Tomas Vrba

Your starter is not dead, it is cold and bored

Almost nobody's starter is dead. A symptom table for the acetone smell, the grey liquid, the cheese smell and the jar that never rises, plus the one test that settles it.

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.

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.

You cannot buy a good square anymore

Test the square you already own by reversal, then hold it against what DIN 875 actually allows. Eight squares, my own measurements, one of them firewood.

Your pack is four kilos heavier than you think

How to weigh a pack honestly, bin bag and wet tent included, and the point where cutting grams stops buying you speed and starts costing you sleep.

It is always DNS, but here is the actual reason

Why DNS breaks things out of proportion to its size, with real dig output read line by line, plus the four commands I run to prove it is not DNS.

Magnesium: what the trials actually show

Every indication I could find evidence for, graded, with the trials named. Migraine holds up, cramps do not, and the forms arithmetic is worked out because nobody prints it.

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.

Mapping my own light pollution

I put an SQM on a 1 km grid across Lisbon and made a lovely contour map of something that cannot honestly be contoured. Four months, one admission.

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.

Null Island has a weather station

0,0 is three kilometres of open water in the Gulf of Guinea and the busiest coordinate on Earth. Why zero and nothing keep collapsing into each other.

Blitz ruined my calculation and I fixed it in 400 games

Four hundred tracked games, blunder rates by time control, and the two rules that halved mine. Includes every reason my own numbers should not convince you.

Koji on barley, day by day

A 47 hour log of growing Aspergillus oryzae on pearl barley: bed temperatures, humidity, two interventions at four in the morning, and where the safety line actually sits.