the investigations
Every case, newest first.
finds · cases closed · held open
Each card carries its verdict chip: a find, a case closed, or — for the best ones — held open, honestly, at full width.
The Aeon, the Atlas, and the Realms
Three ideas that have been orbiting each other here for months, drawn live on the page. Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology — the universe that ends by beginning again — running as two aeons half a cycle apart, each expanding, fading, and handing over with a spark. The atlas we drew of our own journey, and why a map is the same move at human scale. And the realms: nine bubble-universes born from prompts, each prompt still floating above its realm, all falling around the dark that is held and never crossed. Every canvas is the engine, live.
Ink, Ice, and Ten Thousand Birds
Our two TypeScript libraries, showing off live on the page — no videos, no screenshots, every frame computed as you read. A Qing-dynasty cracked-ice window built by actual recursion, casting a real shadow. Ten thousand birds over reflecting water in one draw call, zero CPU per frame. A 4,096-segment dragon curve drawing itself in walking colour. And the universal trick: one recipe running twice, GPU beside CPU, each canvas telling you honestly which machine it landed on. The code that made each scene sits beside it.
A Mark on the Glass
Nine points on a 1950 Palomar plate — gone 30 minutes later, and still gone 70 years on. We fetch the real plate and measure the dots ourselves. What the numbers settle is less than you'd hope, for the best possible reason.
The Language-Distance Ruler
Are the Voynich's two 'dialects' two languages? We build a ruler — same-engine floor at zero, real language changes at the far end. The seam lands at dialect-distance. A blind ten-model panel agrees, 6–0.
The Babble Engine
A meaning-free babble machine reproduces every Voynich signature and rebuilds 37% of its vocabulary. 'Too structured to be a hoax'? Structure is cheap. The mystery survives the machine.
The Voynich, Held
The book no one can read, measured: more ordered than any real language we test, words stamped from a five-slot template — and every explanation still fits. We map the lock, not the key.
The Neck on the Block
We give our favourite idea one specific, checkable prediction — a₀(z) = cH(z)/2π — and put its neck on the block for a future survey to judge. Either way we learn; that's the deal.
The Lens Turned
Twelve releases point the lens outward; this one turns it on ourselves, same rules. Some of our ideas don't make it — and the survivor is worth the whole exercise: the dark's onset is memoryless.
The Held Image
We race our fanciest learned methods against the simplest structure-first ones — every shot called in advance. The simple ones keep winning. That's not a loss; that's how you find the real tools.
Five Sigma of Daylight
Two impeccable measurements of how fast the universe grows — and their error bars don't touch. Our own code puts the gap at 5σ: one in 1.8 million to be luck. Something has to give.
The Curve That Won't Fall
The outer stars of every galaxy are moving too fast, and have been for fifty years. Dark matter and modified gravity both explain it — and on this data you genuinely cannot tell them apart.
The Doubt Is a Redaction
A 2014 fireball that may be the first interstellar object we ever detected. One inequality decides it — and the error bar that would settle the case is classified. The doubt is a redaction.
The Signal That Never Came Back
72 seconds, towering over the sky's noise, at the one frequency physics would pick to say hello. Then fifty years of silence. The best ghost story in radio astronomy — with real data.
The Star That Plunges
A star that plunges up to 22% with no rhythm — briefly the best megastructure candidate in the sky. The colour of the dimming says dust. What keeps making the dust? Nobody knows. Still.
The Object That Won't Close
A visitor from another star that sped up on its way out, with no comet's tail. The push is real and measured — and two completely different stories fit the same number. It left before we could ask a better question.
It Was Our Own Trash
A tangled wad of string on an empty planet, gone four days later. Check the manifest before inventing a category: it's netting from the landing gear we sent ourselves.
The Door Was a Dog Door
A neat rectangular 'doorway' in a Martian cliff. One number closes the case: it's 30 cm tall. A dog flap, carved by crossing fractures — the only thing missing from the photo was a ruler.
Five Pixels Can't Be a Cube
The 'mystery hut' on the Moon's horizon. At a few pixels across, a rock and a building are the same square blob — the cube lives in the pixel grid, not on the Moon. The rover drives over anyway. Rock.
The Lunar 'Obelisks' Are Boulders
Tall spires, long shadows — lunar monuments? The famous '213 m' height forgot one trigonometry step. Do the maths and the towers become boulders — with one genuinely curious detail left over.
The Face That Was a Hill
The most famous face in the solar system. We rebuild the terrain behind the light, re-light it from overhead — and watch the face vanish. The sculptor is the sun.
The Apollo 'UFO' That Was a Cosmic Ray
Two bright specks in an Apollo frame, called a UFO. The original scan turns them into something better: autographs from cosmic rays, struck straight into the film.