it. Four claims came back wrong — a theorem running backwards, a transistor credited to three men when it was two, a story about Ramanujan reported as documented when it reaches us only through biography, and an account of short sleep that sat too close to my own four hours. Two of the eleven had no citations at all; both now carry a full apparatus. None of this changes what the work says. It changes what the work can be held to, which is the part I care about.

From the series. On Arriving, On Asking, On Becoming, On Being, On Computing, On Counting, On Dreaming, On Facing, On Rising, On Watching.

Alongside them. On Thinking, which sits outside the sequence in the theory work, and had fallen out of the record entirely.

Each piece carries a short note on its own page saying what the pass did to it. This is ongoing — every essay in the On ——ing series will be rebuilt this way, with fresh and accurate sources, until the whole of it has been checked. My thanks to the people who check my work; it remains the most useful thing anyone does for me. More to come!

Fifteen works have been rebuilt on a corrected equation, with every source checked against the literature rather than against my memory of it. The heart of it: the normalizer now actually normalizes, so volume buys nothing and only facing moves the value — arithmetic rather than hope. Each piece carries a short note on its own page saying exactly what moved, so if you have read something here before you can see whether it still says what it said.

Essays. On Explaining, On Existing, On Questioning, On Expanding, On Gravitating, On Magnetizing, On Transmitting, On Shaping, On Completing, On Returning.

Journals & companion. Journal One, Journal Two, Journal Three, Journal Four, The Jay and the Quark.

More updates to come!

Conscious Cat has been added to the collection, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a poem about my cat. Most of what lives on this site works hard — on coherence, on the explanatory gap, on what a sentence is doing — and this one is here to break the monotony and remind you, and me, that I am still a person who lives with an animal that has opinions. It is an acrostic, it is meant to make you smile, and underneath the joke it is doing the same thing everything else here does: looking hard at a perspective that isn't mine. It also became the seed of a longer book, now in progress. ♥ J

UNIFY joins the Pathways shelf — a 501(c)(3) movement that gathers people across the world into synchronized meditations for peace, then turns that attention toward something practical close to home. Their premise is one this whole body of work keeps circling: that stillness found inside a person does not stay there, but ripples outward through a family, a community, and further. Over thirteen years and more than a hundred and forty campaigns they have drawn in upward of a billion people across a hundred and fifty countries. The gatherings are free, open to anyone, and ask nothing but your attention at the appointed hour. If the argument here has ever persuaded you that aligned attention accumulates into something, this is that argument practiced at planetary scale — and it is worth your support. Their page is here.

Marking the Seam — What a Sentence Is Doing has been added to the collection. It steps back from the framework to examine the practice that governs all of it: the seam, the discipline of marking in each sentence whether a claim is formal, empirical, or interpretive — so that a term borrowed from physics never quietly spends credit it hasn’t earned. Drawing on Levine, Atmanspacher, Laudan, and the metadiscourse linguists, it argues that this marking is a matter of disclosure rather than demarcation, and it admits its own cost: that the seam renders underdeveloped ideas legible as underdeveloped, which is the practice working rather than failing. It closes where my imprint’s own name begins — on the older sense of legible, not to read but to gather.

Comparisons — An Individual Perspective on Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Relativity and Jays and Photons — A Hypothetical Consideration of the Presence of Light have now been added to the collection. These are two separate pieces, and both represent a great deal of new research and learning for me as an independent thinker. Some of what they draw on was not even known to me before I began writing them, so I kept learning until the wording represented a true understanding of what I was trying to say. Enjoy. ♥ J

Legible Traces is now an LLC — the entity I write and publish under going forward. Nothing about what is already here changes: every journal, essay, and chapbook on this site stays free to read and download under CC BY 4.0, DOIs and all. The structure is simply the shape the work needed as it grew.

The first release under it is One Step Short: Finding a Meaningful Life Inside the Explanatory Gap, coming soon to Amazon. It gathers the whole body of work collected here — the journals, the essays, the theory — and rewrites it for the general reader: a book about the distance between what science can explain and what it feels like to be alive inside it, and how a meaningful life gets built in that gap.

One note on licensing, so there is no confusion: the book is a commercial release and carries conventional copyright — it is not offered under CC BY 4.0. That licence continues to cover everything archived on this site, including every work the book was built from. The source stays free; the book is the bound and rewritten version of it. A link will follow as soon as it is live.

A third name joins Pathways: MissConception — Sara Nicole Glass — a Kansas City poet, emcee, educator, and performance artist who has spent two decades building rooms where other people get heard. I met her years ago in Lawrence, and I have kept finding her since in the same place: at the center of a crowd, bringing people together.

The Pathways section now points outward — to people and organizations whose work deserves more eyes than mine. The first is Instituto Pró-Onça, a women-led Brazilian nonprofit restoring jaguar corridors in the Cerrado, the most biodiverse savanna on Earth and the source of water for much of a continent. Their premise is a generous one: that the people who live in a landscape are the ones best placed to heal it. My cousin, Oxford wildlife biologist Jan F. Kamler, contributes to their work — which is how I came to know them.

Joining them on the same shelf is Kind Mantras — healing frequencies for humans.

Directions — All the Infinite Places a Mind Can Travel is, for me, something of a personal chef-d'œuvre. There is still so much left to write, but this one arrived unbidden and long awaited — the kind of inspiration you don't argue with. It is a standalone meditation on conscious thought in time, moving through a five-stage contemplative exercise — Comfort, Darkness, Life, Descent, Arrival — before opening outward into perspective itself: the infinite superposed realities a mind can travel, and the Jays we exchange between them. Woven through it are my own summarized instructions for meditation, set down plainly and offered freely for anyone to use. It joins the Artwork page.

Every published piece is now hosted here as a free, downloadable PDF — byte-for-byte the same record deposited on Zenodo. Each work now carries two links: Read / Download PDF (the reading copy, here on the site) and Cite this work (DOI) — its Zenodo DOI, which remains the canonical citation. The whole corpus is browsable from one place on the new All Works page.

The four journals of Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence have been updated and realigned with the newest work, and the companion paper The Jay and the Quark, along with On Completing and its coda On Returning, were revised in the same pass. Every DOI here resolves to the most recent revision, so the current version of each is always a click away. Released today: On Thinking — An Introspective View Into the Symbology Behind Duality, a philosophy-of-mind reflection reading science and religion, fractal and mandala, as two attentions on one world — asking how far the felt task of "seeing whole" tracks the brain's integration across the corpus callosum. It joins the Scientific Theory page.

Faith — The Fractalization of the Same Image joins the theory directly. The essay reads the world's faiths as refractions of a single image — one pattern recorded and refracted across history in different languages, times, and depths of understanding. Reading scripture, myth, psychology, and science symbolically rather than doctrinally, it follows the reciprocity ethic and the "kingdom within" across traditions, traces the Tower of Babel through its many tellings as a shared memory of scattered coherence, and turns to Jung to locate the barrier to that shared image within personal identity. Its close is plain: that coherence is gained through understanding, that legacy is the legible trace kindness leaves in time, and that the meaning of life is to be happy — and to show others how.

Several new pieces arrive today. On Asking, long in the making, joins the On ——ing series — a meditation on questions, intervals, and answers, read through Ramanujan's Question 289 and the golden ratio's nested radical. On Returning is a short coda set just outside the series: a last look back at the mathematics of the earlier work — why some of it needed softening, and confirmation that it now has been, so the whole reads more honestly and more digestibly. Outside The Darkness stands on its own, a hypothetical view from the edge of a black hole, asking whether a horizon ends information or transforms it. And in the Turning Toward series, Turning Toward Addiction is now available.

A new series begins. Turning Toward —— is a philosophy-of-psychology companion to On ——ing, turning toward the mental-health conditions a life moves through. Its introductory piece, Turning Toward Mental Health, is now available, with further pieces to follow. Written as philosophy and testimony rather than clinical guidance — and, as always, offered freely.

As of July 3, 2026, all philosophy-of-mathematics and physics works in the On ——ing series, the four-journal manuscript Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, and The Jay and the Quark have been updated to align with the new framework set out in On Explaining — now available with the rest of the series.

My theological science-fiction work, Elian Carver: An Alien's Perspective of Earth, has reached the hand-edit and illustration phase. The months-long wait is finally coming to a close, and “preprint” copies will be available in the coming weeks. Thank you to everyone for the insight and assistance in completing this project — I couldn't have done it without you. ♥