Magic is forbidden in Myrsina, along with various other abominations, such as girls doing maths. This is bad news for Gretel Mudd, who doesn’t perform magic, but does know a lot of maths. When the sinister masked Huntsmen accuse Gretel of witchcraft, she is forced to flee into the neighbouring Darkwood, where witches and monsters dwell. There, she happens upon Buttercup, a witch who can’t hel…
Continue reading →
Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it. In…
Continue reading →
When someone on Twitter mentions my blog, the WordPress WebMentions plugin automatically fetches those Tweets and turns them into comments on the blog post. It looks something like this: That is pretty cool - but has one slight problem. If someone changes their Twitter avatar, or deletes their account, the image disappears and I'm left with a broken image. Booo! So, how do we fix this?…
Continue reading →
Before I start this blog post - here's a big fat warning. You will get no support from Boyue if things go wrong with your device. I have their previous model, the Likebook Ares. After less than a year of use, I noticed screen discolouration. The eBay reseller wasn't interested in helping me with a return. Boyue ignored my repeated complaints - and I was stuck with a defective unit. So I waited…
Continue reading →
Whenever I open Twitter in a new tab on my phone, the page layout looks weird for a few seconds. It starts out looking like the desktop view and then, after a few seconds, it snaps back to the mobile view. What's causing this? Try opening this link to a window size detector in a background tab. Then visit that tab. On Chrome, this is what I see. If I hit the refresh button on that tab, the …
Continue reading →
I was recently asked to look at some advice for new graduates entering the workforce. It was the usual mix of helpful, obvious, and trite. You know the sort - tailor your application to the job specification, make sure your CV is spelled correctly, don't give up, etc. In the middle of it, was this doozy. "Put your application in a gold coloured envelope so it stands out from the crowd!" This…
Continue reading →
Previously on Terence Eden's blog... About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twitter threads actually looked like. Well, lockdown finally got the best of me, and I finished the project! TweeView.ml Here are a few screenshots of "interesting" trees, and a little bit about how it works. …
Continue reading →
Here's set of visualisation I've been working on. Last night, at #TapIntoTwitter, I demonstrated a fun way to view your Twitter conversations as a force-directed graph in 3D space. I'm going to show it off to you, then explain how it works. This is a designed as a "fun" demo. Here we go! So, what's going on? As I've previously blogged about, Twitter has a new conversations API. That allows…
Continue reading →
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that…
Continue reading →
At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in sub-zero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different…
Continue reading →
When most people think about street addresses they think of parcel deliveries, or visitors finding their way. But who numbered the first house, and where, and why? What can addresses tell us about who we are and how we live together? Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., how ancient Romans found their way, and why Bobby Sands is memorialised in Tehran.…
Continue reading →
Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect intelligence for the government. Immediately she feels that something strange is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina,…
Continue reading →
