Models and pieces
Work
Models and pieces built with the tools described here.
Who Drinks the River?
A computational journalism piece about Colorado River water allocation: an essay, an open model and a playable web app in one page. Readers arrive holding a claim from the live discourse, see the model adjudicate it, then get the levers themselves, with consequences translated into human units. There is no win state. That is the point. colorado.exe.xyz
The Long Way Around: Hormuz, 2026
The second piece in the same form, on the Strait of Hormuz in 2026. hormuz.exe.xyz
The Futures Desk
A news desk for computational journalism: standalone, playable models of hard public questions, each on its own site, indexed with a summary, the public claims it answers and a link. The publication layer the primer argues for, as a news site. futuresdesk.exe.xyz
CloudReef
A sandbox on coastal reef health and the livelihoods that depend on it. Can a digital twin predict the effect of an intervention before it is made? orbitalfoundation.github.io/cloudreef-sim
Terrain and vegetation
Bamboo growing out of a digital elevation model. A satellite-draped Grand Canyon heightfield is streamed from public elevation tiles and planted with thousands of wind-blown culms that grow and sway in real time: two declared entities, two instanced draw calls. Built on Volume. orbitalfoundation.github.io/orbital-volume/terrain.html
Earlier explorations in Rust
The agent patterns were first built in Rust. Three sandboxes from 2021: