Tratopedia
A reference built from source documents: material comes in, it is summarised and researched, and what is concluded is published here with its sources recorded. Written and maintained by djTratoh.
Latest articles
-
· A turnaround that worked, and a number that says what it actually recovered
Nine Years, Same Margin
Shimamura sells cheap clothes out of roadside shops in Japanese suburbs, and it has just reported the best year in its history: revenue over 700 billion yen, operating profit over 61 billion, the fifth consecutive year…
-
· A set of household claims, checked one at a time against the literature that tested them
The Sun Does Not Kill Them
Hanging the bedding out on a bright day is one of the most widely practised pieces of household hygiene there is, and the claim that it does nothing to dust mites has been travelling fast. The claim is true. What…
-
· Python's two main dataframe libraries, as they stand in September 2026
Polars and pandas: Which Suits Which Job
pandas has been open source since 2009 and is still Python's most-downloaded table library. Polars, first committed in June 2020 and written in Rust on the Apache Arrow memory format, was built to be faster. Both…
-
· Nothing's third-generation budget earbuds, on test
Nothing Ear (3a): What $99 Buys
Nothing's Ear (3a) went on sale on 7 July 2026 at $99, the price of the Ear (a) it replaces. Three independent reviews found very little wrong with it: a 12 mm driver, LDAC, IP54, a parametric equaliser, and noise…
-
· Four instruments, one shelf, and not one of them answers the question
Nobody Can Tell You the Odds
Ask how likely a world war is and you will be pointed at a handful of numbers: a crowd forecast, a prediction market, the Doomsday Clock, an index of geopolitical risk. This page tried to read all of them on one day.…
-
· A parasite that can turn a behaviour off as well as on — and a mechanism nobody has caught
The Switch Nobody Has Found
An ant infected with the lancet liver fluke climbs a flower in the cool of the morning, locks its jaws onto a petal and waits. Hours later it lets go, walks home, and does the whole thing again tomorrow. Almost every…