After reading Laline Paull's The Bees, I was eager to read her next work. The Bees was about Bees, obviously. Pod is about a pod of dolphins - and their oceanic friends and society. Weirdly, this is the third book I've read from the perspective of cetaceans. Both The Idiot Gods and Startide Rising deal with similar themes - how to represent the complex world of sea creatures into sometime weird yet understandable. Pod has exactly the same story as The Bees - an outcast tries to find her…
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This film is a masterpiece. Sure, the plot is nothing special ("What is the dark secret behind this seemingly idyllic life?!?) but it is directed with such flare and texture that it becomes a joy to watch. I can't remember when I last saw something which kept me engrossed just through the sheer inventiveness of its design. I love going into movies without knowing anything about them. I'd seen the poster (made it look like a romance movie) and I was vaguely aware there was some "drama" behind…
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"How long have you been vegetarian?" Asked the waitress. "Oh, over twenty years now," I replied. She looked concerned. "Some people find the 3D printed steak a bit..." she paused, considered, and continued, "A bit intense. It takes people by surprise how it makes them feel. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd eat it again." With that, she swept off with our cocktail orders. Unity Diner is a lovely vegan diner near Brick Lane. It has kitschy booths, funky cocktails, and a menu stacked with…
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Punch was a satirical magazine first published in Victorian London. It had a long and noble history of poking fun at... well, just about every fashionable idea of the day. Anyone who pricked the public's conscious probably found themselves lampooned within its pages. Charles Babbage - inventor of the first mechanical computer - found himself starring in a few articles. Here's a scan of one from 1844 (extracted text follows) Returning to the new Houses of Parliament, we must again…
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Hmmm... I was left a bit unconvinced by this series of essays. They feel like casually written blog posts - or hastily dashed-off Sunday Supplement articles. I was expecting a bit more rigour and investigation. The book treads over well-worn ground - most Silicon Valley companies are trying to recreate Mommy tidying their room via AI, Uber is trying to eat the world, algorithms leave us in filter bubbles. It's interesting, but hardly new insights. The essays have a heavy focus on love. And…
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Why do most programming languages use the / character when we have a perfectly good ÷ symbol? Similarly, why use != instead of ≠? Or => rather than →? The obvious answer is that the humble keyboard usually only has around 100 keys - and most humans have a hard time remembering where thousands of alternate characters are. Some programming fonts attempt to get around this with ligatures. That allows the user to type <= but have the font display ≤ Are there any modern programming languages whic…
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Last week, Liz and I had the great pleasure of speaking at GeoMob London - a meet-up for digital geography nerds. We gave a talk about OpenBenches and how far it has come since launch. It blows our minds that we've have over TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND unique benches added to the site. And it is a little daunting to host nearly a quarter of a terabyte of photos from around the world. We got lots of great feedback (and free beer). Yes, it was weird to be in a crowded lecture theatre again. And…
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I hate leaderboards. I think competition tends to corrupt the incentives people have to contribute to a goal. Yet, at the same time, I was delighted to see that I was the top mapper in the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand. For one specific week in December. They say golf is a good walk spoiled. StreetComplete is a good walk enhanced with sidequests. As you wander around, it asks you little questions about your environment. Is that post-box still there? Does this restaurant serve vegetarian…
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This is a curious book. It starts out as a look at the security of everyday objects, but quickly becomes a series of after-dinner anecdotes about various security related issues. That's not a bad thing, as such, but a little different from what I was expecting. There's no doubt that Mikko walks the walk as well as talking the talk. Almost every page contains a bon mot. For example: Working in information security is sometimes a bit like playing Tetris: your successes disappear but your…
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I've started adding Restaurant Reviews to this blog - with delicious semantic metadata. Previously I'd been posting all my reviews to HappyCow. It's a great site for finding veggie-friendly food around the worlds, but I wanted to experiment more with the IndieWeb idea of POSSE. So now I can Post on my Own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere. The Schema.org representation of a Restaurant is pretty simple: "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Restaurant", …
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We flew in early to Kuala Lumpur - the only way to stave off the jetlag was to go hunting for lunch. We made the mistake of trying to walk through the city. What looked like a brisk 30 minute stroll became an exercise in dashing across busy roads in the sweltering heat. My brain was mush by the time we found the restaurant - a little out of the way and nestled inside what looks like an office block - so we ordered one of the sushi set menus. (My brain was too mushy to take a photo - but the …
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They say you should never judge a book by its cover. I picked this book solely because of the title. I didn't even read the blurb. Frankly, I'm delighted to have stumbled onto something so good! It's a near-future sci-fi story with an actual bibliography backing up its science! That's one of the things which makes it so good - all of the biological research is based on experiments done by real scientists. It's also full of joyous snark abut the practical reality of living in a technological …
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· Book Review · 200 words