Layla Haddad-Mensah

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.

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.

Cape Wrath Trail, eleven days, and everything that got wet

Eleven days from Fort William to the lighthouse: the day by day numbers, the order in which everything got soaked, and the two days I would like back.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The word resilience has been taken from us

A poster with a tree on it, a ninety minute workshop, and the staffing number nobody wants to print on a wall. Also what resilience means to engineers.

Koji on barley, day by day

A 47 hour log of growing Aspergillus oryzae on pearl barley: bed temperatures, humidity, two interventions at four in the morning, and where the safety line actually sits.