Essays
33 essays, grouped by subject. 20 of them teach a subject from the source of a DKE library, and link the module they read. A reading time counts an essay's prose at 230 words a minute.
- Start here 6
- The physical world 7
- Life and the body 2
- Numbers and machines 7
- Light, sound and music 3
- Days, money and food 3
- Messages and wires 5
Start here
What DKE is for and why it is built the way it is, short introductions to Antheos and CTX, and the three laws held to any Personal AI.
- Why DKE is built this way Essay · on DKE
The argument for DKE's design: provenance as grammar, disagreement kept, time in the store, programs that end, and a published contract.
- DKE for AI Developers: A Deterministic Reasoning Engine for Stateful, Auditable Agents Whitepaper · on DKE, dated and versioned
A technical whitepaper for AI developers: DKE as the semantic layer beneath a probabilistic agent, where it sits in the stack, what it keeps, and how to adopt it.
- Who Holds the Chalk Essay · on DKE
One store shared by many agents: the classroom blackboard, the blackboard idea in computing, and how keys, attribution and one call at a time let a store serve as the shared surface without losing who wrote what.
- Antheos in Brief: One Protocol for Any Device on Any Link Essay · introducing Antheos
What Antheos is, who it is for and what exists of it today: one protocol for any device on any link, with no machine in charge.
- CTX in Brief: One Memory for a Person and Their Agents Essay · introducing CTX
What CTX is, who it is for and what it leaves out: one local memory that a person and every agent they work with share.
- The PAI Constitution Constitution · for any Personal AI, apart from LangSyn's projects
Three laws for a Personal AI: what it is for, whom it answers to, and what it protects.
The physical world
Forces and units, matter and its reactions, the sky, the weather, the shape of the Earth, and what is built on it.
- Classical physics, read from a checker's source Essay · on classical physics and DKE's physics library
Classical physics taught from the source of a checker: units and dimensions, a number handed over without its unit, correcting and disagreeing, circuits, the pendulum, orbits, heat and a magnet.
- Chemistry, read from a balance's source Essay · on general chemistry and DKE's chemistry library
General chemistry taught from the source of a balance: atomic weights, molecules drawn as atoms and bonds, functional groups, Hess's law, Dalton's water, balanced equations, acids and the course of a reaction in time.
- Astronomy, read from an observer's source Essay · on astronomy and DKE's astronomy library
Astronomy taught from the source of an observer: Julian dates and the calendar reform, sidereal time, the stars a site never loses or never sees, booking a telescope against a night, the Sun's day, Kepler's equation and the orbit of a comet.
- Geography, read from a cartographer's source Essay · on geography and DKE's geography library
Geography taught from the source of a cartographer: regions within regions, the four colours, boxes across the date line, great circles, Vincenty's ellipsoid, Mercator and the area of a triangle on the Earth.
- Earth science, read from a fieldworker's source Essay · on earth science and DKE's earth science library
Earth science taught from the source of a fieldworker: Köppen's climates, the Saffir-Simpson scale, Mohs hardness, the dew point and the heat index, the standard atmosphere, the Coriolis parameter, the age of a rock and the energy of an earthquake.
- Architecture, read from a builder's source Essay · on architecture and DKE's architecture library
Architecture taught from the source of a builder, and not as engineering, naval-architecture, acoustic-design or heritage advice: a style from its features, the record of height and the list that disagrees with itself, a tower that tips, a hull that capsizes, a room that rings, a channel that falls too little, and a pendulum.
- Did a collider see matter come from nothing? Essay · on the STAR experiment and the quantum vacuum
Whether a 2026 result from the STAR experiment showed matter emerging from nothing: what the spin correlation of Λ hyperon pairs shows, what it cannot show, and how strong it is.
Life and the body
Inheritance and the genetic code, and the measures a physiologist takes of a person.
- Biology, read from a geneticist's source Essay · on general biology and DKE's biology library
General biology taught from the source of a geneticist: Mendel's crosses and the test of his counts, Hardy and Weinberg, the genetic code, what a metabolic network can make, pedigrees, growth, drift and a ring of genes.
- The human body, read from a physiologist's source Essay · on the human body and DKE's body library
The human body taught from the source of a physiologist, and not as medical advice: the ABO and Rh groups and what a mismatch is, body mass index and its bands, resting energy, body surface and the maximum heart rate by two formulas.
Numbers and machines
Proof, chance and evidence, how votes are counted, codes that catch their own errors, the last digit of an answer, and the quantum computer.
- Quantum computing, read from a simulator's source Essay · on quantum computing and DKE's quantum library
Quantum computing taught from the source of a simulator: amplitudes, gates, interference, entanglement, measurement, the Clifford line, and what simulation leaves out.
- Circuits a language model wrote, checked on every input Essay · on circuits a language model wrote, and DKE's quantum library
Reversible circuits written by a language model and certified by DKE on every input and every measurement outcome: an inverse modulo 7, an adder whose carries live in its sum, an inverse modulo 13, every single-point mutant refused but the ones that compute the same function, and a verdict whose why names the circuit it read.
- Mathematics, read from a classifier's source Essay · on mathematics and DKE's mathematics library
Mathematics taught from the source of a classifier: perfect numbers and primes, groups from their tables, triangles, Euclid's algorithm, factors, continued fractions, Pell's equation and a matrix that defeats elimination.
- Statistics, read from an analyst's source Essay · on statistics and DKE's statistics library
Statistics taught from the source of an analyst: strata and Simpson's reversal, Anscombe's four sets, what a positive result is worth, p-values and their levels, the normal, binomial and Poisson curves, Student's t, Pearson's chi-square and a generator that repeats.
- Computing, read from an encoder's source Essay · on computing and DKE's computing library
Computing taught from the source of an encoder: Morse's code and the prefix property, checksums, check digits, Hamming's single-error correction, Shannon's entropy, Huffman's code, binary search and Dijkstra's shortest paths.
- The Last Digit Essay · on rounding, and the test DKE Python holds its arithmetic to
Why a computer's answer can be wrong in its last digit: functions that are not correctly rounded, steps that round twice, and sums that round at every addition; the Patriot battery at Dhahran and the Vancouver Stock Exchange index; and the test DKE Python holds its arithmetic to, the exact value rounded once.
- Elections and voting, read from a counter's source Essay · on elections and DKE's elections library
Elections taught from the source of a counter, and not as legal or electoral advice: methods that pick three different winners from the same ballots, a majority that goes round in a circle, a count in dispute that names no winner, and a house's seats shared by methods that disagree, down to the last seat of the 2020 apportionment.
Light, sound and music
What the eye and the ear can tell apart, and the rules four voices are written by.
- Four-part harmony, read from a marker's source Essay · on four-part harmony and DKE's harmony library
Four-part harmony taught from the source of a marker: consecutive fifths and octaves, what a mark is and is not, chords and their inversions, rhythm, tuning, set classes and twelve-tone rows.
- Light and colour, read from an optician's source Essay · on light and colour and DKE's colour library
Light and colour taught from the source of an optician: sRGB luminance, the contrast levels of the web accessibility guidelines, hue and lightness, Snell's law and total internal reflection, the thin lens, Wien's law and the frequency of a wavelength.
- Sound, read from an acoustician's source Essay · on sound and DKE's sound library
Sound taught from the source of an acoustician, and not as occupational-health advice: the decibel, the hours a noise limit permits, the dose of an exposure and of a worker's day, the range of hearing, the level of two sources and of a distance, the speed of sound and the Doppler shift.
Days, money and food
The calendar's rules, the cost of a loan, and what a kitchen must know before it serves a dish.
- Calendars, read from a chronologist's source Essay · on calendars and DKE's calendars library
Calendars taught from the source of a chronologist: the Julian and Gregorian leap-year rules, the days a reform skipped and the days a place never had, the weekday through a reform, the date of Easter, day numbers and the span between two instants.
- Money, read from a lender's source Essay · on money and DKE's finance library
Money taught from the source of a lender, and not as financial advice: the payment of a loan, which offer costs the least in total and which is over a household's limit, the effective rate, the doubling time, present value and the real rate.
- Food and cooking, read from a cook's source Essay · on food and cooking and DKE's food library
Food and cooking taught from the source of a cook, and not as food-safety or medical advice: the minimum temperatures of a chart, the danger zone, a kind with no standard, the nine major allergens, and the arithmetic of a recipe.
Messages and wires
How urgent words moved before networks did, air through tubes under Paris and current down a telegraph line, and the law Antheos writes for the small devices that talk now.
- The City's Breath: The Pneumatic Post of Paris Essay · on the Paris pneumatic post
How Paris moved its urgent messages through air-driven tubes under the streets from 1866 to 1984, who used them, and why the system ended.
- A Bus Made of Air: Antheos over the Pneumatic Post Essay · on Antheos and the Paris pneumatic post
What the Antheos Protocol would ask of a person reading and writing notes by hand over the Paris pneumatic post: what works, what breaks, and where Level 1 assumes a machine.
- Fifty-Five Motors: Antheos among the World's Small Devices Essay · on Antheos among the world's small devices
Antheos set beside the protocols, numbers and laws of the world's small devices: what is already there, where Antheos differs, and what it has yet to show.
- What Hath God Wrought Essay · on Samuel Morse and the first telegraph message
An essay on Samuel Morse, the painter who built the American telegraph, and the sentence he sent on 24 May 1844: who chose it, where it came from, and how an exclamation became a question.
- What a Wire Can Hold Essay · on telegraph lines and the Dallas 1-Wire bus
An essay on how many bits a wire can hold: what telegraph engineers learned by spending lines, states and time, and how the Dallas 1-Wire bus makes the same bargain on a chip.