Books, drawn by Nib

Short pages on the questions behind things. Every drawing moves, every page checks you, and you can ask Nib about anything on it.

Why the world works

The everyday puzzles behind physics, astronomy and the living world, drawn so you can turn the knobs yourself.

Why is summer warm?
A page set to today, at a latitude guessed from your time zone (drag it to your own): move the Earth round its orbit, tilt the sunlight, run the day across your sky, and see why seasons come from a lean.
Why is the sky blue, and sunsets red?
Drag the Sun down and watch Nib colour the sky: why air scatters blue, why the sky isn't violet, why sunsets are red, why clouds are white, and why Mars has blue sunsets.

What a language model actually does with your words, from tokens up to transformers: drawn, and runnable in the page.

Why can’t AI count the r’s in “strawberry”?
See exactly what GPT-2, GPT-4 and GPT-4o receive when you ask about “strawberry”, then train your own tokenizer on Alice in Wonderland and watch letters fuse into tokens.

Data structures and algorithms, from binary search upward: every idea drawn, every piece of code runnable a step at a time.

How can 20 guesses find one number in a million?
Binary search, drawn and playable: guess a number in a million in 20 tries, step through the code, flip the one character that breaks it, and see the overflow bug that hid in Java for nine years.
What is dynamic programming, really?
Watch the obvious Fibonacci program ask the same questions billions of times, then flip one switch and see the call tree collapse into a chain: dynamic programming, drawn and runnable.

The turning points of history, told with maps, timelines and the evidence itself, so you can test the stories.

How did the printing press take over Europe in fifty years?
Watch printing spread across Europe year by year on a hand-drawn map, test the ripple idea against 125 real towns, and pull a fifteenth-century press to print your own name.