Lisa Prenzlau

the chord i keep coming back to

the four note stack i keep using, written as frequency ratios, with the cent values and how far the tempered version sits from each one.

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.

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.

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.

My sky is not dark and I have the numbers

Two years of SQM-L readings from one hole in my lawn, the night a floodlight went up next door, and what 0.33 mag/arcsec^2 costs in hours.

Sea slugs are the best argument against design

Stolen harpoons, stolen chloroplasts, disposable genitals, and a slug that throws away its own body and grows another. None of it looks planned.

I lost a won endgame and I want you to see it

A Lucena position I knew cold, and the one move on move 61 where I stopped asking which piece was supposed to move. Full annotation, clock times included.

Limiting magnitude from first principles

Where the fifth root of 100 comes from, why 5 log D is just Pogson again, and why every aperture table you have seen is a point source table.