Experiments

One bench for every piece of the shared 3D shelf. Pick a piece on the left and the stage shows it alone on a plain ball: the scene and its gestures, the cut-away, the noise, the glow, the scale notes with their brackets, the kept picture.

A ball with a quarter cut out: granules boiling on the surface, the core, the radiative zone and the convection zone at true scale inside, the radiative zone shimmering. Nothing spins on its own; one finger turns it, pinch comes closer, a tap asks what a part is. Two notes on the picture say what is drawn out of scale. Drawn fresh every frame on the graphics card.

The Earth as a ball on the graphics card, beside the globe the Time Machine draws today: the pieces of continent as meshes turned by their plates, the same age and the same view on both, so the two can be compared by eye. A slider for the age, today to a thousand million years; the ground as the old painted map or NASA’s Blue Marble; lit from the upper left or evenly; the dozen cities riding their plates. It turns like a globe on a stand: north up, the tilt stopping at the poles.

The Time Machine’s map and timeline, with a slider that lowers the sea past the ice-age low to the bottom: the shelves dry first, then the ridge comes up out of the Atlantic. Two layers to turn on, the floor’s age and its magnetic stripes. Tap the sea and a probe reads what is under it — how deep, how old in words, and which way a compass pointed when that floor cooled — and the timeline’s handle follows the age.

A 10 by 10 window of whole steps, numbered along the bottom and the left. Before the first line, drag the small dots outside its sides to resize it, 1 to 20 each way, reading width, height and area as you go. Then press on any edge, a side of the frame or a line already drawn, and drag into the pane: a line comes with you, parallel to the edge, across that one pane, settling on a whole step; lines never cross, they meet. Tap a pane to colour it; a line under the board adds up the area of each colour, and the empty panes, to the area of the window. Two fingers move the board and pinch zooms it; it goes full screen at the first touch.

Make a number as a rectangle from the 1, tap Fix to hold its area, and drag right to make it wider, up to make it taller: the corner can stop only where the area is exactly that number at the resolution on the dial, and every stop it passes stays, labelled with its width and height. The window that results is every exact way to make the number. Between 1 m and 9 m wide, 9 has 3 exact stops in metres, 13 in tenths, 21 in hundredths, 29 in thousandths. The curve never fills in.

The nested bar driving the Time Machine’s map. This side of the ice ages the map is the ground, today’s land with the sea lower where it was lower; past them it is the earth from space, the continents where they were. The change is the globe pulling away from the ground, or coming down to it.

The nested bar of deep time over a globe. Drag the copper marker and the continents move to where they were in that year, turned by their plates; drag the globe to turn it. The globe says how sure it is: crisp to 200 million years, smeared east and west to 540, a ghost before that, and no map at all before the oceans.

Earth’s 4.6 billion years as one bar, cut into sections where the evidence changes kind. Tap a section and it comes down as a bar of its own; a bar with nothing underneath only twitches. Every bar says what it is known from. A dot is the oldest evidence of a thing; its faint tail is where it probably began.

Two clear discs cut with spokes, one turning slowly behind the other over a light, and a third pattern that neither disc has on it racing round between them. In the middle, an hourglass goes round with the mount, so the sand never has time to finish.

Twelve thousand years on one line, and a window on it. Drag the window and the line below spreads out the years inside it; drag the copper handle and the map shows the world in that year, the sea lower where it was lower. Tap a mark for what happened, and More for the story. People and Sea level draw a curve over the years; one question replays itself.

The second painting story. The pearl has no hook; the girl was nobody; the blue was a stone from Afghanistan that cost more than gold. Tap the painting for a magnifier, and later for what each colour is made of — including the dark behind her, which was once a green curtain.

The home page as it was from 13 to 20 September: two labs as words, three works as round icons, Experiments as a line below. Replaced by the gallery.

A string of beads pinned at both ends. Drag a bead and let go; with no friction it never settles, and the corner of the picture counts how long it has been moving. Turn on Listen and the same beads, following the same rule a few hundred times faster, go straight to the speaker — you hear the string itself, not a recording. Tension tunes it; the Pitch slider snaps to 110, 220, 440 and 880 Hz.

The North Sea on the moving map, and a slider from 20,000 years ago to today. Move it back and the sea drains off the shelf: Doggerland joins Britain to the continent, and the Channel is a river valley. One line says how far down the sea was.

Six of Hokusai’s events on a timeline over a world you can move: drag it, pinch or scroll to zoom, pull the strip under it to make it taller, and the word at the strip’s right puts it back. A tap on the line slides the map to the place; the road to Kyoto fits itself. The whole earth is one picture at six scales, down to about a kilometre a pixel.

Twelve thousand years and the whole earth on one page, with nothing to read. The copper dot runs up the years first; then a pale band appears over the whole line, and that band is the zoom: drag it, or drag either end, and the road and the line underneath redraw to what it covers, and the map under them shows where those things happened. The odometer reads the band’s left edge. Tap a date or a place. What I’ve seen shows only the things you have tapped here or been shown on the old road.

A still picture of the ground with a story’s own marks on it, and nothing else: no borders, no names but the ones the story gave, no green. Colour is height and nothing but height, so the shelf round Britain shows on its own. Three cases on one page — the whole earth with Tambora on it, western Europe with the road from London to Lake Geneva, and a name in a sentence that opens the same map in a window.

A road drawn on parchment, a copper dot that follows your finger, and a mirror between your hand and the dot if you want one. Five roads to begin with — a square, a Z, an O, an H, and the star Brenda Milner gave Henry Molaison — two rules for what counts as a bump (a band you must stay inside, or a line you must not leave), and four mirrors: off, left-right, up-down, both. Every trip leaves a trail in its own glass colour. Nothing is counted out loud; when you ask for the graph, there are three small ones — bumps, seconds, and how far you went — one point per trip. Come back tomorrow and yesterday’s last trip sits hollow at the start.

A story with the star beside it: trace the road ten times, seeing only a mirror of your hand, and then look at what the screen counted while you were feeling clumsy. Henry Molaison, Brenda Milner, and the two kinds of remembering.

Every dated story’s title card. A copper dot leaves year 0 — when the ice let go, about twelve thousand years ago — and rolls up to the story’s year in ten seconds, leaving events behind it: figs planted on purpose, a tower at Jericho, the first alphabet, a new star seen by day. A line at the top never changes scale, so four-fifths of it stays nearly empty; a road below it winds toward you in perspective, with room to read; and when the dot lands, the story’s own neighbourhood draws itself underneath. Tap the road to stop. Tap anything to read. Run it again and it draws a different set. Your line so far keeps everything it has ever shown you.

Three benches standing on one idea — that a note is a fast rhythm and nothing else. Counting turns into pitch, whole-number fractions turn into chords and then into a whole scale, and a strobe turns every interval into a polygon. Each carries its own reading.

A story about making windows, and a board for making them: a man who drew every window full size on a whitewashed board, seven colours of glass, strips of lead called came, and circles alone. The board is Glass Geometry's window profile; the Rose is under Demo.

The geometry lab with circles alone, and two things simpler than the full lab: a shape takes colour by a tap inside it, with a colour chosen, and a circle tells you its radius and its area while you draw it. The first circle reads radius: 1 and area ≈ 3.14.

Stained Glass twice on one page, in two boxes of ordinary size. The left box is the lab at level circles: a tap on a location does nothing, and nothing says so. The right box is the lab as it hangs in the gallery. Draw in one, undo in the other, open the picker in either; play the rose into the left one.

A rectangle, and a ruling you step underneath it — Units, Halves, Thirds, Fourths, and on past Tenths without ever arriving anywhere special. The rectangle never moves; only the came does. Where the ruling doesn’t measure a side, the last piece is simply cut short — real glass, cut at the edge — and the count doesn’t come out whole. Nothing is greyed out and nothing is announced; the fit is something you see. Then Stack ↑ or Stack →. The whole squares already standing inside the rectangle outline themselves where they are — nothing moves — and only the leftover strips and the corner travel, gathering into more whole squares along one edge, with whatever remains sitting inside its own seam, its missing pieces plainly absent. Ten thirds by six fourths: three wholes found, two more assembled, and the answer is five.

A plane, and one white tile at the origin: the 1. Touch it and drag — right for width, up for height — and the 1 stretches into a rectangle, with its twin following across the diagonal a little fainter, showing the same two numbers exchanged. Lift your finger and the rectangle goes; what stays is one tile at its far corner with the product written on it. Build a few and the map draws itself: the squares run white up the crease, everything else grey to one side or the other. Hide the duplicates and only the lower half remains. Tap any tile to see the rectangle it was made from.

The coordinate grid constructed in front of you — two seed points, full circles rolling down the axes, every line earning its crossing circles, accelerating as the numbers grow. Knobs for duration, the legible opening, and acceleration; zoom in far enough and the tenths construct themselves.

Every pane shaded by the rank of its largest prime factor — white at 2, deepening toward black at the 256th. Drag and scroll out as far as you like: the map refuses to go dark, because almost everything is built from small primes.

A load test: how much of a frame does it cost to draw a table of leaded panes while panning and zooming? Reports draw time against the 16.7ms budget, because frame rate alone reads 60fps until things are already bad.

Two declared palettes, a resting one and a lit one, both derived from the workshop's own colour so hue never moves. Showing a set — or selecting a pane — lights its members. Nothing is dimmed to make anything else stand out.

Prime colours across four workshops, stripes ordered smallest prime to largest, with a monochrome toggle. Asks whether arrangement alone can tell 6, 10 and 14 apart when colour is switched off.

A listening bench for the primes Glass Multiplication does not yet have: four candidate ways to sound 11 and 13, heard against the four that exist.

Multiplication and division as rectangles, on a number plane you can pan across.

How many beads fit around a circle — count them, divide circumference by diameter, and keep the past measurements.

Someone arrives, someone leaves, and everyone clinks glasses: the triangular numbers, counted out.

The route a Necker cube flip takes through the brain, drawn as a station map.

A bench for auditioning the interface's voice — gesture sounds, feedback sounds, pitch and ratios.

What the pointer becomes for each gesture: arrow to crosshair, magnifier, precision magnifier, double-click and hold.

The first story, from April: a cube that flips as you look at it, and what the brain is doing while it flips.