A NOTE ON THIS SMALL PLACE
About this site.
A field of curiosity is a personal website for Vik, bringing together science, play, and the pleasure of following a question.
The moving field
The artwork is drawn in your browser. Its shapes are inspired by electron-orbital imagery, its texture by layered noise, and its jiggling points by the invitation to imagine matter in motion. It is a visual exploration, not a scientific simulation.
The field follows you through the page. Move your pointer or touch the screen to disturb the particles nearby. The pause control keeps it still; your device’s reduced-motion preference is respected. Three particle clouds hold the Matter, Mind and City links. You can follow them with a pointer, touch or keyboard. They are a way through the ideas, not a measurement or a game.
A few words, unpacked
- Orbital: a quantum-mechanical description associated with an electron’s state. The s and d labels here describe the inspiration for the shapes, not a calculation of an atom.
- Coherent noise: smoothly varying randomness. Layers of value noise shape the density; Perlin gradient noise colours the artwork.
- Coarse-graining: viewing a system in larger groups, trading fine detail for a broader picture.
Working questions
The short reading sequence condenses Vik’s questions about scale, perception, consciousness, useful experiments, organising work, and shared spaces. These are provisional lines of inquiry, not claims of expertise or a settled theory of consciousness. For a fuller discussion of the philosophical distinctions, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on emergence.
Privacy
The production site uses Vercel Web Analytics to count visits and page views, and Vercel Speed Insights to measure page performance. These services use no analytics cookies or cross-site identifiers. Reports group visits by page, referrer, country, browser and device; page URL query strings and fragments are removed before reporting. Vercel uses a temporary request-derived identifier for visitor counts, discarded after 24 hours. Local previews are excluded. There are no advertising pixels. See Vercel’s analytics privacy information. The particle field runs in your browser; only your motion preference is remembered for this browsing session. The Delhi map requests map tiles from OpenStreetMap, which receives the connection information needed to deliver them. Its public records are served with the site; there is no live camera feed, facial recognition, or tracking of people.
Vercel hosts the site and may process normal connection information, such as IP addresses and request logs, to deliver and protect it. Links to other sites take you to services with their own privacy practices.
The Delhi field note
Who gets to look? combines an archived traffic-signal inventory, approximate accident-prone locations, historical waterlogging records, district crash totals, and dated government publications. It distinguishes traffic districts from revenue districts, crash events from people killed, and installed equipment from proposed spending. Each dataset explains its source and limits. The argument about privacy is Vik’s position; the data does not establish the effect of cameras on road safety.
The oblique street view appears here and inside the full Delhi field note. Its tour moves the viewpoint through districts; it is not a replay of vehicles or an accident reconstruction. Roads are a bundled OpenStreetMap snapshot. Geographic-distance and distance-along-path routines are adapted from the God’s Eye View project under its MIT licence.
Credits & materials
The field, particle animation, and favicon are original code-based artwork created for this site. No reference-site artwork or photographs are used. The visual direction was informed by quiet editorial sites, including Emergence Magazine.
Typography uses Fraunces and DM Sans, served locally under the SIL Open Font License. Fraunces licence · DM Sans licence.
Outside paths credit and link to their original creators: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Nicky Case, and The Public Domain Review.