Chapter IV - The Sunny Colossus from Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953) by Lawrence Durrell. In this chapter Durrell tells the story leading to the creation of the Colossus of Rhodes in 280 BC. I’ve printed his written word verbatim and added images to accompany the story.

No companion to Rhodes would be complete without some reference to the island Colossus; and yet the subject cannot be touched upon without some reference to the siege out of which it was born, and to commemorate …

Simple rules can generate complex behaviour. I’m reading A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. A key idea of the book is that a simple rule, applied iteratively, can generate complex behaviour. The difference between Rules 222, 90, and 30 are trivial, yet they generate vastly different results.

In this post we explore the principles and implement the …

For how long now have we not nibbled
At the immediate past in this fashion, words,
Regretting our ignoble faculty of failing,
Slipping between whose fingers?
Melting between whose lips?
The disabused ruins of history’s many
Many costumes we discarded.

The little shop has been pulled down
Where we bought stamps, tobacco, Easter ribbons.
A sort of little face now uprooted which
Once determined a whole order of joy,
Ruled over a pulse-rate, made so imperative
And magical the re-reading of a …

The Main Trunk line is a railway running through the middle of the North Island connecting Wellington and Auckland. It was finished in 1908 and became the preferred way to travel between the two cities. Car and aircraft have since superseded rail for personal travel, but the Main Trunk is still used for transporting dairy, minerals, and wood. The Northern Explorer is a scenic train service which runs on the same line. I recently took the 11 hour journey from Wellington to Auckland.

This year I’ve been exploring the field of Resilience Engineering. Resilience Engineering is concerned with building complex systems that are resilient to change and disruption. I’m interested in how we can understand and reason with complex systems. Here I write what I’ve learned so far, and how we can apply it. Most of the ideas I discuss here are proposed by Dr Richard Cook, John Allspaw, and Prof David D. Woods.