Emil Kraus

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.

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.

Pliny describes his villa and nobody can draw it

Epistulae 2.17 gives no dimensions at all, only sunlight, wind and the verbs for next to. Four centuries of reconstructions and not one of them holds.

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.

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 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.

Code-switching is a muscle, not a metaphor

The term drifted out of linguistics into a vague social metaphor. The technical meaning is the better story and I want it back.

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.