The Atlas of Human Insignificance
Cosmic scale, deep time, radio reach, extinction and the fate of human traces presented as an exercise in proportion rather than nihilism.
Enter the atlasInstruments, simulations and suspect archives
Experiments & Archives
Not everything in the City is an essay. Some arguments are better encountered as scales, orbits, projections, fractals, moving geometry or archival records whose stars have developed administrative objections to being where astronomy says they are.
The Fractal Abyss
An infinitely zoomable Mandelbrot explorer: a simple iterative rule producing structure that no useful human intuition could enumerate in advance.
Open the abyssThe Observatory of Incorrect Stars
Photographic plates, notebooks and correspondence from a private observatory whose recorded sky does not quite agree with the one above it.
Enter the archiveOrbital Mechanics by Iteration
A force-diagram explanation and simulator showing how an orbit accumulates from repeated local updates rather than from an instruction to draw an ellipse.
Run the orbitDimensions in Motion
Choose two-, three- or four-dimensional objects, rotate their coordinates and watch higher-dimensional geometry arrive on an ordinary screen by projection.
Animate the dimensionsRotating 4D Shining Cube
A four-dimensional hypercube projected and animated in MATLAB, accompanied by its source code and the image used in the experiment.
View the cubeThe Earlier City of Dis
A curated route into the site's Computational Demonology ancestry, retained as provenance rather than allowed to become a second, obsolete catalogue.
Open the earlier cityInteractive pages may use JavaScript for their instruments. Explanatory prose remains part of the document wherever practical. The Observatory is fiction presented in documentary form; the numerical and scientific explainers identify their assumptions and simplifications.