It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel.

Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …

Like every other nerd, I spent way too much time earlier last week playing with and worrying about Chat-GPT, but you can relax, I've stumped it:

I never thought that my addiction to lipograms would lead to any useful conclusions, but these exchanges seem to capture exactly what Chat-GPT is …

I trained a recurrent neural net with the same parameters as the most recent version of GLOSSATORY on the Gutenberg e-text of the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

The output was even better than I expected. The following excerpts were taken at increasing temperatures (the …

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 …

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 …

The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English. London: Profile Books, 2015

Michael D Gordin

This book falls at the intersection of a few of my interests - language, the idea of an auxiliary or neutral meta-language, the history of science in general and academic …

This is the first in a series of posts about the way we think about programming, the influence these ideas have on how we write code and what languages we choose, and why I like the functional programming paradigm in general and Haskell in particular.

Consumer notification: I've worked as …