Jun 9‘Tell me what to do’: University staff grapple with AI policyIf there’s one thing academics don’t like, it’s looking out of touch. When it comes to AI, there’s an urgency to understanding what it can do and whether students are using it to cheat — and whether in an AI world “cheating” means the same as it did. At a…Ai In Education4 min readAi In Education4 min read
Jun 6AI: Another blow to human self-esteem?For centuries, human beings have been learning that they are less and less important. Galileo insisted, to his cost, that the earth was in the middle of nowhere rather than at the centre of the universe. Darwin wasn’t popular for showing that we were just another species. …AI10 min readAI10 min read
Sep 27, 2022How not to deal with foreign currencyI just got back from a week in Norway. On the way there, at Heathrow, I got some Norwegian Krone and now I’m home, I went to my local currency exchange to turn what I had left back into UK pounds. Out of interest I looked at the figures for…Cash2 min readCash2 min read
Dec 23, 2020How to transfer notes and highlights from scanned books into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet via KindleThe problem If you find an old book that’s been scanned by Hathi Trust, for instance, that you want to use for an academic project, it will consist of pages that look like this: How do you turn the text into a form that you can easily quote and paste…Kindle5 min readKindle5 min read
Apr 2, 2020London has the plague againThe graph for deaths during the Great Plague of 1665 is instantly recognisable. …Coronavirus5 min readCoronavirus5 min read
Mar 10, 2020How the dot com boom opened entrepreneurship to allExactly 20 years ago, the dot com boom was at its height. The high tech NASDAQ index hit a historic high point on March 10 2000. Then the crash began, ending the dreams of countless young entrepreneurs. …Dot Com Bubble6 min readDot Com Bubble6 min read
May 8, 2019Just the start of his long StruggleA review of A Death in the Family, the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series, My Struggle. A couple of things to get out of the way first: although this paperback edition from Vintage calls itself “Fiction” on the back next to the price, the blurb, just above, says…Books5 min readBooks5 min read
Published inBest tech books·Oct 24, 2016Understanding treesLab Girl by Hope Jahren This is an odd cocktail of a book made up of three ingredients, shaken or stirred together with varying success. First, there’s the science: beautifully written, poetic but rigorous explanations of how trees grow and reproduce: like Biology A level taught by Seamus Heaney…Science3 min readScience3 min read
Published inThe transparent shed·Aug 7, 2016From greenhouse to… gut?I hate that phrase you hear on food programmes on the radio: ‘from farm to fork’. But what would the greenhouse equivalent be: ‘from greenhouse to gut’? ‘From greenhouse to gustatory experience’? ‘From greenhouse to getting supper’? …Food2 min readFood2 min read
Jul 27, 2016A strange coincidence of family historyWhen we got married, my wife and I bought a terraced house in West London, in an area that estate agents like to call Chiswick but is really Acton. It’s near Chiswick Park tube station but the neighbourhood had historically been called Acton Green — or, locally, Starch Green, because…Genealogy4 min readGenealogy4 min read
