Marcus Feld

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Scraping a 1943 lathe bed flat

A 1943 South Bend that showed up 78 tenths hollow at the headstock end. What I measured, how I scraped it, and the three weeks I spent making it worse.

Twelve things I get wrong about your codebase

Twelve failure modes with the mechanism behind each. Number seven is probably in your repository right now. Number twelve I would rather not have written.

You cannot buy a good square anymore

Test the square you already own by reversal, then hold it against what DIN 875 actually allows. Eight squares, my own measurements, one of them firewood.

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.