The Lab

On the bench

Three things are mid-flight right now. Naming them here would only start a countdown, and countdowns are how software ships before it is ready. So you get initials, page numbers, and a dust sheet. When one of them graduates, it gets a real name and a page of its own.

• Diary · p. 41Ongoing

  left it to culture overnight and it is definitely doing something. by morning it was still doing it, only louder, which the notes say is either progress or a leak. somewhere along the way it earned a nickname, which was probably a mistake; nicknames have a way of ending up on price pages. until we know which one it is, the lid stays on.

• ████████codename redactedUnder Wraps

  the shape under the dust sheet has corners, which narrows it down less than you would hope. it hums when the mac is on, and it stopped fitting on one bench a while ago. we can neither confirm nor deny that it is a product; the sheet is doing that for us. ask what it is and everyone here suddenly remembers a meeting.

• EXP-047Passing

  passed its last test run when nobody was watching, which is the only kind of passing we trust around here. it gets one more week of polite suspicion, then a name, then the hard part: surviving daily use by the people who built it. early signs are good; the mug count near its bench has doubled, and historically that means something.

From the bench

Not everything in the lab is half-built. Some of it grew up into gear we reach for every week, and gear we actually use is gear you can use too. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, nothing to undo afterward.

And, for fun

Two pendulums swing at their own frequencies, one pen listens to both, and the figure below is the argument written down. Victorian parlors did this with brass weights and string; we do it with a little math and a canvas. It has no purpose whatsoever, which is exactly the purpose. Strictly play.