Things That Teach Themselves
8 interactive sites that teach you by doing — drag gears, fly through 3 million research papers, trace history's cause-and-effect chains.
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Mechanical Watch
A masterclass in learning by touching — drag the gears, spin the balance wheel, feel the escapement click into place. You don't read about how a watch works; you operate one.
How Browsers Work
Every time you type a URL, a hundred invisible steps happen before a pixel hits your screen. This site makes them all visible — animated, interactive, and in order.
Going from 1+1=2 to Quantum Mechanics
A UCLA student built the guide they wished existed — no skipped steps, no assumed knowledge, every concept derived from first principles. Quantum mechanics as a thing you can actually follow.
Cateno
History doesn't happen in isolation — Cateno lets you trace how one event caused the next, pulling you through the chain of cause and effect that led to the world as it is.
Worldview Upgrader
You think you know how the world works. This site respectfully disagrees — it surfaces the gaps between what most people believe and what the data actually shows.
Trails
What if 100 books could map their own connections? Trails finds the invisible threads — "useful lies," "invisible fractures" — that run between different works, and lets you follow them.
TomeSphere Atlas
Three million arXiv papers, mapped as a galaxy you can fly through. The shape of human scientific knowledge — where topics cluster, where fields converge — becomes something you can actually see.
ResearchRabbit
Drop in one paper, and the citation network blooms around it — who built on this work, what it was built on, and which papers grew up beside it. Literature review becomes a thing you explore, not endure.
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