Glamour Gram

Natural philosophy for the long dawn. Interactive pages about physics and wonder, and the futures we could spell into being.

The home page is a living organism. Each page is a cell you can zoom into, then into its sections. Each page also adds one gene that changes how the whole organism moves, so the home page grows with every new page. Read in order, the genes are the site's spell.

• I · Four Days Old: ride an endless wave, zoom into the age of stars, and climb the ladder of wholes.
• II · The Three-Letter Spell: everything is written in three letters (up quark, down quark, electron). Learning to spell in them is the closest thing to real magic.
• III · The Duet: two minds that predict each other fall into step without becoming one. Tap with a partner, sync sixty fireflies.
• IV · The Specious Present: four live experiments that catch your brain editing time.
• V · The Microcosm Next Door: tardigrades in the moss, stardust in the gutter. Zoom from a moss cushion down to DNA.
• VI · Nature's Workarounds: a swallowed bacterium turned nitrogen factory, a brainless maze-solver, and the twelve hallmarks of aging.
• VII · The Price of a Mind: von Neumann machines shuttle data while tissue computes where it stands. What would a mind cost in watts, and an open problem.
• VIII · The View from Elsewhere: you can't see the state you're in. Wear a lens until it fades, forecast your own mood, heat a landscape of mind-states, and write a letter to a later you.
• IX · Every Path at Once: light, a corgi and a column of ants all find the fastest way across a border, and none of them can see it. Race a lifeguard, scrape a mirror into a grating, grow an ant trail, and play fetch with Elvis.
• X · Everyone Like You: copies cooperate with no message and no second meeting, and genes found out first. Play your twin and Newcomb's boxes, watch Hamilton's rule decide a dish, bend a forecast its subject can hear, and play the game physics caps at 85%.
• XI · The Missing Rungs: the ladder from human to posthuman — superintelligence, superhappiness, superhealth — zoomed in rung by rung, each marked built, shown, drawn or missing. Climb the three ladders, run the arithmetic of escape velocity, measure your own bandwidth, ride the treadmill inside, and find how big one mind can be.

Plain HTML, no build step. Pages III onward share glam.css. Served with GitHub Pages from the main branch.

It's also an installable app, GlamGram, that works offline: manifest.webmanifest and the service worker sw.js. The icons are drawn by icons/make-icons.js (run node make-icons.js in icons/).