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.

It is about something, however, and something that I consider existentially, transcendentally important. The appropriate name for that something still eludes me, but I think it will transpire to the reader after reading more than a couple of these disconnected posts.

Here are some good starting points:

Metacognition

• Embedded Prophesy Devices
• A Framing and Model About Framings and Models
• "Bad" Framings
• A Black-Box View of Life
• The Odysseus Black Box
• Process World, Object-Oriented Mind

Language

• A Fundamental Framing of Human Language
• Language is a Bottleneck for Thought
• The Beautiful Dissociation of the Japanese Language
• In Japanese You Need a Dictionary to Count Things
• Linear Algebra Explains Why Some Words Are Effectively Untranslatable

Aphantasia & Neurodiversity

• Aphantasia
• Normality and Surprise in an Image-Free Mind
• I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine
• Reading Blood Meridian with Aphantasia

Posts from this blog have been featured in The Browser and on Hacker News. I've also written for Nautilus Magazine.

I also have another website, Plankton Valhalla, where I post longer essays about science, seen in a different (and hopefully more accessible) light.

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.