Helena Vasques

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.

A case binding in nine steps and one failure

Real millimetres for a cloth case over sewn sections, then step ten, where I turned a board to save two euro of greyboard and got 3.8 mm of warp.

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.

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.

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.

why everything i release is three forty seven

every piece i put out is 227 seconds long. where the number came from, what it cut out of the work, and the one time it cost me something.

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.

Postmortem: 43 minutes of 502s and one very confident regex

Our gateway returned 502 for forty three minutes because of a regex I would have approved too. Full timeline, the pattern, and the dashboard that lied to me.

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.