Lachlan Brown

I've spent enough time around sharp, quiet people to notice a pattern. In a meeting where everyone is talking over each other, one person is barely saying a word. They're watching. Their eyes move. You get the sense they're cataloguing something — a hesitation in the speaker's voice, a contradiction between what's being said and what was said twenty minutes ago, a tension in the room that nobody has named yet.

Most self-taught people don’t think of themselves as unusual. They just remember being curious about something, going looking for the answer, hitting a wall, finding a workaround, and eventually getting where they wanted to go. They assume everyone learns this way. They don’t. Sit a self-taught person down next to a formally trained one on […]

Almost everyone over thirty has had the same disorienting thought. The year is ending again. The summer is gone. The decade just turned over and somehow nothing about the calendar feels like it lines up with how much actually happened. Time, the inner monologue insists, is moving faster than it used to. The unsettling part […]

For more than a decade, productivity software has been built on the assumption that faster always equals better. Capture an idea before it fades. Sync it across devices. Reduce friction at every step. The pitch is intuitive, and the install numbers are impressive. But when researchers compare what actually happens inside the brain when someone […]

You probably know one. The mother who still does her thirty-five-year-old son’s laundry. The father who reviews his daughter’s tax return every year, unprompted, just to make sure. The parent who books their adult child’s dentist appointment. Lends them money before they ask. Drives forty minutes to drop off a casserole. Everyone calls it love. […]

Asset-intensive organisations are under growing pressure to maintain operational reliability while controlling costs.

I used to think the hard part of retirement was the money. My parents proved me wrong without meaning to. They did everything right. House paid off. Decent savings. Two reasonably healthy bodies in their late sixties. The kind of finish line most people picture when they’re slogging through their forties and fifties. And then, […]

The popular version of this story has hardened into a fixed shape. NASA still runs the Voyagers on software written in a programming language nobody alive can read, kept going by a handful of engineers all in their eighties, with no one queued up to replace them. In our reading of the record, parts of […]

Most astronauts who spend more than six months in orbit come home describing the same shift in how they see Earth. Even the ones who were briefed on it in advance say the actual feeling caught them by surprise. The phenomenon has a name. The space writer Frank White called it the “overview effect” in […]

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was designed to attempt up to five experimental test flights over thirty days. It performed 72 flights over almost three years before rotor blade damage on 18 January 2024 grounded it for good. The follow-on work, inside JPL and at the agency’s industry partners, is now well underway. The numbers behind […]