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 …
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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,…
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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 …
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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 l…
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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 n…
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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…
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These are the facts: throughout history human beings have had sex. Sexual culture did not begin in the sixties. It has always been celebrated, needed, wanted and desired part of what it means to be human. So: what can learn by looking at the sexual lives of our ancestors? What does it tell us about our attitudes and worries today, and how can the past teach us a better way of looking forward?I …
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As recommended to me by a comment on my blog. This is ridiculous fun from start to finish. It's a John Grisham-style courtroom drama. Only the defendant is an alien. Literally a multi-limbed beast from a dozen light-years away. That's it. That's the whole plot. And it works wonderfully. Nothing wrong with a bit of good clean sci-fi fun. It lightly explores racism - using the aliens as a proxy…
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This is a little story about standards, technology, civilisation, and the modern world. I know it is tempting to only talk about the various ways technology disappoints us, but sometimes it can be quite magical living in the future. A few week ago, I took a trip to a foreign country... I waved a rectangle of black-and-white squares in the vicinity of an optical scanner. The tiny computer's eye…
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The set of HTML <ruby> elements allow us to add pronunciation above text. For example: "When you visit the zoo, be sure to see the panda - 熊(Xióng)猫(māo)." This is written as: <ruby>熊<rp>(</rp><rt>Xióng</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby><ruby>猫<rp>(</rp><rt>māo</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>. That is, the word or character which needs text above it is wrapped in <ruby>. The pronunciation is wrapped in <rt>. The <r…
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This is selection of essays looking - as the title suggests - at the relationship between Shakespeare and immigration. It's always worth re-examining our relationship with "classic" works. There are some very obvious immigration issues in Shakespeare - and this book does a plausible job of uncovering some of them. It also takes us through some of the issues facing Elizabethan England - for…
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I speak English. My Amazon account is set to English. My Alexa listens to my English commands and replies in English. Except for new book notifications. I saw a pulsing yellow light on the dot. I've memorised all of the various signs and portents the accurs'd device can summon up, so I asked it (in English) what notifications it had for me. It replied, naturally, in German. I couldn't grab an …
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