Keeping Cool in the Son Kul

In 2018 we did some new routing in Kyrgyzstan, a trip report just got published in Professional Mountaineer Summer 2020 (which they have made available free online due to COVID lockdown). Campsite picture courtesy of Dan:

Testing whether your brain is a quantum computer (Jupyter)

Are our brains quantum computers? Enough speculating, let's do a test. (Hosted on github because wordpress.com won't let me format it correctly).

Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering (Jupyter)

The piano keyboard, what an odd way to lay out a collection of notes. Why? WHY? For nerdy people with an interest in music I wrote an explanation. (Hosted on github because wordpress.com won't let me format it correctly).

Hard comp-fi: a new fictional niche?

I’ve been exploring a bunch of stories which in some way, explore the beautiful ideas behind computer science, software engineering and even plain old programming. I want to call them “hard comp-fi”, to echo the well-established genre of hard sci-fi, which is defined by accurate, watertight science taking centre stage in the narrative. In hard …

Manifest Logic

Speculative fiction/fantasy. Pay no heed to the intro to software engineering hidden behind the thin disguise.

Notation for social deduction games (part 2)

Warning: this post continues from Notation for social deduction games and will make no sense at all unless you've read that post first. So, my preferred notation for Spy Thriller games is a graph, where nodes represent players and links represent methods of introduction such as a shared password or meeting place: I'd be interested …

Notation for social deduction games

This post focuses on the challenge of finding an abstraction that describes social deduction games in general. These games (e.g. werewolves, two rooms and a boom, spyfall) seem to require the sort of twisted thinking needed for security protocol design: a problem famously likened to programming Satan’s computer. What they tend to have in common …

The unintentional story telling comedy of an 18 month old

Terry Pratchet suggested that Homo Sapiens should in fact be called Pan Narrans - the ape that tells stories. Harari's Sapiens suggests that the ability to create myths, rather than greater intelligence, is in fact what separated us from Neanderthals. Either way it's generally agreed that myth plays a huge role in our culture. Most …

No equipment is essential to safety

Following the Smartphones in Hills article, UKH invited me to write an opinion piece, although they published it under a slightly less contentious title - you can read it here.

Mingulay

In 2007 a bunch of us went to climb for two weeks on the uninhabited Scottish island of Mingulay. Click any of these pictures to enter the slideshow. This was back in the days when I lugged a film SLR up sea cliffs - apologies for the lo-fi negative scans...