JC

Fig. 1 — 408 km up, about where the space station lives

John Colarusso

Guitar, pool, national parks, scuba, data science, evolution and a frankly unreasonable amount of Terry Pratchett. This page is a cross-section of all of it, from orbit to the bottom of the sea.Not to scale. Nothing here is to scale. Neither is the universe, and nobody writes in to complain about that.

Descend

Fig. 2 — 4,421 m, the top of Mount Whitney, Sequoia National Park

Go outside.
Stay out late.

National parks are the best idea anyone ever had.Wallace Stegner said it first, more or less. He was right. Give me a trailhead at dawn, a campsite with no signal, and a sky so full of stars it looks like a mistake.

Fig. 3 — 1,200 m, a campsite after dark

Somebody always
brings a guitar.

Usually me. I play and sing in The Walkups, usually a little too loud for a campground.

Listen on Spotify @the.walkups

Setlist · heavy rotation

  1. The Strokes
  2. Arctic Monkeys
  3. The Last Shadow Puppets
  4. The Voidz
  5. Little Joy

Encore: The Walkups (that’s us)

Fig. 4 — A food web of my headphones. Solid lines are shared members; dashed lines are vibes. Hover a band.
Fig. 5 — Six strings in standard tuning, synthesized from white noise with the Karplus–Strong algorithm (1983). Pick a chord, turn the amp on, drag across the strings.

Fig. 6 — 0 m, sea level. Perfectly level, like a good table.

Rack ’em.

Pool is applied physics with a soundtrack: angle in, angle out, a little spin, a lot of trash talk. This table runs on elastic collisions and slightly too much friction.

Drag back from the white ball, then let go.

Fig. 7 — 18 m, the open-water dive limit

Breathe slow.
Look around.

Diving is the closest most of us get to being an astronaut:NASA agrees. Astronauts rehearse spacewalks underwater, in a pool big enough to hold full-size mock-ups of the space station. weightless, a little alien, and the only sound is your own breathing.

The fish are boids. Each one follows three rules (don’t crowd, match your neighbors, stay with the group) and nobody is in charge. Move your cursor through them and you’re the shark.

Safety stop · 5 m · 3 min

Fig. 8 — 200 m, where the twilight zone begins

Down here, life
makes its own light.

Below about 200 meters, less than one percent of sunlight survives, and an astonishing share of the animals glow. Bioluminescence evolved independently dozens of times. Evolution keeps reinventing the flashlight, which is my favorite kind of fact: biology, physics and statistics all at once.

Fig. 9 — Sunlight vs. depth in clear open ocean. On a log scale, exponential decay is a straight line, the most satisfying shape in statistics.

Move through the water: like dinoflagellates, the specks light up when disturbed.

Fig. 10 — A made-up tree of life, grown by a random birth process (a Yule tree). Glowing branches evolved light on their own.

Fig. 11 — 4,000 m, the abyssal plain. You made it.

Say hi.

The bottom of the sea looks a lot like the top of the sky: cold, dark, mostly unexplored and full of things that make their own light. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, but I can’t prove it. That’s a turtle, by the way.Possibly carrying a world on its back. Hard to tell at this depth.

hello@johncolarusso.com

Set in Fraunces and DM Mono. The fish are boids, the guitar is Karplus–Strong, the tree is a Yule process and the pool table is elastic collisions with too much friction. No frameworks, no trackers, no cookies.

© 2026 John Colarusso · Back to orbit ↑ · GNU Terry Pratchett