Essays
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The Genetics of Unicorns
Why even the simplest genetics can't cleanly separate nature from nurture. Breed some unicorns and watch the "answer" change with every population.
5 March 2026 Read → -
How Much Italian Are You?
What an ancestry-test percentage actually means, why the same DNA gets scored three different ways, and why we're all recent cousins.
19 March 2026 Read → -
To Switch, or Not to Switch?
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.
2 April 2026 Read → -
Ninety-Five Per Cent Confident?
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.
16 April 2026 Read → -
You Tested Positive. Now What?
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.
30 April 2026 Read → -
Twenty-Three People, One Birthday
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.
14 May 2026 Read → -
Signal or Noise?
Three groups, three different averages. Real effect or just wobble? The analysis of variance, made visual: between-group signal weighed against within-group noise.
28 May 2026 Read → -
Drawn by Circles
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.
11 June 2026 Read → -
Drawing Rudolph with Maths
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.
25 June 2026 Read → -
When Should I Run My Dishwasher?
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.
9 July 2026 Read → -
Income: Perception vs Reality
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.
23 July 2026 Read → -
Immigration: Perception vs Reality
What the public believes about immigration in the UK and Europe, versus what the numbers actually show. A scrollytelling data essay.
6 August 2026 Read → -
The Pull of the Equator
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.
7 August 2026 Read → -
How Many Draws Is Enough?
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.
7 August 2026 Read → -
Where Your Tax Goes: Perception vs Reality
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.
7 August 2026 Read → -
Who Is Heating the Planet?
Blame China, blame the rich, blame the flights? Four ways of counting carbon give four different answers.
8 August 2026 Read → -
Your Seven Tonnes
Set your driving, flying, heating and eating, and watch your own bar land on the world scale.
8 August 2026 Read → -
Your Summer in 2050
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.
8 August 2026 Read → -
Your Hand on the Dial
Six dials that decide how hot the century gets. Set coal, cars, forests, methane and carbon removal, then see the summer you chose.
8 August 2026 Read → -
The Great ADHD Backlog
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.
8 August 2026 Read → -
The Climate Scale
A guided climb from a phone charge to the sunlight, four changes of unit, one number that should not fit.
9 August 2026 Read → -
One Flight
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.
11 August 2026 Read →