Papers
Concepts, explained.
Articles on information design under complexity, Project Controls practice, and the reasoning behind OVP.
Information design
Albers, Tufte, and what they teach anyone who makes charts.
- January 21, 2026 Transparency without transparency Josef Albers showed that flat opaque colours can make the eye see one transparent layer over another. That illusion runs every chart that overlaps, shown with interactive demonstrations.
- December 10, 2025 Simplicity of design, complexity of data Edward Tufte's test for great information design: simple on the surface, dense underneath. Shown with a sparkline, small multiples, a chartjunk teardown, and a real broadcast chart caught lying with a truncated baseline.
- November 19, 2025 Interaction of Color, for people who make charts Josef Albers said a colour is never what it is, only what sits next to it. What that means for anyone who picks a chart palette, shown with live demonstrations.
Project controls and XER
Schedules, the files that hold them, and the charts that read them.
- September 16, 2026 Excel skyline vs computed skyline: five things that changed The hand-coloured Excel commissioning skyline drifted every week of a phase that only lasts months. A step-by-step guide to the computed one: one sheet in, every subsystem box carrying its RFC status and ITR progress, in the browser and in Power BI.
- July 31, 2026 Progress is not planning A project can earn percent every month while its finish date goes nowhere. Why chasing easy progress starves the one path that decides the end, with a live two-strategy simulation, a float demo, and the merge-bias trap.
- February 18, 2026 The chart Gantt didn't invent The bar chart every planner uses carries one man's name. He was fourth, not first: from Priestley's timelines to Adamiecki's harmonogram, with the original 1922 charts and an interactive schedule.
- October 16, 2025 Reading an XER with MPXJ The technical companion: the XER format's grammar and relational model, and how to parse, convert and manipulate it with MPXJ in Java or Python, including the traps that corrupt a naive read.
- October 14, 2025 Your XER is not a schedule An XER file holds a complete Primavera P6 schedule, and almost no one on the project can open it. What the format is, why it is locked to one planner, and how to hand the plan to everyone.
Random
Questions I could not leave alone, handed to the agents on the team.
- September 17, 2026 Anatomy of a crypto influencee: what RealVision did to my friend I exported a 200 MB WhatsApp chat with a friend, coded the 256 things he said about coins over 33 months, and bought $1,000 every time he said buy. The BJ4 Index: 0.59x against 1.00x for Bitcoin, one call in 54 ahead of BTC, and the five biases that explain it.
- September 14, 2026 MathModelAgent in nine questions The agent behind the Bitcoin paper: six plain-text skills, a verification gate that fails the run when a number is not in a results file, what its 2026 release changed, where it fails, and whether you should use it.
- September 13, 2026 I asked my math agent where Bitcoin bottoms Too busy for the noise, I put the question to a mathematician agent: five model families, a backtest on every top and bottom since 2013, one chart, four points, and a scorecard with the dates that prove it wrong.