John Graham-Cumming

There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...

Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination

Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ . I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources t...

A tale of two cultures

Getting around the London 2012 branding police

The Guardian reported the other day on the London 2012 Olympics branding police who ensure that words like London, 2012 or Games aren't be...

Apple's amusingly round reuse figures

If you take a look at Apple's Environment page you might well be impressed by the amount of reuse Apple is getting by taking back devices....

Call yourself a 'brogrammer'? Then get the hell away from me.

UK government declines to pardon Alan Turing

There's been a petition to the government and an Early Day Motion asking for Alan Turing to be pardoned. This is something I oppose desp...

The 10:10 Code

Four years ago I wrote about a way to encode the latitude and longitude of any point on the Earth's surface to 10m of accuracy with a 10 ch...

How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma

On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...

Beware the Alan Turing fetish

"All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk

As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...

UseTheSource: a place for beautiful code

Twitter's odd use of the word 'followed'

How to write a "Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller"

The Power of Gratitude

The real reason (climate) scientists don't want to release their code

Tweet is cheap