Blake McMeekin

Hello! My name’s Blake. I work with Data Science, Systems Analysis, and Design.

Data Science represents the way we sense the world.

Data is “information in digital form.” It’s everything we see on a screen, every phone call, every video of our kids, and every satellite image of a distant galaxy. The amount of information today is inconceivable - as of 2022 “roughly 2500 petabytes” of new data is generated every day, and that number is expected to grow continuously.

How do we relate to these incredible streams of information, and how can we use it to understand and improve the world? That’s what Data Science is all about - finding data, uncovering the meaningful threads that run through it, and weaving these threads to make the world a better place.

I started seriously exploring Data Science in 2022. I decided to enter after watching the development of systems like GPT, DALL-E, and AlphaFold, listening to lectures by researchers like Jürgen Schmidhuber and Demis Hassabis, and reading a textbook about the Science of Science. It started to feel clear that the industry will continue to have a tremendous impact on the world, changing how R&D and science are done, how organizations and individuals make decisions, and how we think about thinking. I used the Data Science program Flatiron to quickly enter into the field, and afterwards worked as an Analyst at an integrated analytics startup.

Some of my Data Science projects can be read about here:

Systems Analysis represents the way we understand the world.

Systems Analysis describes a way to make complicated things simpler. The central concept is that nature reuses organizational dynamics. By studying those organizational dynamics it’s possible to carry insights across domains and solve problems with more coherence and less redundancy.

My introduction to Complex Systems Theory happened when I was 18 and a mentor, Hal Bennett, lent me his favorite books collected over his ~30 years running R&D organizations. In those books I read about a fundamentally different, more coherent way to understand the world, addressing many of my big unanswered questions about society and the natural world. Systems Theory refers to a set of perspectives to view things as emergent, interconnected, nested, nonlinear, scale-dependent, and isomorphic.

Here are some simulations I’ve made of some of these common organizational dynamics:

Studying these organizational dynamics are what led to the creation of this website and design company, Alterity, as these organizational dynamics can continuously create unique things using creative processes closer to what we find in nature.

An unexpected side-effect of this research has been a number of consulting conversations with business owners about business systems, incentive structures, marketing strategy, and product direction. This has supported successful product lines, fundraising, business models, and companies. I love these consulting conversations, and I’m always open to new ones.

Here’s some of my writing related to systems analysis:

Design represents what we create and change in the world.

Design means creating a system that accomplishes some goal or function. Much of my work here has come in the form of physical parts:

The procedurally generated products on this website:

And my projection-microscope side project (Which can be read about and downloaded here.)

The next thing I’d like to do is spend more time building software and infrastructure that expresses these passions at larger scales. I’m particularly interested in building systems using Large Language Models, NLP, and image generation systems, and applications such as the machine-reading of whitepapers or patents, education technology, social network analysis in organizations, and connecting larger markets to recent advancements.

Thanks for reading - now let’s make something! To get in touch, reach out through one of these channels: