Tangentstools, hobbies, asides.

1. i.

   Ancient Greek

   I study languages because they are a window into another way of thinking. The more distant the language, the more novel the form of thought. I don’t claim that studying Greek will make you think exactly what or how Plato thought; but studying Greek will afford a new way of thinking in virtue of how Greek vocabulary has a different network of meanings, and how the grammar forces those words to combine in different ways. Pieces written here are speculative and exploratory, not serious philology.

   In progressMaking Elizabeth Holmes

2. ii.

   KPHP

   A classical radio station with one listener, run on WHRB’s afternoon-concert rules.

   KPHP is a classical radio station that broadcasts only to me. It follows the programming rules of WHRB’s afternoon concert (I was a member throughout my time at Harvard), and it reads a legal ID (“KPHP, Berkeley”) near the top of each hour. The call letters are K, for west of the Mississippi, and my initials, PHP.

   Read on

3. iii.

   Paraphon

   Every performance at the 2025 Chopin Competition, aligned so that one can switch pianists mid-phrase.

   Paraphon lines up every performance of a piece from the 2025 Chopin Competition, so that up to four pianists can play in lock-step. This facilitates detailed comparative study of particular passages.

   Read on

4. iv.

   Film emulation

   Making raw photographs look as if they were shot on film, without letting a model touch the final pixels.

   A local tool of mine, f2palette, makes raw photographs look as if they were shot on film. This is no new idea, but I think the execution is novel. I use FLUX, an image editing model, to imagine what a photograph would look like on, say, Kodak Gold 200. f2palette then fits a lookup table that reproduces that rendering and applies the table to the full-resolution file, so that the edits are applied in full quality.

   Read on