Mark's Blog

Latest — 30 Jun 2026

Two inconsistencies in English native speakers tend not to notice

Modal negation An odd thing about modal (and "semi-modal") verbs in English that is natural to native speakers but completely illogical: sometimes putting "not" after the modal verb negates the modal verb itself, and other times it negates the main verb. For instance, consider these sentences:

More issues

Low-coupon gilts offer a better return than the best fixed-term savings accounts on the market

Here is a point I only figured out recently, that I have rarely seen anyone explicitly make, and that I suspect the vast majority of normal people with savings and investments are completely unaware of: if you live in the UK, and you pay at least basic rate income tax

I plan to post more

My plan: * multiple times a week, post something interesting I learn or do * get comments enabled on this blog * get a favicon * have only modest standards for post quality Should help me get into a habit of writing!

Simple uses of quantifiers can make regexes take quadratic time unnecessarily

Suppose I want to extract all substrings of a text that consist of one-or-more letter as followed by a letter b. This is obviously both: 1. trivial to do with a single short regex 2. trivial to do in linear time but if you try to do it with a

CPS guidance misstates the law on defence of property?

[Disclaimer: I am a layman, NOT a qualified lawyer of any kind.] Something curious I noticed today: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/self-defence-and-prevention-crime currently claims that: Self defence and the prevention of crime originates from a number of different sources. Defence of the person is governed by the common

Spiked is talking nonsense about the Laurence Fox libel ruling

Spiked magazine have published an article by their chief political writer, Brendan O'Neill, about the ruling against Laurence Fox in his libel case. I've seen it shared by a bunch of Twitter users I follow and by the Free Speech Union. It's a bad

Don't trust the first item in the X-Forwarded-For header

I set up a blog. It was annoying.

Today I created this blog. It's hosted in AWS and runs on the free and open source version of Ghost - although if you take a glance at the Ghost homepage, you might not even realise that there is a free and open source version, given the prominent