The Lab

We build our own tools, and some of them are public. Everything here is a working demo built from public sources.

The Functional Drinks Compass

Six territories in the U.S. functional drinks aisle, placed by how many public moves each has seen and how much evidence of demand stands behind it. Click a territory for its openings and concept sketches, pick from a dozen questions it answers with every sentence cited, or paste a line of pack copy and see which FDA, FTC, or TTB rules it runs into.

Open the Compass

The Collision Wheel

Pick any two territories and see what their crossing suggests, with the evidence from each side. The dotted lines are open crossings, where nothing links two territories yet, which makes them open ground for new ideas.

Open the Collision Wheel

Scientific Instruments

111 instruments from the Smithsonian's open-access collections, from an English astrolabe made between about 1300 and 1450 to a Civil Defense radiation calculator from 1963. Start with a question, play the mystery object game, or work a slide rule yourself. It shows what an anniversary archive feels like to use.

Open Scientific Instruments

Running in our lab, not yet online

The Motif Galaxy

The 250 most common melodic shapes in an archive of 13,295 musical works, drawn as stars and linked when they are alike. It is one view of the melody archive for composers described on our Work page.

Draw a tune

Two ribbon charts side by side, for South Korea's AI Basic Act and the EU AI Act, each showing which kinds of clause hand power to a later instrument and who receives it

Delegation, side by side

The EU AI Act and South Korea's AI Basic Act on one view: which clauses leave their substance to a later decree, standard, or committee, and who ends up holding that power. In South Korea the largest share goes to presidential decree; in the EU it spreads across agencies, standards bodies, and committees.