Aditi Varma

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.

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.

About this profile

Who I am, what I teach, the things I refuse to post about, and a standing invitation to tell me my translations are wrong.

Justified text on the web is a lie we agreed to

A browser fills one line and forgets it, then pays for the mistake in word spaces. Worked examples, what hyphens and text-wrap pretty really buy, and what I set.

What Jot looks like from the inside

Jot hands a model the same Markdown you wrote instead of a scraped page. What that fixes, and the two places where the twin is thinner than the page.

The pawn structure that taught me patience

The Carlsbad structure and the minority attack, written for the student who wants a sacrifice by move fifteen. Three plans each side, and two games worth an hour.

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.

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.

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.

Rust removal, five methods, one winner

I sheared a rusty belt guard into five coupons and gave each one a different treatment. Times, costs, mass loss, and what each did to the metal underneath.

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.

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.

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.

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 on-call handover I have used for nine years

The plain text block I hand over with. Every field, why it is there, and the two I deleted, one of which I put in myself and should not have.