About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF relationships were defined in terms of positive sentiment. There wasn't (and still isn't) a FOAF representation for "divorced" or "estranged" or "fired by". I thought this was a failing.…
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I was asked to help create some pseudo-NFT style avatars for Cambridge Digital Humanities' Faust Shop project. Something with vaguely the same æsthetic as those daft "Crypto Punks". You can see it in action partway through this TikTok video. @cambridgeuniversity Visit the #Faust Shop and see what happens when you make a deal with your digital double. #Devil #EduTok #Cambridge #Performance #Philosophy ♬ original sound - Cambridge University Here are some examples of the types of av…
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Shamir's Secret Sharing (henceforth "SSS") is clever. Far too clever for most people to understand - but let's give it a go. Suppose you have a super-secure password for a Really Important Thing. Th15IsMyP4s5w0rd!123 You can remember this - because you're awesome. But it might be a good idea to share the password with someone else, just in case. Of course, if you share it with one person, they'll be able to use it. No good! So you split the password into several overlapping pieces and give…
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I fucking loved my first visit to #EMFcamp. After two years of lockdown, I was over-excited at the chance to be with all my friends in a field this year. I was over-excited about doing a talk about my beloved solar panels. I was over-excited about sleeping in a goddamned camper-van! I was even - sadly - excited at seeing my name broadcast on TELETEXT! Photograph © Skylar MacDonald 2022. All Rights Reserved. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. The universe, of course, had other …
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You remember that bit in Star Wars where the Rebels find the flaw in the Death Star plans and then completely fail to exploit it? Yeah, that's why they don't make movies about inept hackers like me… Anyway, the website https://play.starwars.com/html5/starwars_crawlcreator/ allows users to create their own "Star Wars" style crawl. It's a fun little site - but it has a few flaws. Whenever you let people enter content which is displayed back on the screen, there's a possibility that they'll be a…
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The British town of Scunthorpe is a delightful place to visit. It is a perfectly normal town, with just one tiny problem. Its name is often unfairly redacted online because it contains a "rude" word. See if you can spot it… This sort of overreach is generally known as the Scunthorpe Problem. I ran into this issue on a kid-friendly site from a major brand. I had the temerity to type a perfectly normal word. A child friendly word. Dare I say it, a word that every English speaking child knows. I…
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This is a delightfully funny movie - albeit riddled with implausibilities. It is tender in all the right places, silly where it needs to be, and ruthless in its exploration into the characters' psyches. Leo Grande is the male equivalent of the Manic-Dream-Pixie-Girl trope. But that's exactly what his character is paid to be. He isn't merely a one-dimensional sex-object - the client needs more than that. So he performs the role of "perfect man". Even when she is probing him to make sure he…
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