About
Everything worth caring about lives in the long tail.
Most subjects have a short tail: a handful of things nearly everyone has met, with explanations most people half-know. Then they have a long tail of rarer cases, each built for some particular job. The long tail is usually where you find out how the whole thing works.
Every essay here is called The Short and Long Tail of something: file formats, hurricane names, maps, whatever turns out to have a good tail. It starts with the questions you would half-anticipate. What is it? Who makes it? Why does it exist? How many are there? When did the common ones appear? Which ones matter?
Then it goes into the tail. It picks the rare, specialised and strange cases that show a mechanism the familiar version hides, and works at least one of them through properly, with real numbers.
The essays are for readers who aren't specialists but don't want to be talked down to. Every factual claim links to where it comes from, and each essay lists its links at the end. If a claim is uncertain, the essay says so.
New essays arrive when they're ready; the RSS feed is the simplest way to follow along.