The Fool on the Hill

The Fool on the Hill

The sound of Scittle

By Simon Brooke || 29 September 2025

A spiral and a tree, written in Scittle

The language of God, part one

I'm a (computer) language snob (and also, nerd). I have strong opinions on the aesthetics of computer languages; I like my language to be beautiful. Which is to say, simple, elegant, consistent, with as little arbitrary syntax and as few special cases as possible. For these reasons, I'm most comfortable in Lisp. If God did not write the universe in Lisp, God wrote it in some language so similar to Lisp as to make no difference. You need only look at a fern-moss, or a distant galaxy, or a cloud, or water curling over a weir, to see this1.

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Was Charlie Kirk a Christian?

By Simon Brooke || 23 September 2025

A person by the name of Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a university campus in Utah, USA, this month. This piece is not a defence of his assassin. No one should be killed for their political opinions. However, the claim has been made — not least by Kirk himself — that Kirk was a Christian. As an ex-Christian, and as someone concerned with both theology and ethics, I want to examine that claim.

What are my qualifications for deciding who is and is not Christian?

I have none, and do not decide. I am agnostic precisely because I believe that it is blasphemous to make any strong claim about the numinous. I shall set forth the evidence, and leave the decision for you.

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Tricycle construction notes and resources

By Simon Brooke || 23 September 2025

Tricycle construction notes and resources

This isn't a normal blog post. Normal blog posts are typically rarely updated. I intend to update this fairly regularly as ideas occur to me.

Composite techniques resources

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Learning from CAD

By Simon Brooke || 10 September 2025

Learning from CAD

As I reported in my last essay on the tricycle project, I now have a CAD tool which I'm learning to use. So, learning to use it, I'm beginning to be able to visualise the tricycle, if not yet concretely, at least as an assembly I can look at and study. And doing that brings up several things.

That removable subframe

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Details, details

By Simon Brooke || 3 September 2025

Details, details

Thinking about how the tricycle will go together means thinking about a lot of details. One of the first thing that needs thinking about in detail is the four-bar linkage, since if that does not work the whole idea does not work and there's no point in investing quite a lot of money in laying up the hull.

Early CAD drawing of the four bar linkage

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