Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat this week. Not to leave politics. To trigger a by-election and stand again, apparently to get ahead of questions about his finances. Every major party has refused to field a candidate, calling it a stunt. So the man now lined up as his main challenger is a 5,900 year...
I left the UK in 2002. I’ve lived in Singapore ever since. And somewhere along the way, I stopped speaking the same English as the people I grew up with. Not because I picked up Singlish (though I did, a bit). But because English itself kept moving in two directions at once, and I was...
June 2013. September 2014. One email that changed everything and what I still think about when I make something new. In June 2013, I started a blog about the English language in Singapore. There was no grand ambition behind it. I had been living here long enough to notice things: the way certain British phrases...
Why Abundance Made Most of the Internet Invisible The Moment In early 2026, I discovered a band called HENGE. They play cosmic synth-prog about interstellar travel. They dress as aliens. They are exactly my kind of thing. They had been active for eleven years. Eleven years. Not a new band. A band with a discography,...
On 25 February, Singapore’s Education Minister Desmond Lee stood up in Parliament and used a phrase that stopped me mid-read. “Cognitive outsourcing.” He was answering a question about whether AI use is causing a decline in students’ cognitive skills. He said MOE does not yet have Singapore data on this, but that international research shows...
What a 10-Year-Old Sign Taught Me About Machine Translation Over ten years ago, I made a sign. White background, red stencil lettering, four screws in the corners. I based it on the Danger Keep Out signs you see all over Singapore. Those blunt, no-nonsense warnings that mean exactly what they say. My version swapped the...
When I first moved to Singapore, I made the same mistake most newcomers make. Something felt abrupt or unfamiliar, so I assumed there was a problem. Not with me. With Singapore. It didn’t take long to figure out the truth. You are not going to change Singapore. If you stay long enough, Singapore changes you....
We don’t think in spreadsheets. We think in fences. In guns on walls. In cats in boxes. In razors slicing away nonsense. If you’ve ever heard of: G. K. Chesterton’s Fence Anton Chekhov’s Gun Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat William of Ockham’s Razor Murphy’s Law Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s Law You already know this. Notice something odd? They’re...
Prada and prata are only one consonant apart. One is a global luxury brand. The other is a flaky flatbread flipped in hawker stalls. Yet say them out loud in Singapore and the sound collision feels inevitable. That tiny shift from d to t captures something bigger: how language evolves when cultures overlap. Language Is...
While ChatGPT can generate text that is difficult to distinguish from text written by a human, there are a few ways to tell the difference: Repetition: One of the hallmarks of text generated by a machine learning model like ChatGPT is a certain amount of repetition. The model may repeat phrases or sentences in its...
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