Questions Nobody Asked
28 Jul 202515 years ago, I was unemployed. I’d dropped out of university the year before and my job prospects weren’t looking good.
I was spending a lot of time on Twitter (presently X). And I noticed some patterns, the ways different users behaved. And I wrote a blog post about it.
Some years earlier, when I was in secondary school, I created my first blog on MSN Spaces. It was called “Philosophical Sheep”, after a doodle I would draw on my exam revision notes
(this is a recreation)
I read a lot of ‘popular maths’ books at the time: Fermat’s Last Theorem, Music of the Primes; going back to the books that first sparked my interest in maths: Why Do Buses Come in Threes and its sequel How Long is a Piece of String
I thought that I’d like to do something like that - explain maths-y things in a way that was interesting and accessible to casual readers.
The first blog post was called “How to Weigh the Sun”, making use of Newton’s law of gravitation, angular momentum, and algebra.
The only person who read it (to my knowledge) was my sister. Her comment was along the lines of “you’re such a geek”. Which is hard to argue.
The second, and last, post on that blog was about houses of cards: how many cards do you need to build a house of a given height, and how high of a house you can build with a standard deck (5 rows).
The post ended
And basically, that’s it. Answers to questions you’d probably never ask.
That was where this blog got its name: Questions Nobody Asked
I ultimately went back to university (a different one), and completed my degree. But before that, I wrote a lot more blog posts.
At that time, I thought that the blog might even help me get a job (or at least that’s what I told my parents).
The name of this blog is kind of ironic - each post does start with a question that I asked. Something I’m curious about. Or sometimes the question is just “I wonder if I can”
And I try to answer those questions using the tools I have at my disposal: maths, physics, coding.
If I find an answer, and especially if the answer or the process of finding it is interesting, then I write about it. Because I want to share this cool thing I did.
And I want to explain it in a way that casual readers can understand, and hopefully find interesting.
That’s the reason I keep writing this blog.
When I applied for my current job, I included a link to this blog. On my first day, when I met my line manager, he said that what he found appealing, more than the topics of the posts (which aren’t really applicable to the job), was that it showed how I think through problems.
I’ve been working there almost 10 years now.
Granted, I haven’t written as many posts since then. But then, it’s a lot easier to find the time when you’re unemployed ;)
I started this blog 15 years and 136 posts ago.
I thought I should mark the occasion
Chris.
[I don’t think my sister reads the blog anymore]