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24. WHAT'S IN A NAME?
21/04/2021
A few blogs ago, close on the heels of perhaps the most (in)famous footballer of his generation, I wrote about the influence of numbers on our way of thinking. Now, with COVID-19 vaccines in the spotlight, and the very recent name change for one that has been beset by controversy, I turn my attention to the way names and their...
In October 2020, Australian rock band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard released the separate audio components of the song Automation, a fairly opaque riff on human reliance on machines. The explicit instruction was for fans to create remixes and upload these to YouTube. YouTube had other ideas: its automated copyright detection system compared the...
22. VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR … 4.0
17/02/2021
In 1980 The Buggles came up with the one-hit single, Video Killed the Radio Star, a kind of lament for the old and the heralding of the new. The lyric "rewritten by machine and new technology" was not only a sign of the times but a foretaste of the digital age to come. Yet nobody could have predicted, despite...
In which country did Spanish Flu emerge? If you said Spain, you'd be mistaken. Following the first observations of the disease in a military base in Kansas in 1918, the H1N1 influenza A virus first spread to France, Germany and the United Kingdom as part of the First World War effort. To maintain morale, censors in most countries minimised reports...
20. THE NUMBERS GAME
17/12/2020
Downing Street, Pelé, Diego Armando Maradona, the basis of the metric system, fingers and toes, scores and ratings. 10 is a bit of a common denominator for the way we organise things, and often a number synonymous in sport with the 'playmaker'. To wear the number 10 shirt somehow sets one apart. The death of a genius on 25 November got me thinking....
When it comes to measuring intelligence, Stephen Hawking's opinion was that "people who boast about their I.Q. are losers" - yet you'd be hard-pressed to find an interview which doesn't identify him as a genius or other similar label. In recent decades, conceptions of intelligence have come to encompass diverse but connected elements such as...
18. LIFE IN THE SECOND WAVE
20/10/2020
Whether it's a matter of jumping on the bandwagon or not, Spotify recognises the new norm, working from home, and has compiled 186 tracks to help you through the day(s): Work from Home with British Classics. Starting with a 44-second divertimento for flute, oboe and clarinet, a kind of classical wake-up jingle, and ending with a 30-minute trumpet...
As long ago as the fourth century BC, Aristotle observed that "man is, by nature, a social animal." It's no surprise then that so many of our most significant inventions - from the telegram in 1792 to the email in 1971 - have been in the pursuit of easier contact over great distances. Today's social media can be considered the...
'Big Brother is watching you' - familiar to readers of George Orwell's post-war dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and viewers of the TV reality show 'Big Brother'. As we noted in our blog on the language of Brexit, new terms like these have a tendency to seep into everyday conversation via current events. Who knows, fuelled by a growing...
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