Dan Whitlock

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 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.

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.

Rockpool survey, Prussia Cove, fourteen low tides

Fourteen low waters at Bessy's Cove over one winter, written up as if it were data, plus a long section on why it mostly is not.

Scraping a 1943 lathe bed flat

A 1943 South Bend that showed up 78 tenths hollow at the headstock end. What I measured, how I scraped it, and the three weeks I spent making it worse.

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.

Twelve things I get wrong about your codebase

Twelve failure modes with the mechanism behind each. Number seven is probably in your repository right now. Number twelve I would rather not have written.

The five sentences in every fraudulent management letter

Five sentence archetypes I keep finding in letters management writes to auditors and boards, what each one is doing, and which one I circle in red.

Benford's law, and when it lies to you

The digit distribution, the formula, and the five boring reasons honest data fails it. Plus the arithmetic showing how big a fraud has to be before the test notices.

The Latin name is Aplysia punctata and it looks like a wet slipper

Five animals from one stretch of Cornish shore: a sea hare that inks with its own lunch, an anemone eater, a limpet, a cushion star, a barnacle.

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.