Porcinogenic

Another quickie on the back of the WHO report that bacon and sausages rank alongside cigarettes as a major cause of cancer.

Hogwash

Just a quickie about today’s news… no pun intended #piggate

Of Ants and Rhinos

I recently opened a Pandora’s box when investigating incorporating LESS into a web project I’ve been working on. Long story short, I found myself having to compile Rhino into a jar I could execute. Having installed Ant to perform the task, I ran the command and got the following exception: C:\rhino1_7R5\xmlimplsrc\build.xml:129: src ‘C:\rhino1_7R5\build\tmp-xbean\xbean.zip’ doesn’t exist. Which is exactly what I want to be dealing with when investigating a CSS precompiler. In… Read More »Of Ants and Rhinos

America Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

A quick cartoon about the irony of François Hollande’s recent outrage at discovering his phone may have been tapped by the NSA, the same week that France introduced new sweeping mass surveillance laws for the French populace. Still trying to get the hang of this political cartoon malarky – I’m always hesitant to label things in fear of falling into trap that The Day Today parodied so well, but don’t think… Read More »America Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

Fuel Fossils

In an effort to refine my drawing skills I’ve decided to start producing semi-regular topical cartoons. I don’t think my drawings have ever been very incisive, so I’m hoping this will help me focus on that a bit, and will also hopefully be fun for people to read/look at (what’s the correct verb for “consuming” a cartoon?) So this is my first effort – a shot at the recent G7 summit… Read More »Fuel Fossils

Say what? Analysing speech at SAS

I rarely get to talk about my work at SAS since mostly it’s experimental research and development, and therefore kept fairly hush hush. Recently, however, I had to the opportunity to write a guest article for data-informed.com about a project I’ve been working on for the past few months. Having partnered up with a Scottish speech-to-text company, we built a system which could take reams of audio, transcribe them, and then… Read More »Say what? Analysing speech at SAS

For Gran

It’s a cliché for people to say their grans are strong. And maybe most of them really are. But my gran could beat up your gran. No question. Under the skin of those scrawny arms were iron pipes. Her legs were twin pistons. She could walk for days, and her will was made of steel. After getting the biopsy which eventually diagnosed her lung cancer, she walked a mile to the shops… Read More »For Gran

My ‘Conference on World Affairs’ Appearances

I recently had the tremendous honour of attending the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado, as a panellist and solo presenter. The experience was incredible, and I’m working on a blog post all about my week there which I’ll post here very soon. In the meantime, audio recordings from my panels were made available online, so I thought I’d share them up here for posterity. The Panels The format for all… Read More »My ‘Conference on World Affairs’ Appearances

To bed, but not to sleep

At some point in the last 10 years, I’ve managed to convince myself that I knew a quote from Hamlet that wasn’t in fact from Hamlet. The quote is: “to bed, but not to sleep” My (false) memory tells me this was part of some Hamlet soliloquy referring to insomnia caused by concerns of dead dads and murderous uncles. For close to a decade it’s been in my brain’s bank of… Read More »To bed, but not to sleep