Point at a rabbit and say gavagai. Nobody can tell what you meant.

Quine’s puzzle is that a word and a thing can sit side by side and still leave the translation open.

Projects

One bean selected: the wheel lights only its matched flavors — herbal in green at the bottom, apple and orange in the fruity arc, walnut, caramel and black tea around the top — with everything unmatched faded out, beside a table mapping each of the roaster's tasting notes to its place on the wheel.
One bean's notes, lit across the wheel
Berry selected on the wheel, with 142 matching coffees listed beside it across four roasters, each showing its own tasting notes and price.
Berry, 142 matches

Built to skip checking flavor notes roaster by roaster: filtering happens directly on an interactive SCA flavor wheel, and each bean's own profile is plotted on that same wheel, so roasters sit side by side instead of in separate tabs.

Open bloom

A path traced across the sphere by seven arrow-key presses, with the generator sequence and the composed function listed beside it.
Seven steps out from the identity

Arrow keys act as generators — up and down rotate about world x, left and right about world y — and a marker traces the path they spell out across a sphere while a panel lists the sequence so far. Two views: a fixed sphere with a moving marker, or an egocentric one where the marker is locked and the sphere turns beneath it. Built as a more visual rendition of a rotation visualizer for MIT's Paradox and Infinity course, where these are exactly the rotations behind the Banach-Tarski paradox.

MIT OCW · 24.118 Paradox and Infinity, Lecture 16Open cayley

A week's plate — peaches at a market, with its three pairings over the photo — beside the open notes in English and Chinese, and the archive rail of earlier weeks below.
y26.w32, notes open

An imaginary ice cream shop, curating impossible flavors and weekly menus for the mind. A menu starts from food I liked that week, paired with a photo I took. Earlier weeks sit in an archive rail, and the route opens on the current one.

Open creami

The series header over Odd Taxi key art, listing thirteen episodes, 999 words and a JLPT range of N5 to N1.
The series, and what's in the deck
The episode list, each row a thumbnail with the title in English and Japanese, a one-line summary, and how many words that episode contributes.
Episode by episode
One episode's vocabulary with JLPT level filters across the top, each row showing the term, its reading, part of speech and level.
Filed by JLPT level
A revealed study card: the term, its meaning, and the subtitle line it came from with the word highlighted and its timestamp in the episode.
The line it came from

One of my favorite anime — less for the plot than for the serifu. What drew me in is how precisely observed the lines are: analogies sharp enough to name things I hadn't had words for. Vocabulary drawn from all thirteen episodes, each card keeping the line it came from and where in the episode it was said. Filed by episode and JLPT level, filterable to a level or tag before a study session, in a Netflix-style browsing UI colored to the show's own poster palette.

Open flashcard

A task broken into a nested tree of subtasks, each line with its own checkbox and collapse control.
The task, broken down
The same tree narrowed to leaf tasks only, each one showing the parent path it sits under.
Narrowed to leaf tasks

Built to fight my own procrastination. Procrastination is associated with weaker executive function, task initiation among the measures studied, and breaking work into smaller steps is one remedy researchers suggest — an association, not a demonstrated cause. Write the task you're avoiding and a server-side request tries an AI breakdown into a tree of subtasks, falling back to a fixed outline if that fails. The tree can be dragged to reorder, checked off, or narrowed to leaf tasks only, and is stored in the browser.

APS · Why Wait? The Science Behind ProcrastinationOpen prodo

Most of these started as something I wanted to use myself.

If one of them is useful to you, or broken for you, I’d like to hear about it.

Email gavagai