From the archives, w/e 4 June

15.33, Friday 4 Jun 2021

Blog posts this week from years gone by.

1 year ago

Filtered for musical cyborgs (29 May 2020).

Another article goes hard on how the beats aren’t humanly possible: The prosthetic arm can play the drums four times faster than humans.

The arm can also play strange polyrhythms that no human can play.

It’s a collection of links, mostly videos, about music instruments that are also cyborg prostheses.

Experiments with projectors and video calls (4 June 2020).

I’ve been posting recently about video calls and online talks. And, in the spirit of that, last week tweeted about a ridiculous experiment with an overhead projector.

Aha, that experiment was fun! That post was the write-up; here are the photos. Sadly I no longer have a wall behind me at my desk, so I can’t project over my head and “write” on the wall during video calls. But it would be neat to reboot this somehow.

3 years ago

Four short stories and what I learnt writing them (31 May 2018).

I wouldn’t say I’m great at writing fiction. I find it tough. It is the easiest thing in the world for me to pick holes in what I’ve written. So instead, as an exercise - and as some personal positive reinforcement - I want to remind myself what I learnt writing each one, and also what I like.

From time to time I write short fiction, usually sci-fi (though not lately). This post links out to four stories and what I learnt in the process of writing each one. I’m still pleased with this one, from December 2017: The search for another intelligence.


Posts selected from the On This Day archive spelunking page. This is an experiment to see how to best include old posts in the current feed in a meaningful way, possibly as a regular Friday feature.

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