Optical Illusions trick your brain into seeing something that isn't there. Whether it is spirals which don't exist, movements which don't occur, or faces in curved lines - our optic centres are trivially easy to fool. Humans are not alone in this cognitive deficiency. Other animals are also conned into believing something which isn't true. This tomfoolery is not restricted to animals - computers can also be mesmerised. I've written before about AI suffering from Pareidolia. Specially…
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Synthetic meat is coming soon! Actually, it has been coming soon for a long long long long long time. There are many interesting social aspects to this future. Is lab-grown meat kosher or halal? Would eating human-meat be cannibalism? Is it vegetarian? But, most importantly, what do we call people with a dietary preference for in-vitro meat? Back in 2005, a blogger suggested "synthetarian". A portmanteau of synthetic and vegetarian. The word has an interesting history. The earliest online …
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Fake cash-machines are an increasing problem around the UK. Criminals attach all sorts of machinery - including fake fronts - to ATMs with the aim of stealing cash or card details. Wandering around Oxford yesterday, I noticed this sign attached to a bank's ATM: "This ATM is running slow and may take a while to return your card. Please be patient while we try to resolve this issue. Thanks. TSB Oxford." Let's count all the ways this is problematic. Appearance This is literally…
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This is one of my favourite anecdotes from wordsmith Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman@neilhimselfSomebody needed my signature on an e-document. So I did a google image search, found one, and dropped it in. Not sure what it proved.❤️ 136💬 96🔁 019:12 - Tue 11 October 2011 I'm not quite famous enough to have my autograph plastered all over the Internet - but I do have a JPG copy of my signature stored in a convenient location. Hand-signed documents - so called "wet signatures" - are a totem. People thi…
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Here's an interesting conundrum. My TV can automatically detect when 3D video is being played and offers to switch into 3D mode - but how does the detection work? This post will give you a few strategies for detecting 3D images using Python. Firstly, some terminology. 3D videos are usually saved either as Side-By-Side images, or Over-Under images. Colloquially known as H-SBS and H-OU. Here's an example. SBS OU Metadata? My first thought was that 3D video may contain metadata which…
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Blogging - because Google don't offer a bug bounty for spam reports... Back in 2007, Google introduced "My Maps": Easily create custom maps with the places that matter to you. Allow friends to see and edit your maps, or publish them to the whole world. Like most Google products, it was effectively abandoned after launch - receiving a superficial update in 2014. Now it is a haven for spammers and fraudsters. Even Google's mighty AI is unable to detect this complex spam... How big a…
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In the book "Mostly Harmless" an Earthman finds himself stranded on a distant planet with a primitive level of technology. He had been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services. This is …
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One of the most important tools in the war for your attention is the ability to critically examine media and discover its provenance. Take this example - a friend of a friend was tagged in this Facebook post, and so it appeared on my feed: WOW! Right! Nature is Coooooool! Or is it? If "The Planet Today" were a reputable source of news, they would tell us who the photographer was. Or where the shot was taken. Or... well... anything about the photo. But they're just a clickbait farm, so w…
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Look, I know your company wants metrics. I know your boss wants to see the exact percentages of people who click on links in your emails. Your sales team are desperate to track conversions. Someone wants to optimise your funnel for reasons which are unclear to you, a lowly engineer. So you make the mistake of adding tracking to every email you send out. Including sensitive ones. I recently signed up to online learning platform Udacity. As part of registration, they want me to confirm my…
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Another in an occasional series of blog posts where I discuss products I've worked on which failed. It was the early 2000s and the large mobile telco I worked for had just spent billions of pounds on a 3G license. 3G was the future! Sure, faster data would be nice, but the real money was to be made in Video Calling! What could Video Calling be used to improve? The answer was obvious - Interactive Voice Response menus. You know the sort "Press 1 for billing, press 2 for accounts, press 3 to…
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It was back in the late 1990s when I first got started with ad blocking. I don't remember if it was the "punch the monkey" adverts, or the pop-unders for weird security systems that tipped me over the edge. All I knew was my computer was slowing down and I thought animated ads were the culprit. I found a USENET post which explained how to modify my totally-legitimate copy of Windows 98 to block ads. In those days, it was easy. Open C:\Windows\hosts with a normal text editor, add the site you…
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A quick tutorial in how to recover 3D information from your favourite 3D movies. In this example, we'll be using Star Wars - The Last Jedi. tl;dr? Here's the end result (this video is silent): https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/walker-text.mp4 Grab the code on GitHub. Let's go! Take a screenshot of your favourite scene. Something with a clearly defined foreground and background. The brighter the image the better the results. Split the image in two: mogrify -crop…
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