I recently came across catalogs from Maxis—the maker of SimCity and other simulation games—from 1993 and 1994. These catalogs are billed as Software Toys Catalogs and are fascinating looks into what they were offering during this time and how they were thinking about their products. From the Internet Archive:

• 1993 Software Toys Catalog from Maxis

• 1994 Software Toys Catalog from Maxis

From 1994:

I love this focus on open-ended play: “When you play with our toys, you set your own goals and decide for yourself when you’ve reached them. The fun and challenge of playing with our toys lies in exploring the worlds you create out of your own imagination.”

From the 1993 catalog about SimCity 2000 (which includes a t-shirt!):

The best line is “If SimCity 2000 were any more realistic, it’d be illegal to turn it off.”

And within the SimLife listing is “mold the landform, customize the climate, manipulate time, change physics, then create life and let it loose on the unsuspecting landscape”:

There is even a book shop section in the catalogs, with the 1993 edition including an “atlas of planet management”:

Related to simulations and their verisimilitude—SimCity 2000 being almost illegal to turn off!—the journalist Steven Levy wrote a meditation on the nature of these simulations in Macworld from 1990 that is well worth a read. A tiny sample:

And if you want more vintage Maxis, awhile back I wrote about a Maxis annual report from 1996:

Now let’s think more about creating a Maxis 2.0. ■

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New Season of The Orthogonal Bet Podcast!

In case you are not a subscriber, we are back with new episodes of The Orthogonal Bet! Watch us on YouTube or listen wherever podcasts are available.

A few new conversations:

• Gordon Brander on Roleplaying the Future

• The case for crazy philanthropy with Stuart Buck

• Dexter Palmer on Escaping the Literary Pigeonhole

• How Societies Collapse with Florian Jehn

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 How Markdown took over the world: “it reminds us of how the Internet really works: smart people think of good things that are crazy enough that they just might work, and then they give them away, over and over, until they slowly take over the world and make things better for everyone.”

🝤 10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents: “Opinion: As software power tools, AI agents may make people busier than ever before.”

🜚 You Need A Kitchen Slide Rule

🝳 Isometric NYC: And how it was made.

🝤 The Mythology Of Conscious AI: “Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.”

🜹 Does Anthropic believe its AI is conscious, or is that just what it wants Claude to think? “We have no proof that AI models suffer, but Anthropic acts like they might for training purposes.”

🝊 What It’s Like To Be A Worm: ‘Finding evidence of “sentience” is fraught, whether in a comatose patient, an animal, or a neural net.’

🝤 How did medieval French handwriting become “the Nazi font?”

Until next time.

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I love films about how a product or company came to be. There are so many of these innovation biopics (or, as Kevin Kelly calls them, “product docu-dramas”). A selection I’ve enjoyed:

• BlackBerry

• Air

• The Founder

• The Social Network

• Tetris

• Flamin’ Hot

(Related bonus: the fantastic television series Halt and Catch Fire, about the early personal computer industry.)

A number of years ago, also explored these kinds of cultural products (he even made a list of films and television shows suggested to him on this topic) in his essay “Age of Invention: On the Silver Screen,” though he was disappointed by how well they displayed the actual process of innovation.

Another question is: are they accurate? Generally, probably not so much. But I view them as spurs to learn more: to learn more about the market share of Nike over time, or the details behind the rise and fall of the BlackBerry. These films also show the incredibly human aspect of innovation and triumph and failure. The success of these advances is steeped in the messiness of humanity.

Are there other ones you like? Please share them in the comments. ■

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I published an essay for Asimov Press entitled “Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?” about the difficulty in creating truly novel research organizations:

Asimov Press

Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?

In biology, genetic variation often results in things that look more or less the same. Despite the panoply of genetic sequences in our cells, for example, we end up with a limited number of tissue types. This is known as canalization, the idea that, despite genetic variation, environmental forces, and randomness, lots of genotypes yield the same phenotype. This is why many…

Read more

2 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Samuel Arbesman and Asimov Press

Please check it out.

I love learning about jobs that I didn’t know existed. For example, insurance archaeology.

Here is an interview with an insurance archaeologist:

Westlaw Today: Your company locates historic insurance policies. Why would anyone need to do that?

Brian Della Torre: The short answer: because old insurance policies can be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. General liability and excess liability policies are typically written on an “occurrence” basis, which means they never expire, and provide coverage for claims emanating from the policy period in perpetuity.

Certain types of claims stem from harms that may not be recognized for decades, including environmental, asbestos, sexual abuse, silica, head trauma, forever chemicals and other toxic torts.

When decades later lawsuits are filed alleging such harms, the policyholder can submit claims for defense and indemnification from the insurer at the time of the occurrence, but only if they can identify the coverage in place.

In fact, historic policies often provide broader coverage. Older policies offer defense costs in addition to policy limits and fewer exclusions. Before 1986 there were typically no “absolute pollution exclusions,” asbestos exclusions or sexual abuse restrictions.

Insurance archaeology is the specialized research conducted to reconstruct that historic coverage. Since the early 1980s, insurance archaeologists have helped a wide range of entities to reconstruct historic coverage, including Fortune 100 manufacturers, utilities, religious institutions, municipalities, public and private schools, insurance carriers, dry cleaners, retailers, and real estate companies.

Read the rest here.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 It’s Time to Save Silicon Valley From Itself: “Big Tech has lost its way. At WIRED’s Big Interview event, Techdirt editor Mike Masnick and Common Tools CEO Alex Komoroske announced a manifesto designed to help the industry get back on track.” This is the Resonant Computing Manifesto I helped to create.

🝤 Interview with Susan Kare (2000): “Susan Kare designed the icons for the first Macintosh. A high school friend of software wizard Andy Hertzfeld, she studied art history in college, and received a Ph.D. in fine art from New York University in 1979. She joined the Macintosh project in 1983, and was responsible for many of the details that gave the Macintosh its distinctive appearance.”

🜚 How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life

🝳 Watch men: “Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.”

🝤 The Land of Giants Transmission Towers

🜹 Jiggle Cat: An optical illusion.

🝊 Size of Life

🜸 The Eschatian Hypothesis: ‘that the first confirmed detection of an extraterrestrial technological civilization is most likely to be an atypical example, one that is unusually “loud” (i.e., producing an anomalously strong technosignature), and plausibly in a transitory, unstable, or even terminal phase.’

🝖 How I Read: “I don’t believe there is any special virtue in finishing a book. I read all but the final 92 pages of Infinite Jest. My regret is not the 92 pages I didn’t read.”

🝊 We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars: “Anthropic’s Claude ran a snack operation in the WSJ newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish—and taught us lessons about the future of AI agents.”

🝳 America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines: “In post-apocalyptic fiction, imagined futures turn today’s political and cultural tensions into geography.”

🜹 We asked four AI coding agents to rebuild Minesweeper—the results were explosive: “How do four modern LLMs do at re-creating a simple Windows gaming classic?”

🝊 Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy

Until next time.

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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:

Casio LF20W-8A Watch

This beige-gray watch is simple and delightful. I hadn’t worn a watch in years but then decided to try this one out and I really like it. It has a digital analog clock, which seems pretty rare, as well as the ability to change the time for a myriad of cities around the world. I’m not entirely sure I understand the point of the little circle on the upper-right (it just counts ten seconds), but I find it mesmerizing. This watch also seems to be popular among the Casette Futurism crowd.

Maruman Mnemosyne A7 N193A Horizontal Rule Notebook

These tiny notebooks are great for quickly jotting down notes and they are small enough to easily slip into your pocket. You can take it everywhere. Bonus: you can feel sort of like a reporter who is also a giant when holding this and flipping it open. Pairs well with Muji gel ink ballpoint pens (and if pencils are more your thing, the Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil is recommended).

Mighty Wallet

The Mighty Wallet is thin and light. It’s also made of Tyvek—the kind of material that is used in some shipping envelopes, so it doesn’t rip—and so you have lots of printed patterns to choose from. I like mine a lot.

HiRui Knitted Beanie Hat

As someone who enjoys snow and winter, I am a big fan of winter hats. But in general, traditional beanies will either end up covering my ears and then also rendering my neck too hot, or I push them up and they don’t fully cover my ears, leaving them cold. Enter this odd little hat that looks like a helmet. It covers my ears but leaves my neck cool. Perfection.

Glyphs Mini

Want to try designing typefaces? Glyphs Mini is a great piece of software for testing out this hobby. As someone who enjoys this pastime, I like using Glyphs Mini and can recommend its ease of use as well as its power.

Zometool

I love open-ended building toys, particularly Lego bricks. But Zometool is a very different kind of one, but also open-ended. It’s a combination of struts and rhombicosidodecahedrons and they are a lot of fun to play with.

Commodore 64 Lego Building Guide

Speaking of Lego, want to build a tiny Commodore machine? Chris McVeigh’s building guide has you covered. You can either use your own bricks to make this or you can purchase the ones you need using a service like Lego’s Pick a Brick.

Ambigrammia

The book Ambigrammia by Douglas Hofstadter helped me to rediscover the world of ambigrams: “a calligraphic composition of glyphs (letters, numbers, symbols or other shapes) that can yield different meanings depending on the orientation of observation.” Ambigrams are interesting little puzzles and artworks, and are a delight to try to make and to tinker with.

I hope you enjoy some of these fun things. And if this gift guide proves popular, I can try to make this a yearly occurrence. ■

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The Resonant Computing Manifesto

We should be creating digital experiences that are enriching rather than dispiriting. We should be building “resonant computing:”

Great technology does more than solve problems. It weaves itself into the world we inhabit. At its best, it can expand our capacity, our connectedness, our sense of what’s possible. Technology can bring out the best in us.

Please check out the Resonant Computing Manifesto that I’m a contributor to and consider signing it.

Matt Webb gave me the opportunity to share a few books related to The Magic of Code over at his wonderful blog Interconnected: 3 books with Samuel Arbesman

From an article on aphantasia:

Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee’s early programming career: “Writer J. M. Coetzee’s early poetry is almost undecipherable. That’s because it was written in computer code.”

🝤 What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?: A Conversation with Lance Richardson

🜚 Personal Business: “My point is that my reasons for working on Are.na are personal. Our endurance for continuing this work comes from it being personal. Our strength as a business comes from it being personal. And the rewards that I get from this work, and deciding to continue this work, are personal.”

🝳 AI World Clocks: “Every minute, a new clock is displayed that has been generated by nine different AI models.”

🝤 The Dreidel of the Future, Part One and Part Two

🜹 How to Send a Message to Future Civilizations: “When written knowledge is more ephemeral than ever, how can we pass on what’s important?”

Until next time.

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Let’s begin with official governmental divisions:

There are some more here.

But you can also look at less official regions as well. For example, here is one analysis of American baseball fandom from over a decade ago (and here’s another one):

Or you can examine cultural and historically connected regions, such as “the Nine Nations of North America”:

Or a newer division from the book American Nations:

Or this one from Reddit:

And there are so many more! Have a favorite? Please feel free to share it in the comments. This is my catnip. ■

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I had the pleasure of delivering a book talk about The Magic of Code at the wonderful Linda Hall Library! Check it out here.

The Orthogonal Bet Has Video (and a Website!)

Check out the website. And our YouTube channel.

From the Wikipedia entry for bismuth:

Bismuth was formerly understood to be the element with the highest atomic mass whose nuclei do not spontaneously decay. However, in 2003 it was found to be very slightly radioactive. The metal’s only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, undergoes alpha decay with a half-life roughly a billion times longer than the estimated age of the universe.

Now that’s something.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The Pivot of History: “How Horse Riding Became Possible — and Changed the World”

🝤 Ungrounded thought: ‘If you redefine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solution through an iterative linguistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That definition is pretty thin. We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer.’

🜚 Jonbar hinge: “In science-fiction criticism, a Jonbar hinge or Jonbar point is the fictional concept of a crucial point of divergence between two outcomes, especially in time-travel stories.”

🝳 A Classic Graphic Reveals Nature’s Most Efficient Traveler: “A famous graphic, now updated, compares locomotion in the animal kingdom”

🝤 The Case That A.I. Is Thinking: “ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about.”

Until next time.

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I love the history of computing. This should not be surprising, particularly for those who have read The Magic of Code. But being able to place our technological advancement into a historical context, to understand the path dependence and contingency, to see the long paths that early developments take to become everyday tools—all of these are necessary for thinking about the future of computing.

As often attributed to Alan Kay: “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” And history can do that really well. We need to cultivate more of this computational “historical sense”—a phrase used by T. S. Eliot and that I first heard from .

So when I find interesting facts and ideas about computing history, I try to internalize them. Here are some fun ones worth thinking about:

The ENIAC and Humanity’s Computing History

From the Computer History Museum: “It was believed that ENIAC had done more calculation over the ten years it was in operation than all of humanity had until that time.” Humbling and wild. This also could imply that until the 20th Century we were far from a quantitative civilization.

The IAS Machine and Humanity’s Memory Storage

From George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral: “In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on planet Earth.” Things have changed a bit since then. But I am struck by the early days of a technology where you can actually identify and count every instance of a technology.

Also, a month later the double-helix model of DNA was published.

The “Long Nose” of Tech Innovation

From Bill Buxton: ‘What the Long Nose tells us is that any technology that is going to have significant impact in the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old. Any technology that is going to have significant impact in the next 5 years is already at least 15 years old, and likely still below the radar. Hence, beware of anyone arguing for some “new” idea that is “going to” take off in the next 5 years, unless they can trace its history back for 15.’

Things take time, though I wonder how true this kind of developmental timeline is still true. (See also “lateral thinking with weathered technology.”)

The Surprisingly Long History of Emoji

From Emoji history: the missing years: “At this point, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell.” And so the timeline gets extended further and further back.

What should we do with all of this information? Right now, I just enjoy keeping this kind of thing rattling around in my mind, as strange bits of information that might be useful. But this collecting of historical anecdotes can often be the precondition for insight, something that fits nicely with the Linnaean Instinct, which I have noted is related to technological archaeology:

And this Linnaean instinct in technology allows us to manage technological history and to learn from it. It’s a prerequisite for learning from what has come before us. You first need to collect and organize old hardware and software (such as here or here), or even computers from alternate universes, from all the paths not taken.

So keep on the strange edges of computing history, whether through reading about the origins of concepts in computer science as found in Ideas That Created the Future (or other books from my Humanistic Computation Project) or even just checking out out old computing magazines on the Internet Archive (there is a lot to be found there, as I discussed awhile back).

But no matter what, keep on cultivating a historical sense in computing. It is part of building a more humanistic approach to computation. ■

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Please consider reading and reviewing my new book The Magic of Code:

Here are some more recent podcasts I’ve done related to the book:

• Six Pixels of Separation

• Humans on the Loop

• Clearer Thinking

And don’t forget to listen to The Orthogonal Bet:

The Orthogonal Bet by Lux Capital

The Orthogonal Bet is a podcast by Lux Capital that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman Produced by Christopher Gates

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’: “In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules.”

🝤 AI-Designed Phages: “A new paper shows that a generative AI model can design viable bacteriophages.”

🜚 Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers

🝳 from counterculture to cyberculture (ft. fred turner): Fascinating interview of Fred Turner by (so much interesting in this conversation, including the importance of understanding history when building technologies).

🝤 The strangest letter of the alphabet: “The rise and fall of yogh”

🜹 Redshifted civilizations, galactic empires, and the Fermi paradox: “We consider several scenarios in which a civilization can migrate to a time-dilated frame within the scope of classical general relativity and without incurring a biologically intolerable level of acceleration.”

🝊 How Pickleball Explains American Culture: “In 2019, pickleball was half as popular as badminton. Last year, it was more popular than baseball. What does its rise tell us about fads, fitness, and culture?”

🜸 Tomoya Ikeda - Macintosh Artist

Until next time.

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We need more philanthropic risk-taking.

This is particularly important in the world of science and technology research. With American public funding of science rapidly changing—or simply evaporating in real-time—one area that many people are looking to is private philanthropy. And yet it seems like we have the following situation: while wealthy people might have taken lots of risk to make their money, they often seem risk-averse when it comes to giving it away.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, at the institutional level, you have organizations like Arcadia Science and Ink & Switch that are trying really exciting new models for scientific research. But can we get more risk-taking in philanthropy?

That’s why I was excited to see Stuart Buck’s new essay in Palladium titled “The Case for Crazy Philanthropy.”

Stuart admirably lays out the importance and gap here, from research projects to new organizations, all of which need to just be weirder:

Given the challenges of our times, we need to revitalize crazy philanthropy—that is, donations to unusual issues, to individuals outside the traditional university system, and to genuinely outside-the-box ideas that could lead to the creation of entirely new fields. Philanthropy can have much higher impact if it doesn’t just piggyback on existing institutions and ideas.

Further, he notes (bold is my addition):

Where is the crazy philanthropy today? Nat Friedman is perhaps the closest thing we now have. Friedman is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and, in early 2023, he and others launched the Vesuvius Challenge to see if modern machine learning experts could figure out how to decipher ancient scrolls from the Herculaneum Papyri that were mostly burnt in the ancient volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

In early 2024, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that three entrants had deciphered several passages and had won a $700,000 prize. Since then, he has advertised in a post that he wants to hire someone at $2,000 a week to work on the Shroud of Turin. In an interview, Friedman put it bluntly: “I think most rich people are boring, and they should do more cool things.” What remains in this domain? At least 2,800 square meters of scrolls, including possibly the location of Plato’s tomb and a copy of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans.

And perhaps that is the key here: we must valorize the interesting and weird rich people, encouraging them to try even more of this kind of thing. There needs to be a shift in the philanthropic culture.

This is something that Nadia Asparouhova noticed several years ago as well:

We aren’t hard-wired to do this stuff. The default state of a suddenly wealthy person is to quietly buy the boat or the vineyard in Napa, raise a family, and avoid confronting the power they've been given. But the industrial wealth class, which preceded our digital wealth class, wasn’t hard-wired to do this stuff, either. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller deliberately campaigned to make philanthropy (initially called "scientific giving", to distinguish it from charitable giving) attractive to their peers.

If we don't talk about philanthropy, we risk repeating the mistakes of our European predecessors – recoiling into America's ancestral shell – instead of following in the footsteps that the industrialists so boldly laid out for us in the last great technological wealth boom. The failure mode of today’s ascendant wealth class would be a backslide into aristocracy, perpetuating the bloat and disquiet of generational wealth, instead of finding ways to discharge it back into society, further shaping how the world turns by increasing opportunities for others to succeed.

For as Nadia also notes:

The earliest modern philanthropists remind me of startup founders, driven less by benevolence and more by the hubris to believe they can shape the world to their liking. If venture capital is risk capital for private goods, philanthropy is risk capital for public goods.

We need more of this. This probably involves somehow making sure that credit goes to the philanthropists that make early bets and take big swings on weird and amazing projects that make an impact. Celebrate the Rockefeller Foundation for supporting Norman Borlaug’s work or creating the field of molecular biology, and whatever the more modern equivalent is today.

This also involves changing how we think about incrementalism as well. As Josh Foer notes (he is discussing Judaism-focused philanthropy, but the message is generally applicable):

There are certainly places that will write small checks, $30,000 checks, $50,000 checks, but to start a real ambitious venture requires more capital than that — like an order of magnitude more capital. And there aren’t addresses to go to for that kind of real risk capital, whereas there is a whole system in the for-profit world.

Nevertheless, I think the philanthropic culture can be shifted, ensuring that there is more experimentation, and with enough support to actually do such experiments properly. But whatever needs to be done, let’s make it happen. ■

If you are interested in exploring this cultural change in philanthropy, please reach out.

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Updates

A few recent episodes of The Orthogonal Bet you might enjoy:

• Kristoffer Tjalve on The Internet Phone Book

• Edward Ashton on The Fourth Consort

• Neal Agarwal on neal.fun

• Julian Gough on the Evolution of Universes

• Étienne Fortier-Dubois on Tech Trees

• Chris Ferrie on Writing Quantum Physics for Babies

I also continue to do podcast interviews and other appearances about my new book The Magic of Code (please do get a copy!):

• Belief in the Future

• Work for Humans

• Cross Roads conversation

• And a conversation at the Recurse Center from May about my book

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The Flower Designer: “A plant biologist’s quest to design and create 1,000 unique flowers, mostly in his spare time.”

🝤 Miyazaki Hates AI Art, But Should We? New deeply thoughtful video from Kirby Ferguson about AI art.

🜚 The Weight of a Cell: “A single yeast cell weighs about one million times less than a grain of sand. But how do we know this?”

🝳 A Rogue New Life Form: “A tiny microbe discovered by accident challenges the definition of cellular life”

🝤 When a Bug Saved the Company: “Compared to giving away two-plus weeks for free, this more strict limitation led to dramatically higher sales. We had unwittingly created a vastly superior trial.”

Until next time.

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In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan, human history is revealed to be a mechanism (at least in part) for a stranded alien to receive a part needed to repair his spaceship.

As discussed in Peter Cooper’s Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World:

Vonnegut also mocks the belief in conspiracies, suggesting that crazy circumstance has produced things as they are. In The Sirens of Titan he pushes the notion of plotted history to comic and cosmic extremes: the entire course of human civilization and precivilization has been arranged—for a bathetic purpose—by Tralfamadore, a planet about 150,000 light-years away.

Everything is connected, everything is meaningful, but also everything is absurd.

This vast interconnection of events and knowledge is also seen in the works of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is suffused with a conspiracy that may or may not exist. The phrase “everything is connected” is even stated explicitly in Gravity’s Rainbow in relationship to paranoia. As per Cooper again, “For Pynchon, paranoia is the model of a cosmos in which ‘everything is connected’ and of a world in which interlocking interest groups do manipulate events to some uncertain degree.”

Conspiracies abound, coincidences might be more than they seem, and details can be stitched together in surprising and exciting ways.

Of course, every story we tell is a conspiracy of sorts: events interconnect and become more meaningful than is found in our everyday lives. Normal reality is just a bunch of facts and events, and storytelling—whether creating satisfying fictional tales, the process of how we make sense of our own lives, or even the writing of history—is a mechanism for imposing a kind of narrative on top of these things after the fact.

But paranoid and conspiratorial thinking is having a moment. And it seems as if AI might be abetting this and making it more likely.

As per one article discussing one person’s breakdown:

At the same time, it's difficult to ignore that the specific language he's using — with cryptic talk of "recursion," "mirrors," "signals" and shadowy conspiracies — sounds strikingly similar to something we've been reporting on extensively this year: a wave of people who are suffering severe breaks with reality as they spiral into the obsessive use of ChatGPT or other AI products…

In fact, in this instance, ChatGPT was even using a particular style that fits this kind of approach to the world:

Social media users were quick to note that ChatGPT’s answer to Lewis' queries takes a strikingly similar form to SCP Foundation articles, a Wikipedia-style database of fictional horror stories created by users online.

Fiction becomes paranoia becomes meaning where none exists, all courtesy of ChatGPT.

There are likely many reasons why this is happening when people interact with AI (eg. sycophancy), so I don’t want to make too much of any specific aspect of LLMs and how their use can lead to this kind of problem. But at least one reason might be due to the specific nature of large language models: the latent spaces of large neural network systems embed all knowledge within them, so everything is somewhat interconnected. You pour all of our texts into these models and it stitches everything together: concepts, terms, people. If you navigate far enough within this high-dimensional space, everything can be discovered some number of hops away from everything else. And even more than that, these models have ingested our stories, which thrive on this kind of interconnection and meaning, perhaps making this kind of thing even more likely.

This is like the dark version of E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, or even just plain interdisciplinarity: the concept that ideas can and should be stitched together and that there is something productive in connecting together what we know. This is something that I am deeply sympathetic to. But it can be taken too far, finding connections where none are there. It is the pareidolia of knowledge.

A balance lies somewhere between nihilism and conspiracy-mongering. But relying on AI to help us find this balance is not the right answer. ■

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Some Updates

I wrote an essay for Wired: “Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl”

And here a few podcasts I’ve appeared on related to The Magic of Code:

• Inner Cosmos

• Infinite Loops

• Smart Friends

• Invested

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life

🝤 Flounder Mode: “Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work”

🜚 To Combat Summer Reading Slumps, This Timeless Children’s Television Show Tried to Bridge the Literacy Gap With the Magic of Stories

🝳 The Making of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: “How the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke”

🝤 AI Comes Up with Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work: ‘Even so, the researchers were befuddled by the AI’s design. “If my students had tried to give me this thing, I would have said, ‘No, no, that’s ridiculous,’” Adhikari said. But the design was clearly effective.’

🜹 Most Americans Opposed the Moon Landing: “After President Kennedy’s 1961 declaration to put man on the lunar surface by the end of the decade a Gallup poll revealed only 33% supported, compared with 58% opposed”

🝊 Cable Bacteria are Living Batteries: “How a discovery in a Danish lake changed our understanding of biological communities and energy.”

🝤 The people's history of collapse: “How dominance hierarchies doom societies”

Until next time.

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Diegetic music refers to music in a fictional story, such as a movie or television show, that is actually heard by the characters, rather than being a soundtrack that’s for the audience. Think of it as the difference between a character listening to a song on the radio and spooky music that is just telling the audience that something bad is going to happen.

When it comes to musicals, this can be particularly messy, because in some cases characters know they are singing and in other cases they don’t. As per Wikipedia:

For example, in The Sound of Music, the song “Edelweiss” is diegetic, since the character (Captain von Trapp) is performing the piece in front of other fictional characters at a gathering. In “Do-Re-Mi” the character Maria is using the song to teach the children how to sing, so this song is also diegetic. In contrast, the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” is non-diegetic, since the musical material is external to the narrative, it being a conversation that would in a naturalistic setting take place as simple speech.

The musical episode of Strange New Worlds is all diegetic, as the characters know they are singing, even if they are discomfited by it. This is particularly true for the Klingons:

But diegetic music can also cause a kind of breaking of the fourth wall (assuming I’m understanding all of this correctly!), collapsing the distance between the characters and the audience. A particularly delightful example is where Boston Legal’s Jerry Espenson sings the television show’s theme song:

And if you’ve seen older advertisements for Skyrizi, you might have noticed at least one that incorporates the music itself. The viewer initially thinks the music is non-diegetic but receives clues that this is not so. Watch for someone adjusting a volume dial, someone playing part of the music on a keyboard, and another person playing the part of the tambourine in the jingle itself:

The beauty of all of this is that it allows for this constant dancing between different levels: the thoughts of the characters, what they are aware of, what we as the audience are aware of. And I love it. ■

(please feel free to share more weird examples of diegetic music in the comments.)

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Don’t forget that The Orthogonal Bet podcast is still going strong and that The Magic of Code is out!

The Magic of Code got a big review in the Wall Street Journal, which is really exciting. And I’ve been recording more podcasts (here’s one that’s out!).

And please rate and review my book on Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere else! Thanks so much.

In 1976, Richard Brautigan wrote a little essay/poem called “Owls” in response to the idea of the orbital colonies conceived by Gerard O’Neill for CoEvolution Quarterly (also available here):

Hoot! Hoot! Hoot! Hoot!

I think for the time being, the remaining years of this century, we should limit our exploration of outer space and concentrate our creative energy and resources on
taking care of our mother planet Earth and what lives here.

Owls hoot in the early Montana evening when the air is very still and floats the scent of pine trees.

I like this planet.

It's my home and I think it needs our attention and our love.

Let the stars wait a little while longer.

They are good at it.

We'll join them soon enough.

We'll be there.

This pairs nicely with Brautigan’s “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”, which starts this way:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I am a fan of space exploration and might quibble with Brautigan’s priorities, but I think the broader point—that technology needn’t be at odds with the human or our environment—is one that is vital. Technology and nature can simply be in “mutually programming harmony.” And sometimes the stars can be patient for us.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The Origin of the Research University: “Universities have existed for more than a thousand years — and for almost all of that time, they weren’t centers of research. What changed in 19th century Germany?”

🝤 WeatherStar 4000+: From the readme: “This project aims to bring back the feel of the 90s with a weather forecast that has the look and feel of The Weather Channel at that time but available in a modern way.”

🜚 The weird zombie existence of the Family Circus

Until next time.

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I am still working on my Humanistic Computation Project, my continuing effort to take the idea of computing as a humanistic liberal art seriously. And one real output is my book The Magic of Code, which is out this week! Go check it out.

But I don’t want it to end with my book. I am also thinking a lot about how to build this out further. As part of this, the list now includes courses and lectures that explores these ideas, as well as other organizations that are playing in a similar space. I want to build a community of like-minded thinkers and also try to develop talks and classes: there needs to be a deep educational component of this. And, after talking to David Lang—the best thinker on the nature of field-building out there—perhaps even start creating gatherings and workshops around this topic. Please reach out if you’re interested in this and want to make this happen.

I’m excited to make this a reality. ■

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I wrote a letter to the editor to ARC Magazine about Tolkien and tech companies, sharing my list Tech of the Rings (I even discussed this letter on an episode of their podcast).

And I’ve started recording a slew of podcasts around the book launch. Here are two:

• On a Limb: Rekindling The Magic of Code with Sam Arbesman, PhD

• Humans + AI: Sam Arbesman on the magic of code, tools for thought, interdisciplinary ideas, and latent spaces

Get excited.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? “Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.”

🝤 Based on a True True Story? “Scene-by-Scene Breakdown of Hollywood Films”

🜚 Harvard Law School’s ‘copy’ of Magna Carta revealed as original

🜸 Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe

🝤 Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament: “Mac fan paid $900 to color-match iconic Apple beige-gray ‘Platinum’ plastic for everyone.”

Until next time.

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Just a reminder that my forthcoming book The Magic of Code is being published next month! Here’s a website for the book, with some very kind blurbs.

Thanks so much to all who have already preordered. If you haven’t, my publisher is running a preorder sale for all of you, my subscribers, where you can use the code ARBESMAN20 to get 20% off:

So please pre-order it now. Tell your friends and family about the book. Inform podcasters about it. Discuss it online. Post kind reviews of it. Bother everyone you know.

And now to other matters…

Organizational Edge Cases

I was reading this history of Unix by Brian Kernighan when I came across this delightful little fact: Richard Hamming, the renowned mathematician and computer scientist, was the chair of the Computer Science Research Department at Bell Labs. But this department consisted entirely of Hamming and his secretary:

As Kernighan describes it:

He was a department head, but there were no people in his department, which seemed odd. He told me that he had worked hard to achieve this combination of suitable title without responsibility…

I love this. Hamming had constructed himself an organizational edge case. These organizational edge cases can provide flexibility for individuals as well as provide the kind of open-endedness that organizations need to allow for unexpected and undirected thinking. This is a generalized version of the outlier roles in venture capital and other institutions that I’ve previously discussed.

Another example of this organizational edge case is what Polaroid once had. As per Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos, there was a department known as Miscellaneous Research:

This is amazing. Never stop creating organizational edge cases. ■

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Check Out the Orthogonal Bet Podcast

I’ve been having some delightful conversations over at the Orthogonal Bet podcast. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with some amazing guests about mythmaking, important lines of computer code, the future of programming, the nature of progress, antimemetics, rest and work, and so much more! Check it out.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science: “Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.”

🝤 When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI: “I rarely see historians and computer scientists (or people who write for literary magazines and people who work in AI labs) having this sort of conversation today.”

🜚 Darwin’s Children Drew All Over the “On The Origin of Species” Manuscript

🝳 Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter: “I don’t know how long this period of alien agnosticism will last, but I do know it’s officially begun. It reflects a broader symptom of our age: as our world ever more resembles science fiction, we become collectively more uncertain, not less.”

🝤 The Creativity Hack No One Told You About: Read the Obits: “Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.”

Until next time.

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The Phantom Tollbooth was initially supposed to be a children’s book about cities.

Sort of.

Norton Juster, the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, initially received a grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book about cities aimed at children. But Juster was having trouble writing it and, as part of his procrastination, he ended up writing The Phantom Tollbooth.

And the best part was that the Ford Foundation didn’t seem to care!

In an article in The New Yorker, Juster tells the story:

Juster, who speaks with the soft accents of the old Brooklyn, began recalling the origins of the book: “I had come back from the service, and I went to work in an architectural office. I was really kind of bored with everything, and I think, I’ll do a little book on cities. The kind of book that will be interesting for kids. I applied to the Ford Foundation for a grant—old saying, when God wants to punish you, he gives you what you ask for!—and got the grant.”

“Five thousand bucks you got!” Feiffer interjected.

“Was it that much? Anyway, I was up to my ass in worries and notes and couldn’t get it done. And so I took a vacation with friends, at the beach, Fire Island.”

…

“My guilt for not doing it was overwhelming,” Juster continued. “So I started work on a little story about a kid who didn’t know what to do with himself, and didn’t like to learn. It was Milo! At that point, I just kept writing. When I finished the book, I felt very worried and very guilty. I thought the Ford Foundation was going to demand the money back.”

“I wondered what became of our money,” Feiffer said.

“After the book came out, I never heard from them. Long time later, I found that they were delighted about it.”

While I would certainly love to see a children’s book about cities by Juster, I am delighted by the fact that the Ford Foundation was supportive of this unexpected use of the grant.

From an interview with Juster, here is how he thought about the grant process and his concern that it had gone in a very unexpected direction:

RES: You also spoke, in that interview, about initially submitting a grant to write a childrens'[sic] book about urban aesthetics.

JUSTER: Oh yes. That's the book that I wanted not to do. That's why I wrote The Phantom Tollbooth.

RES: I think I speak on behalf of the entire planet in saying that we're so glad you changed your mind! I wondered though, and maybe other writers would too, whether or not the grant you applied for came through? And what happens in the event that one gets a grant for a specific purpose, then winds up using it for another purpose entirely? In this case for writing a different book?

JUSTER: Well that was on my mind, of course. So I sent a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth to the Ford Foundation, so they'd understand. And explained to them that I had not done the book that they had given me the grant for. I did this, and in all truthfulness, a number of things that were in The Phantom Tollbooth were generating some things that I'd been thinking about because of my work on the grant book.

One was the Cities Of Illusion and Reality — the cities disappear but people don't notice it. There were several things that came directly from things that I was either thinking about, or had done research about for the book on cities. Anyway, I explained all this and I never heard from them. But at that point I had my entire grant. So I had some money and the money did provide the time for me to do the book I wanted to write. So I hope they're not upset.

RES: Never having applied for a grant, I had no idea how it all worked.

JUSTER: Oh, neither did I. I was terrified! My sense is that when you give a grant — I mean, I have no experience so I'm now talking off the top of my head. But it seems to me, I think you have to be prepared for the idea that something will be generated that may not be exactly what you anticipated. But that's fine because the whole idea of giving someone a piece of time to pursue something, is that that pursuit might lead to something unanticipated. And that's great. So I don't think you can be that product oriented. I mean, there's a difference between taking a grant and squandering it or taking it fraudulently and not doing it. That would legitimately upset someone. But this is a different situation. It's one of the things that's very nice about the McArthur[sic] genius grant, which I have never gotten (Juster chuckles), I'm afraid. And I don't anticipate getting it. But one of the things I've always admired about that setup is they give the money and say, "Okay, this is to give you the time to pursue what you want."

Many philanthropic foundations grant-making agencies are today burdened by a great deal of accountability and metrics and reporting. Which sounds like a good thing, as we don’t want the money to be wasted. But it needn’t always be so. Sometimes grants should be more open-ended, funding “people not projects,” as per Alan Kay. Or even just a bit more flexible in where the work might take people.

As Juster notes above, “the whole idea of giving someone a piece of time to pursue something, is that that pursuit might lead to something unanticipated. And that's great.” This kind of open-endedness and unexpectedness in funding is vital. And we need so much more of it. ■

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Just a reminder that my forthcoming book The Magic of Code is being published in a few months! I even made a little website for the book, with some very kind blurbs.

You can pre-order it now here.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🝊 What Limits a Cell’s Size? ‘Red blood cells are tiny and shaped like biconcave discs to aid with diffusion; by abandoning a spherical shape and evolving more toward a “donut,” they increase their surface area without compromising their compact volume.’

🜸 King of fruits: “But it may be useful to remember that the yellow pineapple that we can buy in any supermarket is, itself, the product of many careers’ worth of work. In fact, for centuries, the ‘ordinary’ pineapple was a supremely expensive luxury item in Europe, fit for the early modern equivalent of posting social media pictures (displaying the fruit at dinner parties among aristocrats).”

🝤 The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967: “Isn't it strange that this historical essay includes purchase recommendations? That's kind of the beauty of our weird little industry. Most of the pencils discussed in this article are still manufactured and sold, even though there would never be another pencil launch to top Hi-Uni and MONO 100. Mitsubishi and Tombow each expanded and modernized their businesses, and today both are heritage brands with large, diversified product lines.”

🝳 Europe's strange border anomaly: “Not far from the Belgian border, the Netherlands municipality of Baarle-Nassau is home to nearly 30 Belgian enclaves, known collectively as Baarle-Hertog. On the map, they look like cartographic amoebae, some of them with Dutch nuclei inside.”

🜚 The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that’s Everywhere: “As one scholar noted, once the manicule became a standardised, mass-produced typographic element, it lost the personal touch that had made it special​.” A history of the symbol I use in the newsletter subject lines (thanks to Patrick for the link).

Until next time.

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Many of my readers know that I hosted a Lux podcast series last year called The Orthogonal Bet.

Well, beginning today The Orthogonal Bet is now a standalone podcast, with its own feed, and better than ever! We are now the sister podcast to Lux’s flagship Riskgaming podcast.

The Orthogonal Bet is still guided by my personal philosophy, that “the world is combinatorially weird and fractally interesting. And therefore, omnivorous curiosity is the only proper response.”

As I noted then:

If it’s hard to predict what will help move progress forward, let’s optimize instead for the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.

And we tried really hard to optimize for the interesting, strange, and weird.

Last season this resulted in talking science fiction and evolutionary biology with Adrian Tchaikovsky, the failures of the Soviet space program with John Strausbaugh, AI and human cognition with Alice Albrecht, the history of SimCity with Chaim Gingold, the nature of biology with Philip Ball, world-building and magic with Lev Grossman, and so much more.

It’s been a wild ride but it’s only going to get better. Our first episode of this season kicks off with Niko McCarty who explores publishing, biology, and more with me.

The entire back catalog is available in the feed and we have a lot of great new episodes lined up as well. Stay tuned for discussions of antimimetics, rest and leisure in the tech world, sending radio broadcasts into outer space, the friendship between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, computer programming and humility, and much more.

So get excited for some weirdness and subscribe. ■

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The Handoff to Bots: “The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.”

🜚 The hardest working font in Manhattan: “It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching for my book about the history of typing.”

🝳 Setting up the studio for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television house

🝤 How Workplace Tech Has Changed Over the Years, From the WSJ Archives: “It’s easy to forget that the fax machine was once a breakthrough technology. Or how mind-bending ‘electronic mail’ was. Not to mention the elevator…”

🜹 Global internet grid could better detect earthquakes with new algorithm

🝊 A Defense of Weird Research: “Government-funded scientific research may appear strange or impractical, but it has repeatedly yielded scientific breakthroughs — and continues to pay for itself many times over.”

🜸 Logarithmic Maps of the Universe

🝤 Uh so about that asteroid: “The asteroid is currently moving away from the Earth obliquely. Measurements of its trajectory are tricky so the impact probability keeps changing.” (not really relevant any longer, but an interesting read)

Until next time.

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The history of how color is perceived and used in literature throughout time is a rich one, and one that I cannot do justice to fully.

However, over the years numerous curious theories have been proposed to account for such curiosities as the fact that Homer refers to the ocean in the Iliad as the “wine-dark sea” (could the Greeks not see blue? Or was shimmery quality simply something they prized more? Or something else entirely? See this article and this book for so much more).

That was why I was delighted to discover that John Milton in Paradise Lost describes the rainbow as having only three colors:

Over the Earth a Cloud, will therein set
His triple-colour'd Bow, whereon to look
And call to mind his Cov'nant: Day and Night,

This is from the end of book 11 which alludes twice to the three-colored rainbow.

One reason for the three colors is provided in an old version of Paradise Lost, which notes that it is likely due to the three primary colors from which all other colors are derived: red, blue, and yellow.

And this was all before Isaac Newton: I recall that the apparent reason we consider the rainbow to have seven colors is due to the numerological and mystical notions of Newton, who is responsible for many insights into optics and color.

Isaac Asimov had a very different take on the three-colored rainbow: rather than connecting it to the color palette, Asimov used it as evidence of Milton luckily anticipating the three colors in the retina for how all color vision operates. From Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost:

But perhaps it might be related to how people used to view rainbows? At least one ancient philosopher-poet, Xenophanes, considered the rainbow to consist of three colors: purple, red, and yellow (strangely, I discovered this tidbit in the paper “Semantic Meaning of Colours in John Milton’s Poem Paradise Lost,” which appears to fail to discuss the description of the rainbow in this epic poem).

To be honest, I don’t know what to make of all of this. Were the three colors Milton alludes to simply several “primary” colors from which all other combinations were made, as noted above? Or did contemporaries of Milton consider the rainbow to have three main colors? Was this related to Milton’s blindness? Was Milton making a clever allusion to something and I completely missed it? Or something else entirely? Regardless, I will continue to dwell on this triple-colored bow and the meaning of its arc across the sky. ■

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Another Font Project: Katznelson

Related to my typeface creation hobby, I am also working on a Hebrew typeface called Katznelson, after Berl Katznelson, and inspired by the idea of combining Krisper and ShmulikCLM:

Lev Grossman has a wonderful exploration of the Arthurian enchantress Nimue:

The funny thing about Nimue is that precisely because she’s handled so loosely and carelessly that she ends up feeling more like a real person than most of the Arthurian pantheon.

This pairs well with my essay awhile back on “the messiness of reality and stories.”

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich bet over different decades, and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity? “The fact that we produce far more materials than we did in the past, yet prices have barely changed, suggests that contrary to Ehrlich’s prediction, we’re not close to running out of these materials any time soon. That is what brings me closer to Simon’s worldview.”

🝳 Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes: “So ultimately, the glass box aesthetic became popular not only because modernist architects liked it, but because it made buildings cheaper to build, and because developers gradually realized that ornate, highly-detailed exteriors weren’t particularly compelling to renters or to their investors. And once that aesthetic was in place, risk aversion and cost considerations kept it in place.”

🝤 Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth: ‘She was a novice cartographer who landed a dream assignment: to create an atlas of the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”’

🜹 Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity: ‘Mapping explorers of Wikipedia rabbit holes revealed three different styles of human inquisitiveness: the “busybody,” the “hunter” and the “dancer”’

🝊 Evolution and The Knightian Blindspot of Machine Learning: “In dramatic contrast, biological evolution routinely produces agents that thrive within an open world, sometimes even to situations that are remarkably out-of-distribution (e.g. invasive species; or humans, who do undertake such zero-shot international driving). Interestingly, evolution achieves such robustness without explicit theory, formalisms, or mathematical gradients.”

🜸 Lynch and Mystery: John Higgs has a fascinating exploration of mystery (scroll down for that section).

🝖 Let’s Play Jewish Geography! “This is a huge world, with billions of people. It’s easy to feel like a grain of sand, insignificant. Then you play Jewish Geography and learn the incredible ways we are connected to each other. It’s soul-nourishing.”

🝊 A Brilliantly Detailed Map Of Medieval Trade Routes & Networks

🝳 Earth Detecting Earth: “If an extraterrestrial civilization existed with technology similar to ours, would they be able to detect Earth and evidence of humanity? If so, what signals would they detect, and from how far away?”

🜹 The Sims Turned Players Into Gods. And Farmers. And Vampires. And Landlords. “As the virtual dollhouse turns 25, the game designer Will Wright explains how The Sims was a sandbox for the American dream.”

🝊 Chimes at Midnight: “It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?” On the Clock of the Long Now.

Until next time.

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In anticipation of my forthcoming book The Magic of Code, I’ve created a list (of course!) geared towards what I am calling Humanistic Computation. This is sort of a recommended reading list of books and articles that explore various aspects of “computation as liberal art.”

From the list page (which is in turn adapted from my “Computation as Philology”):

Computation is a kind of universal solvent. In studying computation, you are not simply thinking about the nature of for-loops, or data structures, or databases. By taking the nature of computation seriously, you are able to interrogate the nature of language and how humans think, as well as the limits of mathematics. Insights into computation address profound aspects of biology or even philosophy. When we model the world in silico, simulation can help us think about the complex nature of how we build scientific models, or even reality itself. And dwelling on computation also draws in the humanities, whether it’s literary analysis and biblical studies, or code as magic, the history of ideas, or even Greek mythology.

Computation has the ability to provide a uniquely unifying framework, exerting a massive centripetal force on ideas and fields of knowledge. We must nurture its connective power. So what is the field that focuses on this power, one that is essentially a mashup of computer science, the humanities, and a sprinkling of the sciences both natural and social? It might be what I termed logismics. Or we could simply refer to it as humanistic computation, or even the liberal art of computing. But whatever we call it, this page is designed to act as a resource (and living syllabus) for exploring this burgeoning field.

Check out the Humanistic Computation Project (and please feel free to suggest other books and articles to include!). ■

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The world of tomorrow: “For progress to be appealing, it must offer room for diverse pursuits and identities, permitting communities with different commitments and values to enjoy a landscape of pluralism without devolving into mutually hostile tribes. The ideal of the one best way passed long ago. It was glamorous in its day but glamour is an illusion.”

🝳 The Dream Machine: “I recently started working at Renaissance Philanthropy. It’s a new organization, and most people I’ve met haven’t heard of it. So I thought I’d explain, in my own words and speaking for myself rather than my employers, what we (and I) are trying to do here.”

🝤 Draw all roads in a city at once

🜹 Materials and Manufacturing Underpin Civilization: “To be maximally provocative: the materials in the device you’re reading this on and the processes that create and assemble them are more important to progress than the smallpox vaccine.”

🝊 A game for comparing different coding fonts

🜸 Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts: “From symphonies to rock music, marching bands and advertising jingles — we hear Zildjian cymbals everywhere. Drummers across the globe know that name because it’s emblazoned on every gleaming disc. What’s less known is the Zildjian family has been making their famous cymbals — with a secret process — for more than 400 years.”

Until next time.

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I love typefaces. I find their details and broad strokes intriguing and beautiful. A year ago or so, I began to try my hand at designing my own typeface. This is something not for the faint of heart and, to be clear, I am still far from good at this. I am not only very much an amateur but also self-taught (I recommend the Foundations of Type Design as a great resource). But it is something that I have wanted to do.

And I had an idea for it: I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.

Reasonable people can disagree, but I find humanistic—or Venetian—typefaces (typefaces based on the early days of printing, with a more calligraphic feel) to have the features that I found most evocative of the books of sorcerers:

But there aren’t really serif humanistic typefaces that are monospaced and I wanted to try to make something myself (here are a few typefaces that are either inspirations or some nice monospaced fonts worth looking at: Triplicate, Inconsolata, Monaspace superfamily, Fell types).

With that, I created Humanist Computer (the name is inspired by Donald Knuth’s typeface of Computer Modern).

I began with the “n” and then iterated from there, spending more effort on some glyphs than others:

Here’s an early take on the “e” that I found in my notes:

There was a calligraphy marker involved, along with lots of Glyphs Mini. But over many months I succeeded in developing glyphs for the basic ASCII characters.

Am I done? Not really. But now I can at least live with Humanist Computer on a daily basis. I can work in it, coding and playing with files:

I’ve even changed my Terminal font to Humanist Computer:

So, do I feel like I am coding in a spellbook? A little bit (here’s a comment I found that is interested in the same idea). It’s fancy and weird and also computational. I love this font.

And I love it not just because type is fun or beautiful, though I think it is certainly these things. But type can also help frame a user’s work, change how one thinks about something. It’s a kind of tool for thinking, in the same sort of way that a well-designed pen or notebook is as well. And I got to build my own!

Given that this typeface is still very rough and very much not a finished product—and it might never be—I am not currently releasing it. But Humanist Computer is something that I live with on a daily basis, allowing me to see the results of my effort, and keep on tinkering with. Is the font good? Maybe. Is it mine? Yes, and I’m proud of it.

It is typeface as continuing hobby. ■

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Advance Reading Copies of “The Magic of Code”!

The book is becoming more real…

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 A Mathematician in a School of Art: an interview with Edmund Harriss: “Within the intersection of mathematics and art lie beautiful creations to delight mathematicians and artists alike. Mathematics may be the muse that inspires art or serves a more fundamental role alongside a brush, lathe, or loom. To gain greater context on this field, we interview Dr. Edmund Harriss, a mathematician, artist, and assistant professor at the University of Arkansas.”

🝳 How to Measure Molecules: “A 19th-century physicist, Lord Rayleigh, was the first to experimentally measure the size of individual molecules. He did it using little more than oil, water, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation.”

🝤 The Arecibo Message, Earth’s First Interstellar Transmission, Turns 50: “In 1974 we beamed a radio transmission into space that changed the way we think about our place in the cosmos”

🜹 A Revolution in How Robots Learn: “A future generation of robots will not be programmed to complete specific tasks. Instead, they will use A.I. to teach themselves.”

🝊 The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

🜸 Public domain works done for NASA: “These are some of my works commissioned by various NASA facilities. They are offered here to provide something like definitive digital versions of such images, and unfortunately the NASA centers can rarely do this. You paid for them and they're yours.”

🝖 Why did clothing become boring? “An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn’t.”

Until next time.

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At long last, my book The Magic of Code is going to be published. Though really not quite yet—it’s not being released until June 2025, so there is a while to go. Nevertheless, the book is feeling real. The copyediting is complete and I am in the middle of looking at page proofs. The book is getting ready to go into production, beginning its long journey from computer file to physical object you can hold in your hands. (Or, I guess, to ebook or audio file but that journey sounds less impressive,)

And we even have a cover!

Delightful!

This book is what I wish I had been able to read about computing when I was younger. Instead, I had to cobble together a lot of these ideas and insights from many sources on my own. But this needn’t be the case any longer. The Magic of Code can hopefully be an introduction to the wonders and weirdness of computation, and how these ideas connect to all manner of topics, from language and biology to philosophy and thought. It’s also—I dare say—a lot of fun. If you’re an expert programmer, hopefully there will still be something in here that entertains. But if you’re new to this world, let it be a kind and friendly introduction, a view of computing and code that is humanistic and capacious. And if you have a loved one for whom you wish to demonstrate why the world of computing and code is fascinating, please press this book into their skeptical hands.

For more on the philosophy behind the book, here is what I wrote awhile back when my book deal was announced. But a guiding principle, that this book should have the following quality, still stands:

I’ve tried to stuff the book with fun ideas and interesting facts, brief digressions and entertaining stories, all in service of the idea of computing as a liberal art. It’s a wild ride.

And now I am going to make the required plea for preordering my book. The power of preorders is one that you have likely heard about before—they all count towards bestseller lists on the week of the publication day—but if you would like to learn more about their meaning and importance, I recommend you take a look at Robin Sloan’s discussion of this in the months prior to the launch of his wonderful novel Moonbound. But in short, as Robin notes elsewhere:

Preorders are the essential fuel for any book’s launch. I’d estimate the value of a preorder, in algorithmic and marketing terms, at around 10X the value of a sale after publication. That’s some serious leverage.

Which means that I am going to be asking you, Dear Reader, to shout about this book from the rooftops. Preorder it yourself, get your friends and family (and enemies and strangers) to preorder it as well. You can do so from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, independent bookstores, or wherever books are sold.

Also, if you have suggestions for podcasts on which I should discuss this book, or other publicity or promotion opportunities, please feel free to reach out.

And fair warning Dear Reader: you will hear more about this book in the coming months, but I will do my best to balance it with other ideas and concerns. This newsletter will not become an airhorn for The Magic of Code. Or at least it won’t only become that.

In the course of writing and researching this book I have spent a lot of time exploring the historical threads of computing, connected these ideas to many of other domains of knowledge, and tried to convey my abiding sense of excitement in the world of computation. I’m overjoyed that this book will be out in the world in a few months. Thank you to all of you, my readers and supporters, who have been with me on this journey. ■

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Some Other News

I recently had a great conversation with Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians novels, about his new book The Bright Sword over at at the Lux podcast for The Orthogonal Bet. Check it out (as well as my other conversations too).

I also reviewed Henry Oliver’s book Second Act in the Wall Street Journal.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Making Habitable Worlds: Planets Versus Megastructures: “We suggest to specifically pay attention to the multiple planetary systems that have Strange Exoplanetary Architectures (SEA) - unusual planetary arrangements that cannot be explained by current planetary formation theories, because these could be the result of ETI moving planets intentionally to suit their needs.”

🝳 The Hidden Bird Algorithm: “Simulating flocks in the shadows of Hollywood.”

🝤 Why Does Anyone Care About the Nobel Prize? “More than a century ago, the Swedes pulled off one of the greatest branding exercises in history.”

🜹 Polostan by Neal Stephenson: “The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.”

🝊 Spreadsheet Day was October 17th

🜸 I love that this children’s book exists: What Is the Story of Captain Picard?

🝖 Retro 80s Versions of Tech Company Logos

🝊 The ABC of Fonts Series by Simon Garfield: Short books about Albertus, Baskerville, and Comic Sans.

🝳 Type Revival for Film & TV: “For my work on Season 5 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we had a big subway sequence in Episode 2. The old hand-painted signage in New York’s subway system had a look that was very specific to New York and that was not represented in any typefaces I could find, and since I knew we’d be making a lot of signage for this, creating fonts was a suitable solution for speed and historical accuracy.”

Until next time.

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In the course of working on my forthcoming book (which you can now preorder!), the following little remembrance of the iPhone’s release found itself on the cutting-room floor, but I thought a version of it might be of interest to readers.

Soon after the iPhone’s release in 2007, I went to a mall in the suburbs of Buffalo to see this new device in all its glory. I was home from graduate school, and together with my father and grandfather, went to our local Apple Store and stood amidst throngs of fans, hoping to see for ourselves the seamless blending of “an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator” promised to us by Steve Jobs. When we finally got a turn, my father removed it from its pedestal and played with it.

My grandfather, who lived to the age of ninety-nine, was an avid science fiction reader his entire life. He read the novel Dune when it was serialized in a magazine, as well as Popular Science magazine for over seventy years—for he loved the facts of science as well. He subscribed to one of the flagship science fiction magazines Analog Science Fiction and Fact for years (and gave me shopping bags of old issues when he was done with them).

After watching his son—my father—pinch and swipe his way around the iPhone’s screen, my grandfather proclaimed something to the effect of “This is it! This is what I’ve been reading about my entire life.” For him, bringing human knowledge to your fingertips was not a device for imagined interstellar explorers; it was real and it was for all of us.

But we too often forget the extent to which the smartphone is an object of magic. We complain about the locations of the tabs on our phone’s browser, or how the camera doesn’t focus properly, or how it drives us to distraction. But the smartphone is an object from our fantasies, rife with unbelievable abilities. There is the beguiling touchscreen that can register our fingers as they dance across a piece of glass, something that was hard to picture as a possibility outside of Star Trek even on the eve of the iPhone’s release. (In fact, over a decade ago, I went to an exhibit of Star Trek props at a science museum and realized that what the crew of the Enterprise-D was working with hundreds of years in their imagined future are bad versions of the iPhones and iPads we already have.)

Both grumbling and wonder are found throughout the computing world. Sometimes the grumbling is even fair (don’t use your smartphone too much!). But I think that more and more, the grumbling about the tech world is most of what we focus on, at the expense of computing also being a cause for wonder and delight, as exciting as it was for my grandfather in the Apple Store many years ago.

Returning to the iPhone, its capacity to spark wonder is intimately connected to the its ability to meld ideas from numerous different domains: around human interaction, how we listen to music, how it connected us to the world’s knowledge, how we think about information, and much more. To borrow another phrase from Steve Jobs, at Apple’s core was “technology married with the liberal arts.”

Of course, this broad view of computing and technology—one that is capable of sparking wonder—is not Apple’s alone. It is found all throughout the world of computing, but only if we choose to look for it. (And spoiler: that’s what you’ll find in my forthcoming book.) ■

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Miscellanea

• From Charles Kingsley in The Water-Babies:

  Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster?  And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world?  People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.

• The Tiny Awards results are out!

• I recorded a podcast episode on “The Intersection of Science Fiction and Reality.”

• And The Orthogonal Bet podcast series is going strong. Go give it a listen.

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture: “For me, this was a perfect example of a creeping high strangeness I’ve noticed in the 21st century. A strangeness I don’t remember from my youth, the world of the 90s and early 2000s. Funnily inappropriate Curious George stickers are merely one instance, a symptom of something larger.”

🝳 Measuring the Black Death: “Reports suggest that between 40 and 60 percent of the population died during the bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the mid-1300s. What accounts for this wide range of estimates?”

🝤 Cliopatria: A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE

🜹 The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman: A fantastic story set in a version of the world of King Arthur. I found the layering of gods from different times and places particularly fascinating.

🝊 Vanishing Culture: On 78s: “The period of 78s doesn’t just parallel other historical developments. The sounds on 78s document cultural norms, performance practices, tastes, and the interests of people who, after centuries of drudgery and lives spent in the fields and hard labor, finally had free time.”

🜸 In Praise of Reference Books: “Reference volumes should be valued as least as much as fiction and other nonfiction books”

🝖 The Mercy of Gods by James. S. A. Corey: “From the New York Times bestselling author of the Expanse comes a spectacular new space opera that sees humanity fighting for its survival in a war as old as the universe itself.”

🝊 Productivity Is a Drag. Work Is Divine: ‘What Americans colloquially call “work” divides into two categories in ancient Hebrew. Melakhah connotes creative labor, according to early rabbinic commentaries on the biblical text. This is distinct from avodah, the word used to describe more menial toil, such as the work that the enslaved Israelites perform for their Egyptian taskmasters as described in the Book of Exodus.’

🝳 Who’s the Dodo Now? A Famously Extinct Bird, Reconsidered: ‘By the 18th and early 19th centuries, the remaining dodo specimens were so poorly preserved that some prominent rationalists questioned whether the bird had ever existed or if it was just an elaborate hoax. “The dodo and the solitaire were considered to be mythological beasts,” said Mark Thomas Young, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southampton and lead author of the paper. “It was the hard work of Victorian-era scientists who finally proved that they were not.”’

🜹 The Searchers: “Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab”

Until next time.

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Matt Webb recently wrote a delightfully provocative blog post, titled “When kids books low-key break the system of the world,” about the unexplainable and weird in fictional worlds, from children’s stories to the presence of Tom Bombadil in the world of Tolkien. As he notes:

The real world doesn’t fit neatly together. The real world contains the unexplained.

Therefore a real fictional universe must contain the unexplained too. Is that it?

Not the kind of unexplained that preoccupies everyone inside the fictional world, not like that, not a mystery. Rather: a magical nonsense which is a nonsense only to the reader, something that doesn’t fit even given our omniscient point of view, but the characters of the inner reality respectfully take it for granted.

This all reminded me of something I explored in my book Overcomplicated on the “biological” and messy nature of reality. The world is not all simple mathematical curves or straight lines. It is complicated and delightful, and often does not fit into our neat categories. The world is full of edge cases. As James Somers wrote about biology, “It’s all exceptions to the rule.”

And we intuitively recognize this fact. For example, when movie effects artists and model designers need to make science-fictional spaceship models, they often employ greeblies or greebles: adding little bits and doodads to a smooth surface, such as from model kits. These greeblies just feel more realistic:

But the best discussion of this feature of the world is probably found in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, in an exploration of the ancient Greek pantheon of gods:

Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever, except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn’t even fully a god—he’s half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.

There is a balance here that must be followed. We need order, but we also need a bit messiness (get the balance wrong though, and we end up with pareidolia). And that’s the key to constructing something realistic.

As G. K. Chesterton wrote of the world and its complexity and rationality (quoted in Thinking in Systems):

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.

How do we model all of this? Humbly and with a certain amount of tradeoffs, avoiding the Kitchen Sink Conundrum.

As Alan Jacobs has written about William Blake’s illustration of Isaac Newton (artwork is here and shown below):

…his portrayal of Isaac Newton—tautly muscled, gloriously beautiful, applying his compasses to paper, but also turning his back on the irregular complexities of the natural world. Indeed, his own beauty exemplifies those complexities: he has been made by a God whose preferences in geometry are quite different from Newton’s own. A human body is proportionate and exhibits bilateral symmetry, but, the circle Leonardo drew around his Vitruvian Man notwithstanding, you can’t do figure drawing, or even sketch a pile of rocks, with a compass. Newton preferred regularity to irregularity, simplicity to complexity, but that preference took him away from reality.

Subjecting the world to rationality and rules is important and insightful. But it’s also vital to recognize exceptions and a bit of messiness, both in how we build our models and how we think about reality.

Humans seem to recognize this balance between order and disorder as something that it is a fundamental feature of the cosmos. The world is fractal and replete with edge cases. And good stories require these features as well. ■

Speaking of storytelling and world creation, I recently came across this list of nonfiction books that could be role-playing game sourcebooks. I love this idea:

Most people read fiction for the stories. But there’s a select group, you know who you are, who get as much or more joy from the “world building.” You might be in this group if you read Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings, or if you enjoy idly illustrating (or generating) maps of imaginary kingdoms, or if you like coming up with your own stories that take place in the world of your favorite authors. There’s a whole category of people who read the manuals and source books for tabletop role-playing games, not because they intend to play them, but because they like luxuriating in the descriptions and imagining the alien worlds they portray.

What if I told you that you could have this experience in the real world as well? Our universe is fractally strange, and so are our societies. This is a post dedicated to works of non-fiction which, if you close your eyes or change the names, give the same imaginative thrill as the most daring speculative fiction.

We need more of these! And we also need more infodumps. As per a short essay I wrote years ago on “Pocket Histories of Interstellar Societies”:

I’m a fan of science fiction. But as much as I enjoy the ideas and the storytelling, when it comes to grand interstellar societies—galactic empires, federations, and all that—one of the things I love the most is to simply read the histories of these worlds. A capsule summary of how a world came to be—technologies invented, geopolitical shifts, how it ticks and operates, and the current state of that universe—is my catnip. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading the stories that are placed in these settings too, but I am also a big fan of simply learning about how these these vast interstellar settings for humanity are constructed.

The equivalent of this for the real world that I provided was the CIA World Factbook. But we need more of these for nonfiction and I’m glad that people are trying to create—and highlight—this kind of writing.

(A bit of self-promotion: my forthcoming book is a field guide of sorts to the many delights and features of computation, as well as how this all relates to the world more broadly.)

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence: ‘It remains to be seen if Turing’s prediction is merely off by a few decades, or if the real alteration will be in our conceptions of what “thinking” is—and our realization that intelligence is more complex and subtle than Turing, and the rest of us, had appreciated.’

🝳 The Decline in Writing About Progress: “The rise and fall of our interest in progress?”

🝤 Dwellers in the Deep: Biological Consequences of Dark Oxygen: “Our findings indicate that complex life fueled by dark oxygen is plausibly capable of inhabiting submarine environments devoid of photosynthesis on Earth, conceivably extending likewise to extraterrestrial locations such as icy worlds with subsurface oceans (e.g., Enceladus and Europa), which are likely common throughout the Universe.”

🜹 Piecing Together an Ancient Epic Was Slow Work. Until A.I. Got Involved: ‘Scholars have struggled to identify fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh — one of the world’s oldest literary texts. Now A.I. has brought an “extreme acceleration” to the field.’

🜸 Predictions from Tom Wolfe in 1987: “The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word.”

🝖 An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery: “The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.”

🝊 Slow Roads: A “procedurally-generated driving game”

🝳 The Dying Computer Museum: “I want to refocus to the fact that the Living Computer Museum was never a museum.”

🜹 Ode to Man: “It is unfashionable to express reverence for humans—but no entity in the universe deserves it more. A species with this capacity for science and art, for inventiveness and creativity, for planning and building, for love and compassion, profoundly deserves to live, to thrive, and to expand to the planets and the stars.”

Until next time.

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Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.

But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?

In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic!), noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:

In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.

In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.

This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here1, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.

This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:

And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States.

In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are. ■

In the wake of the recent Microsoft outage due to CrowdStrike, I had an essay published in The Atlantic about how to think about testing and understanding complex systems:

Fundamentally, because our technological systems are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. These are not computer programs built by a single individual; they are the work of many hands over the span of many years. They are the interaction of countless components that might have been designed in a specific way for reasons that no one remembers. Many of our systems involve massive numbers of computers, any one of which might malfunction and bring down all the rest. And many have millions of lines of computer code that no one entirely grasps.

We don’t appreciate any of this until things go wrong. We discover the fragility of our technological infrastructure only when it’s too late.

So how can we make our systems fail less often?

The full essay is here.

I’ve been publishing more new episodes of The Orthogonal Bet podcast series (it’s in the main Lux podcast RSS feed).

Some new ones:

• Using Computational Biology to Understand How the Brain Works with Amy Kuceyeski

• The Quest to Find the Poetic Web with Kristoffer Tjalve

• What AI Can Learn from Human Cognition with Alice Albrecht

• Unveiling the Complexity of Life with Philip Ball

The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🝊 Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing: If you like this, you’re going to love The Magic of Code.

🜸 This Crystal Fragment Turns Everything You See into 8-Bit Pixel Art, and it’s Fascinating

🝳 In defense of an old pixel: On the joys of pixel fonts.

🝤 Mythical Wealth-Creation Machines: “Not too far from Finland, in the vast lands of Russia, folktales tell of the Скатерть-Самобранка, which Google translates as “self-assembling tablecloth” but is generally rendered as “magic tablecloth.” Supposedly, whenever you lay down the tablecloth, food and tableware magically appear, and similarly, when you’re down, they magically vanish. Practical!”

🜹 PBS of the Internet

🝊 Meet the Flower Designer Who Built a Laboratory In His Home: “Sebastian Cocioba, a vocal advocate for amateur science, built a home laboratory from spare parts and second-hand machines purchased on eBay.”

🝳 Mechanical Intelligence and Counterfeit Humanity: “Reflections on six decades of relations with computers”

🜸 What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? “Bell Labs may thus not only be a product of unique historical circumstances, but unique technological circumstances: telecommunications technology that was best provided and controlled by a single, enormous monopoly, which in turn made Bell Labs possible.”

🝖 A Carrier Bag Theory of Biology: “Neither resolution nor stasis, but continuing process.”

🝊 Internet Phone Book: “We are creating a physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web. It features the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.” Add your website!

🝳 Planetary Scale Replication as an Agnostic Biosignature

And you can now vote on the Tiny Award nominees!

Until next time.

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As part of my book writing process, I was recently taking a look at Gregory Chaitin’s short book Proving Darwin. I found this point he made about biology and software and archaeology intriguing:

In fact, it’s like archeology—that’s what biology really is, a kind of software archeology! So there is artificial software, computer programs, and there is natural software, DNA. Nature invented software before we did, long before. And the origin of life is really the origin of software, the origin of DNA, a universal programming language found in every cell. A powerful programming language, one that can presumably express any possible algorithm, any set of instructions for building and running an organism. It is a programming language that we are beginning to understand, a very complicated programming language, one that has grown by accretion over the millennia…

While we are increasingly understanding the massively nondeterministic and complex nature of biology (cf. Philip Ball’s How Life Works) and I don’t want to make too much of the software comparison here, I appreciate the idea of exploring a technology—computational or biological—and seeing the deep history contained within it. For technological and biological evolution have proceeded slowly and iteratively over time, accreting changes. To quote Chaitin again, “As Jacques Monod said, Nature is a bricoleur, a handyman, a tinkerer. You make do with old things, you patch them up, you fix them so you can reuse them.”

This accretion resonated with an essay I wrote nearly a decade ago titled “Why Our Genome and Technology Are Both Riddled With ‘Crawling Horrors.’” A taste:

It’s hard to change these technologies that grow slowly and becoming increasingly messy. The people who initially designed them might be long retired, or even dead. Replacing the systems entirely demands a big upfront cost and comes with the risk of unmitigated failure. So we tinker at the edges of these kluges, treading carefully. When messy enough, these systems are sometimes even referred to as crawling horrors, in homage to the unspeakable monsters that haunt H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.

If this sounds vaguely biological, you are onto something. Many of the most important sequences of DNA in a human cell, such as the ones that power how our genetic code is translated or how we use energy, are the same ones that other, far different, organisms—separated by eons of time—also use. Essentially, this is the legacy code of biology. Sometimes these sequences remain unmodified, but often, through evolutionary time, these systems are also tinkered with, and changed.

In both of these realms, we can only understand these systems when taking an archaeological approach to them.

A corollary is that when we are dealing with complex organisms, we must also proceed with humility in understanding them. So instead of biohacking hubris, we should instead proceed this way (from another essay of mine):

When it comes to biology and nutrition, while there is no doubt so much more to learn (and not everything that stands the test of time is necessarily correct), an incremental tinkering approach, tempered by a lot of humility, might be much more effective in the long term than the quick fixes of biohacking.

Or we can at least recognize this:

Technological and biology archaeology is needed for improved understanding of these systems. And so is humility. ■

More on Maxis 2.0

Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to me about my idea about “Maxis 2.0.” It seems as if there is a lot of interest in this idea.

I also had a chance to speak with Chaim Gingold, author of Building SimCity, on The Orthogonal Bet podcast series where I poked a bit at the possibility of a Maxis 2.0.

One additional point I’d like to share is that I think there is also a clear need for a “HyperCard for simulation” (where you could build any SimCity you want, for example, based on your own ideas around urban dynamics).

This kind of idea is also noted in Ken Forbus’s amazing essay “Why computer modeling should become a popular hobby”:

Customizable simulations. Most simulations allow you to only change a handful of parameters over a narrow range. Simulations that make it easy to explore the consequences of major model changes, such as plugging in a different traffic model in SimCity 2000, enable more people to get "under the hood" and experiment in ways they find meaningful.

Perhaps this could be one of the first software applications released by a Maxis 2.0?

And by the way, perhaps a Maxis 2.0 could take as its inspiration some of the innovation around institutional forms that has been happening in non-traditional research organizations, considering that there is a lot of similarities here with what a Maxis 2.0 might need to do: R&D and interdisciplinary thinking at the intersection of simulation, gaming, complexity science, education, and engagement with the public.

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 From boiling lead and black art: An essay on the history of mathematical typography: “Knuth was certain that it was time to help typography leap over phototypesetting—from matrices of hot lead to pages of pixels.”

🝳 How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play: “AI-powered NPCs that don’t need a script could make games—and other worlds—deeply immersive.”

🝤 Life Secrets of the Late Bloomers: “Being an ugly duckling in your youth can be the key to becoming a successful swan later in life”

🜹 A Lego CNC Pixel Art Generator

🝊 Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction: “We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. We demonstrate how this occurs due to random interactions and self-modification, and can happen with and without background random mutations.”

🜸 The Rubik’s Cube Turns 50: “Mathematicians and hobbyists have had a half-century of fun exploring the some 43 billion billion permutations of Erno Rubik’s creation.”

🝖 When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica: “RAND’s halcyon days lasted two decades, during which the corporation produced some of the most influential developments in science and American foreign policy. So how did it become just another think tank?”

🝊 Samuel Newman's Concordance, and How "Delve" Changed the World: ‘How the word "delve" is channeling the past to talk to the present, and the future.’

🝳 BusyBeaver(5) is now known to be 47,176,870

Until next time.

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