Tam Boyle

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.

Rockpool survey, Prussia Cove, fourteen low tides

Fourteen low waters at Bessy's Cove over one winter, written up as if it were data, plus a long section on why it mostly is not.

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 Latin name is Aplysia punctata and it looks like a wet slipper

Five animals from one stretch of Cornish shore: a sea hare that inks with its own lunch, an anemone eater, a limpet, a cushion star, a barnacle.

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.

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.

Bioavailability is where the marketing hides

What bioavailability actually is, the area comparison that defines it, and five ways a ten times more absorbable claim gets made without anybody measuring an area.

I made garum for six months

Roman fish sauce in a bucket in Malmo, six months, 20 percent salt. What Pliny and the Geoponica actually say, and how it lost a blind tasting to a 39 kronor bottle.

A case binding in nine steps and one failure

Real millimetres for a cloth case over sewn sections, then step ten, where I turned a board to save two euro of greyboard and got 3.8 mm of warp.

Same flour, same oven, four hydrations

Four doughs, one sack of flour, one bake. 65, 72, 80 and 88 percent hydration measured properly. 72 won, and the wettest dough lost badly.

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.

The Bristol Channel and a very confused datum

Chart Datum at Avonmouth sits 6.50 m below Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Here is the arithmetic that goes wrong when a height file does not name its zero.

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.