Oct 13, 2026
The Trouble with Zero
The four levels of measurement are useful, but their familiar classroom explanations obscure the difference between what numbers represent and what we can meaningfully do with them.
Blog
Essays, notes, and project updates.
Oct 11, 2026
Two Slits in the Right Ear
A colonial Quaker's livestock earmark survived in the records of West Jersey. It turns out to be a small curiosity with an unexpected connection to heraldry.
Sep 23, 2026
The Bottleneck Moved
AI does not eliminate bottlenecks. Once a model becomes capable enough, the constraint moves downstream to verification, permissions, workflow, and human attention.
Sep 20, 2026
How a Racing Stripe Became a Language
In 1967 the U.S. Coast Guard adopted a new diagonal "racing stripe." Within a generation, coast guards around the world were speaking variations of the same visual language.
Sep 10, 2026
GitHub's Ongoing Actions Outage
I have two little production systems running in GitHub Actions. One, Krigsbot, wakes up every morning, looks for environmental and polar news, makes some editorial decisions, and queues a day's worth of…
Sep 3, 2026
The Sky Is Falling
The BBC published a story this morning about the Netherlands moving part of its national gold reserve from North America to London. BBC article Ordinarily, this would not be particularly exciting. Central…
Aug 25, 2026
A Maintenance Plan for Memory
The United States maintains thousands of buoys. They are numbered, charted, lit, and serviced on a schedule. Every one of them says some version of the same thing, which is that the…
Aug 11, 2026
The Fatal Image Is Now Open
I have built a virtual museum exhibition. This was not the plan. Judith and Holofernes: The Fatal Image is now open at judith.jameshoward.us. It brings together 58 works depicting Judith, Holofernes, and…
Jul 30, 2026
Effective Challenge Is Now Optional
On April 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took the most battle-tested governance framework in American finance and…
Jul 27, 2026
When Every Bank's AI Fails Together
Financial regulation is built on a useful fiction: that banks make mistakes independently of one another. This assumption underpins diversification requirements, stress testing methodology, and most of what the Federal Reserve does…
Jul 22, 2026
What We Do Now
The history of artificial intelligence is a history of a moving target. The first machine decision was a thermostat closing a circuit. The field got its name at Dartmouth in 1956 and…