I assume it's a difficult problem because I've not found an example of a humanoid robot that can wash itself. This feels odd, given there are impressive sprinting, back-flipping, dancing robots out there. Robots do have different constraints. They could use walk-in baths, UV or chemical cleaning, disposable gloves (or...

The point is a good one:  If you want to get chips from NVIDIA, Jensen [the CEO] makes you pay for them [...] If you want to get the best researchers, they get salaries. We're not going to say "oh, AI is so important that we're going to bring back slavery". That doesn't make any sense. So I don't understand why if the...

I'm officially late in welcoming in autumn, but in my defence it now feels like autumn.  We spent a few days in the Chilterns. It's not a part of the country I know at all, and now getting back and looking at a map I see we were in one tiny part of it, near Henley-on-Thames.We lucked out with blue skies and beautiful...

That was the last episode of Science in Action, a BBC World Service weekly hosted by Roland Pease. I know there’s Inside Science. There's also Nature’s podcast which—believe me—I’ve tried to like, but it’s sterile compared to the rapport Pease created with scientists. I will miss it.   Maybe the rumoured “The Rest is...

Following on from the first report on co-op games I’ve been playing, here’s another batch. Split Fiction, which you have to play as co-op. Inventive, fun, and towards the end especially inventive with the split play. I’ll say no more. Highly recommended. We’re likely to re-play this one, swapping roles. Biped, in which...

I don't do much Scala anymore, but when I do I make use of Scalafmt so I don't have to care about all that stuff.  In the Helix editor, to be able to run :fmt on a Scala file you need this in your ~/.config/helix/languages.toml file: [[language]]name = "scala"formatter = {   command = "scalafmt",   args = ["--stdout",...

What I do is: Open my email client, write the post, add #tags, images, links. Run proofreading tools. Send it to my email address. That's it. (Ok, sometimes I use the web editor too.) Before this, I spent years using a static site generator, but found I stopped blogging. It was a little bit of a hassle to write a...

I was early for a meeting in London last Friday, so wandered around. Having not lived there for a couple of decades, I see the place with tourist eyes. Oh, the history! It's pretty good to switch into this mode now and then. I was south of King's Cross, in an area full of bio/med and history. It's branded itself as The...

Reading: Nerd’s Eye View: 13 things you need to know about daylight saving time, The New World, 22 October 2025. In March 1968, Britain’s clocks went forward but were not put back until October 1971. The experiment was abandoned because it wasn’t really clear whether it actually worked better, and some people, most...

I'm working with audio files recorded from an iPhone in m4a format. To open these in Audacity you need FFmpeg installed. This is currently a minor faff on macOS. Step 1: Install the right FFmpeg version I had 8.0 installed, but Audacity (as of version 3.7.5) needs 7. So it's:  brew install ffmpeg@7Step 2: Locate the...

Artist and audio nerd Pere sent me this piece he found: it 20 seconds before the vocoder kicks in. It's strangely beautiful.

Reading: Scalable synthetic biology revolutionizes targeted therapy with logic-gate proteins, News Medical, 10 October 2025.This is right up my street: building up a logic gate in a protein. It goes something like this. You have some therapeutic payload (a drug, say), connected (tethered) to other molecules that are...

Reading: Apophenia, Audio Pareidolia and Musical Ear Syndrome, Neil Bauman (9 July 2015)I thought our neighbours had taken up playing extremely faint indie pop/rock. I could hear it in the kitchen, but only when our new hob extractor fan was on. Apparently this is "audio pareidolia": my brain finding patterns in the fan...

I found a case where Safari, the macOS web browser, will sometime append a username to a password field. It's very odd. This is with Apple Password, on an old-ish web site using two step login: fill in the username, press next, fill in the password. Using autofill, the site would respond with "incorrect password", but...

Rather than doing monthly links, I'm experimenting with posting them as I find them.The Addiction EconomyA project from Society InsideSummary: everything is terrible, just like you thought. I saw this project covered in an issue of The New World: The biggest cause of preventable death the world has ever known– bigger...