You are accused of a crime. Who would you rather determined your fate – a human or an algorithm?
An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. Yet a human can look you in the eye before passing sentence.
Welcome to the age of the algorithm.
You're sat in a pub, chatting with your mates. You start to moan about how the cheap lager they serve gives you a headache. All of a sudden, a stranger runs up to you and says: "Oh no! Headaches? Have you tried the refreshing taste of Pepsi® Cola? It's the Flavour That Keeps Giving™!" I… Continue reading →
Tado is a brilliant smart thermostat. But their API is very poorly documented. This is an updated guide for 2019. I am indebted to Stephen C Phillips' original documentation. Getting started You will need: A Tado (duh!) Your Username (usually your email address) Your Password A Client Secret Getting the client secret I'm using this… Continue reading →
The realization that Galileo had fathered two nuns made me question everything I’d been taught about him in school. What if he did everything he did as a believing Catholic? I wondered. Isn’t that a much more nuanced, interesting story? And how would his daughter nuns have reacted to his unorthodox notions about the heavens? To his trial for heresy by the Roman Inquisition?
Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Why We Sleep delves into everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence.
Mostly notes to myself, as a follow-up to this older post. This is a 3-step process. Add the file to an MKV Use MKVmerge: mkvmerge "audio.wav" --chapters "audio.cue" -o "audio.mkv" You can see that chapter names have been added to the .mkv if you run ffmpeg -i or mkvinfo. Split the MKV by chapter This… Continue reading →
Back when social networks were new, Twitter was a great place to raise a complaint with a company. You could be sure that the Twitter account was run by someone who got social and, more often than not, would show tweets to the CEO. Sadly, Twitter corporate accounts now all follow the same script "Gosh!… Continue reading →
What happens when a robot begins to question its creators? What would be the consequences of creating a robot with a sense of humour? Or the ability to lie? How do we truly tell the difference between man and machine?
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius.
I've just got a set of wearable NFC tags, and I've discovered something interesting about the way data is stored on them. tl;dr Overwriting a tag can leave old data intact, and still readable. Here's the decoded memory layout of a tag with data written to it. In this case, a (failed) experiment at storing… Continue reading →