Reusable nappies produce less carbon and far less waste, but the advantage is smaller and more conditional than it first appears. Cost, washing and parental time make the trade-off much messier than “reusable good, disposable bad”.
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Children in wealthy countries toilet train much later than they used to, and biology alone does not explain the shift. Gentler parenting norms and increasingly convenient disposable nappies seem to have reinforced each other.
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Chlorinated cake flour sounds alarming. The evidence says it is safe at regulated levels. I think Britons should be allowed to buy it.
Read more →Gatwick is a smaller expansion assessed against an earlier climate budget. Heathrow’s full impact is scheduled to arrive after the 2050 net-zero deadline. Their emissions estimates also use different assumptions.
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Britain is not alone in constraining airport growth, but its carbon budgets make the test distinctive. Around the world, expansion reveals how much confidence governments place in aviation’s future decarbonisation.
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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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Solving for the time zone map that fits the sun, and finding that tidiness is nearly free but barely helps the average person.
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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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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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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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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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A seven-day walk along the northern West Highland Way from Balmaha to Fort William, with Sarah, in early June.
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A methodological probe of stance, lexicons, LLMs, and rhetorical echo in UK parliamentary immigration speech.
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A month of listening to a self-hosted newsletter-to-podcast pipeline, and what it revealed about TTS for journalism.
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A practical two-week clockwise loop through Taipei, Taitung, Tainan, Alishan, and back to Taipei.
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Notes from two weeks in Taiwan: civic order, street-level chaos, and the infrastructure that quietly carries the load.
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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 →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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On reading This Is Vegan Propaganda, the gap it left, and building a small tool to fill it.
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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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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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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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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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On caged hens, the restaurant visibility gap, and why I wrote to my MP about eggs.
Read more →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 →I assumed touchline conversions were nearly hopeless and central kicks were automatic. The data says I was wrong at both ends.
Read more →On rationalisation, Peter Singer, factory farming, and the slow process of aligning what you believe with how you actually live.
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