Interdisciplinary walkthroughs
Physics — its accounting of entropy, information, energy flow, and criticality — turns out to explain things far outside itself: why forgetting costs energy, how markets misbehave, how order assembles with no designer, why life doesn't break the rules it seems to, and why every mania rhymes. Each piece below starts from a real question and walks down to the structure underneath. Several are playable.
Thermodynamics ↔ information ↔ computation
Computing a number can be free; forgetting it cannot. Maxwell's demon, the Szilard engine, and the hard floor of kT ln 2 under every bit.
Physics ↔ economics ↔ finance
Random walks and equilibrium got borrowed from mechanics — and blew up on the fat tails. The thread that held runs through information theory: it tells you how much to bet.
Emergence ↔ criticality ↔ collective behavior
Fireflies flash in unison, a new bridge wobbles itself toward collapse, sandpiles avalanche by a power law. Synchrony is a phase transition with no one in charge.
Physics ↔ life ↔ far-from-equilibrium
A seed becomes a tree while the universe runs down. Life doesn't defy the law — it rides it, renting local order from an energy gradient and paying in exported heat.
Manias ↔ technology diffusion ↔ forecasting
Tulips, railways, dot-com, AI. There's a recurring shape to euphoria and a discipline for reading it — but the one thing it never gives you is the timing.
Further afield — not built yet
Two rabbit holes from the same map are queued: strange loops & self-reference (Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach — can a system model itself?) and the large-scale structure of the universe (Laniakea, the Great Attractor — complex systems at cosmic scale).
A small set of Big-Question walkthroughs — each opens with a real puzzle, builds the model underneath it, lets the strongest objections fight, and ends with an honest judgment and the dispute that's still live. The format is borrowed from Uniflection's walkthrough pattern; the subject here is personal learning, not the product.
The through-line is physics used as a lens across other disciplines — information, computation, economics, life, complexity. Every page is a single self-contained file with no tracking and no backend; the interactive pieces run entirely in your browser.