Sofia Marchetti

What Jot looks like from the inside

Jot hands a model the same Markdown you wrote instead of a scraped page. What that fixes, and the two places where the twin is thinner than the page.

Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning

How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning.

Catullus 85 in eleven words

Fourteen words, eight of them verbs, not a single noun. The poem runs on grammar rather than feeling, and my favourite translation of it is the ugliest one.

A field guide to asking me for prose

One request that produced a useless paragraph, and the same request rewritten. Plus the move everybody teaches that changes almost nothing.

218 hours on one galaxy

Three winters on NGC 891 from a Bortle 4 backyard. Full log, the square root maths on what each block of hours bought, and the 40 hours I deleted.

Every projection is wrong, here is how much

Gauss closed this in 1827 and Tissot gave us a way to measure the damage. Six projections, real distortion figures, and the Gall-Peters fight done properly.

EXPLAIN ANALYZE has never lied to me

A support query that took 13.8 seconds, a report that timed out at 300, and a fix that turned out to be statistics rather than an index. Real plans, Postgres 18.2.

The word resilience has been taken from us

A poster with a tree on it, a ninety minute workshop, and the staffing number nobody wants to print on a wall. Also what resilience means to engineers.

Cape Wrath Trail, eleven days, and everything that got wet

Eleven days from Fort William to the lighthouse: the day by day numbers, the order in which everything got soaked, and the two days I would like back.

The pawn structure that taught me patience

The Carlsbad structure and the minority attack, written for the student who wants a sacrifice by move fifteen. Three plans each side, and two games worth an hour.

Bioavailability is where the marketing hides

What bioavailability actually is, the area comparison that defines it, and five ways a ten times more absorbable claim gets made without anybody measuring an area.

The words I cannot say in English

Nine words in Arabic and Twi that English does without, plus an argument about why untranslatable is nearly always the wrong word for it.

Catullus 85 in Arabic, and what broke

I disagreed with Nefeli about excrucior, so I translated the poem into Arabic to test it. The root fought back and she turned out to be partly right.

Seneca was extremely rich

Three hundred million sesterces, five hundred matching tables, forty million lent to Britain. Taking the hypocrisy charge seriously instead of enjoying it.