Does history actually lean to the left
I do not think that it does. At least not necessarily.
Caffeine and Lasers
Coffee, Science and Beer
Latest posts
Book Review: Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction A new friend of mine recently reccommended this one to me after I was gushing about how much I loved "The Disposessed" and emplored me to go into it blind. Oh boy am I glad that I did. In that spirit I will spoil even less than usual in my reviews here and say it is WELL worth the read. She does a fantastic job playing with perspective. Despite the third person narration,…
Book Review: The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
Rating: 🟧 Type: Fiction
Book Review: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow
Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction If you are an avid reader of Doctorow's blog "Pluralistic" you will have probably heard most of the arguments here before. That isn't too much of a complaint, after all, Docotow specifically says the point of his blog is to help him flesh out his arguments for his books. Overall, I really liked the book. (It helps that I was already very clsoely aligned with Doctorow…
New Spider Just Dropped
Australia has a spider who uses slingshot traps to catapult their prey.
Book Review: Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction
Bending things with lasers!
A placeholder note for a paper on how atmosphere, oxidation, and laser parameters affect laser sheet metal forming.
Very Specific 3D Printed Tools
Very Specific 3D Printed Tools
Robot tadpoles and spoofing frog communication
A tiny TadBot that mimics tadpole ‘hunger’ vibrations — and what it means to fake a frog family signal.
Book Review: Still Lost: Tales from 2080 by Sam A Miller
Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction
A Remarkably Simple Demonstration On Diffraction
I spotted a remarkably simple demonstration of optical diffraction the other night, from looking across at the far away lights on the otherside of the train tracks from a balcony. I noticed they looked quite different dependng on whether the flyscreen was open, or closed. Take a look:
Some thoughts on the role of astrophysics, AI and ML.
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Book Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: ⭐ Type: Fiction
Link: I've fired one of America's most powerful lasers – here's what a shot day looks like
A look into what it's like working with one of America's most powerful lasers
Book Review: This Book Will Make You Kinder by Henry James Garrett
Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction
Book Review: Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There is no Future? by Slavoj Žižek
Rating: 🟩🟩 Type: Non-Fiction
Book Review: Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal
Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction
Book Review: The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence by Ros Atkins
Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction
Which Kind of Animal? Identity Meaning and Nature in Disco Elysium
I've been thinking about how we find meaning in life after reading The Happiness Of Dogs by Mark Rowlands. I also finally played Disco Elysium, and I think I have thoughts on applying Rowlands thoughts to the game. A note on spoilers: I will be discussing the game without any care for spoilers. This is your only warning. Literally the very next sentence is a spoiler.
How to build a Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor
A short buildlog / tutorial for how to build a Shack Hartmann Wavefront Sensor
Removing blog comments and guestbook from Caffeine & Lasers
Things with age verification and privacy invasion is getting pretty hairy here in Australia. I am not totally sure if my implementations of blog comments or a guestbook are in violation of Australia's rules. Who could of guessed these rushed through laws would be ambiguous and have unforseen drawbacks?
Its so over
Its always "Its so over" the most before the "We're so back"
Intersecting Interests
My contribution to the 2026 Feburary Indie Web Carnival
Book Review: Negotiation: The Game Has Changed by Max H. Bazerman
Rating: 🟩🟩 Type: Non-Fiction
Book Review: The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd
Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction
The Chocolate Log: Lavender and Vanilla Dark Milk Chocolate
I recently got my hands on a melanger and have been trying my hand at chocolate making. Only after starting this hobby, I found out that there are very few sources on the internet for home-scale chocolate making. Thankfully, we have The Chocolate Alchemist, whose giant shoulders I can stand on as I learn how this process works. However, with such a lack of knowledge on the internet, I figure this…
Book Review: Being Human by Lewis Dartnell
Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction The book promises a lot, the concept is an investigation to how biology has shaped human society and history. For a while it manages to hold up to that promise, the first few chapters are genuinely really interesting. By the midpoint of the book it starts to drag unfortunately, while the first few chapters investigate where cooperation and altruism comes from, the…
Countering The Quantum Propaganda
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog
Does dithering still protect you from DeepFakes?
Warning, this blogpost may self destruct in a unknown ammount of time.
Why humans are humanoid-shaped, and why Sci-Fi Mechs should not be
This is a story through millions of years in its past to explain why humans are shaped the way we are, and millennia into the speculative future for why mechs should probably not replicate human geometry
100 Days of 2026
Publically declaring my goals for hte first 100 days fo 2026
Late Night Doodles
Sharing some more drawings.
Bad Art Day
Sharing an afternoon of doodling.
Caffeine And Lasers Wrapped 2025
My 2025 Wrapped.
Three Predictions For The Web
My submission for the December 2025 IndieWeb Carnival
Wormz in Space!
The UK Space Agency is sending wormz to space, (on the ISS) to study biological effects of spaceflight
Book Review: Exile Economics by Ben Chu
Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction I probably need to stop reading books with theses which I already agree with from the beginning. Turns out that economic protectionism and isolationism is bad for your economy. Who knew?
Book Review: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction I knew Facebook did shady shit beforehand but the degree to which and the amount they knew that they were doing still managed to shock me. the metaphor the title implies, a reference to the Great Gatsby is extremely apt. The belligerence with which the Facebook leadership acted kind of blew me away. On the other hand, it is important to remember that this is and ex…
The Stupid AI Risks
Here I explore some of the missing middle of AI risks. The stupid risks, not caused by ultraintelligent artificial super intelligence, instead by pluggisng a dumb ai into a complex system
The Horrible Economics Of Digital Entertainment
Like software, digital entertainment is infinitely reproducible (for free); however, unlike software, it is easily substitutable (replaceable). This has grave impacts for artists, making the demand curve much slipperier.
4 Gravitons - Mandatory Dumb Acronyms
An amusing post by 4 Gravitons which I am sharing its entirety here.
Learning Reinforcment Learning
I found myself needing to design some reinforcement learning for some of my work and came across this fantastic video.
Book Review: More Everything Forever by Adam Becker
Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction This ends up feeling like one of those documentaries about flat Earth consspiracy theorests, except the nutjobs in question are Peter Theil, Sam Altman and Venture Captialists. I found it frustrating at some points because of the ammount of time it spends debunking obviously stupid ideas. It definately brought up some insights into ideology of some of these people, but…
Book Review: How They Get You by Chris Kohler
Rating: 🟩* Type: Non-Fiction *If you willingly read the finance stories in the news or know a bit about personal finance, you can probably skip this book. But I would highly recommend buying for any teenagers or twenty-somethings in your life. (I know I would have liked to have read it earlier in my life.) It ends up being closer to a personal finance book than an economica book. Its insights…
Book Review: Challenger by Adam Higginbotham
Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction It is embarrassing for me to admit that I work in the "Space Industry" but I barely know anything about space history, so I picked up this one.It was one of the most compelling non-fiction books I have ever read. It felt like reading a thriller. I swear I could hear the intense music kick in once I got to the chapter about the SRB O-rings. If you know you know. At a…
A Good Day on the Web
Today was a good day for me on the internet. I was struggling with a design for a hobby project I am in the planning stages of, so i hit up the Laser Pointer Forum asking for advice on how to build a particular piece of kit. The helpful folks there pointed me to The Laser Cookbook by Gordon McComb, so I gave it a search and it was avaliable to borrow on the Internet Archive's Website! And had…
IAC 2025 Reflections
I attended IAC 2025 last week in my home city of beautiful Sydney!
I was on a podcast!
I recently appeared on my friend's podcast "The Nerd and the Scientist".
The IgNobel Cacio e Pepe
Preparing Cacio e Pepe as prescribed by teh 2025 IgNobel Prize winning paper
Book Review: Life As No One Knows It by Sara Imari Walker
Rating: ⭐ Type: Non-Fiction This was a great read as a physicist. The book was written with quite a high level of assumed knowledge, so if thermodynamics sounds like a scary word, I might suggest reading something more accessible. For me though, the premise was very interesting and prompted me to go and read a number of the papers cited in the book. From what I can tell, the central concept of…