Scorched Earth: What the Drach Trial Showed Me
An expert witness draws the line he will no longer cross after almost 2 decades of loyal service to the German criminal courts. A…
Journal
Journal
Forensic practice meets scientific commentary here, and neither is allowed to stay comfortable for long. This is written from inside the disciplines. Not from a press release. Not from a university office three floors above the evidence.
What you get is long-form: forensic identification, human evolution, neuroscience, digital surveillance, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence. Sourced to the primary literature, argued without institutional caution, written by someone who has spent decades in courtrooms, at crime scenes, and in laboratories where the distance between a correct conclusion and a wrong one is measured in someone's freedom.
One thread runs through all of it. Fear is not a substitute for data. And anyone who needs you frightened before their argument can stand has already lost it.
Thank You, Adobe, for the Price Increase
A Friday morning renewal notice pushed a 25-year Adobe customer to cancel Creative Cloud. The essay covers legal exit rights, filesystem residue, and cheaper…
When Tehran Writes and Brussels Stays Silent
Letters from Tehran turned an open-source browser encryptor into a forensic finding about privacy, surveillance, and trust. The article examines AES-256-GCM, Chat Control, and…
A Ph.D. Does Not Make You Smarter. It Makes You Credentialed.
A misattributed Feynman quote opens a forensic examination of credentials, IQ tests, and metacognition. The article contrasts academic title rituals with people who keep…
Otto Sapiens, the Last Model Before Extinction
A diagnosis of the Stone Age brain under the screen, the voluntary surrender of thought, and the single moment where Otto Sapiens never wants…
Why Silence Reigns Beneath My Texts
Introducing the Otto Sapiens: the statistical majority holding firm, unshakeable opinions derived from background audiobooks. A forensic expert on why silence beneath his posts…
The Sleepless Question About the Ship of State
There are nights when the body refuses sleep and the mind reaches for the oldest political question: is the human animal built for democracy?…
Why I No Longer Open the Phones of the Dead
Every request begins with a death and ends with a question. A forensic expert explains the Secure Enclave, German digital estate law, and the…
Hantavirus: Three Dead, One Ship, and What the Panic Is Hiding
Three deaths, one ship, one virus name. A forensic expert reads what the headlines leave out about the Andes virus, pandemic mathematics, and thirty…
Probability Zero: Why Our Genome Could Not Have Arisen by Chance
A forensic expert presents the mathematical case against the chance origin of the human genome, working through protein folding calculations, Hoyle's enzyme probability, Levinthal's…