TO UNDERSTAND01
Example 1 of 4
Attention — An Atlas of a Cut
It connects fields usually encountered separately and leaves you with a portable way to see selection, power and blind spots.
Marius Comper · a public instrumentarium
I make hard questions explorable.
Reports, maps, games and tools about power, health, science, language and culture. Each begins with something worth following all the way through.
496 works across all languages5 editorial connectionsRO / EN (sometimes ES / CAT)
4 gestures
A public instrumentarium
What do you want to do with a question?
Choose a gesture, then change the example. The question stays; the instrument changes.
Do something with the question
Here, data answers when you touch it.
Choose, move, write or follow. These projects do not end at reading.
Drag the slider
Eight in Ten
18,214 settlements, 127 rivers, one name-layer at every drag.
Trace the crops
Roots beneath the plate
Lift 177 countries back to the plants' primary regions of diversity.
Defend the choice
The Swap
You defend, without realizing it, the exact option you rejected.
Link two countries
How many borders away is the world?
Build the route with the fewest land borders.
Write a sentence
The breath of words
Measure the length of your own words.
Choose a year
The light that left
Look at the stars whose light was leaving then.
The working shelf
Six instruments for questions that refuse to sit still.
Read them, trace them, use them or test them. Each turns a large problem into a gesture you can make.
Fourteen Societies Live Like You
Run your own life through the sieve of Murdock's sixteen questions and watch the archive of 1,291 societies drain dot by dot, on the grid and on the map; then read how Romania entered world anthropology through twenty-nine pages written in 1913.
Who Named Romania
Search a village name or a word fragment and see its distribution across a map of 18,214 inhabited places.
Everyone Is a Relative
Pick a relative and see on the map which languages distinguish it; learn why nepot is both grandson and nephew, why văr means “true” and why your child's in-laws are kin in the language and strangers in the Civil Code.
The oxygen line
Lower a probe through 19 measured Black Sea profiles and watch oxygen disappear. At 100 m, one cast retained only 1.2% of its maximum.
After the last tonne
Follow the work that continues after closure approval and distinguish a procurement estimate from an actual payment.
You pick first. I pick second.
Pick, roll, and discover why choosing first gives away the advantage.
Anthropology
Twelve studies of life together
The unwritten rules of Romanian life
Who takes responsibility for the shared staircase? What obligations come with a wedding gift? Where does family end? What is laid in the path of the dead? What do the crosses of Săpânța say, the sky a ploughman once named, or fairy tales stretched along a single timeline? Twelve projects on neighbours, reciprocity, kinship, folk belief, ritual and everyday conventions, with cultural comparisons and models to explore.
Culture & playPanel Block Civilization
Culture & playThe Envelope Economy
Culture & playThe Unwritten Grammar of Romanian Everyday LifeCulture & playEveryone Is a Relative
Culture & playWhat Isn’t Done
Culture & playLinen on the threshold
Culture & playFrom me
Culture & playReleasing the house
Culture & playRed after yellow
Culture & playEight syllables on an oak cross
Culture & playA plough, an auger and three saints
Culture & playThe Dragon Comes Halfway ThroughA Romanian series
Romania, layer by layer.
Thirteen works that read Romania through names, people, networks, roads, buildings, water, migration, health, tourism and time. From a word on the map to a child’s route, each opens onto a longer history.
What We Know About Ourselves
Read the hundred propositions in about forty minutes or just the chapter that concerns you, open any deduction to see which numbers it rests on and which would bring it down, then touch the map to see how they connect.
Eight in Ten
Romania's ten longest rivers: eight had their names written down before AD 600, centuries before any present-day village is mentioned. Of the next 109 rivers assessed, six. A stratigraphic map of names: ancient, Slavic, Turkic, Hungarian, German, Romanian.
How old is your town?
The median age of each of Romania’s 3,181 localities, computed from the registered population by single year of age (INS, POP107D), on a map with every real boundary. Search your locality, see how old it is against the country and the county, its age fingerprint in one hundred squares, its pyramid by sex and its path from 1992 to 2026. In 528 localities there are now more registered people aged 80 or over than children under 10; in 1992 there were 9.
When did modernity reach your town?
A year-by-year timeline of water, sewerage, gas and district-heating networks for 3,181 Romanian localities from 1990 to 2025. Modernity arrived in layers: 1,065 have piped water but no sewerage, and 56 of 382 district-heating systems remain.
What Is Still Standing
The 17,956 buildings on Romania's List of Historic Monuments, mapped in the order they were built. Of the 1,197 older than 1500, 1,008 stand between the Carpathians and the Tisza, and the oldest thing in a typical Transylvanian locality dates from 1700; in a Wallachian one, from 1818.
The Sea That Vanished
Paratethys, the sea shut in between the Alps and Central Asia, became the largest lake in Earth's history 11.6 million years ago: 2.8 million square kilometres. Put back over today's map, at its highest level it covers 81.5% of Romania's territory, and in the Great Khersonian Drying it retreats to 9.2%.
Romania, 20,000 Years Ago
A geological clock from the Last Glacial Maximum to today: the Black Sea was a lake 105 metres lower, the shore lay 87 kilometres from Constanța, the Danube ran another 210 kilometres across the exposed shelf, and glaciers came down the Retezat. The map is computed from terrain and bathymetry, with your town pinned on it.
Where do the children go to school?
Per 100 children born in Romania between 2015 and 2019, the country has 85 primary-school pupils in the autumn of 2025: 91 in towns, 79 in communes. The map shows, for each of the 3,181 localities, how many pupils it has per 100 children born there, which children go to the next town and which towns gather them.
Romania is moving, one commune at a time
From 1990 to 2025, Romania's National Institute of Statistics counted, for every locality, how many people registered a new address there and how many left. The map shows big cities standing still or shrinking, the communes around them growing by up to 56 per thousand a year, and several border population explosions linked to registered address changes.
Atlas of Medical Deserts
Doctors, family doctors, dentists, pharmacies and hospital beds per 10,000 residents, for each of Romania's 3,181 localities, today and twenty years ago. Doctors per 10,000 residents rose from 21.2 in 2004 to 34.0 in 2024, but towns have 56.4 and communes only 5.8; 315 localities lost their last doctor, and 566 have never had a pharmacy or a hospital.
How Romania's tourism breathes
712 localities, each with its own tourist year traced month by month from INS TEMPO data, 2023-2025. Nearly a third of all reported nights in Romania fall in July and August alone, yet a clustering algorithm separates localities most cleanly into just two shapes of year: a nearly season-free group (597 localities, including the ski resorts) and a coast-dominated one (115 localities).
When distance to the hospital starts to matter
For each of Romania's 3,181 localities, 2014-2022 mortality (adjusted for age and urban/rural mix) compared with the real distance to the nearest functioning hospital. Only 1.1% of the population lives more than 30 kilometres from a hospital, and mortality stays nearly flat out to 15 kilometres — but several towns that do have their own hospital, mostly former mining towns, have mortality up to 54% above expectations.
Where the asphalt ends
Romania has 87,220 km of public road, and 20,959 of them are gravel or bare earth. Almost all sit on the local network: 99.4% of the unsurfaced kilometres are county or communal roads, where the share is 30.2%, against 0.7% on national roads. A county map, the four surface classes year by year since 2000, and the streets of 319 towns.
Now
New and changed.
Four recently published or substantially revised works. Follow updates in your RSS reader.
The Housing Paradox
Romania holds Europe’s highest homeownership rate (95.3%) alongside its most overcrowded dwellings (40.5%), with just 1.1 rooms per person. A sociological investigation into the 1990 mass privatization, mortgages melted by hyperinflation, and the concrete flat drafted as a private welfare state of last resort.
Death, everywhere
The anthropology of death, sorted by question: who may touch the body, whether the name may still be spoken, how long mourning lasts, where the spirits go, whether what relatives do after a death changes the afterlife. Every answer comes from the 186 dated societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and 137 Austronesian cultures in Pulotu, with the number coded beside every count and the uncoded societies drawn into the same figure. Then every society's record, a map, 21 cases read at their dates, 12 theoretical arguments and the questions nobody has coded.
The Atlas of Human Possibility
Anthropologists described 1,291 societies and coded every record under the same headings. The atlas sorts them by 54 everyday questions: who gives wealth to whom at a marriage, who inherits the land, where a baby sleeps, what is done with the bones. Three lenses (answer, region, language family), ten rare possibilities and a game: in which societies did people live most differently from what feels normal to you.
The Hajnal Line, Rotated by 60 Degrees
Between the day a woman leaves her parents’ house and the day she marries, a Swede has 12.6 years, a Romanian 3.1, and a Croatian minus seven months: she marries before she moves out. The line John Hajnal drew in 1965 from Saint Petersburg to Trieste still captures 95% of the marriage pattern and only 60% of the household one, because the household axis has rotated sixty degrees and now divides north from south. An instrument that rotates the line across 36 countries.
Enter through what interests you
Choose a path through the collection.
I selected 32 works and arranged them into eight paths. Begin with the body, mind, words, public life, the planet, small things, history or play.
01 / 08
Mechanisms you carry
Inside the body
Pressure, pulse, sight and breathing. Four projects that measure processes the body regulates before we notice them.
More about the body
Science & technology
Ninety Millimetres of Mercury: The Calf's Second Heart and the Pressure Drop in the Ankle
In a standing adult, the hydrostatic column raises ankle pressure to 90 millimetres of mercury. The direct-cannulation finding is summarized as a fall towards approximately 25 millimetres after six to seven steps through the soleal valves.
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Science & technology
Twenty-Five Percent in Cold Water: The Mammalian Dive Reflex and the Vagal Brake on the Human Heart
When your face touches 10–15 °C water during breath-holding, the trigeminal nerve fires the mammalian dive reflex: resting heart rate plummets by 25%, while limb blood flow is cut by 80% to conserve oxygen.
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Science & technology
Pupil squared
When the pupil moves from 2 to 8 millimetres, its diameter grows fourfold while the circular opening grows sixteenfold. Simulate the pupillary light reflex and calculate your own aperture.
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Science & technology
The Two-Hour Nostril: The Hidden Asymmetry of Breathing
At any given moment, ~80% of resting airflow passes through just one nostril. Every 2–3 hours, the brain swaps sides to preserve moisture and separate odors.
↗02 / 08
Psychology without easy answers
Your mind fools you. Can you catch it?
An anchor, a loss, a false memory and forty-eight retested ideas: four instruments that test your own mind, ending in your score or verdict, not just an explanation.
More about psychology
Science & technology
The Anchor
4 estimates with randomly drawn anchors in 2 minutes: an instrument that measures your pull toward the first figure — your personal ruler (anchor / estimate / truth) and anchoring index.
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Science & technology
The Loss Scale
Eight hypothetical lei gambles in 90 seconds: an instrument that estimates your λ coefficient — how many times heavier a loss feels than an equal gain — against the classic 2.25 median.
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Science & technology
The Lure — A False Memory Planted in Three Minutes
A three-minute interactive memory test: 36 words dealt once, 18 judgments, and three planted words you will swear you saw.
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Science & technology
What remains of psychology
48 ideas in psychology, from the marshmallow test to eyewitness memory: the original claims, later findings and what the evidence supports today. Includes an interactive lab about choosing analyses.
↗03 / 08
The traces left in speech
Words carry their past
Etymologies, colours, trade routes and a yes with many relatives. Language preserves maps its speakers can no longer see.
More about words
Language & words
The Layers of a Word
Search a Romanian word and see its donor language, etymological chain, first appearance in the dated-prose corpus and frequency in subtitled film dialogue and Wikipedia articles.
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Language & words
Why we say “da”
Romanian is the only Romance language that says da from Slavic: in CoRoLa da occurs 11,847 per million in writing and 14,212 in speech, and among the top 10 words 9 are Latin, one is Slavic.
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Language & words
Where Blue Ends
Draw the line between green and blue, then see why one clean switch describes only 35 of the World Color Survey's 110 languages.
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Language & words
Tea Took Two Roads
The same core vocabulary across 107 languages of Eurasia. Tea is the word the continent shares most widely, and on the rainbow nobody agrees. Search any word and see what the continent answers.
↗04 / 08
The rule reaches your door
Life, administered
Water, records, driving tests and financial thresholds show how a public decision becomes an ordinary day.
More about public services
Romania
The water that never arrives
Of every 100 litres entering regional operators' networks, 50 do not generate revenue. ANRSC data on water losses, access and connection.
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Romania
The Hour the State Loses
A doctor writes the hour of death by hand, on every certificate, every time. Three steps later, on the civil-status record issued through SIIEASC, the hour is gone. The National Institute of Statistics has never published it. What is known instead.
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Romania
The Licence, County by County
First-attempt driving-test results across all Romanian counties from 2018 to 2025: map, trends, comparisons and the limits of public crash data.
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Romania
One leu below the line
An interactive ruler for Romania's direct-purchase thresholds and the values that gather around them in the SICAP register.
↗05 / 08
The planet moves
Earth, water, sky
Disappearing stars, a country swallowed by the sea, polar air and depths without oxygen. Four scales for the same planet.
More about climate and nature
Science & technology
How Many Stars Can You Still See?
From a site without artificial light the naked eye picks out nearly 4,500 stars, from central Bucharest fewer than 130. An instrument across 44 Romanian locations and radiance trends since 1992.
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Science & technology
Doggerland: the country beneath the North Sea
A field guide to Doggerland's plains, rivers, forests and people, reconstructed from sediment, seismic data, artefacts, isotopes and ancient DNA.
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Science & technology
The polar vortex and cold weather in Romania
El Niño can change atmospheric circulation, but it does not produce a Romania forecast on its own. Follow the signal from the Pacific through the stratosphere, the polar jet and surface weather, and see where the chain breaks.
↗Science & technology
The oxygen line
Lower a probe through 19 measured Black Sea profiles and watch oxygen disappear. At 100 m, one cast retained only 1.2% of its maximum.
↗06 / 08
Move closer until the story changes
At the scale of small things
A mucus barrier, old bubbles in ice, an electric field and a droplet caught before impact.
More scientific mechanisms
Science & technology
Three Hundred Thousand to One: The Two-Hundred-Micrometre Barrier That Stops the Stomach From Digesting Itself
In the gastric lumen, acid at pH 1.5 would dissolve muscle tissue and light metals. Just 200 micrometres away, epithelial cells maintain a neutral pH of 7.0 via an active mucus-bicarbonate barrier.
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Science & technology
Air in ice has two ages
Across 834 EPICA Dome C samples, ice and trapped air carry different chronologies. Move the core through a ten-centimetre gate and see why the jump to the 2025 global mean is 2.13 ppm greater than the spread across 1,723 pre-industrial samples.
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Science & technology
Ten Million Volts per Metre
A human cell maintains a 70-millivolt potential across a 7-nanometre membrane. The electrostatic gradient reaches 10,000,000 V/m — 3.3× the dielectric breakdown of lightning in air —, turning the body's 37 trillion cells into a 40-Farad capacitor that consumes 20 watts of metabolic pumping to prevent short circuits.
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Science & technology
The charged drop sharpened before impact
In controlled tests, a charged saltwater drop slid about 4 cm, sharpened into a cone, and left local defects after 3,000 impacts; the neutral control stayed smooth. The page separates observed morphology from the separate chemical test and what cannot be extrapolated to field conditions.
↗07 / 08
The past still occupies space
History left in view
The money of 1947, Cucuteni–Trypillia cities, a railway board and the traces of a very long journey.
More about history
Romania
The Money of 1947: One Rate, Four Ceilings
The monetary-reform law fixed one 20,000-to-one rate, but Article 8 produced maximum outcomes of 75, 150, 250 or 375 stabilised lei. Compare the same stack under the four legal values.
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Culture & play
Cucuteni–Trypillia: Two Millennia Under One Name
A visual history of the Cucuteni–Trypillia world across two millennia, traced through chronology, settlement plans, houses, food, objects and genomes.
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Romania
The Board Flipped in 2015
Romania's largest air destination is Luton, a town of 225,300 people: 1,886,522 passengers in 2024, more than Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted together. It has held first place without a break since 2015, and every airport in the country has its own Europe — Sibiu flies 63.4% to Germany, Târgu Mureș sends 52.8% to Budapest. Pick an airport and a year and read the departures board.
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Romania
Seventeen Hectares, Nine Thousand Seven Hundred Square Kilometres
A 17-hectare island, lost by Romania to a secret 1948 protocol, became six decades later the legal anchor for splitting 12,200 km² of sea at The Hague.
↗08 / 08
Understanding through trying
Play with precision
Level a beam, cut exactly in half, stop one second and let a machine challenge your intuition.
More projects to play
Science & technology
No Spirit Level: Can You Level a Beam by Eye?
In a dark-room subjective visual horizontal test, 95% of 72 healthy participants placed the line within ±2.5° of true horizontal. Five attempts across distinct visual challenges measure whether your balance drifts left or right.
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Culture & play
Can You Stop at Exactly One Second?
Start a hidden timer and stop it when you think exactly one second has passed. After five attempts, every miss appears in milliseconds and the photo finish shows whether each press landed early or late.
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Science & technology
Can You Find the Center of the Circle?
A 5-round visual precision test: tap the center of the circle without a compass. A steel needle drops to measure your error in millimetres and determines whether your eye lifts the perceived center above the true axis.
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Science & technology
Can you set the angle to exactly 90 degrees?
A 5-round geometric precision test: rotate an adjustable tool blade on a surface plate to set a 90.0° right angle. The engineer’s square drops to reveal the daylight wedge and your angular error across tilted reference frames.
↗Editorial connections
Things become more interesting when you change the distance between them.
Five paths built from shared mechanisms, not categories. Each brings together work that seems to inhabit different worlds.
Three lists, one portrait
What a country chooses to name, license and fund
A street map, driving-test results and cultural funding look unrelated. Read together, they show how memory, mobility and public priorities acquire an administrative shape.
History, distinctions, attention
History in a word. Boundaries between colours. Attention in 78 languages.
Etymology shows what entered Romanian. Colour vocabularies show how 110 languages divide the same palette. One hundred forms from 78 languages connect attention with orientation, listening and care.
When information must be used
Tools for decisions too large for a single answer
Navigating medical care requires comparison, evidence and real access. These projects organise the options without pretending to decide for the person using them.
Three promises, one question
What dose actually produced the headline number
A new weight-loss molecule, an ice bath and an entire drug class all promise large results. In all three, the number that circulates comes from one specific protocol — a dose, a frequency, a study — that most people never actually reproduce.
Two systems, one public euro
Two different registries, one question: where did the money go
SEAP shows what a military unit buys when it is required to tender. FOREXEBUG shows ten years of local budgets, commune by commune. Two separate systems, built not to talk to each other, followed here one at a time.
Three promises about access
What the state says it will do, and what actually happens
A shelter with a lock, a service that claims to be fully online, a wait time everyone quotes but no one measures. Three places where the state's promise about access meets what a citizen actually experiences.
Four datasets, one world
Romania, One Point on a Global Map
Four pages each take one worldwide dataset — 186 societies on death, 1,291 on everyday life, 207 languages on politeness, 36 countries on marriage age — and turn it into something to explore. Romania appears in all four, but never as the subject: just one point among many, on a much larger map.
Four thresholds the state has not closed
The arithmetic of the institutional gap
A tenth of a point decides funding. An unrepaired pothole has an exact annual price. An emergency plan stops at 72 hours. A sensor network stays a costed proposal. Four mechanisms that make the gap between law and reality measurable.
What sits under a story that feels self-evident
The mechanism behind the story
How the 1990s parallel economy survived, why hesitating over a child is a credible-commitment problem, who decides what reaches your attention, and whether a geographic legend survives measurement. Four pieces that take something intuitive and reduce it to a checkable mechanism.
A major earthquake can come at any time
Vrancea is not waiting
How deep the earthquake source sits, how fast the destructive wave arrives after the first signal, what is not known about school buildings, and what happens after the first 72 hours. Four pieces about the same risk, from the source to the third day.
What the law requires, what the numbers show
The earthquake paperwork
The planning code changes construction rules, the PAID table shows who actually insured their home, and a seismic-year comparison sets two ways of measuring the same risk side by side. The regulation and the numbers behind preparedness, not just the earthquake itself.
A map in
The subject says where. The gesture says how.
Choose an intersection: what the work is about and what you want to do with it. The numbers reveal where the library grows dense; the example opens one concrete door.
The complete library
496 works. Enter through your question.
Search for a name, place or problem. In the library you can filter by subject and by what you want to do with the work.
One last door
Let the library choose something you did not know you cared about.
About me
I'm Marius Comper. I make these projects because I'm curious, and I welcome any idea that gives me something new to explore.
I use various AI tools, including GPT, Claude, Gemini, Muse Spark and Grok. These projects are also a way to test how those tools are progressing.
Have a question, a source or an idea worth exploring? Write to me. If you spotted a mistake, include the project link and, if you can, a supporting source.
ideas@mariuscomper.uk