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NaN Peacock · hongdam.net, Chiang Rai

Ten Impossible Problems

Ten problems that looked impossible, and what NaN Peacock built for each. Tap a picture to open the live site.

  1. Open →motdang.net/sites/thai-drawn

    01

    Thai, Drawn

    Problem

    Learn to read Thai — 44 consonants, five tones, and a tone rule that turns on consonant class, vowel length and the final sound — from study material scattered across ten sources in her projects.

    Built

    One app in one drawn style. A letter answered right twice moves its picture into the letter village. A tone machine, checked by 25 tests. 467 words in 24 decks, 1,117 street signs from Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, 44 animated paper-cut letter pictures.

  2. Open →motdang.net/sites/rider

    02

    Rider

    Problem

    A daily delivery puzzle needs a fair target score every day, on Chiang Mai's one-way roads, with shops that open only at their posted hours.

    Built

    Each day the game tries every order of stops and sets par in under 5 ms. Riding to the nearest stop lands about 87% of par, so three stars take planning. After each leg it shows the better next stop and the baht given up. One-way moat roads, the evening walking streets and this hour's rain change the routes; 234 legend cards wait along them.

  3. Open →nanobotco.github.io/golden-gate

    03

    The Golden Gate Bridge

    Problem

    Predict the tide under the bridge in a browser, the way Lord Kelvin's brass tide machines did, and draw the bridge from its numbers under today's sky.

    Built

    Eight wheels, least-squares fitted to NOAA's station at the bridge, predict the tide to about 4 cm. The 3D bridge comes from its published figures — 470 ft cable sag, suspenders every 50 ft — under the sun, moon and stars where they stand now, with live fog, wind and cloud. Toys: will-it-fit under the deck at today's tide, catenary against parabola, thermal sag, the railing's song. English and Thai.

  4. Open →nanobotco.github.io/warp-and-weft

    04

    Warp and Weft

    Problem

    Read a Khmer ikat shawl from one phone photo. A vision model called its animals elephants.

    Built

    Checked against rendered Khmer script, the gold word matches គោ, cow. The site redraws the shawl and turns weaving into toys: a loom, a draft from threading, tie-up and treadling, ikat in seven steps, the gcd rule for satin, the ~900 m of silk in one cocoon. In English, Thai and Khmer.

  5. Open →nanobotco.github.io/thai-time

    05

    Telling Time in Thai

    Problem

    Rebuild Lanna time: a day of 16 watches, 90 minutes each, and a 60-day cycle of named days. An earlier clock project dropped the day cycle for want of a fixed date to count from.

    Built

    The anchor came from the 2022 RMUTL Lanna calendar — 1 January 2022 is กาบยี — and its arithmetic matches the calendar's April and December rows. The Royal Gazette page that set the six-hour clock was read from the original: dated 1900, where English Wikipedia says 1901. A coconut water clock sinks on Torricelli's law.

  6. Open →motdang.net/sites/doodle-map

    06

    Chiang Mai, Doodled

    Problem

    Bring Nancy Chandler's hand-drawn Chiang Mai map into the present, live, after her death in 2015 and her firm's close in 2019 — with her artwork still under copyright, so nothing could be traced.

    Built

    A new interactive doodle map, Edition 2569 BE, drawn from scratch: about 107 chosen spots, seven gates each drawn differently, 12 wats, 8 big markets, spirit houses and public art. Live rain and PM2.5 haze, TomTom traffic every 5 minutes, the Ping river gauge, monks on alms rounds 05:45–08:30, paper that tints with the hour. It is the map on motdang.net's front page.

  7. Open →motdang.net/roadworks/san-klang

    07

    San Klang Bridge

    Problem

    Celebrate the opening of a ฿995 million flyover that opened with no ceremony and no ribbon.

    Built

    A cut-the-ribbon page for 11:00 on 29 September 2026, drawn in script, in Thai and English: the reader cuts the ribbon. On it: ฿995,210,789, 1,237 days from contract to opening, ฿804,536 a day, and the head foreman in a yellow hard hat walking the deck before the first cars.

  8. Open →nanobotco.github.io/nitpick

    08

    nitpick

    Problem

    Read every shop sign from a 360° camera on a moving scooter. Each frame is 7680 × 3840, the Mac's Thai text reader works only at full scale, and sending whole frames to a model burns through the budget.

    Built

    The Mac reads every sign first and matches it to known places; the model sees only the crops it could not place, packed onto sheets. On the same 12 frames: 33 places found against 34 the old way, 54k tokens of context re-read per frame against 241k, 9 turns against 138.

  9. Open →motdang.net/chiang-rai

    09

    Chiang Rai, Slowly

    Problem

    Make Chiang Rai, thin in motdang.net's search, pull visitors — while the same pages carry a local tour operator's trips without reading as an ad.

    Built

    Eight pages in a magazine voice: the Golden Triangle, sights, sidequests, the slow boat, the operator's trips, a camera roll. 31 of NaN's own photos and 51 from Wikimedia Commons, gold-ruled margin notes, and a Lantern Night page with rising lanterns, the moon's phase and a countdown to 24 November 2026.

  10. Open →motdang.net/doodles

    10

    Doodles

    Problem

    Give a city guide a new hand-drawn picture every day, and a picture for some 80,800 place pages with no photo — drawn from each place's facts, adding nothing the facts don't say.

    Built

    An auto-doodler with about 50 animated Lanna scenes: Akha dress, 14 cuisines, the moat at each gate and hour, festivals, sak yant. A nightly pass redraws one into a new version. Photo-less place pages get a portrait from their own facts — a noodle shop's sign, its opening hours, its light. Every version keeps the engine that drew it, in a repository at motdang.net/doodles.