Not long after this was written, I started working on Flux Garden, "The
GarageBand of Scientific Computing" [...]
Maybe the most valuable result of the project was coming to recognize that a
commercial app was too narrow, in many ways, for what I wanted to accomplish.
One way was that the computer screen was too confining.
I envisioned living in a world which explained itself through mathematical
models, where mathematical modeling and exploration was something that people
did together, casually and constantly, with ordinary materials in the real
world. I wanted to "do math with my hands".