Playground
Interactive tools and visualizations.
History, Politics & Philosophy
Epistemic Regimes
Reality Foundations Theory's account of Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern as three incompatible operating systems for truth, power, and purpose — explored across five pieces.
Three Orientation Worlds
Slide deck for the FPO presentation — July 2026. Three epistemic regimes mapped as a structural account of political incommensurability. Premodern, Modern, Postmodern: not positions on a spectrum, but competing operating systems producing unrecognizable truths.
View SlidesReality Foundations Questionnaire
18 statements. 3 scenarios. One classification. Explore how you think about truth, power, and the purpose of governance — and whether your instincts align with a Premodern, Modern, or Postmodern framework.
Take the SurveySemantic State Machine
Three epistemic regimes — Premodern, Modern, Postmodern — mapped as competing runtimes across live political events. Fire each regime to watch its truth primitives, power structure, and cross-regime enemies activate in real semantic space.
LaunchSemantic Vector Space
49 words from three epistemic regimes, embedded with MPNet-768 and projected into 3D via UMAP. Allies, enemies, and Telos primitives cluster by semantic gravity — not by design. Gold lines mark inversions: the same word as ally in one runtime, enemy in another.
ExploreThreat Map
Each regime is a closed Truth · Power · Purpose package — and every arrow is a commitment that reads as an existential threat to a neighbor. Modern takes the two-front assault; Premodern and Postmodern share no threatened item, they mirror each other instead.
ExploreAmerican Epochs
Seven named periods from 1941 to the present, mapped as two legitimacy cycles — each following a Rise → Apex → Crisis arc. Click any epoch or event to read its interpretive annotation.
ExploreHow Fascism Works
Real events mapped to Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works framework — ten pillars, twenty sub-mechanisms, force-directed. Click any node to trace how a moment connects to a larger pattern.
ExploreContention Map
Philosophical ideas mapped as allies and enemies — from Kant and Hume to Foucault and Rawls. Click any node to trace how a claim connects through the field. Every edge carries its provenance: sourced, reconstructed, or openly conjecture.
ExploreAmerican Labor Market
58 years of U.S. employment data on a single slider. Watch how each sector's share of the workforce compares to its share of job creation — from 1968 to 2025. Includes unemployment, S&P 500, Fed rate, and workforce demographics.
ExploreColor & Perception
First, Everyone Had to Agree
How the Dow Jones color palette became one accessible standard a dozen brands adopted — consensus before automation, the science of CIE L*, and the humility to correct your own standard.
ExploreWhat's My ΔE?
Test how finely your eyes can distinguish color. Two colors appear side by side — click where they meet. Each round the difference shrinks until we find your Just Noticeable Difference, measured in CIEDE2000.
PlayOdd One Out
A 3×3 grid of color swatches. Eight are the same — one is different. Click the odd one out. No shared edges, no tricks — just your eyes against increasingly subtle CIEDE2000 differences.
PlayPurple Haze
Why does blue go purple when you fade it to black? Pick any color and watch it interpolate to white and black across nine color spaces side by side — sRGB, HSL, CIE L*a*b*, OKLab, and more. See the hue shifts for yourself.
LaunchInterpolation Paths
See how color interpolation actually moves through 3D CIELAB space. Pick a color and a tween space, then watch the path from that color to white and black — rendered as curves through the visible gamut.
LaunchGamut Viewer
Explore a 3D model of every color the human eye can see. Switch between CIELAB and CIE xyY coordinate spaces, overlay sRGB, Adobe RGB, and Display P3 gamut boundaries, and discover how much of visible color your screen can actually show.
LaunchDesign Systems & Tools
Make It Easier
A talk on rebuilding the Dow Jones Design System from React-only to universal — twenty brands, five platforms, from first principles. One set of tokens, the same component rendered in three real brand skins.
ExploreLayla
A layout language for design systems. Describe a component in plain English and get structured Layla output — or provide a .layla file and compile it to HTML, React, or SwiftUI. A Claude Code skill.
Get the Skill