Over a slightly boozy lunch, on a Mediterranean isle, the topic of Greek mythology reared its head. We segued into how those gods set the template for every modern story and superhero franchise. David, our somewhat taciturn companion, suddenly piped up "Of course, you really want to read Maria Tatar's take on Campbell's work." A few clicks later and the book was on my eReader waiting for me to sober up. Isn't the future spectacular? Tatar's book takes issue with Joseph Campbell's monomyth of…
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We forced an AI to look at thousands of photos of memorial benches. Just because. Here are the results. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 100%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */ …
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Cyrano is deeply weird. As a retelling of the classic story goes, it hits all the right beats. And yet everything about it just feels… off. The actors speak their dialogue with the cadence of a Shakespearean play or Restoration comedy. But they speak modern English with some very laboured prose. The music is delightful. But the lyrics sound like they've been mistranslated from French and forced to fit the tunes. The comedy is broad and genuinely entertaining. But the bathos fatally blunts t…
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Another fun and frantic slice of near-future sci-fi from Anne Currie. This is the sequel to Utopia Five. A post-global-climate-catastrophe Britain, where augmented humans stalk the land and immersive technology allows for an effective panopticon. Is it a snooper's paradise, or a sensible way to maintain order? There's a surprising amount of philosophy in here - although it does occasionally lapse into a Wikipedia-highlights of a famous philosopher. But, at 99p, who am I to complain? It would…
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Recently, I've been getting a lot of spam notifications from Google Drive. Here's a sample: The notifications come direct to my Android phone via the Drive app - they don't appear in my Gmail spam folder. There is no way to report the abuse. If I go to the list of notification in the Android apps, there's no option to report that the notification is spam. If I'm stupid enough to open the spam file, there is a context menu but - again - no way to report spam. What about the detail…
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There are some books which make you feel smarter just by having them on your shelf. This is one of them! I would consider it essential for anyone working with code - whether a wide-eyed newbie or grizzled veteran. How do human brains understand code? What neurological quirks do we all have? Which common mistakes can be easily avoided? Only by understanding our puny hardware ("Isn’t it a miracle that humans can do anything with no more than 1 byte of memory") can we understand how we should r…
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The fine folk at HP sent me one of their new Laser printers to review. The HP M140w is a small printer/scanner with built in WiFi. It's pretty good - but has an atrocious app - and works with Linux. So, what do you get for your £220? Unboxing Annoyingly, it doesn't come with a USB cable! I thought that was to save money - but they included a UK and EU power cable, so I think it's just to "encourage" using the WiFi. Even more annoyingly, it doesn't use USB-C - instead it's that awful square …
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