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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Everyone is decamping from Twitter to Mastodon! The great thing about the Federated Internet (hereafter the "Fediverse") is that it is distributed. The bad thing is… it is distributed! What do I mean by that? Here's an example of the problems with decentralised systems. If I want to create a link on a website which will share text to Twitter, I just create a URl which points to: t…
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I started reading this as the news came out that someone at Google got convinced that their AI was sentient. And that's what this book is about! A researcher starts talking to his computer and gradually becomes convinced that it is "alive". It is a perennially prescient story. And it is fascinating to see how the state-of-the-art was perceived in 1972. It is in the shadow of 2001 - but much…
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With the collapse of VC subsidised convenience firms - for example instant grocery delivery apps - the modern world is facing a minor meltdown. No more biscuits on demand! No more cheap drivers at your beck and call! Calamity! Some have dubbed this The End of the Servant Economy. Perhaps it is. But what do we mean by a "servant"? If I lived in Downton Abbey or Bridgerton (I wish!) then the…
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An excellent premise for a book - if an AI is accused of murder, should it be faced with a jury of its peers? But I just found it a bit flat and disappointing. This could have been a fascinating courtroom drama, or spacey whodunnit, or even a philosophical investigation into the nature of guilt. Instead, it's just a plodding legal procedural which spends an awful lot of time on the domestic…
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In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: "hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun", "description":"The legendary extinct bird cooked in tomato sauce, served in a gluten-free bun.", …
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