The Standing Grace (Labour Love and True)

The silver heart warms And it is hers Lights of Devon in May Bits of the golden brown And Sunny in May A torchlight in this repeal Breaking art the random In this remark And his, on day four And Olivet then Two of Earth in his watch The glitter upon our risen fear Nine to deck and cavalry Edges of soft peat And weary of the blue At Sun in the nineties And where return, the horse is me And I am rain for nightsradar Sympathy to knight in her keep Days of war to Kent And Irving ran her My love and story Nights for gold but then, A vicious smell Collapsing hand repeal On this day they win And killed my soul I miss her neck in my caress

And beauty was brief I lost her whale and then her sea Us in Heaven- would wait as much in slip In search for why, why the truth- had given us this road And plainly pathed What voice togetherness And sympathy for my partner Less than salt Iron clues in this gear of Wallace And each sympathy by day We lost our call to heed This random knife in her For low to light and Austria Vertigal for this hour The most high hand And into common, our love this held Repeating war by night And the common loon was man And this old of what was In day of poor and peace The bell of Arthur; end day And nights on time But better of I think about her She goes forever,- in the verse that I am And fading bleed Til oats call And Victory Day My white pet in Heaven All forces clear I am a man- at war for seven.

Article written for “Pensamiento Iberoamericano,” a journal published by the Ibero-American General Secretariat. This issue is dedicated to the upcoming 30th Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, to be held in Madrid on November 4 and 5, 2026, under the theme “Ibero-America. Together we build our Community. Together we project it toward the future and toward the world.”

Photo: The New York Times – Water vapor rising from cooling towers at Google’s data center in Santiago, Chile

By Paz Peña, coordinator of the Latin American Institute of Terraforming.

[Spanish version / Portuguese version].

The growing socio-environmental impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not a matter of efficiency or will; they are the result of an economic and political model centered on a handful of very powerful companies determined to consolidate their power networks and reshape the global economic infrastructure in their favor.

In this context, the question is: what role do Ibero-American governments play, especially when it seems that we are viewed merely as a means of socializing the environmental costs of the AI economy? Amid a turbulent geopolitical landscape in which hegemonic power in the 21st Century will indeed be up for grabs, our countries can find a way forward through strategy, creativity, and solidarity.

An Inconvenient Truth

It’s not a matter of merit; it’s the design of the model: the frenzy surrounding AI is sustained by a narrative of technological determinism and inevitability that presents it as the only possible future, driving governments and investors to fund projects out of fear of being left behind. This is the case in several countries in Ibero-America, which are investing despite having no chance of competing on equal footing: cutting-edge AI depends on specialized chips, intellectual property, and hyperscale data centers concentrated among a small number of external providers. The concentration of resources determines who gains the strategic and economic advantages and who sets the terms for access, pricing, and data governance, widening the gap between creator and consumer nations.

The case of Latam-GPT reflects this situation: although it was presented as a model developed by and for Latin America to strengthen digital sovereignty, it uses Meta’s architecture and is trained on Amazon’s infrastructure. This demonstrates that sovereignty and the ability to compete do not depend solely on model development but also on control over digital infrastructure, data, energy, and the rules that underpin these systems.

This frenzy is designed, on the one hand, to fuel an economic bubble that allows loss-making AI companies to attract venture capital (such as OpenAI, which loses three times as much as it earns), while diverting attention from debates about existential risks or socio-environmental impacts. On the other hand, mass consumption facilitates what Cory Doctorow calls “shittification,” in which platforms first make themselves indispensable to capture users, then aggressively extract value and consolidate their dominance.

The Socio-Environmental Costs of the Model

This AI-frenzy model requires the global expansion of its data centers. Large corporations use this investment to fortify their dominant position and pursue a reverse business model, incurring billions in operating losses while forcing users and smaller competitors into cognitive and infrastructural dependence. This expansion is the material and political foundation that ensures power remains concentrated in an elite capable of sustaining this financial endurance race.

Furthermore, corporations need to plan for a more diverse and strategic distribution of data centers to meet the training and inference needs of models, which require characteristics such as low latency and efficient access to energy, water, and land. This explains why Brazil is home to one-third of Latin America’s data centers, while Chile and Mexico are establishing themselves as emerging markets: their governments offer policy measures to facilitate access to critical resources, including operating within socio-environmental legal loopholes. This loophole allows corporate profits to be privatized while environmental costs are socialized onto local communities and public budgets, in a context of zero public participation, a lack of transparency, and the classification of resource consumption, such as water, as a trade secret.

When discussing their range of socio-environmental impacts, water and energy are key issues. A hyperscale data center can consume up to 19 million liters of water per day for cooling—equivalent to the water use of a city of 50,000 people—a critical issue in regions experiencing water stress. Furthermore, a single AI query requires up to 10 times as much energy as a traditional search. The electricity consumption of data centers in 2025 (448 TWh) could meet the annual household energy needs of the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa for 2.6 years. This overwhelms local grids, has driven up electricity prices for consumers in the United States, and forces a reliance on fossil-fuel power plants to ensure supply.

In this context, some Latin American countries with cleaner energy mixes appear to be attractive destinations; however, this advantage is misleading: large-scale infrastructure is being attracted without a sufficient assessment of its cumulative impacts on energy systems, nor is there any political accountability regarding the power granted to these corporations in our countries’ energy transition.

A Socio-Environmental Policy for AI

Until now, the corporate narrative has been that AI sustainability will be achieved primarily through process efficiency. However, the Jevons Paradox demonstrates that improvements in technological efficiency often lead to an increase in total resource consumption. And while technical improvements exist to reduce environmental impact, they are isolated measures not replicated globally and do little to address the system’s scaling up.

In this context, a socio-environmental policy on AI from Ibero-America should not focus so much on mere efficiency measures or on implementing serious, transparent, and participatory legal frameworks—which, while necessary, are insufficient. A serious socio-environmental policy for AI in Ibero-America must be a digital economic policy that decouples itself from the frenzy surrounding AI and seeks new avenues for economic, human, and environmental sustainability through technological alternatives. This can only be achieved at the regional level, through multilateral dialogue, creativity, and determination. Perhaps this turbulent 21st century, rather than merely a crisis of hegemonies, is also an opportunity for our countries.

#English

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Bref aboiement derrière l’enceinte d’une villa, dite ‟toiture verte”, [à tribord de soi], et passage d’une motocyclette au réservoir mantelé de peluche rose. Le taximan porte une doudoune décolorée, un cachenez noir et des lunettes de plongée. [Soi gravit péniblement la pente jusqu’à petit stade et garage du futur, se faisant face.] À cet instant, de ce lieu-là, on entend peu le fond sonore du trou de la ville qui pourtant machine à plein rendement, mais seulement, tombant des fils électriques, quelques pious pious de moineaux gris.

#Fenêtresurville #Didascalies

In the library of my mind, I browse through heaps of disorded yellow scrolls, some of which seem to be made of papyrus.

I am an inexpert — but patient — librarian trying to bring some order into this dust riddled chaos, even though I am still barred from entering the “forbidden section”

Maybe one fine day…

Anyway.

These pages which crumble too, unless handed with care.

Disappear In a cloud of dust.

There are spells in there of considerable power, tricks I’ve learned throughout the years!

And so to bring order to this chaos, I will now look at one which I have seen, there is a type of warm smile I couldn’t place, but I found the memory to which it belongs, so I’ll write it down now, and sort it later.

---

It was a dark late summer night, I had been drinking champagne straight from the bottle. Had been holding a beer in the other one, and a cigarette between the fingers even though I no longer smoked.

There was a company event, colleagues.

At one point a few weeks earlier, during lunch, a girl who I didn’t know, but who knew some of the others around the table, was talking about having been bullied in school.

There was an anger in her voice, I do not remember exactly what was said, but I reacted to the strong vulgar language.

Then after a while the conversation moved on to other topics, like animal cruelty or how a high carb diet was beneficial and healthy.

Meanwhile, I said nothing.

Now during the night, on this event, I saw her again standing alone by the grill from which smoke rose to the dark sky

I went to her and said

— I was bullied in school too

She looked at me. It took a while for her to place me.

— ”I don’t think it was that bad, though…,” I continued to fill the silence in which I heard only the cracking from the fire, ”…but, I don’t remember anything”.

I think it was the first time I told anyone about the hole in my memory.

— ”are you angry at them?”, she asked

— ”yes”, I said, but I wasn’t really.

— ”I am too, I picture myself hurting them! Murdering then!”

— ”yeah, me too”, but that wasn’t true either.

— ”we’ve gotten our vindications now”, she said

Which was to say that we were both reasonably successful and well paid, having made it still somehow,

— ”that’s true”, I said.

There was a silence,

I saw her turning then to face me, and there, on her face — which had a warm orange glow from the embers — was a smile of compassion, which made me want to cry.

I smiled back, not sure what to say next, so I went to get vegan hot dogs for her, but when I came back, she was gone.

الخميس 24 محرم 1448

إقالة أو استقالة أو عقد ينتهي عند أجله، أو تجربة تنقضي قبل أجلها.

جربت ذلك كله في ثمانية أعوام خلت من مسيرتي المهنية. وكانت النهاية سواء. تسجيل الخروج من البريد وتسليم اللابتوب والخروج من بابٍ دخلت منه في اليوم الأول.

الإخراج من بريد العمل. صورة التقطتها في الساعة السادسة وإحدى وثلاثين دقيقة من نهار الثلاثاء 22 محرم 1448.

حان اليوم الأخير!

ها هو قسم الآي تي (القسم التقني) يخرجك من البريد الإلكتروني، ويمنعونك نظرة أخيرة في سجلك الحافل من رسائل المتابعة والمهمات والاجتماعات الكثيرة.

ستغيب السحابة التي كانت تظلك وكنت تستودعها ملفات الوورد والإكسل ومستندات أخرى شخصية وعملية.

أنت اليوم غريبٌ عن أنظمة علاقات العملاء (CRM) وتخطيط موارد المؤسسة (ERP). غريبٌ كان قريبًا إليها، وممنوعٌ عن الدخول وقد كان يلجها كل يوم.

فلتودع اللابتوب! لقد حان الفراق، وانقضت أيام الوصال، وصار حتمًا عليك أن تدعه بعد أن كنت تحمله إلى كل مكان، وتستعد للاتصال به في كل لحظة. وها أنت تخلص منه بياناتك الشخصية التي امتزجت ببيانات العمل وأسراره.

فلتستعد أيضًا لانقطاع الصلة بالزملاء الذين يودعونك اليوم، ويشيعونك إلى الباب الذي يؤدي إلى مجاهل تختبئ في طيات القدر.

ألست تتسائل حينئذٍ عما يضيع منك في يومك الأخير؟ وهل كنت تملك شيئًا قبل ساعة التجريد من العمل؟

بطاقات غير مجدية. صورة التقطتها لركام من بطاقات العمل وهي الآن بلا عمل. الخميس 24 محرم 1448.

حكاية: هل كنت أملك ما أعمله؟

ذات يومٍ أخير كنت أنتظر إتمام نقل الملفات كلها من اللابتوب إلى بريد شخصي، وقد طال المقام، وأردت أن أودع الزملاء قبل أن أخرج للمرة الأخيرة تقريبًا من الشركة.

قال لي أحدهم: (أليست هذه ملفات العمل؟)

(الملفات التي عملت بها).

(فلماذا تنقلها إليك؟)

(لأنني أنشأتها واستعملتها).

(لكنها ملك الشركة وليس لك أن تنقلها بغير إذن).

(...).

(اصنع ما شئت لكنني أردت أن أنبهك).

لم يكن أحدنا مديرًا على صاحبه، لكنه اختلاف رأيين لا يخلو أحدهما من الصواب والنظر.

الحاسب والبريد وما فيهما من البيانات ملك الشركة، ولها أن تتصرف فيه كما تشاء بحسب العقد.

وللموظف أعمالٌ وملفاتٌ أنشأها وبذل فيها جهده وينبغي أن يكون له نصيبٌ منها دون أن يضر بالشركة أو يفشي أسرارها.

لكنني علمت بعد قليل أن القسم التقني يلقي بذاكرة اللابتوب إلى مجاهل العدم، وأنني لم أستفد كثيرًا -كما ظننت- مما استبقيته من الملفات!

أي شيء تناله الشركة في ساعة التجريد؟

1- اللابتوب.

2- والشاشة ولوحة المفاتيح.

3- والحقيبة.

ولا داعي لذكر البريد أو الحسابات المتعلقة فذلك أول ما ينزع منك عند حلول الأجل.

أي شيء تناله من الشركة بعد ساعة التجريد؟

الحقوق ودفتر وقلم!

وإنني ما زلت أحمد الله على دفترٍ من الورق قيدت فيه يوميات العمل وملاحظاتي وما شهدته في كل اجتماع.

وذلك الدفتر أحب إلي من بريدٍ هائل، وسحابة عظيمة!

لن تأذن الشركة باستعادة الملفات بعد استيداعها في سحائبهم، لكنها لن تتسلط على مسوداتٍ للمخططات والمنجزات.

ما خبر اليوم الثاني؟ صورة التقطتها لإحدى يومياتي. الخميس 24 محرم 1448.

أربعة تعلمت ألا أؤجلها إلى ساعة التجريد

1- تخليص المستندات الشخصية من مستندات العمل.

وميض: سألت مديرًا أن أستخرج ملفاتٍ لي من جهاز صار محظورًا علي، فسألني أن أحصيها في قائمة، وأرسلها إلى القسم التقني. فكيف السبيل ولا سبيل؟

2- وكتابة تقرير عما أنجزته وعما أردت إنجازه.

وميض: تركت التعويل على شهادات الخبرة لما نلت إحداها فلم أجد فيها شهادة صادقة على خبرتي ومعرفتي. وما زلت أطلب تحرير الشهادة وذكر بعض ما أنجزته لتكون شهادة صادقة وافية.

3- وكتابة الرسالة الأخيرة لزملاء العمل.

وميض: عاجلني القسم التقني بقطع الاتصال وكف يدي عن البريد، وكان ينبغي ألا أؤجل الرسالة الأخيرة إلى يوم الغد!

4- وطلب شهادة الخبرة وأي مستند تحتاج إليه في المستقبل.

وميض: شق على زميلٍ سابقٍ أن يستخرج شهادة خبرة. وعلل تأخره بطول العهد. فأدركت أن ساعة التجريد تجردنا من كل شيء حتى طلباتنا الصغيرة!

شهادة لمن يهتم، فمن يهتم؟ صورة التقطتها لإحدى شهادات الخبرة. الخميس 24 محرم 1448.

خلاصة مجردة

قال أحد الشعراء: يمثل ذو اللب في نفسه مصائبه قبل أن تنزلا

فإن نزلت بغتة لم ترعه لما كان في نفسه مثلا

لا تخفف الأيام وطأة النهاية، ولا ترفع عنا وقع ساعة التجريد من، لكنها تبصرنا بحاجتنا إلى تجريد أعمالنا قبل أن نتجرد عنها راغمين!

ولا تدع كتابة الأعمال ما دمت تحمل الورقة والقلم!

أحص ما عملته، وقدر ما صنعته بيديك، فليس ذلك شأن المدير أو الشركة أو أي أحد من الناس سواك أنت.

كلمة مجردة

(بالكتابة جمع القرآن وحفظت الألسن والآثار؛ ووكدت العهود وأثبتت الحقوق، وسيقت التواريخ، وبقيت السكوك، وأمن الإنسان النسيان، وقيدت الشهادات، وأنزل الله في ذلك آية الدين وهي أطول آية في القرآن)

أبو بكر محمد بن يحيى الصولي – أدب الكتاب – المطبعة السلفية 1341 ص24.

وكتب البراء بن محمد

tawasul@albaraaibnm47.com

كاتب مختص بتطوير الأعمال ومهتم بإحياء التقويم الهجري والاكتفاء به.

عصر الخميس لخمسٍ إن بقين من المحرم من عام ثمانية وأربعين وأربع مئة وألف.

فكرة قادمة: تجربة في درء اختلاط الملفات الشخصية بملفات العمل، وتجربة أخرى في تقييد المنجزات.

هامش:

عنوانان بالإنجليزية والفرنسية:

At Last, What We Lost? Reflections

Tenir jusqu’au bout, mais il reste quoi pour le reste ?

Three Parker 51 Clones: Wingsung 601 Demonstrators. Photo by Unattributed, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

For those who have seen my posts on c/Fountain Pens, PixelFed, or elsewhere on the FediVerse will know that I have been nearly obsessed with finding a good set of Parker 51 clones. I've had several (from Jinhao and Junlai) that have been disappointing. While they had the look and filling mechanism that I wanted, many of them would fail in terms of writing well, or in drying out. What exacerbated these purchases was that they would all come up when searching for a “Hero 601” on Amazon, which is the pen I'd seen reviewed that was often praised.

(As an aside: I don't use AliExpress[1].)

This time around, I found the Wingsung 601. The Wingsung version has also been praised by many other reviewers, so when I found them on Amazon, with a limited quantity[2] still available, I jumped at the chance to get them. And I am extremely happy that I did.

What I like About the Wingsung 601 Demonstrators

First: Getting to see the filling system in action is just wonderful. I have demonstrator versions of both piston and vacuum filler style pens. And, I have seen pens like the Conid Bulk Filler in operation. But, none of them were as satisfying to watch as a Vacumatic. Watching the ink being sucked up the filler tube and spilling over into the barrel of the pen is just fun to watch. The only thing I wish was that the filler tube could be a bit longer. But, I'm certain there is a balance between the suction force and the length of the filler tube. Even so, the whole thing is just fun to watch.

Second: After filling these three pens with Diamine Oxford Blue, Writer's Blood and Jet Black I started writing with them for about two weeks. I rotated between them frequently, making certain to give them all their due chance to fail. For the most part they were consistently excellent writers. The took well to traveling in my bag, and were just solid performers.

Where I found them most useful was for writing in my Kokuyo B5 notebooks. Unlike the Apica A5 notebooks which have a 7mm rule, which I use for journaling, the B5 notebooks have 6mm ruling. This is actually more of an issue with pens with larger point sizes. My Asvine pens have a .7mm point, and while they write fine in the Kokuyo notebooks, the writing feels a lot more cramped than writing in a 7mm ruled notebook. The Wingsung pens, with their .5mm point made my writing in the B5 notebooks feel a lot more comfortable, less crowded, easier to read.

Third: After spending a couple of weeks with these pens and feeling quite satisfied with their performance I decided to do one more test: dry out. So, I topped off the pens with their respective inks, and put them into a pen stand for two weeks. I stored them nib down, so I could also see if there were any leaks into the pen caps.

The result? All three of them passed with perfect colors (pun intended). In fact, the writing sample in the image was the first thing I wrote with each pen after they had been sitting for two weeks. (Had they failed, I still would have posted that image.) The fact that they worked this nicely is a good indicator that the cap seal is good. And, they didn't leak any ink into the caps while sitting in the stand.

And, in the end that's what you want, isn't it? A pen that you can pick up when you need it and it will write.

What I Didn't like About the Wingsung 601 Demonstrators

I won't claim that these pens are perfect. However, I will say that for a $20 Parker 51 clone with the Vacumatic filler, I find these issues to be quite tiny. But, here they are…

First: Out of the box one needed a bit of adjustment. I don't know where it happened, but one of the pens had a hood and feed alignment issue. This took all of 5–10 seconds to fix, and just required my fingers to manipulate everything into place. But, once adjusted everything worked as I've described in the above section.

Second: I sometimes found it difficult to get the pen at the right angle for writing. This was a matter that with the transparent nib hood light would reflect off it in such a way that I thought it was at the correct angle, but the pen felt scratchy and off. I tried to compensate for this by posting the pen with the clip lined up with the nib, but even then I wasn't always able to get it just right.

Honestly, I think this second issue is likely more of an issue with my eyes. I have allergies that affect my eyes and nose, and it is likely the problem was due to my eyes not focusing quite right.

Conclusion

There is more to like about these pens than the things I listed above. Another thing to like is the size. A lot of people don't want a pen the size of a Montblanc Meisterstucke LeGrand, Pelikan Souveran M100 or an Asvine V800, and a pen this size might be perfect for them. Another advantage (at least for the non-demonstrator version) is for these pens to be quite stealthy. These look more like a Parker Jotter style pen, than they do a fountain pen, until you unsheathe it.

Of course, with the demonstrator version you get the fun of watching it suck up ink when you fill it, and see the ink sloshing around in the barrel once it's filled. And, you always know precisely how much ink is left in the pen, making it easy to know when to refill.

And, as a bonus, Wingsung includes the tools needed to remove the Vacumatic mechanism from the pen for maintenance. But, I don't foresee a need to remove the mechanism for quite some time.

Issues? Only two issues: one really minor adjustment needed, and the other is likely an issue due to my allergies. And I don't see either of these as reasons to not like these pens.

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[1]: I know I could have found both the Wingsung and Hero versions of this pen there. But, I've been ripped off by sellers on AliExpress three times while shopping for keyboard parts, and one time while trying to purchase watches. So, I've sworn to never shop on that site ever again. [2]: There were, if I recall, ten or less of these pens available. Checking today, there are more of the demonstrators, but other versions of these pens have lower quantities available. Newer versions of these pens are also available, but they do not use the Vacumatic filling system, opting for a cartridge / converter system instead.

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Categories: #FountainPens Tags: #pens, #parker, #clone, #wingsung, #chinese, #vacumatic, #demonstrator License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

This was written for the players since there are many characters and many things happening, sometimes simultaneously. The focus is on the big picture, so players can make informed decisions about their future moves.

• Key events sessions 50 thru 120
• Key events sessions 120 thru 180

Balozkinar’s Corrected Commoners’ Calendar Year 4434

Fall (Goodgrove, Blackmoon, Willowind, Redleaves, Maggotfeast)

• The Return: with the witch Ah'sas gone, adventurers haul as much treasure as they can from the sunken fort. They bury the treasure in two spots. Gomm maps one location, while Nesterin Sylpetor maps the other. Once back in Hara, they learn that the Red Queen has appointed new castellan, of her choice: Tsamar, the Queen of Pirates.
• Justice Supreme: while adventuring, Ambros recovers the Golden Gavel of Justice, becoming a High Priest of Forseti. Red Queen appoints him as the Justice Supreme of Hara.
• Old Debt: party returns to Ketche to complete a geas that was drowning Ambros. They spend rest of the season hunting down Graylock, a gnoll.

Winter (Coldrain, Shadowrath, Gloomfrost, Year's End)

• Operation Cleanup: Tsamar cracks down on thugs and mercenaries commanded by merchant families. Two hundred hardened soldiers—a squadron of heavy horsemen, a squadron of mounted crossbowmen, and a throng of heavy footmen—arrive to serve the new High Priest, Ambros Ap Mortain. They are led by knight Marlon val Brookwood, Jace, and vicar Arlon. Adventurers adventure, raiding an ogre den, a thieves' hideout, and a lair of Flaming Eye bandits.

Balozkinar’s Corrected Commoners’ Calendar Year 4435

Winter (Thawmist, Dewsnap)

• Feeding an Army: Ambros and others pressure young Lord Kyle to pay for protection. In return for gold, land, building a temple, naming Dalkanarion castellan of Cedarwade keep, granting 600 acres to Balarus, and appointing Thorm as Overseer of an iron mine, adventurers will secure Kyle's territories and clear his name.
• The Siege: Ambros and his army, backed by adventurers, besiege Cedarwade Keep. They face bitter resistance in the dungeon underneath it. Adventurers are ultimately victorious, defeating the hobgoblins.
• Glory and Ambition: Ambros and Dalkanarion march the army to Hara, in a show of power and might. Only Ambros is granted audience with the Queen. Dalkanarion is confirmed as castellan of the Cedarwade Keep. Tsamar gives him sixty-five ruffians as “soldiers,” who turn out to be thugs paid by the Namelin family. Nobody is happy. Dalkanarion marries an innkeeper's daughter, and swears to be people's champion.

Spring (Flowerbloom, Sweetrain, Meadowlark, Longrass)

• Hunting Racoba: adventurers follow up on reports of sighting a scrawny person with a pointy hat leading a large gang of unsavory men few leagues north-west of Cedarwade Keep. They split their army in half, leaving some defenders at the keep. Rest march towards the plateau. By the time they arrive the enemy army has left. Adventurers find two entrances into the underground complex. They repeatedly storm it, suffering losses. They vanquish bandits left behind by Racoba. They also learn that they controlled just a small portion of the dungeon.
• Raiding Racoba's Redoubt: army returns to the Cedarwade Keep. Supply chain train is established between the keep, Midway, and Hara, ensuring a flow of food, drink, and coin. Adventurers organise repeat expeditions to the underground complex. They are harried by swimming ghouls. They find Racoba's abandoned sleeping chambers and ransack them. No sight of the fugitive wizard himself. Kho Rimbo explores the second level on his own, returning with valuable information.
• Kyle, Denied; Ambros, Scolded: Lord Kyle pleads with Dalkanarion to spend some of the forces to aid people of Ahyf. Dalkanarion says no—he should petition Hara instead. Ambros communes with Forseti, wishing to delegate his duties. Forseti says no.
• The Recall: Ambros and his army are summoned back to Hara. Select adventurers are left behind and continue raiding Racoba's Redoubt. Upon returning, Ambros finds the city in total pandemonium: Tsamar missing, Aseti Namelin dead, Tangay of Seven Stars dead, and Zenon Coke dead. His immediate attempts to restore order and peace fail, resulting with most of Hara perishing in flames.
• Forged in Blood & Fire: Earani Cor, the Red Queen of Hara, proclaims the Kingdom of Hara, spanning from Midnight Goddess Hills in the north to river Cedarwade to the south. She presents the Seal of Invincible Overlord. Ambros is named Patriarch General, while Marlon is appointed as new castellan. Ambros is given mandate to restore order and hold all merchant families accountable.
• The Artefact: twenty-four adventurers storm the Windowless Tower. Few emerge alive, carrying a powerful artefact called Egg of Desire. Dalkanarion, Heran Marod, and Belegar Grimlisnev gave up their treasure share in return for keeping the egg. The trio takes the shorter route towards Cedarwade Keep, cutting across the territory of cannibal barbarians. They are promptly captured by cannibal barbarians. Ambros has a vision of naked Dalkanarion sacrificed to the Bull God.
• The Impossible Choice: Grand Wizard Klekless Racoba delivers an ultimatum to the Queen: surrender or die. Ambros appoints Marlon to oversee Hara's defense. Then he gathers adventurers and they head out for Ghinarian Hills, rushing to save Dalkanarion.

Summer (Warmshade, Sunstrong, Thistleburn, Harvestime)

• Saving Dalkanarion: adventurers locate the lair of the Bull God tribe. They endure the horrors within. By accident they stumble upon Dalkanarion attempting a daring escape. Lost in the deep caves, they attempt going up. Survivors imitate cannibals by going naked and smearing blood over themselves. Unbeknownst to others, Dalkanarion gets possessed by an evil sword. He slays Tobias the Hobbit, steals his ring of invisibility, and flees. Others escape as the hills begin to quake. Heran Marod, in his dying euphoria, summons the Wrath the Umannah, blasting the lair. Dalkanarion is nowhere to be seen.
• Defeated: survivors retreat to Ahyf. There they learn that Racoba has Hara surrounded. Ambros gathers the strongest adventures and rushes towards Hara. He arrives in time to witness the fall and orgy of violence that follows. Ambros communes and learns that Queen is still alive. They reconvene at the Castle of the Wode. Queen commands Ambros to head back to the Bull God lair. He nominally agrees, but is disillusioned after she and her followers disappear the next morning.
• On the Run: since their adventuring party had been spread out all over the region, Ambros and friends head to Ketche, and then to Ahyf. Scouts learn that Ahyf had fallen as well. Ambros, Marlon, and Mavis are now wanted. Scouts extract few of the adventurers. The party gathers and hides in the ogre den they emptied months ago. They use the rivers to reach Ironburg, a mining thorp sitting at the northernmost border of the kingdom. Klekess Racoba proclaims himself a wizard-king of Hara.
• Another Kyle: Rall Kyle, young Kyle's uncle, rules Ironburg. Kho Rimbo fools him into believing that he is the Eyes of Racoba. Drunkard Rall believes him, which causes him to drive the miners ruthlessly. They eventually rebel and refuse to work.
• Cuddling Crus: Old Crus, a venerable and powerful wizard living in the vicinity of Ironburg, has a curious taste. In exchange for specimen from Woelands he mentors magic-users. Desperate for power, adventurers agree and return to the dungeon atop the Midnight Goddess Hills. They succeed and are allowed access to Crus's expansive library.
• Castle Yukanthur: adventurers discover ruins of Castle Yukanthur four leagues north-east from Ironburg. Yukanthur was a powerful wizard and this was rumored to be his last resort before the fall. Initial delve does not go too well.

Fall (Goodgrove, Blackmoon, Willowind, Redleaves, Maggotfeast)

• Castle Yukanthur: Ignaeus and Ambros lead many expeditions to Castle Yukanthur. The dungeon beneath the ruins is expansive, spanning several levels. Danger and wealth abound, making for a grueling, but rewarding experience.
• Trouble Brewing: Ambros calms the miners, and pacifies Rall Kyle. Adventurers make for nearly one fifth of the thorp's total number of able bodied men, and few dare oppose them in any way. Ambros commissions Xaver, a dwarf junk trader from Ironburg, to procure equipment and supplies from Hara. The dwarf reports that mentioning Ambros “opened many doors” to him.

Winter (Coldrain, Shadowrath, Gloomfrost, Year's End)

• Ambros, Captured: after a punishing expedition, the party is ambushed by Sig of Dostrogoths and his men. They are captured, with Sig claiming to be the new baron of Ironburg. Rupert Ironwill, a cleric of Tyr, accuses Ambros of a number of crimes, including the burning of Hara. Alaric vouches for Ambros. Sig promises Ambros a fair trial and takes him to Ironburg. Rall is found guilty and is drawn and quartered. Kho Rimbo is found guilty for lying and is sentenced to brank's bridle until summer next year. Ambros awaits his trial while others continue adventuring.
• Castle Yukanthur: expeditions to Castle Yukanthur continue. Adventurers push deeper, but their progress is slowed down due to Ambros not being allowed to leave Ironburg. Luckily, he is still available to raise many dead they bring back.

There were other things I could write about today, but I just watched a YouTube video about a guy talking about different drugs that he had tried and ranking them in terms of how much they ruined his life. He spoke with such candor and a pure lack of judgment, one that comes from no sense of moral superiority or a pedestal to stand on. It’s kind of weird for me to describe it this way because it’s someone who is talking about all of the extreme drugs that they were addicted to, but I do think that most humans myself included does some extent have some thing or other that they consider themselves as an expert in to some extent. And I think this is the whole patronizing aspect. But just the way that he spoke about it was meaningful. And I guess I want to capture that in my mind a little bit more intentionally.

JOURNAL 9 juillet 2026

Ce matin, en arrivant au ministère, ma chérie a appris que sa thèse est maintenant indexée parmi les auteurs japonais, son nom est transcrit ! Et elle va être rééditée parce qu'elle sera au programme d'une licence à partir de l'année prochaine, pas mal hein ? C'est pas tout : son ministre de tutelle lui a fait savoir que le ministère allait s'occuper de finaliser son dossier de naturalisation. Je ne sais pas ce qu'elle leur a fait, mais on dirait qu'ils tiennent absolument à la garder. Pour le moment, elle est juste officiellement consultante, elle ne peut pas être titularisée comme fonctionnaire car étrangère. Qu'est ce que ça cache par-derrière, je ne peux pas m'empêcher de me demander parce que je me méfie des politiques comme du diable. On en discutera ce soir, quand elle rentrera, elle a sûrement elle son idée. Je sais qu'elle est super forte dans son domaine et même takaichi sait qu'elle existe, mais quand même... Pendant ce temps yôko m'a téléphoné, elle s'est inscrite sur un site de rencontre...

We bought two 25lb bags of organic popcorn for a snack. We’ve tried growing it dry farming (without watering) and it didn’t do too well. It would likely do pretty well with some light irrigation which we may do someday but for now in the garden we have switched to a sweet corn that dries out well for milling. Anyways, for now we are buying bags of popcorn as a fun snack. We try to avoid toxic food including foods laden with glyphosate which many corn products are guilty of, so we bought organic to avoid that. We ran into a problem though, the popcorn didn’t pop – it had like 20% pop rate, which is horrible. I dug around on the interwebs and found someone mention that it is likely because they were over dried. I guess they need some level of moisture in order to pop well, which these did not have. So I added about 1tsp of water per cup of overly dried popcorn and shook it up in a jar. I left them to absorb the moisture for about 18 hours and tried it out. It worked perfectly, out of 1 cup of popcorn there were 6 seeds left unpopped.

I don’t know if this is really a thing anywhere, but it probably should be. I’ve never seen “loaded popcorn” before anywhere. There is caramel popcorn, sweet kettle, spicy, ranch, powdered cheese, and things like that – but where is the gourmet smothered popcorn that you eat with a fork or spoon? I’ve seen loaded french fries, polenta style, nachos, potato skins, and things like that. So we’ve tried it a couple different ways. The way I tried first was with store bought cheese a couple years back and it was pretty good. But I just found a new style that is delicious. That is why this is being written, it’s my second time making it and I just gotta share.

There is a cheese called shankleesh which is very easy to make if you have a milking animal. It’s a very early form of cheese. If you are used to pasteurized milk you may be disgusted by the process. You either make yogurt which is the traditional way, not so gross, or make clabber which is what we do as we don’t have awesome middle eastern yogurt cultures. Clabber is taking raw milk and letting it sit at room temperature till it naturally separates. You get a yogurt like substance that floats up and the whey is at the bottom. This works best if you never refrigerate or cool the milk, you will get the best strains of bacteria at room or slightly warmer temps. The colder it is (like a refrigerator) you will be promoting the not so great cold-loving macrophages. After you have your clabber or yogurt, strain it in a cheese cloth. After about 24 hours add salt and let it sit one more day. Then you take that thicker cheese, form balls, and roll it around in a bowl of spices. I forget the traditional shankleesh spices that make up za’atar but we always just make up our own spice blend. It’s often dried onion, garlic, and random others (dill, thyme, pepper, cayenne, etc.) Let the balls air dry for a while then put them in a half-gallon or whatever sized jar and cover the cheese with olive oil. Then you let it age 1-3 months and it’s ready to eat. Leave about 1 inch of room at the top, as it ages the oil expands and it does need to be opened (or burped) once in a while because of CO2 while fermenting. One of the reasons we started making this cheese is because we don’t have our cellar yet to use as a cheese cave.

I've mentioned this book in another post, but it's worth repeating. If you want to learn more about natural cheesemaking this is the best book available as far as we've found: 'Milk Into Cheese' – by David Asher

Back to the loaded popcorn. The shankleesh cheese balls are awesome broken up and spread throughout a bowl of popcorn with the oil from the shankleesh drizzled over the top with a little extra salt. Our youngest son danced around spinning his arm around (his latest sweet move) while gobbling this up with me. It’s best eaten with a spoon in my opinion, and it’s pretty top notch. The oil left from the shankleesh is great used as a popcorn oil drizzle, as a dressing, with rice, and much more. If you have a milking animal I’d recommend playing around with it. It’s an easy cheese that doesn’t need rennet, cooking, cheese presses, or a cheese cave. An easy beginner cheese. It reminds me of feta, just a little softer.

Thought I’d share a little about the homestead and food. One of the big reasons people get into homesteading is for the food it seems. Our bull was out at a friend’s place for the last month or so, it seems their main milker is now pregnant so now it’s our turn to get our milker knocked up. Pretty funny stuff, we have a cow brothel.

I’d like to give a notice to anyone reading this blog. If anyone is viewing this on Mataroa.blog and desires to continue reading jump over to the Bear.blog or Write.as versions of this. I have nothing against Mataroa; it is a fine enough blogging platform in my view. I’ve been playing around with all three of these and have narrowed in on Bear.blog and Write.as for a couple of reasons. One is the discovery feed on Bear and the read.write.as feed on Write.as. Another reason is that the Mataroa markup language is just enough different than Bear.blog that I can’t just copy/paste it over. So with all the reformatting needing to be done it is just too much work for the very limited readers on that site. If it had the same amount of readers as the other two I would likely continue. But for my own time saving efforts I’m going to drop it.

Have a good one.

Over the next several days, I'll be moving my blog from Substack to Write.as. For continuity, I'll keep the original post dates for each one. I think this shift is part of the freedom she said she wished for me last month.

“Live your life — be free.”

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

∞

Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you:

1. Pink Floyd – The Wall (1979)

2. Metallica – Master of Puppets (1986)

3. Iron Maiden – Powerslave (1984)

4. Rhapsody of Fire – Symphony of Enchanted Lands (1998)

5. Angra – Angels Cry (1993)

I read this on Cafélog from Thomas, who read it from Martin and I immediately started thinking about which albums I would choose.

It was tough to narrow it down to five, but I went with my first instinct. These are all albums I listened to countless times, from start to finish, during my most formative years.

#music #heavymetal #NoisyMusings

There is a chart taped inside the door of almost every paediatric clinic in the developed world. It is so familiar that most parents stop seeing it, the way you stop seeing the safety card in the seat pocket of an aeroplane. Two smooth bands of curves rise from left to right, and somewhere on them, plotted at every visit, is a single dot: this child, this height, this age, this month. The dot is not interesting in itself. What makes it powerful is the curve behind it. Because there is a curve, a clinician can glance at the dot and know, in seconds, whether a child is growing as a healthy child of that age should grow, or whether something has gone quietly wrong. If the dot falls more than two standard deviations below the median height for the child's age, the clinic has a word for it, and the word triggers an investigation. The word is stunting.

We have had that curve, in one form or another, since 1977. We have nothing remotely like it for the mind. And we have just begun, at planetary scale and without anything resembling consent, to do to children's cognitive development the one thing that the growth chart was invented to catch: to interfere with it during the window when it matters most, while having no way to see whether the interference is helping or harming until the children in question are grown.

This is the argument that has crystallised, in the spring of 2026, around a deliberately uncomfortable analogy. Rebecca Winthrop, who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and has spent a career studying how children learn across more than fifty countries, has become one of the most articulate voices warning that artificial intelligence may be doing something to children's developing minds for which our existing vocabulary is inadequate. The fear she keeps returning to, drawn from her conversations with educators, parents and students worldwide, is not abstract. The thing they worry about most, she has said, is children “stopping being able to think well”: a cognitive offloading so habitual, so early, and so invisible that the capacity to think independently never gets built in the first place. The provocative framing that has attached itself to this concern borrows the language of paediatrics. If a child can be physically stunted by a deficit during a critical developmental window, the question goes, what would it mean for a child to be cognitively stunted by the same mechanism, and why do we have no chart on the clinic door to detect it?

This article is not, primarily, another entry in the long and increasingly tired genre of “is AI rotting children's brains”. The mechanism by which effort builds cognition, and the danger that outsourcing the effort prevents the building, has been argued elsewhere and is taken here as the premise rather than the thesis. The harder and stranger question is the one underneath it. Suppose the worry is real. Suppose a generation is, in fact, being cognitively shaped by tools nobody fully understands. How would we know? What would the chart on the door even measure? Who would collect the data, against what baseline, how often, and what would the dot below the line oblige anyone to do? The scandal, on this reading, is not merely that we might be harming children. It is that we have built no instrument capable of telling us whether we are, and we have started the experiment anyway.

What stunting actually is, and why the analogy is exact

To understand why the analogy is more than rhetorical, it helps to be precise about what physical stunting is and what makes it detectable. Stunting is not simply shortness. It is impaired growth and development, most often resulting from chronic undernutrition during the first thousand days of life, that leaves a child too short for their age by a specific, agreed, internationally standardised margin. A child is classified as stunted if their height-for-age falls more than two standard deviations below the median of the World Health Organization's Child Growth Standards; below minus three standard deviations, the classification becomes severe. Those numbers are not arbitrary thresholds invented by committee. They are pinned to a reference population of how healthy children actually grow when the conditions are right.

That reference population is the quiet triumph behind the whole edifice. Between 1997 and 2003, the WHO ran the Multicentre Growth Reference Study, gathering data from roughly eight and a half thousand children across six deliberately diverse settings: Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the United States. The crucial methodological choice was to enrol only children raised under recommended health conditions, the children of non-smoking mothers, breastfed, with access to good nutrition and care. The resulting curves, published in 2006, are therefore not a description of how children do grow, which would merely encode the world's existing deprivations. They are a prescription for how children can grow when nothing is holding them back. A child measured against that standard is being asked a sharp question: are you growing as you would if your environment were not failing you?

This lineage runs back further. The first widely used growth charts in the United States were produced by the National Center for Health Statistics in 1977 and were promptly adopted by the WHO for international use; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised them in 2000 before the WHO standards superseded them for the youngest children. The point is that the infrastructure took decades to build, was repeatedly refined, and rests on an enormous, boring, unglamorous foundation of measurement. Because that foundation exists, stunting is not a vague anxiety. It is a number, tracked annually across almost every country on earth through the Joint Malnutrition Estimates maintained jointly by UNICEF, the WHO and the World Bank. In 2024, those estimates put the number of stunted children under five at roughly 150 million, around 23 per cent of all children that age. We can argue about how to bring that number down. We cannot pretend we do not know it. That is the difference an instrument makes.

Now hold the cognitive case against that standard, point for point, and watch the parallels hold and then break. Stunting has a critical window, the first thousand days; cognitive development has its own sensitive periods for language, executive function and abstract reasoning, longer and softer but real. Stunting has a clear mechanism, nutritional deficit during that window; the cognitive worry has a clear proposed mechanism too, the outsourcing of the effortful cognitive work through which capacity is built. Stunting has a reference population of optimal growth; cognition has nothing of the kind. Stunting has an agreed threshold and a global monitoring system; cognition has neither. The analogy holds exactly until the moment it matters most, and then it falls into a void. Every element that makes physical stunting actionable is precisely the element missing on the cognitive side.

The mechanism we are not measuring

It is worth stating plainly what the instrument would need to detect, because it is not mysterious. The science of how skill is built from effort is among the better-replicated bodies of work in psychology. The UCLA cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork, with his collaborator and wife Elizabeth Bjork, spent decades establishing what he called, in 1994, “desirable difficulties”: the counterintuitive finding that conditions which make learning feel slower and harder in the moment, retrieving an answer before checking it, spacing practice, generating your own examples, produce far stronger long-term retention than conditions which make learning feel smooth. The struggle is not the obstacle to learning. The struggle is the learning. The feeling of fluency, of material going down easily, is a notoriously poor guide to whether anything durable has been built.

A growing literature suggests that generative AI is, by its nature, a machine for removing desirable difficulties. A study by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon, presented at the 2025 CHI conference, surveyed 319 knowledge workers who used generative AI tools at work and analysed 936 first-hand examples of that use. Its central finding was that the more a worker trusted the AI, the less critical thinking they reported doing; cognitive effort was offloaded to the tool, and the workers who relied most heavily on it produced a less diverse range of outcomes. A separate and much-discussed study from the MIT Media Lab, published as a preprint in June 2025 under the title “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, had 54 participants write essays while wearing EEG headsets. Those who used a large language model showed measurably lower neural engagement across networks associated with attention and memory than those who wrote unaided, and grew more passive with each essay; the authors described what was accruing as “cognitive debt”. None of this is new in kind. As long ago as 2011, the psychologists Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel Wegner described in the journal Science what became known as the Google effect: when people expect information to remain available externally, they remember it less well themselves. The instinct to offload is old. What is new is a tool that will offload almost any cognitive task you care to hand it, deployed to children before the capacities being offloaded have formed.

The reason this is so much harder to measure than physical growth is structural, and it sits at the heart of why no chart exists. Height is a competence and a performance at once: a child who is tall simply is tall, and you can read the fact off a wall with a pencil and a tape. Cognition is not like that. A child who produces a competent essay has demonstrated a performance, but the performance does not tell you whether the underlying competence exists, because the performance can be borrowed. This is the gap that the desirable-difficulties literature has obsessed over for thirty years, the chasm between the feeling of understanding and the fact of it, and AI widens it into a canyon. A child prompting a chatbot to write a five-paragraph essay will hand you a five-paragraph essay. Any instrument that scores the essay will record a capable student. What the instrument cannot see, without doing something quite different and far more intrusive, is whether the child could have written it alone, defended its claims, or noticed the one sentence in it that is subtly wrong. We are, in other words, trying to measure the one thing our existing tools are built to be fooled by.

Why the instruments we already have do not add up to a chart

It is tempting to assume that the measurement problem is already solved, that schools are awash in assessment data and surely one of those streams must capture what matters. They are awash in data. None of it is a growth chart for cognition, and understanding why is the crux of the whole argument.

Consider the large-scale international tests first. The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, the nearest thing the world has to a standardised cognitive measure across countries, runs only every three years and publishes results with a lag of well over a year. It samples fifteen-year-olds, which means that by the time a cohort is tested, the developmental window the analogy worries about is largely behind them. And it measures, by design, performance on tasks, the very layer at which AI assistance is most easily mistaken for ability. PISA is a magnificent instrument for comparing school systems. It is structurally incapable of functioning as an early-warning system for the cognitive formation of young children, because it arrives years too late and measures the wrong layer.

National examinations are no better suited to the role, and arguably worse. They are spaced years apart, periodically rewritten in ways that break comparability, optimised to certify achievement rather than to detect developmental drift, and increasingly contaminated by the same problem, since a competent prompt produces a competent answer. The whole apparatus of summative assessment was built to ask “has this student met the standard?” It was never built to ask “is this child's capacity to think developing as it would if nothing were interfering?” Those are different questions, and only the second is the cognitive analogue of plotting a dot against a growth curve.

What about the more modern candidates, the technologies sold precisely on their promise to see inside the learning process? Learning analytics, the harvesting of fine-grained data from digital learning platforms, can tell you a great deal about behaviour: how long a pupil lingered on a page, how many attempts a problem took, where attention wandered. Formative assessment, done well, gives a skilled teacher a running sense of where understanding is forming and where it is not. Both are valuable. Neither is a growth chart, for two reasons that recur throughout this subject. First, as researchers in the field readily acknowledge, learning analytics remains weakly connected to any theory of how learning actually happens, and rich in correlations whose meaning is contested; it measures engagement with a platform, not the formation of a mind. Second, and more damning for the analogy, none of these tools has a reference population. There is no equivalent of the WHO's optimally raised children, no curve of how cognition develops when nothing is holding it back, against which any given child's trajectory could be plotted. Without the curve, the dot means nothing. You can collect a billion data points about a child's clicks and still have no way to say whether the child is, in the cognitive sense, stunted, because you have nothing to compare the child to.

There are better instruments in principle, and they are revealing precisely because they are so rarely used at scale. Get a child to reason aloud through an unfamiliar problem without a screen, and you can begin to distinguish the child who has internalised a process from the child who has only ever watched a machine perform it. Administer a neuropsychological battery and you can detect executive-function deficits that no content test will show. Observe a pupil completing a task the deliberately hard way and you can see the difference between performance and competence open up in front of you. These methods exist. They are expensive, intrusive, slow, and produce no headline number for a minister to brandish. They are, in short, everything a national monitoring system is institutionally disinclined to fund, which is exactly why none has been built.

The experiment we have already started

While the measurement gap remains a void, deployment has not waited. This is the asymmetry that gives the whole situation its moral weight, and it is worth stating in concrete numbers, because the numbers are not gentle.

By late 2025, the College Board reported that 84 per cent of American high school students had used AI tools for schoolwork. Surveys of teachers put generative-AI use among K-12 educators above 80 per cent. The California State University system signed a contract with OpenAI to put ChatGPT Edu in front of more than 460,000 students and tens of thousands of staff, described at the time as the single largest deployment of the tool by any organisation on earth; the contract was renewed in 2026 even after a survey of more than 90,000 students and staff found a majority of faculty reporting that AI had a negative effect on their teaching. In the United Kingdom, the Department for Education issued guidance in mid-2025 on bringing generative AI into classrooms, cautioning about hallucination, bias and the handling of children's data, and noting pointedly that many popular tools are nominally restricted to users aged eighteen and over. The global market for AI in education is measured in billions and rising. Dozens of national systems are folding these tools into the daily texture of childhood.

Put the two facts side by side and the shape of the thing becomes hard to unsee. We are deploying, at a speed and scale that would be the envy of any public-health programme, a set of cognitive tools whose effect on developing minds we cannot measure, in the precise developmental window during which, if the worry is right, the damage would be done and hidden. A pharmaceutical company that wished to give a new compound to every child in a country would be required, at minimum, to run trials, define endpoints, monitor for adverse effects and report them to a regulator empowered to halt the programme. We have done the cognitive equivalent of skipping all of that. We have administered the intervention first and left the question of how to detect harm as an exercise for the future, on the implicit assumption that if something were going badly wrong, somebody would surely notice. The growth-chart history is the rebuke to that assumption. Stunting was always happening; what changed in 1977 was that it became visible, and only once it was visible did it become something the world organised itself to reduce. Before the chart, the harm was real and simply unmeasured. The unmeasured child is not the safe child. The unmeasured child is the child whose harm has not yet been given a number.

The temporal structure of the danger is what makes the absence of an instrument so corrosive. Physical stunting at least announces itself in the present tense; a short child is short today. Cognitive shortfall of the kind being theorised compounds silently and reveals itself late. A child who never built argumentative stamina at nine may look entirely fine at nine, because nine-year-olds are not asked to sustain arguments. She may look fine at fifteen, when her assessments reward exactly the short-form, well-structured production that AI excels at generating. The missing capacity becomes load-bearing only at nineteen, facing a dissertation, or at twenty-seven, expected to be the one in the room who notices that the model's confident output is wrong. By then the window has narrowed, the environment has no incentive to reopen it, and, crucially, there is no record. Nobody plotted the dots. There is no chart to point to that would show when the line first dropped below where it should have been. The harm, if it occurred, will be undeniable in its effects and unprovable in its cause, which is the worst of all worlds for anyone hoping to act on it.

What building the chart would actually take

It is one thing to lament the absence of an instrument and another to specify it, and the specification is where good intentions meet hard constraints. If we wanted, genuinely, to build the cognitive growth chart, what would the work involve, and why has nobody done it?

The first requirement is the hardest, and it is the one the physical analogy makes most painfully clear. A growth chart needs a reference population, and the cognitive reference population we would most want is the one we can no longer assemble: children developing without AI, under otherwise optimal conditions, measured longitudinally on the capacities we care about. There is no pre-AI cognitive baseline of the right kind, captured at the right grain, ready to serve as the curve. The window in which it could have been gathered cleanly is closing as the tools saturate childhood. This is not a fatal objection, because cohorts can still be assembled with varying exposure, and natural experiments exist where access differs, but it means any chart we build now will be reconstructing the baseline under compromised conditions rather than inheriting a clean one, the way paediatrics did. We are trying to draw the curve after the experiment has begun.

The second requirement is deciding what to measure, and here the temptation to measure what is easy must be resisted absolutely, because measuring what is easy is how we got here. The instrument cannot score essays or test recall of content, the things AI produces on demand. It would have to target the underlying capacities: the ability to sustain effortful reasoning without assistance, to retrieve and recombine knowledge from memory, to detect when an argument does not hold, to tolerate not knowing long enough to work something out. Measuring those means measuring under conditions where assistance is withheld and the process, not the product, is observed, which is slow, expensive and individual. It means, in effect, building an assessment whose entire design principle is the inverse of every assessment optimised for throughput. It is the difference between weighing a child and watching how they grow.

The third requirement is cadence and custody, and these are as much political as technical. A growth chart works because the measurement is repeated at regular intervals by a trusted party with no stake in the result, and because there is an agreed threshold that converts a dot into an obligation. The cognitive equivalent would need periodic, process-oriented assessment from early childhood onward, conducted by bodies independent of the companies whose tools are under scrutiny, with thresholds agreed in advance that would trigger investigation. Each clause in that sentence is a fight. Who funds longitudinal studies that produce results on a timescale longer than any electoral cycle and embarrass whoever was in office when the line first dipped? Who is trusted to hold cognitive data on children when the institutions best placed to collect it are often the edtech firms with the most to lose? Who sets a threshold knowing that, once set, it converts a vague unease into a legal and moral demand for action that someone will have to fund?

And then there are the obstacles that have no clean answer at all, the ones that explain why this is genuinely hard rather than merely neglected. There is the privacy and surveillance problem: a serious cognitive monitoring system means assessing children, repeatedly and individually, in ways that generate exactly the kind of intimate developmental data that should make anyone uneasy, and the history of children's data being collected for their own good is not reassuring. There is the gaming problem: any high-stakes metric distorts the behaviour it measures, and a cognitive growth chart with teeth would invite schools to coach to it, hollowing out the very thing it was meant to detect, in a cognitive replay of every test that became its own target. There is the equity problem, which cuts in two directions at once: a chart could expose, and so help remedy, the way AI's cognitive effects fall unevenly on children with more or less support at home, or it could become one more instrument by which already-disadvantaged children are labelled and sorted. And there is the deepest problem, the one that makes physical stunting look almost simple by comparison: we do not have settled agreement on what healthy cognitive development under AI even looks like, because the tools are reshaping the cognitive ecosystem so fast that the target is moving. The WHO could define optimal physical growth because the biology of a well-fed child was stable. The biology of a well-thinking child in an AI-saturated world is precisely what is in dispute.

Whose job this is

None of these obstacles is a reason not to build the instrument. Every one of them was, in some form, an obstacle to building the physical growth chart, and the chart got built. They are reasons to be honest that it is hard, expensive and slow, and to start regardless, because the alternative is to keep running the experiment blind. The question that remains is the one the brief insists on, and it is the one most likely to be evaded: whose job is this?

The companies deploying the tools cannot be the primary custodians of the measurement, for the same reason the food industry does not certify its own nutritional claims. Their incentives run the wrong way, and the conflict is structural rather than a matter of bad faith. They can and should be required to instrument their products honestly and to surface data to independent researchers, but the chart on the door must be held by a party with no stake in what the dot shows. Schools cannot carry it alone either; they are already drowning, and asking individual teachers to run neuropsychological batteries is a category error. The work belongs, by its nature, to public institutions operating at the scale and with the independence that paediatric surveillance enjoys: national statistics offices, public health bodies repurposed or extended toward cognitive development, education ministries funding longitudinal cohorts they will not see results from in their own term, and the international bodies that already coordinate child-development metrics. The Joint Malnutrition Estimates are produced by UNICEF, the WHO and the World Bank acting together precisely because no single actor could be trusted or resourced to do it alone. The cognitive equivalent would require the same kind of patient, unglamorous, multi-decade institutional commitment, and it would have to begin now, while today's seven-year-olds are still young enough for their trajectories to be plotted from something close to the start.

That commitment is unlikely to be made, and the reason it is unlikely is itself the most damning fact in the whole account. We are not failing to build the cognitive growth chart because it is impossible. We are failing to build it because building it would force us to confront, in public and with numbers, what we have already chosen to do. The instrument is missing not despite the deployment but, in a sense, because of it: an uninstrumented experiment is one whose results can never indict the people who ran it. There is a long and dishonourable history of this pattern, of harms allowed to compound in the dark for exactly as long as the dark could be maintained, with lead in paint and petrol, with sugar, with tobacco, each of them obvious in retrospect and each defended at the time by the absence of the very measurements that would have made them undeniable. In every case the measurement, when it finally came, did not create the harm. It revealed a harm that had been happening all along, to people who had no chart on the door.

The child in the clinic gets weighed and measured because, a century of effort ago, somebody decided that the growth of children was important enough to count, and that not counting it was itself a form of negligence. We have not yet decided that about the growth of children's minds, and the absence of the instrument is not a neutral gap waiting to be filled. It is a choice, renewed every day that the tools spread further and the chart remains unbuilt: a choice to run the largest experiment on cognitive development in human history, on a generation that did not consent and a public that was never asked, and to ensure, by leaving the instrument unbuilt, that we will not have to know what it did until the children are grown and the window is shut. The unmeasured child is not safe. The unmeasured child is simply the one whose dot we have agreed, in advance, not to plot.

References

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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