Callum Ross

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.

How to read a supplement study in nine minutes

The order I read them in, the specific red flag at each step, and one clean trial walked through end to end. Most papers fail before minute three.

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.

The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying

One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.

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.

Same flour, same oven, four hydrations

Four doughs, one sack of flour, one bake. 65, 72, 80 and 88 percent hydration measured properly. 72 won, and the wettest dough lost badly.

My Arabic is a childhood accent in adult clothes

I went looking for research on losing a language and found that the field's main term excludes me by definition. What that turns out to explain.

The Bristol Channel and a very confused datum

Chart Datum at Avonmouth sits 6.50 m below Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Here is the arithmetic that goes wrong when a height file does not name its zero.