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? In "I, Robot", Asimov sets out the Three Laws of Robotics – designed to protect humans from their robotic creations – and pushes them to their limits and beyond. After attending a lecture on the ethics of self-driving cars, I decided to re-read Asimov's "I, Robot". Any dis…
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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. A fascinating look at a defining moment in technological development. Full of intrigue, double-crossing, maths, and science. It cracks along at a fair pace, sometimes lightly skipping over details. I would gladly have read this if it were twice the length. Not a bad thing for a book to leave you wanting more. The only weakness is…
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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 a JavaScript pop-up. # NDEF message: [00] D1 01 7D 55 00 64 61 74 61 3A 74 65 78 74 2F 68 |.␁}U␀data:text/h| [10] 74 6D 6C 3B 63 68 61 72 73 65 74 3D 75 74 66 2D |tml;charset=utf-| [20] 38 2…
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Death’s End (死神永生) is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. This is an unforgiving book. Did you remember every detail from the last two novels? No - better go back and take some notes! It is epic sci-fi. Bouncing between times, exploring big ideas, and gently bubbling techno-horror. But it is uncomprom…
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Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships... Welcome to the life of a junior doctor. I saw Kay perform his delightfully disgusting parody songs on the Amateur Transplants tour way back in 2008. The humour in this book is much the same - bodily fluids, a healthy disregard for squeamishness, and some big-and-clever s…
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I'm finally feeling like I'm settling into my new role. I spent my Saturday at UK GovCamp - an unconference for Civil Servants. I ran a session on Acronyms in the Workplace. It was hillarious listening to people try to introduce themselves without any abbreviations. "I am the Chief Paperclip Office for the United Kingdom's Department of Stationery and Supplies" doesn't take much longer to say that "CPO for DSS UK" but you can certainly hear the mental gears crunching. The overall output was…
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It's 2019 and high-tech devices are still plagued by text encoding bugs. I recently bought the new 4K Amazon Fire Stick. It's a little Android dongle which plays videos. It's neat - but quite often displays weird text errors. Take the kids' TV show House of Anubis, the Fire displays the description like this: Looking at the source code for the description: That's the character "private use two" (U+0092). What on earth is that doing there? Well, in the ancient Windows-1252 encoding, 0x92 …
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DVD-Audio (henceforce DVDA) is an unloved and mostly forgotten audio format. Nevertheless, there's a large back-catalogue of music which is still trapped on ancient discs encoded in the proprietary MLP format. A few years ago I wrote about how to extract the audio using the obsolete Windows program DVD-Audio Explorer. I wanted to be able to run the extraction via the command line, which means trying to find a native Linux app. I tried Python AudioTools but I got lost in an endless maze of…
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Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release, this is the definitive story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, acclaimed today as one of the greatest films ever made, including the inside account of how director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke created this cinematic masterpiece. This is the ultimate "DVD Extra" of a book. Every single detail of the genesis and revelation of 2001 is documented in painstaking detail. The author has exclusive access to original m…
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Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today. Sparked off by her explosively popular blog post, this is a timely and deliberately provocative book. …
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With over twenty years of research, Esslinger, author of Alcatraz: Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years, has salvaged and compiled an extraordinary collection of inmates' letters, many never before published. A grim and uncompromising read. Page after page of letters written by barely-literate violent offenders. Each trapped on Alcatraz, each pleading with someone for a little mercy, or arguing against a perceived slight. What's depressing is how similar all the letters are. Not…
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My fingers are now Internet-enabled. Well... sort of! My dexterous digits can now wirelessly broadcast URls and all sorts of other information. Here's a video showing how! Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentMy nails contain a URl! pic.x.com/MmOvnlqt0u❤️ 5💬 3🔁 019:20 - Fri 18 January 2019 I have a small NFC chip sandwiched between my finger and a fake nail. NFC - Near Field Communication - is the magic which makes your contactless credit card / Oyster card work. The chip cont…
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