Articles by arbesman
57

Factories Are Just Rooms (interconnected.org)

2

Why uranium is depicted as glowing green (hopefulmons.com)

2

Microcosm Industries (microcosm.industries)

3

The Emergent Self Loop (kk.org)

2

Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field? (resobscura.substack.com)

1

The Ever-changing Art of the Screensaver (2022) (aiga.org)

3

A Catechism for Robots (kk.org)

1

The Wisdom of the People's Computer Company (arbesman.substack.com)

2

Karl Sims and Alexander Mordvintsev on Merging Technology and Biology (2025) (lerandom.art)

1

Dither Explorer (inkandswitch.com)

1

The Slow Work of Making Sense of History (arbesman.substack.com)

1

The Landscape Architecture of Auroras on Demand (bldgblog.com)

1

Macquarium (wikipedia.org)

1

"4B unique (and sometimes memorable) sentences" (aresluna.org)

2

Maxis Software Toys (arbesman.substack.com)

1

Interview with Susan Kare (2000) (stanford.edu)

2

Jonbar Hinge (wikipedia.org)

2

Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist (gingerbeardman.com)

4

Redshifted civilizations, galactic empires, and the Fermi paradox (arxiv.org)

39

The Weight of a Cell (asimov.press)

1

The Conspiratorial Mindset and AI's Latent Spaces (arbesman.substack.com)

32

Show HN: The Magic of Code – book about the wonders and weirdness of computation (themagicofcode.com)

116

“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps (smithsonianmag.com)

2

The Magic of Code (themagicofcode.com)

1

Diegetic Music and Its Delights (arbesman.substack.com)

2

The weird zombie existence of the Family Circus [video] (youtube.com)

2

Have Appliances Declined in Durability? (marginalrevolution.com)

2

The Magic of Code (themagicofcode.com)

5

Prince's special custom-font symbol floppy disks (2016) (nymag.com)

1

The Magic of Code (themagicofcode.com)

125

Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014) (theappendix.net)

7

"The Phantom Tollbooth" Was Supposed to Be a Nonfiction Book About Cities (arbesman.substack.com)

3

What Limits a Cell's Size? (asimov.press)

1

Europe's Border Anomaly (2017) (bbc.com)

1

The Self-Domesticated Ape (kk.org)

1

The Handoff to Bots (kk.org)

1

The cartographer who mapped Tolkien's Middle-Earth (nytimes.com)

2

The Humanistic Computation Project (arbesman.net)

82

Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts (wbur.org)

1

The iPhone and the Wonder of Computing (arbesman.substack.com)

5

Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture (theintrinsicperspective.com)

1

Order and Disorder in Stories and Reality (arbesman.substack.com)

1

Cliopatria: A database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE (zenodo.org)

2

Measuring the Black Death (asimov.press)

4

The Decline in Writing About Progress (mattsclancy.substack.com)

2

Dwellers in the Deep: Biological Consequences of Dark Oxygen (arxiv.org)

2

PBS of the Internet (pbsoftheinternet.org)

1

Planetary Scale Replication as an Agnostic Biosignature (direct.mit.edu)

2

The Archaeology of Biology and Software (arbesman.substack.com)

8

Clouds in Video Games (eurogamer.net)

2

Mythical Wealth-Creation Machines (etiennefd.substack.com)

1

Archaeology of Biology and Software (arbesman.substack.com)

13

The Queen's Doll's House (clairelevans.substack.com)

1

Samuel Newman's Concordance, and How "Delve" Changed the World (paulkedrosky.com)

2

Computational Life: How Self-Replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction (arxiv.org)

3

We Need a Maxis 2.0 (arbesman.substack.com)

1

Conversation with Robin Sloan about his new novel Moonbound (eliotpeper.substack.com)

3

The Wonders of Maxis (arbesman.substack.com)

6

Longer novels are more likely to win literary awards (springer.com)

2

The Nature of Shareware: Gift Economy Meets Profit Motive (arbesman.substack.com)

3

LLM-based educational games will be a big deal (resobscura.substack.com)

0

Additional Advices (kk.org)

1

Tinker: A Short Story (asimov.press)

1

Sports Teams Named After Technologies (arbesman.net)

4

Sports Teams Named After Technologies (arbesman.net)

1

Is Science Becoming Conceptual Art? (dancohen.org)

40

Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the Prehistory of AI (resobscura.substack.com)

1

Snakes and the Adjacent Possible (adjacentpossible.substack.com)

47

On Migraine Scintillating Scotomas (clairelevans.substack.com)

30

The spreadsheet is a simulation machine (arbesman.substack.com)

1

Inception Attacks: Immersive Hijacking in Virtual Reality Systems (arxiv.org)

3

Alan McMasters and the Wikipedia Toaster Hoax (2022) (bbc.com)

2

The Spreadsheet Is a Simulation Machine (arbesman.substack.com)

1

The Guys Turning Old Graphic Design Manuals into Kickstarter Blockbusters (2016) (vanityfair.com)

2

The 29th, and Other Calendar Quirks (etiennefd.substack.com)

1

Rhombicosidodecahedron (wikipedia.org)

1

Bugs that reveal the physicality of computers (2023) (arbesman.substack.com)

8

What if modern appliances were built like the KitchenAid stand mixer? (theatlantic.com)

2

Coercing LLMs to do and reveal almost anything (arxiv.org)

87

Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age (interconnected.org)

1

On Migraine Scintillating Scotomas (clairelevans.substack.com)

4

The Linnaean Instinct and List-Making (arbesman.substack.com)

1

What would happen if you walked into a place where time is frozen? (worldbuilding.stackexchange.com)

4

Neal Stephenson on Generative AI and "The Diamond Age" (theatlantic.com)

7

Poem/1: AI rhyming clock (poem.town)

1

The Veil of Technological Progress (arbesman.substack.com)

1

The Veil of Technological Progress (arbesman.substack.com)

3

Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990) (ietf.org)

1

The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (wikipedia.org)

1

What Would a Multiplayer Mandelbrot Look Like? (arbesman.substack.com)

1

"Operationally Compatible" (wikipedia.org)

1

What Would a Multiplayer Mandelbrot Look Like? (arbesman.substack.com)

2

What Would a Multiplayer Mandelbrot Look Like? (arbesman.substack.com)

1

We've Made Some Metascience Progress Since 1910, but Not Enough (goodscience.substack.com)

1

D&D Alignment Chart of "How to Get a Theorem Named After You" (strongthany.cc)

2

Figuring out the size of a molecule in 1890 (twitter.com/nikomccarty)

136

Cold-blooded software (dubroy.com)

2

The Art of Computational Narrative (arbesman.substack.com)

1

What Happens to All the Stuff You Don't Want (theatlantic.com)

1

AI, the God of the Gaps, and Our Quintessential Humanity (arbesman.substack.com)