In 2013 I wrote and published an eighty-one-verse poem in Spenserian stanzas on FSVO. It started as an affectionate parody of the works of writers like Erasmus Darwin, who in the eighteenth century enthusiastically boosted the natural sciences in poems which are now long unread. It grew into something a …

As an exercise in Haskell, I wrote a monad which threads random-number generation state through a context-free grammar, allowing the creation of arbitrary yet valid sentences. This was kind of clever.

Then I used it to generate a series of descriptions of bands of warriors along the lines of Homer's …

@verbquests is a tribute to old-school text adventures, in which it was often difficult to find the correct verb to apply to a noun. It's powered by the Python Natural Language Toolkit, NLTK.

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 …