The Curious Engineer

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Cabinet of Wonders

arbesman.substack.com

Be prepared for radical interdisciplinarity: science + technology + complexity + humanities + wonder. Click to read Cabinet of Wonders, by Samuel Arbesman, a Substack publication.

ScienceComputing historyEssays / personalTech news / industry

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
98 from 8 Jan 2019 to 21 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (12 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 10

  1. ☞ Software Finds Its Natural Size
  2. ☞ Epistemic Humility and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction of Science
  3. ☞ Nintendo's Exercise Bicycle and the Vagaries of Tech Innovation
  4. ☞ Some Measured Fractal Dimensions
  5. ☞ Visiting the History of Computing and Play
  6. ☞ Microcosm Industries
  7. ☞ The Wisdom of the People's Computer Company
  8. ☞ The Slow Work of Making Sense of History
  9. ☞ Maxis Software Toys
  10. ☞ Innovation Biopics

2025 12

  1. ☞ A Cabinet of Wonders Gift Guide
  2. ☞ Interesting Regional Maps of the United States
  3. ☞ Building a Historical Sense in Computing
  4. ☞ I Want More Risk-Taking in Philanthropy
  5. ☞ The Conspiratorial Mindset and AI's Latent Spaces
  6. ☞ Musical Perception in Fiction
  7. ☞ "The Magic of Code" and the Humanistic Computation Project
  8. ☞ Creating Organizational Edge Cases
  9. ☞ "The Phantom Tollbooth" Was Supposed to Be a Nonfiction Book About Cities
  10. ☞ The Orthogonal Bet: Season Two
  11. ☞ Milton's Rainbow
  12. ☞ The Humanistic Computation Project

2024 13

  1. ☞ Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer
  2. ☞ Computation and Wonder, Soon in Book Form!
  3. ☞ The iPhone and the Wonder of Computing
  4. ☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories
  5. ☞ Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures
  6. ☞ Archaeology of Biology and Software
  7. ☞ The Wonders of Maxis
  8. ☞ The Nature of Shareware
  9. ☞ Sports Teams Named After Technologies
  10. ☞ The Spreadsheet is a Simulation Machine
  11. ☞ The Linnaean Instinct and List-Making
  12. ☞ Living with the Veil of Progress
  13. ☞ Multiplayer Mandelbrot

2023 15

  1. ☞ The Subtle Magic of Catalyzing Change
  2. ☞ The Kitchen Sink Conundrum and Simulation's Balancing Act
  3. ☞ The Sewing Machine as Personal Computer?
  4. ☞ Computation as Philology
  5. ☞ The Garden of Computational Delights
  6. ☞ Determining the Properties of Your Computational Universe
  7. ☞ General Turtle, Inc. and Educational Machines
  8. ☞ AI, the God of the Gaps, and Our Quintessential Humanity
  9. ☞ Ancient Myths and Open Source
  10. ☞ The Magic of Code
  11. ☞ The Monkey's Paw, Norbert Wiener, and the Alignment Problem
  12. ☞ AI, Semiotic Physics, and the Opcodes of Story World
  13. ☞ The Art of Computational Narrative
  14. ☞ The Edges Cases Where Computing and Physics Intersect
  15. ☞ Open-Ended Software as Human Beings

2022 13

  1. ☞ Emergent Microcosms
  2. ☞ Anticipatory Gardening for Technology
  3. Generation Ships and Monarch Butterflies
  4. ☞ A Visual Quine?
  5. ☞ Enlightenment 2.0
  6. ☞ World's Fair Posters and DALL-E
  7. ☞ Dungeons & Dragons & Simulation
  8. ☞ Alternate Histories and GPT-3
  9. ☞ Outlier Roles in Venture Capital (and other Organizations)
  10. ☞ Long-term thinking in the world of software
  11. ☞ Let's Deextinct Flavors
  12. ☞ Ecclesiastes in the Age of Progress
  13. ☞ Constructing Signposts in the Memescape

2021 12

  1. ☞ In Praise of Glitches
  2. ☞ The Technological Parentheses of Our Lives
  3. ☞ Programming Languages and Natural Language
  4. ☞ Forecasting Science
  5. ☞ Emergence, Program Synthesis, and Evolution
  6. ☞ New Types of Long-Term Scientific Institutions
  7. ☞ NFTs and NP Problems
  8. ☞ The Philosopher's Tree
  9. ☞ The Overedge Catalog
  10. ☞ Timestamping Science and Magical Text
  11. ☞ The Anomalies that Drive Science
  12. ☞ Reinventing Book Publishing in the Tech World

2020 12

  1. ☞ Progress Bars and Reticulating Splines
  2. ☞ The Losses of Time
  3. ☞ Happy Accidents
  4. ☞ Alternate Histories and Societal Complexity
  5. ☞ To Simulate a World
  6. The Philosophy Embedded in Children's Stories
  7. ☞ Revisiting the World of Simulation
  8. ☞ The Import and Export of Ideas
  9. ☞ The Wonders of Wikipedia
  10. ☞ Unspooling Computational Worlds
  11. ☞ Pocket Histories of Interstellar Societies
  12. The Wonders of the Linda Hall Library

2019 11

  1. ☞ Exploring the Evolution of Technology
  2. ☞ Coding as Magic
  3. ☞ The Mythical vs. the Everyday
  4. ☞ Free Money + Algorithmically Generated Conjectures
  5. ☞ Recapturing that HyperCard Feeling
  6. The Magic of Small Institutions, the Moon Landing, and Heraldry
  7. Digital Humanism + Quines
  8. Seeing Iridium Flares + Accretive Buildings
  9. Blink Microscope + How To Dial
  10. Tools for Serendipity + A Short Story
  11. Systems Thinking + Our Weird & Wonderful World + Book Announcement!