I've made my first Twitter bot. It posts a new image and accompanying text from my Neuralgae NaNoGenMo project, six times a day, modified slightly so that it fits within the character limit. One of my goals with Neuralgae was to generate something which was in some sense readable, and …

A bot which takes a random Wikipedia page title and turns it into the title of an imaginary blues track. The Talking Random Wikipedia Page Title Blues is something I blogged about ages ago, I was inspired to turn it into a bot by my son having become the world's …

The fourth and last in a series of posts about how we think about coding and functional programming. The first three are The Homunculus, State and Immutable and pure

An algorithm is a procedure or formula for calculating a result, an idea which predates the invention of the computer by …

The third in a series of posts about how we think about coding and functional programming. The first was The Homunculus and the second was State

The subsections of programs referred to in the previous section are often called functions. In mathematics, the term function has a fairly strict definition …

For NaNoGenMo (national novel generation month) 2015, I wrote some Python which generates a series of loosely-coupled deepdream images, and adds eight-line surrealist 'poetry' to them based on the image categories used to draw them.

The full text is here: Neuralgae.

The source code and a fairly detailed description of …

If you think the title of this post is funny, and you have anything to do with science communication, we really need to talk.

In the couple of weeks I've seen infographics going around which try to correct non-technical people about the ways in which they use terms like "chemical …

The second in a series of posts about how we think about coding and functional programming. The first was The Homunculus

Even though I've complained about the metaphor of the homunculus, it can be used as a useful device to explain the differences between programming paradigms to a non-technical audience …

Here are visualisations of the 205 scene categories in the MIT Places Database using a variant of the same technique used to generate the thousand faces of Caffenet.

These are rendered on random grayscale noise rather than a photograph, so they're purely a manifestation of what the neural net has …

Here are the thousand image categories in the ImageNet Challenge data visualisation context, rendered onto a webcam photo of me using the deepdraw technique.

This is the set of image classifications which the standard Deepdreams imagery is based on: as more than one hundred of the categories are dog breeds …

Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism London: Verso Books, 2012

Slavoj Žižek

I've had problems with depression for my whole adult life: I am much better at managing it than when I was younger, but one of the bad habits which I find it hard to shake off is …