Un Mal Principio, Bien Traducido
Building a sentence-aligned Spanish reader out of a childhood favourite, then a Zipf-frequency vocabulary pipeline that turned it into 500 Anki flashcards.
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Writing
21 entries so far.
Kutaisi and Tbilisi, July 2026
Four days coming down from the Caucasus into two Georgian cities, after a landslide cut the mountain half of the trip short.
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Svaneti, July 2026
Eight nights in the Georgian Caucasus with Sarah, walking the Mestia to Ushguli trek and the day hikes at either end.
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The Adaptation Gap: Why Milder Cities Hurt More in a Heat Wave
Houston in a heat wave felt easier than London in one. A pain index across ten cities, tracked from 1980 to today, explains why exposure and coping capacity aren't the same axis, and why the milder place is often the one that hurts.
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Albanian Alps, June 2026
A seven-day hiking trip in the Albanian Alps with my friend Brent, walking the Accursed Mountains from Valbona to Theth.
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West Highland Way, June 2026
A seven-day walk along the northern West Highland Way from Balmaha to Fort William, with Sarah, in early June.
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Stance without affect: where lexicons fail in UK parliamentary immigration speech
A methodological probe of stance, lexicons, LLMs, and rhetorical echo in UK parliamentary immigration speech.
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I Turned My Newsletters Into a Podcast. Here's What Broke.
A month of listening to a self-hosted newsletter-to-podcast pipeline, and what it revealed about TTS for journalism.
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Taiwan Solo, April 2026
A practical two-week clockwise loop through Taipei, Taitung, Tainan, Alishan, and back to Taipei.
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Things Just Work, and a Bit of Chaos
Notes from two weeks in Taiwan: civic order, street-level chaos, and the infrastructure that quietly carries the load.
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London in Three Dimensions
Two 3D maps from Threshold: one showing where London is most expensive by the square foot, the other showing where buyers pay more or less than distance from the centre would predict.
Read more →What a London Property Model Has Learned
Four maps from Threshold, a hedonic LightGBM model for London property prices: where space is expensive, what an extra bedroom is worth, and where the model knows it's guessing.
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Where to Start
On reading This Is Vegan Propaganda, the gap it left, and building a small tool to fill it.
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The Honest Price of a Flight
If airline offsets do not work, the next-best move is to treat the ticket price as artificially cheap and budget for climate advocacy on top.
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The Problem With Carbon Offsets
Why airline offsets fail on additionality, permanence, and scale, and why one long-haul trip home is not a rounding error.
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The Monks Were Tracking Climate Change All Along
Kyoto's cherry blossom record turns a thousand years of hanami diaries into a climate dataset, and the modern bloom dates now move with warming March temperatures.
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When the AI Narrator Gets It Wrong: A Stress Test of TTS on Serious Journalism
A stress test of OpenAI TTS and ElevenLabs on journalism-specific edge cases: context-sensitive words, units, acronyms, and publication-style proper nouns.
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The Eggs You Can't See
On caged hens, the restaurant visibility gap, and why I wrote to my MP about eggs.
Read more →Language Models Are Not Uncertain in One Way
GPT-3.5-turbo on 120 questions, six difficulty tiers, and what the model's own signals do and do not tell you about when to trust it.
Read more →Does Try Location Matter? I Looked at the Data.
I assumed touchline conversions were nearly hopeless and central kicks were automatic. The data says I was wrong at both ends.
Read more →Why I Used to Think None of This Mattered
On rationalisation, Peter Singer, factory farming, and the slow process of aligning what you believe with how you actually live.
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