What happens when a robot begins to question its creators? What would be the consequences of creating a robot with a sense of humour? Or the ability to lie? How do we truly tell the difference between man and machine? In "I, Robot", Asimov sets out the Three Laws of Robotics – designed to protect humans from their robotic creations – and pushes them to their limits and beyond. After attending a…
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The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius. A fascinating look at a defining moment in technological development. Full of intrigue, double-crossing, maths, and science. It cracks along at a fair pace, sometimes lightly skipping over details. I would gladly have read this if it…
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I've just got a set of wearable NFC tags, and I've discovered something interesting about the way data is stored on them. tl;dr Overwriting a tag can leave old data intact, and still readable. Here's the decoded memory layout of a tag with data written to it. In this case, a (failed) experiment at storing a JavaScript pop-up. # NDEF message: [00] D1 01 7D 55 00 64 61 74 61 3A 74 65 78 74 2F 68 …
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Death’s End (死神永生) is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. This is an unforgiving book. Did you remember every detail from the last two novels? No - better go back and take some notes! It is epic sci-fi. Boun…
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Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships... Welcome to the life of a junior doctor. I saw Kay perform his delightfully disgusting parody songs on the Amateur Transplants tour way back in 2008. The humour in this book is m…
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I'm finally feeling like I'm settling into my new role. I spent my Saturday at UK GovCamp - an unconference for Civil Servants. I ran a session on Acronyms in the Workplace. It was hillarious listening to people try to introduce themselves without any abbreviations. "I am the Chief Paperclip Office for the United Kingdom's Department of Stationery and Supplies" doesn't take much longer to say…
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It's 2019 and high-tech devices are still plagued by text encoding bugs. I recently bought the new 4K Amazon Fire Stick. It's a little Android dongle which plays videos. It's neat - but quite often displays weird text errors. Take the kids' TV show House of Anubis, the Fire displays the description like this: Looking at the source code for the description: That's the character "private use…
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DVD-Audio (henceforce DVDA) is an unloved and mostly forgotten audio format. Nevertheless, there's a large back-catalogue of music which is still trapped on ancient discs encoded in the proprietary MLP format. A few years ago I wrote about how to extract the audio using the obsolete Windows program DVD-Audio Explorer. I wanted to be able to run the extraction via the command line, which means…
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Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release, this is the definitive story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, acclaimed today as one of the greatest films ever made, including the inside account of how director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke created this cinematic masterpiece. This is the ultimate "DVD Extra" of a book. Every single detail of the genesis and r…
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Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today. …
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With over twenty years of research, Esslinger, author of Alcatraz: Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years, has salvaged and compiled an extraordinary collection of inmates' letters, many never before published. A grim and uncompromising read. Page after page of letters written by barely-literate violent offenders. Each trapped on Alcatraz, each pleading with someone for a little mercy,…
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My fingers are now Internet-enabled. Well... sort of! My dexterous digits can now wirelessly broadcast URls and all sorts of other information. Here's a video showing how! Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentMy nails contain a URl! pic.x.com/MmOvnlqt0u❤️ 5💬 3🔁 019:20 - Fri 18 January 2019 I have a small NFC chip sandwiched between my finger and a fake nail. NFC - Near Field Comm…
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