About this Website
Welcome to Aether Mug! This blog is not about science, philosophy, philosophers, languages, Japan, paintings, sea or air navigation, literature, picture frames, or boxes, although you may be forgiven if at first you believed it is all of these things.
I'm a thinking-tool artisan, and this blog is where I share the tools I make (or the tools made by others that I refine, repurpose, and rebuild). More often than not, what you read in my blog posts is still a work in progress. Those posts are where you can watch me do my thing, like you would watch a chair-maker making a chair in a small village somewhere in the countryside. This is the internet's countryside, and you've stumbled into my workshop. Do you want to watch, talk, or participate in the work? You're welcome to do all those things.
If you're unsure where to start, here are some recommendations.
The Most Popular Posts
Year One:
Year Two:
- An Aphantasic's Observations on the Imagination of Shapes
- I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine
- Human Stigmergy
- I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese
- Hi No Youjin
- Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate
- Process World, Object-Oriented Mind
- Steinbeck on Teleology
- Linear Algebra Explains Why Some Words Are Effectively Untranslatable
The Not-So-Popular-But-Foundational Posts
- Embedded Prophesy Devices
- A Framing Is a Choice of Boundaries
- A Fundamental Framing of Human Language
- Language is a Bottleneck for Thought
- A Black-Box View of Life
- A Framing and Model About Framings and Models
- Rationality Fails at the Edge
- Living in a Real World, Acting in Imaginary Ones
- Water Lilies, Water Lilies Everywhere
- A List of Introspective Descriptions
The Posts I Personally Wish You Would Read
- Is There Anything Untranslatable?
- You Don't Have Time to Read Books That Won't Change Your Life
- Philosophy Is the Battle Against the Bad Framing Kraken
- Reading Blood Meridian with Aphantasia
- Jack of All Trades, Master of Something
- Ballistic Moments of Weightlessness
- Whatever a Man or Woman Was Able to Accomplish Before, You Can Accomplish, Too
- Strive as It Might (It's a poem.)
- Cow Ontologies (It's a short story.)
- The whole Darwin in His Own Words series
Posts from this blog have been featured in The Browser and on Hacker News. I've also written for Nautilus Magazine.
The longer essays in the Plankton Valhalla series follow a thread through science and everyday life. Ideas from fields such as complexity, emergence, and feedback can change how we see our work, our relationships, and the world around us. I write these essays to make that thread easier to follow.
Some scheduled posts are these longer essays; the others are shorter blog posts. You can choose either kind on the home page.
About Me
I'm Marco Giancotti—an independent researcher and writer. Previously, I was an aerospace engineer, then I was head of business intelligence at a Tokyo satellite startup, then product lead at an international microfinance institution. I live in a cozy neighborhood of Tokyo with my spouse, and spend most of my time reading, writing, and meta-overthinking.
Contact me @marco_giancotti on Twitter, @marco-giancotti on Bluesky, or reply to any of the emails from the newsletter.