Short, structured paths into ideas worth holding on to
These modules are an attempt to teach difficult ideas the way they are best learned: through a concrete case, with a structure that lets you reproduce the understanding rather than merely recognise it. Each module pairs a vivid example — a rainforest making its own weather, a salmon feeding a tree five hundred years away, a forest’s underground fungal web trading nutrients without a broker — with a Paskian entailment structure that shows what depends on what, and challenges that ask you to teach the ideas back.
The series are organised by domain. Each is self-contained but interconnected, with cross-links between series where the ideas overlap.
Foundational concepts of cybernetics — circular causality, requisite variety, autopoiesis, distributed control, and the Viable System Model — taught through ecological cases drawn from the natural world.
How living systems rebuild and sustain themselves — the substrate-maker, the living medium, the closed loop, the trophic cascade — taught through coastal and ocean cases, with the water-and-food thread running throughout. Bridges to groundregulation.com.
Thirty networks — human, biological, technological — laid along James Grier Miller’s levels of living systems, so the same governing patterns can be seen recurring from a single cell to the whole biosphere. One module per level.
Foundational concepts of quantum biology — superposition, coherent transport, tunnelling, and the geometry of regulation at the molecular scale — taught through cases where life uses quantum mechanics as machinery. Companion to the cybernetics series at a smaller scale.
Light is something the body reads as a signal — a clock, set by the sun, that times our physiology — and a century of electric light has scrambled it. The science of light and circadian health, from the spectrum to the blue clock signal to designing healthy light. Connects the regulation thread to groundregulation.com.
Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory, entailment meshes, teachback, and the serialist and holist paths through understanding — the teaching of teaching itself, traced through the cyberneticians who built the tradition.
The beat-to-beat variation of the heart as a window onto regulation in a living system — what HRV measures, what it reveals about the balance of the autonomic nervous system, and how it connects breath, stress, and recovery.
The Pischinger / Heine connective-tissue tradition, the Virchow Error, and the diagnosis of organisations and ecosystems through their connective medium.
A way into a field through the books that founded it — source texts read closely and rebuilt as navigable knowledge graphs.
A practitioner course hosted elsewhere in the project, on another domain.