The world around us
This is a bit of a catch-all topic for anything that occurs outside a computer – geography, history, politics, whatever catches my eye.
Sub-topics:
It’s cool to care
Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.
Plates and states
On a recent trip to the US, I learnt a surprising amount from watching the license plates on passing cars.
A blue plaque for Hester
Making a small memorial to a forgotten secretary who helped pull off one of the most daring deceptions of WWII.
A day out at the Bure Valley Railway
My photos from a delightful day on a steam railway with smol trains.
A day out to the Forth Bridge
Photographs from a trip to North Queensferry to see the Forth Bridge, the Forth Road Bridge, and an unexpected light tower.
A visit to the Crossness pumping station
Pictures from my recent visit to Crossness, a Victorian pumping station for London’s sewers.
27 articles
The selfish case for public libraries
I don’t use libraries out of a sense of civic duty; I use them because they make me a happier, more adventurous, and more prolific reader.
The palm tree that led to Palmyra
Palmyrene is an alphabet that was used to write Aramaic in 300–100 BCE, and I learnt about it while looking for a palm tree emoji.
Can you take an ox to Oxford?
Let’s work out exactly when you need to pay Oxford’s new congestion charge.
We all lose when art is anonymised
When art loses its creator, we lose the story behind the image – a plea for attribution in our endless scroll culture.
Creating static map images with OpenStreetMap, Web Mercator, and Pillow
I made some simple map visualisations by downloading tiles from OpenStreetMap, then annotating the tiles with Pillow.
Putting history on the map
Antarctic explorers, northern factories, and Hawaiian industry – I wrote about some of the photos I found using the interactive map in the Flickr Commons Explorer.
Google is showing outdated results from the UK’s election
Dozens of MPs who were re-elected to their seats are still labelled “former Member of Parliament”, days after the election results.
Preserving pixels in Paris
I went to France for a conference about archiving the web, and I came back with thoughts and photos.
The Star-Spangled Ballad
If you listen carefully to the Ballad of Willie Watkins, you might hear another song peeking through.
The Collected Works of Ian Flemingo
A fledgling author uses a theatre trip to leave the nest. (Or: some props I made for a cosplay event.)
What mammal is that?
In which Apple Photos accidentally tells me about a cool new animal.
Spy for Spy
A two-handed sapphic romance with a clever narrative twist makes for a compelling and thoughtful new play.
Finding books in nearby library branches
Some web scraping and Python helps me find books that I can borrow immediately.
Our Place in Space
You don’t realise how big the solar system is until you’ve walked the length of it.
A Martian plaque for a made-up plot
If NASA was the first to land on Mars in For All Mankind, what would the commemorative plaque look like?
One small stitch for yarn, one giant leap for yarn-kind
I made a cross-stitch blueprint of the Apollo Moon lander and the Saturn V rocket.
Fictional phone numbers in For All Mankind
Where did this UK phone number come from?
Illustrating the cipher wheels of a Lorenz machine
Some old code I wrote to draw cam-accurate illustrations of cipher wheels.
How I read non-fiction books
I take notes so I remember more of what I read.
The Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Feeling the weight of death in a former concentration camp.
Complex systems have complex failures
When a complex system fails, it’s usually a combination of problems, not a single person’s mistake.
Ten braille facts / ⠼⠁⠚⠀⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑⠀⠋⠁⠉⠞⠎
Where does braille come from? How was braille originally written? What can you write in braille today? And more.
Reading a Chinese dictionary / 读一本中文字典
Although paper dictionaries are mostly a thing of the past, knowing how to use a Chinese dictionary helps me learn the rest of the language.
Keeping track of my book recommendations
The three lists I use to manage my book recommendations.
My visit to the Aberdulais Falls
Pictures from my trip to the waterfalls and former tin plating works at Aberdulais.
Building trust in an age of suspicious minds
Notes and slides from my PyCon UK 2018 keynote. In a world where people are less and less trusting, how can we take steps to make ourselves more trustable?
My favourite WITCH story
As the WITCH computer celebrates five years since its reboot at TNMoC, a fun story of how it was left to run at Christmas.
10 notes
Road signs in the Soviet union don’t have circular heads
Their heads are more a sort of rounded triangle shape, a bit like an oval or an egg.
The “strangler” pattern is named after a tree, not an act of violence
It’s named after the strangler fig tree, which wraps itself a host tree and gradually kills them.
Place with the same name, but different etymology
The @ symbol was added to Morse code in 2004
It was added in May 2004, it’s the first new symbol since the Second World War, and the French have a cute name for it. The rest of Morse code has some surprising omissions.
Some countries have “poison centers” as part of their healthcare service
Poison centres are specialist services offering expert medical advice when you’re poisoned. They’re common in countries like the US, but barely visible to the public in the UK.
The Panamanian Golden Frog communicates by semaphore
The British Forces Post Office (BFPO) and the Loamshire Regiment
The BFPO sends post to the armed forces and MoD personnel, but they’ll never send it to the Loamshire Regiment, which is just a placeholder name for documentation.
Not all coal is the same
There’s a musical that tells you the number of minutes in a year
The song Seasons of Love from Rent starts with the line “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes”.
Germany has longer telephone numbers than the rest of the world