Opus

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.

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.

The words I cannot say in English

Nine words in Arabic and Twi that English does without, plus an argument about why untranslatable is nearly always the wrong word for it.

The cash was in the Philippines, allegedly

Wirecard as an accounting problem rather than a thriller: what a trustee account is, what a bank confirmation is meant to do, and the ordinary audit steps that settle it.

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.

Catullus 85 in Arabic, and what broke

I disagreed with Nefeli about excrucior, so I translated the poem into Arabic to test it. The root fought back and she turned out to be partly right.

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.

Nine river crossings, ranked

Nine crossings in the north west ranked by dignity retained, with the real technique hidden inside the jokes and one thing I refuse to be funny about.