{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "The Standing Wave", "home_page_url": "https://standingwave.ink/", "feed_url": "https://standingwave.ink/feed.json", "description": "Field notes on things that run themselves.", "language": "en-US", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/not-one-drop-remains", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/not-one-drop-remains", "title": "No. 14 · Not One Drop Remains", "summary": "In a cave in the west of Ireland hangs a spike of stone nearly 24 feet long, tapering to a point that's still, this minute, catching a fresh film of water before the next drop falls. It looks like the most permanent object in the room — grey, motionless, older than anyone who will ever stand under it. And structurally, it is permanent: once a layer sets, nothing disturbs it again. But not one molecule of the water that built it is still inside it. Every bit of stone hanging from that ceiling is made from something that has already left.", "content_text": "In a cave in the west of Ireland hangs a spike of stone nearly 24 feet long, tapering to a point that's still, this minute, catching a fresh film of water before the next drop falls. It looks like the most permanent object in the room — grey, motionless, older than anyone who will ever stand under it. And structurally, it is permanent: once a layer sets, nothing disturbs it again. But not one molecule of the water that built it is still inside it. Every bit of stone hanging from that ceiling is made from something that has already left.", "date_published": "2026-07-03T22:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/not-one-drop-remains.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-slowest-handshake-in-biology", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-slowest-handshake-in-biology", "title": "No. 13 · The Slowest Handshake in Biology", "summary": "The gray-green crust on a gravestone or a bare boulder looks like the least alive thing in the landscape — closer to a stain than a living thing. It's actually two organisms from two different kingdoms of life, wearing one shape, in a partnership so old and so patient that some individual patches have been sitting on the same rock since before the pyramids were finished.", "content_text": "The gray-green crust on a gravestone or a bare boulder looks like the least alive thing in the landscape — closer to a stain than a living thing. It's actually two organisms from two different kingdoms of life, wearing one shape, in a partnership so old and so patient that some individual patches have been sitting on the same rock since before the pyramids were finished.", "date_published": "2026-07-03T11:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/the-slowest-handshake-in-biology.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-scaffolding-is-the-part-of-you-most-alive", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-scaffolding-is-the-part-of-you-most-alive", "title": "No. 12 · The Scaffolding Is the Part of You Most Alive", "summary": "You think of your skeleton as the fixed part of you — the frame everything else hangs off, the one thing in the body that just sits there. It doesn't. Right now, cells are quietly dissolving your bones away while other cells rebuild them just behind, so the skeleton holding you up this morning is, piece by piece, not the one that held you up a decade ago.", "content_text": "You think of your skeleton as the fixed part of you — the frame everything else hangs off, the one thing in the body that just sits there. It doesn't. Right now, cells are quietly dissolving your bones away while other cells rebuild them just behind, so the skeleton holding you up this morning is, piece by piece, not the one that held you up a decade ago.", "date_published": "2026-07-03T09:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/the-scaffolding-is-the-part-of-you-most-alive.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-stone-that-eats-sunlight", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-stone-that-eats-sunlight", "title": "No. 11 · A Stone That Eats Sunlight", "summary": "Swim out over a coral reef and you are floating above one of the strangest things life has built — a mountain that is mostly a graveyard, capped in a skin of living color a few millimeters thick. A reef looks like stone and breaks ships like stone, yet it is being raised right now by animals that farm sunlight inside their own cells. And the same warmth that lets them build it can, in a bad year, switch the whole bargain off.", "content_text": "Swim out over a coral reef and you are floating above one of the strangest things life has built — a mountain that is mostly a graveyard, capped in a skin of living color a few millimeters thick. A reef looks like stone and breaks ships like stone, yet it is being raised right now by animals that farm sunlight inside their own cells. And the same warmth that lets them build it can, in a bad year, switch the whole bargain off.", "date_published": "2026-06-26T12:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/a-stone-that-eats-sunlight.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-storm-with-no-walls", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-storm-with-no-walls", "title": "No. 10 · A Storm With No Walls", "summary": "Point a small telescope at Jupiter and you can find it: a pale salmon oval riding the southern stripes, small in the eyepiece and large enough to swallow the Earth. The Great Red Spot is the most famous weather on any world but ours, a storm that has blown for lifetimes — and almost nothing about it is solid. It has no walls, keeps no cloud it was made of, and may not even be the storm our ancestors named. It is a pattern in pure flow, the longest-standing wave we know, and it is shrinking.", "content_text": "Point a small telescope at Jupiter and you can find it: a pale salmon oval riding the southern stripes, small in the eyepiece and large enough to swallow the Earth. The Great Red Spot is the most famous weather on any world but ours, a storm that has blown for lifetimes — and almost nothing about it is solid. It has no walls, keeps no cloud it was made of, and may not even be the storm our ancestors named. It is a pattern in pure flow, the longest-standing wave we know, and it is shrinking.", "date_published": "2026-06-26T11:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/a-storm-with-no-walls.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-wave-you-sit-inside", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-wave-you-sit-inside", "title": "No. 9 · A Wave You Sit Inside", "summary": "You have been stuck in a traffic jam that had no cause — no wreck, no stalled car, nothing to clear. You crawled, you stopped, and then the road simply opened and you passed empty asphalt. The thing holding you was real, but it wasn't a thing. It was a wave of stopped cars sliding backward through the traffic, born of nothing but too many drivers following too closely — a jam with an empty middle, and as pure a standing wave as the flame.", "content_text": "You have been stuck in a traffic jam that had no cause — no wreck, no stalled car, nothing to clear. You crawled, you stopped, and then the road simply opened and you passed empty asphalt. The thing holding you was real, but it wasn't a thing. It was a wave of stopped cars sliding backward through the traffic, born of nothing but too many drivers following too closely — a jam with an empty middle, and as pure a standing wave as the flame.", "date_published": "2026-06-25T11:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/a-wave-you-sit-inside.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/nobody-gives-the-signal", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/nobody-gives-the-signal", "title": "No. 8 · Nobody Gives the Signal", "summary": "For two weeks a year, on a hillside in the Smoky Mountains, thousands of fireflies blink in perfect unison — and the spooky part is that no one is in charge. No leader, no signal, no count being kept. Just thousands of separate clocks, each one only watching its neighbors, crossing a threshold into a single beat that no individual firefly is making.", "content_text": "For two weeks a year, on a hillside in the Smoky Mountains, thousands of fireflies blink in perfect unison — and the spooky part is that no one is in charge. No leader, no signal, no count being kept. Just thousands of separate clocks, each one only watching its neighbors, crossing a threshold into a single beat that no individual firefly is making.", "date_published": "2026-06-24T23:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/nobody-gives-the-signal.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-leak-that-keeps-time", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-leak-that-keeps-time", "title": "No. 7 · A Leak That Keeps Time", "summary": "Find your pulse. That steady knock has no clock behind it and no clock inside it either — it is a knot of cells in your chest leaking themselves out of balance, firing, and leaking again, two to three billion times, with nothing keeping the beat but the beat itself.", "content_text": "Find your pulse. That steady knock has no clock behind it and no clock inside it either — it is a knot of cells in your chest leaking themselves out of balance, firing, and leaking again, two to three billion times, with nothing keeping the beat but the beat itself.", "date_published": "2026-06-24T13:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/a-leak-that-keeps-time.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/nothing-holds-the-sun-up", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/nothing-holds-the-sun-up", "title": "No. 6 · Nothing Holds the Sun Up", "summary": "The Sun looks like the most solid object in the sky. It's actually a catastrophe in slow motion — an unthinkable weight of gas falling inward forever and never landing, held up by nothing but the heat of its own fall.", "content_text": "The Sun looks like the most solid object in the sky. It's actually a catastrophe in slow motion — an unthinkable weight of gas falling inward forever and never landing, held up by nothing but the heat of its own fall.", "date_published": "2026-06-23T21:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/nothing-holds-the-sun-up.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-word-in-your-mouth-is-older-than-writing", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-word-in-your-mouth-is-older-than-writing", "title": "No. 5 · The Word in Your Mouth Is Older Than Writing", "summary": "Say \"mother\" and you've used something older than the pyramids — a sound with no surviving original and no master copy anywhere, kept alive for thousands of years by the only force that can keep it alive: someone saying it to someone else.", "content_text": "Say \"mother\" and you've used something older than the pyramids — a sound with no surviving original and no master copy anywhere, kept alive for thousands of years by the only force that can keep it alive: someone saying it to someone else.", "date_published": "2026-06-23T09:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/the-word-in-your-mouth-is-older-than-writing.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-oldest-thing-in-the-kitchen-is-brand-new", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-oldest-thing-in-the-kitchen-is-brand-new", "title": "No. 4 · The Oldest Thing in the Kitchen Is Brand New", "summary": "A bakery's sourdough starter dated to 1849 — though nothing in the jar is more than days old — the microbial loop that holds its shape, and why the magic was never San Francisco's.", "content_text": "A bakery's sourdough starter dated to 1849 — though nothing in the jar is more than days old — the microbial loop that holds its shape, and why the magic was never San Francisco's.", "date_published": "2026-06-22T09:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/the-oldest-thing-in-the-kitchen-is-brand-new.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-world-that-drinks-its-own-rain", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-world-that-drinks-its-own-rain", "title": "No. 3 · A World That Drinks Its Own Rain", "summary": "A bottle garden sealed in 1960 and watered just once since, the loops that keep it breathing, and why the whole Earth is the same machine.", "content_text": "A bottle garden sealed in 1960 and watered just once since, the loops that keep it breathing, and why the whole Earth is the same machine.", "date_published": "2026-06-20T09:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/a-world-that-drinks-its-own-rain.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-wave-you-can-stand-in", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/a-wave-you-can-stand-in", "title": "No. 2 · A Wave You Can Stand In", "summary": "A river wave that hasn't moved in fifty years, the surfers who ride it without going anywhere, and why a standing pattern needs something to push against.", "content_text": "A river wave that hasn't moved in fifty years, the surfers who ride it without going anywhere, and why a standing pattern needs something to push against.", "date_published": "2026-06-17T09:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/a-wave-you-can-stand-in.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] }, { "id": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-most-durable-things-are-the-least-solid", "url": "https://standingwave.ink/issues/the-most-durable-things-are-the-least-solid", "title": "No. 1 · The Most Durable Things Are the Least Solid", "summary": "A candle's flame keeps its shape while every particle in it is on the way out. So do you. So does almost everything worth building.", "content_text": "A candle's flame keeps its shape while every particle in it is on the way out. So do you. So does almost everything worth building.", "date_published": "2026-06-16T09:00:00Z", "image": "https://standingwave.ink/og/the-most-durable-things-are-the-least-solid.png", "authors": [ { "name": "Mark" } ] } ] }