Notes & Tones Short, interactive essays on ideas worth poking at. https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/ 2026-08-12T12:00:00Z Philippe Guyard One Flight https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/flight/ 2026-08-12T12:00:00Z One London–New York return as a square: most of a sustainable year, hidden by averages, and how often you could take it and still be within a fair share. The Climate Scale https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/scale/ 2026-08-09T12:00:00Z A guided climb from a phone charge to the sunlight, four changes of unit, one number that should not fit. Your Hand on the Dial https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/futures/ 2026-08-08T18:00:00Z Six dials that decide how hot the century gets. Set coal, cars, forests, methane and carbon removal, then see the summer you chose. Your Summer in 2050 https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/summer/ 2026-08-08T16:00:00Z Pick your city and watch its summer move: the analog city it will feel like, the hot days arriving, the record that stops being a freak. Your Seven Tonnes https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/footprint/ 2026-08-08T14:00:00Z Set your driving, flying, heating and eating, and watch your own bar land on the world scale. The Great ADHD Backlog https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/adhd/ 2026-08-08T12:00:00Z A documentary asks whether too many people are being labelled with ADHD. The NHS's own data shows a queue of 800,000 that the system cannot clear. Who Is Heating the Planet? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/climate/ 2026-08-08T12:00:00Z Blame China, blame the rich, blame the flights? Four ways of counting carbon give four different answers. Where Your Tax Goes: Perception vs Reality https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/tax/ 2026-08-07T14:00:00Z Everyone pays it, almost nobody knows where it goes. Enter your salary, get your tax bill split pound by pound, and see how far the real budget sits from the one in your head. How Many Draws Is Enough? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/urn.html 2026-08-07T12:00:00Z A box holds black and white balls in an unknown mix. How many draws before you can name the proportion with a straight face? Fewer than you fear — and more than you'd like. The Pull of the Equator https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/bulge.html 2026-08-07T10:00:00Z Earth spins, and spinning things fling outward. So why don't the oceans pile up at the equator? Chase gravity and the centrifugal force with your mouse, make it rain, and watch the planet find its shape. Immigration: Perception vs Reality https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/immigration/ 2026-08-06T16:00:00Z What the public believes about immigration in the UK and Europe, versus what the numbers actually show. A scrollytelling data essay. Income: Perception vs Reality https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/income/ 2026-07-23T10:00:00Z Almost everyone thinks they earn about average. Enter your household income and find out where you actually sit, who is really poor, and what housing costs quietly do to the numbers. When Should I Run My Dishwasher? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/carbon.html 2026-07-09T10:00:00Z UK electricity is three or four times dirtier at some hours than others. A live code-along: fetch the National Grid's carbon forecast in Python, map it, and find the greenest moment to press start. Drawing Rudolph with Maths https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/rudolph.html 2026-06-25T10:00:00Z A festive codebar code-along: turn a photo into a line drawing with edge detection, then take it apart and rebuild it with the Fast Fourier Transform in Python. Real code, real reindeer. Drawn by Circles https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/fourier.html 2026-06-11T10:00:00Z Any shape can be drawn by a stack of spinning circles. The Fourier transform, made visual: build a square wave from sines, then watch the machinery trace a heart, a star, a sound wave. Signal or Noise? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/anova.html 2026-05-28T10:00:00Z Three groups, three different averages. Real effect or just wobble? The analysis of variance, made visual: between-group signal weighed against within-group noise. Twenty-Three People, One Birthday https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/birthday.html 2026-05-14T10:00:00Z Twenty-three strangers are enough for two to almost certainly share a birthday. Count pairs, not people: the same square-root trick that decides whether your database's random IDs will ever collide. You Tested Positive. Now What? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/screening.html 2026-04-30T10:00:00Z A 90%-accurate screening test comes back positive, so the chance you're ill is about nine per cent, not ninety. Base rates, Bayes' theorem, and the real cost of screening, counted out dot by dot. Ninety-Five Per Cent Confident? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/confidence.html 2026-04-16T10:00:00Z A poll is "95% confident" the answer is in some range. Nearly everyone reads that wrong. What confidence intervals actually promise, with simulations you can run. To Switch, or Not to Switch? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/monty-hall.html 2026-04-02T10:00:00Z The Monty Hall problem: three doors, one car, and a choice that feels fifty-fifty but isn't. Play it, simulate it, and watch your gut be wrong. How Much Italian Are You? https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/ancestry.html 2026-03-19T10:00:00Z What an ancestry-test percentage actually means, why the same DNA gets scored three different ways, and why we're all recent cousins. The Genetics of Unicorns https://philippeguyard.github.io/notes-and-tones/essays/unicorns.html 2026-03-05T10:00:00Z Why even the simplest genetics can't cleanly separate nature from nurture. Breed some unicorns and watch the "answer" change with every population.