This was a cheap Kindle deal, so I took a punt. It's a collection of stories whose titles mirror the tracks of Please Please Me. Except... They kinda don't? A couple of the stories are explicitly Beatle-y, the others aren't. The titles don't seem to bear any resemblance to the stories told. Indeed, one was obviously originally named "Octopus's Garden" - featuring a rather good tale of a man who…
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I thought I wasn't clever enough to read this book. The intro and first section are very challenging if you're not already familiar with philosophy and literary criticism. However, I struggled through and found something quite wonderful. Let's start with what this is about: I advocate for the development of computational poetics: a strategy of interpretation capable of reaching past surface…
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With the news that Royal Mail wants to end Saturday delivery, I got to thinking about how I'd try to innovate a way out of the mess they're in. The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but…
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The last smartwatch that I tried was some awful early Sony device with a locked-down ROM. The battery died after a day and I couldn't find the proprietary charger. It slurped up all my data. It was garish to look at. And it was expensive. The Watchy is the opposite in every single conceivable way. It is an Arduino powered, open source, eInk display, with no data guzzling tendancies. And is only …
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I'm obsessed with the idea that human progress could be accelerated - if only we realised how to properly combine existing technology. I don't want to go "Ancient Aliens" here - but even a cursory reading of scientific history will show you were humanity's progress could have been dramatically fast if only knowledge was more widely shared and recognised. The book "How To Invent Everything" makes …
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There was an interesting discussion at UKGovCamp a few months ago. UKGC is an unofficial yearly gathering of public sector people, who chat informally about thorny issues at work. Suppose a digital design team has to support a policy which charges people money every time they do a thing. Let's say driving a car across a bridge. There's all sorts of cool tech that you could use in order to make …
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Perhaps you are aware of the Mandela Effect - a psychological phenomenon where you are convinced you remember something which never actually happened. This, combined with the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon - where you suddenly start noticing something unusual - can cause extreme cognitive dissonance. What does the verb "to trespass" mean to you? I always thought it was the act of going somewhere p…
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One of the (many) problems with AI is that training data usually needs to come from "natural" sources. If you want to emulate human-written text, you need to train something on human-written text. But with the proliferation of cheap and fast AI tools, it is likely that training data will unwillingly become contaminated with AI-written text. In order to prevent the "Habsburg Jaw" effect, I…
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This is a modern Arabian Nights. Eight Middle Eastern tales of adventure and magic, infused with a startling modernity. I loved the world-building in this. The creeping horror in some of the tales was offset by the delicious exploration of what it means to inhabit a world with Djinn. Interestingly, it seemed very scripture-heavy to me- with characters reciting little prayers and quoting from…
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I recently read Darek Kay's excellent post about styling RSS feeds and wanted to do something similar. So, here's my simple guide to styling your WordPress blog's RSS / Atom theme. The end result is that if someone clicks on a link to your feed, they see something nicely formatted, like this: Prerequisites This involves editing your WordPress blog's theme. If you don't know what you're…
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I'm a big fan of machine-readable metadata. It's useful for programs which need to extract information from messy and complicated websites. It's always surprising where it turns up. For example, take this post of mine on LinkedIn. If you view the source, you'll see this scrap of linked data: <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context":…
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A few weeks ago, someone uploaded this memorial bench to our site: Photo CC BY-SA from Lewis MacKenzie. It is a perfectly pleasant little memorial poem. I wondered about its origins. A quick search shows that the opening couplet was used on war graves from 1916. But are its origins any earlier than that? One of the problems of trying to search old records - especially newspapers - is that…
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