Experiments

Hold a heater up to the sky and turn it until you can’t tell them apart, the way COBE did in 1990. Then point it the other way and find out how fast we’re moving.

Pour water on a wheel of leaky cups and watch where it ends up: at rest, turning one way, rocking like a clock, or tumbling forever. One tap walks through every kind of attractor.

Voyager 1 taken apart: spin the spacecraft, run its flight computers in Rust, save it from a dead memory chip, and read the Golden Record’s cover the way it was meant to be read.

If everyone replies with “Claude said:”, how much of the conversation is people? An xkcd-style what-if with a gzip label, two people wired between two Claudes, and a ping slower than a pigeon.

Trade fours with Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory, rebuilt from their own transcribed solos, and see which record every answer came from.

Route the world’s AI demand by hand, then watch a linear program beat you and put a price on every constraint.