Naming Things: What 'Consilientus', 'Steleology', and 'Concerned Friends' Actually Mean
I do not like empty names.
If I name a company after consilience or a product after a stone monument, I am trying to bind the work to a real idea, not make it sound expensive.
That cuts both ways. A meaningful name gives you language. It also gives you obligations.
Consilience — the unity of knowledge across domains — is not a marketing concept. It is the operating thesis. Every product we build is an attempt to structure a domain so it can be understood, verified, pursued, or preserved.
The products
CollectionChecker is the plainest name in the portfolio. That is part of the point. It is an archive and collector registry, starting with Micro Machines, and the name does not try to perform more cleverness than the product needs. The problem is real. The name says so.
w3f1nd is a compressed question: what are you trying to find? It is the desk of the house, the place where structured missingness becomes action. The stylization nods to the web without pretending to be grander than it is.
Steleology is the most deliberate name. A stele is a stone monument: an upright slab used across civilizations to record laws, commemorate events, and preserve knowledge in durable form. Steleology, then, is the study and practice of preserving knowledge across time. The product is the record room of the house: provenance, condition, continuity, and transfer-ready records. The name commits to the idea that some knowledge deserves better than a forgotten folder.
Concerned Friends of Goodwill comes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. King addressed the letter to fellow clergymen who had called his actions “unwise and untimely” — people who expressed concern but stopped short of action. The platform is a civic intelligence tool: enter your address, understand your representatives, see the data, take action. The name is an invitation to move from passive sympathy to active engagement. It is also, deliberately, a challenge.
Sages is the simplest metaphor and the most unusual product. It’s a 3D application where you summon historical figures — Cleopatra, da Vinci, Tesla, Curie, Sun Tzu, Socrates, Ada Lovelace, Einstein — and ask them to react to content. Not chatbot-style answers with a historical costume, but attempts to reconstruct how someone with a specific worldview and set of constraints might actually respond. A sage is someone whose judgment you seek out. The name says what the product does.
What names reveal
Names are commitments. A company named after consilience is committing to the idea that domains of knowledge should connect. A product named after stone monuments is committing to durability over novelty. A civic platform named after a phrase from a jail cell is committing to a specific moral position.
These commitments are not decorative. They constrain what we build and how we build it. Steleology can’t be a disposable note-taking app — the name won’t allow it. Concerned Friends can’t be politically neutral — the reference won’t allow it.
Most company names are chosen for availability and phonetics. These were chosen for meaning. Whether that’s wise is an open question. But it makes the portfolio legible in a way that “Product A, Product B, Product C” never would.
The connecting thread across all of them is the instinct behind consilience itself: take something ambiguous, unverified, or inaccessible, and make it structured enough to trust.
| Name | Origin | Principle |
|---|---|---|
| Consilientus | Consilience (unity of knowledge) | Domains should connect |
| CollectionChecker | Plain description | Solve the stated problem |
| w3f1nd | Compressed question | Invert the default model |
| Steleology | Stele (stone monument) | Knowledge deserves durability |
| Concerned Friends | MLK, Birmingham Jail | Sympathy without action is insufficient |
| Sages | Historical wisdom-seekers | Judgment is worth summoning |