Visual Notes

This page indexes the interactive notes I reference the most, grouped by what they teach. Each local page keeps the backlinks, short editorial summaries, and embedded canvas so the live route stays attached to the idea it explains.

Best starting routes

Flagship · 15 min

Mechanical Watch

Start here if you want the strongest single visual explainer for systems intuition.

Mechanics · 10 min

Gears

Use this when you want the shorter companion piece before stepping into watch-level complexity.

Physics · 15 min

Airfoil

Open this when you want pressure, lift, and flow to turn from diagram into motion.

Atlas · open-ended

Interactive Explanation Atlas

Use the full route inventory when you want a wider browse beyond the garden's own highlights.

Read by intent

• Choose Mechanical Watch for the best first impression of the collection.
• Choose Gears or Airfoil when you want a shorter, more focused mechanical or physics explainer.
• Choose Tesseract when you want abstraction and geometry rather than physical hardware.
• Choose Primary Interactive Hub if you want the curated external browse surface first.

Visual explainers

Physical intuition

Ciechanowski-style explainers that turn physics, optics, and geometry into interactive play.

• Airfoil — lift, pressure, and flow around a wing.
• Bicycle — gearing, cadence, and mechanical advantage.
• Cameras and Lenses — focal length, aperture, and depth-of-field intuition.
• Gears — meshing ratios, torque transfer, and mechanical systems.
• GPS — trilateration, timing, and satellite geometry.
• Internal Combustion Engine — four-stroke cycles and energy conversion.
• Mechanical Watch — escapements, gear trains, and timing.
• Naval Architecture — buoyancy, stability, and hull shapes.
• Sound — particle motion, pressure waves, and superposition.
• Tesseract — 4D geometry via projections and rotations.

Signal, color, and light

Explorations of color spaces, compositing, and shadow mechanics.

• Alpha Compositing — blending math and coverage.
• Color Spaces — perceptual models and conversions.
• Curves and Surfaces — parametric geometry.
• Drawing Bezier Curves — control-point intuition.
• Earth and Sun — light, shadow, and orbital geometry.
• Lights and Shadows — projection, penumbra, and occlusion.

Data and model intuition

Interactive drills that connect data splits, evaluation metrics, and model behavior.

• Train, Test, and Validation Sets — drag data, update boundaries, feel why the test set stays untouched.
• The Bias-Variance Tradeoff — underfitting vs. overfitting as a complexity knob.
• ROC & AUC — threshold sweeps and AUC interpretation.
• Principal Component Analysis — rotate your attention, not just your axes.
• Linear Regression — least squares and residual intuition.
• Logistic Regression — decision boundaries and probability.
• Random Forest — bagging, feature randomness, majority vote.
• Decision Trees — splits, impurity, and greedy growth.
• Precision & Recall — confusion matrix tradeoffs.

Systems and proof playgrounds

Simulations that make feedback loops, voting systems, and cryptography tangible.

• Blockchain 101 Combined Flow — recommended first pass for the blockchain family.
• The Evolution of Trust — repeated-game cooperation, noise, and repair.
• Parable of the Polygons — small biases, tipping points, and segregation.
• To Build a Better Ballot — voting systems with draggable electorates.
• LOOPY — draw, tune, and simulate feedback systems.
• Blockchain — chained state, nonce updates, and tamper cascades.
• Private Keys — key generation, signing, verification.
• Zero-Knowledge Proof Demo — proof without disclosure.

How these pages work

• Each note includes an embedded iframe for its live interactive, plus short editorial context about what to try first.
• Each note links directly to its own live route; local pages preserve archive URLs and backlinks.
• If an embed fails, open the direct route linked inside that note.
• When the live site feels too wide, step through Primary Interactive Hub or Interactive Explanation Atlas first.