Kojo Amankwah

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.

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.

How to read a supplement study in nine minutes

The order I read them in, the specific red flag at each step, and one clean trial walked through end to end. Most papers fail before minute three.

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.

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.

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.

four tape loops and a broken walkman

how i actually make loops out of cassettes. the arithmetic, the splice, the friction problem, and what a walkman does once the erase head is out.