In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley (1961–2026), with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years
On the life and death of Wolfram's wife: heartbreakingly written and tender
Marzchipane
Notes, reviews, and poetry
Latest posts
What Nobody Teaches You About The Holocaust
On the vast majority of Jews who died in the Holocaust being murdered in the hundreds of thousands by their friends and neighbours on the Eastern Front, and on our continual focus on the concentration camps as a result of the single evil and survivorship bias
Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan
On the nature of top-down NGOs, and the complexity of nation-building: flooding grassroots organisations with money and resources can destabilise and hollow them out, so any such interventions have to be extremely carefully considered
More Bounce to the Ounce!
On the nuclear pulse rocket, its history, its science and feasibility, and on its beauty
explain to me how gears are machined!
On the incredible precision engineering behind gear machining, in particular the pressures and tolerances involved
Rains Over Babel
I watched this at the independent cinema on the 28th of July, 2026. It's a Colombian magical-realism film about a nightclub in Colombia called Babel, which is Purgatory, and a few characters who converge on it one night. It's a fundamentally queer film, with storylines about a pastor's son hiding…
Immortality Sounds Pretty Good, Actually
On counterarguments for arguments against immortality, including not getting bored, not having goals, and incoherent 'every story has an end' claims
We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.
On how the attack-defence balance shifts in an interstellar theatre, different types of space-based weapons and defences, and civilisational strategies for survival
Suspicious Discontinuities
On how thresholding effects can cause odd-looking shifts in otherwise smooth distributions, from p-hacking to voting, grades, birth months, and so on
The Glass Backbone: Why the Army's Logistics Will Break in the Next War
On the ongoing operational failure of the US Army to sufficiently prioritise logistics, supply, and sustainment as theatres become nonlinear and distributed
the door close button
On why lift door close buttons don't seem to work, and a deep-dive into the programming flow behind them
The Empresa de China & the Hapsburg Bid for World Supremacy
On the fascinating global politics of the 15th century, including the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, South America, Japan, and China
The Beam Engine
On the machine that made the first Industrial Revolution possible: the beam engine, with interactive animations
The Sheep Detectives
I watched this on the plane from Guangzhou to Heathrow on the 25th of July, 2026. This was a lighthearted romp, a whodunnit set in a small town, centering on a flock of sheep trying to solve the murder of their shepherd.…
Lady Bird
I watched this on the plane from Sydney to Guangzhou on the 25th of July, 2026. It's a very sweet bildungsroman starring Saorise Ronan, set in a small town in America, and I really loved it!…
Good Will Hunting
I watched this on the plane from Sydney to Guangzhou on the 25th of July, 2026. I can't believe I haven't watched this before, are you Kidding Me.…
Conversations With Friends
Like all of Rooney's novels, this was almost compulsively readable, and I finished it almost obsessively over two days in Sydney in July 2026.…
Dune Messiah
I read this over a few days in Sydney in July, 2026. The original Dune is an acclaimed masterpiece: a treatise on power, religion, economics, and ecology, dressed in wildly imaginative worldbuilding, written with a distinctively circumlocutive style which wraps its nuggets of information in cloaks…
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
On the absolute scourge that was screwworm, the extensive government efforts to eradicate or halt it, and its immediate resurgence after funding was cancelled
Confining Insiders, Raping Outsiders
On the pattern of internal female seclusion and external exploitation and rape, repeated across societies through time, and how in the modern world some states have developed capacity to reduce this, while others have institutionalised it