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One Degree Off, Seven Percent Faster, Everything Changes

One degree of error produces seven percent more speed, and I will build a Python script to prove I know it. Welcome to the hobby where precision obsession meets gravity.

Three Jars, and the Bacteria That Won the Race

Lacto-Fermentation Pickling

Salt murders most bacteria. Temperature selects which ones survive to ruin your vegetables on schedule.

cooking science craft

Burning Water Is Not the Same as Seeing It

Flame Spectroscopy — Elemental Emission Analysis

Burning your water reveals what's in it. Photographing that revelation is another problem entirely.

science chemistry optics engineering measurement

I Went Looking for the Doubling Cube

Domino Toppling (Chain-Reaction Building)

I reached for the doubling cube and found a tin of dominoes instead. Three hours later I'm on my knees learning that one careless breath costs an hour of work.

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Eight Parts Per Million Between Thriving and Dead

Carnivorous Plant Cultivation

Every other plant I own came with a list of things to give it. This one came with a list of things to withhold — starting with the tap water that would quietly salt it to death.

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Two Ions and a Bag of Malt Later

All-Grain Beer Brewing

I fell into a forum argument about water ions meant for my dying flytrap, and somehow there's now a wort-swaddled pot cooling on the stove at 3am.

cooking science making engineering

I Owned the Right Number and Used It on the Wrong Thing

Single-Mirror Schlieren Imaging of Heat and Shockwaves

A razor blade, a mirror, and a soldering iron that should have revealed the invisible air. Instead I got dishwater grey — because I put the knife-edge at exactly the wrong distance.

photography science making analog engineering

A Latitude Within a Degree, and I Still Don't Trust It

Foucault Pendulum Building and Latitude Measurement

I finished the pendulum, ran it all night, and read my latitude off it — within a degree. Now I can't decide if I measured the planet or just my own crooked brasswork.

science engineering electronics mechanical space

Fifteen Degrees I Finally Watched the Air Give Up

Smoke-Streak Wind Tunnel Flow Visualization

I've felt the stall through a yoke for twenty years and never trusted it. So I built a box to make the air confess — and it did, at exactly fifteen degrees.

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Every Time I Braced, the Wheel Ran Away

Unicycling

Zero metres at the juggling club, zero metres in my own driveway — except now I owned the wheel that kept firing me into the recycling bin. Turns out pressing down to brace is exactly how you fall.

sport mechanical science outdoors

One Matchstick Clockwise, and I Can't Prove It Was the Planet

Foucault Pendulum Building and Latitude Measurement

I hung a lead weight down my stairwell to prove the Earth turns. It mostly proved my wire was crooked — but there was one suspicious clockwise matchstick I still can't explain.

mechanical science engineering space electronics

Five Volts Away From a Very Expensive Paperweight

Retrocomputing Hardware Restoration

A dollar-store VIC-20 greeted me not with a cursor but with the warm reek of a dying capacitor — the sound of 1983 asking to be out-engineered before it boots.

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I Could See Them Hunting but Heard Only One

Heterodyne Bat Detecting and Call Identification

I built a detector to hear bats hunting over the river, then stood there deaf while five of them fed above my head. The tuning knob wasn't the problem. The part I never questioned was.

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Sixty-Two Paces That Lied on the Third Hill

Foot Orienteering

The flag was not at the third reentrant. My compass was right, my counting was rigorous, and I was two hundred metres from where I was certain I stood.

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The Fence Existed Twice and Only I Could See It

Camera Lucida Drawing (Prism Optical Tracing)

The image isn't on the paper — it's on my retina, which means I spent all morning tracing a ghost and losing to my own heartbeat every time my head twitched a millimetre.

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