☞ Some Measured Fractal Dimensions
Great Britain's coastline, crumpled paper, and a lung's surface
Cabinet of Wonders
Be prepared for radical interdisciplinarity: science + technology + complexity + humanities + wonder.
Latest episodes
☞ Visiting the History of Computing and Play
The Large Scale Systems Museum and the Toy and Miniature Museum
☞ Microcosm Industries
On simulation toys and software microcosms
☞ The Wisdom of the People's Computer Company
A forgotten piece of computing history is more relevant now than ever
☞ The Slow Work of Making Sense of History
A Lesson from the Now-Defunct CIA World Factbook
☞ Maxis Software Toys
A peek into how the maker of SimCity marketed their products
☞ Innovation Biopics
Movies about how products and companies came to be.
☞ A Cabinet of Wonders Gift Guide
As the end of the year approaches, I thought I might make an official Cabinet of Wonders Gift Guide: 2025 edition. It’s a combination of strange and fun little toys and tools that I like and use regularly. It is idiosyncratic and incomplete, but I thought that some readers might enjoy it. Here a few things I recommend:
☞ Interesting Regional Maps of the United States
There are many ways to divide up the USA
☞ Building a Historical Sense in Computing
Unearthing weird and fun facts from computing history
☞ I Want More Risk-Taking in Philanthropy
More crazy bets please!
☞ The Conspiratorial Mindset and AI's Latent Spaces
Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Artificial Intelligence
☞ Musical Perception in Fiction
Diegetic Music and its Delights
☞ "The Magic of Code" and the Humanistic Computation Project
More on the Humanistic Computation Project...
☞ Creating Organizational Edge Cases
Plus, "The Magic of Code" is out next month!
☞ "The Phantom Tollbooth" Was Supposed to Be a Nonfiction Book About Cities
Unexpectedness in Funding and Grant-Making
☞ The Orthogonal Bet: Season Two
And now on its own RSS feed!
☞ Milton's Rainbow
Colors, Language, and How We See the World
☞ The Humanistic Computation Project
A reading list for computing as liberal art
☞ Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer
Type Design as Hobby and Tool Creation