Of all the ephemeral objects we build for ourselves in the digital world, among the most precious and at the greatest risk of disappearing are databases. Databases are organised and queryable collections of data. The larger ones, along with their cousin the content management system, govern our world and manage who we are, since theirRead More
I have been watching the latest series of Better Call Saul, the best thing on TV just now, despite some considerable competition. The series is a prequel to Breaking Bad, the 2008-2013 series about a high-school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who takes to a life of crime by manufacturing methamphetamine. The crooked lawyer Saul GoodmanRead More
The times are busy at the moment, and I’m not finding much time for writing. And when I do find the time I discover after a couple of paragraphs that I so dislike the results that I have to click on the ‘Move to Trash’ option WordPress understandingly provides for me. Ah well. But IRead More
I’m just back from Helsinki, a delightful city, easy to warm to and welcoming in every degree. I liked the even line of the buildings (Helsinki has no skyscrapers, and almost every building in the city centre whether new or old is four or five stories high, giving a great sense of harmony about theRead More
Last weekend I sat through six hours and thirty-seven minutes of of Les Misérables (France 1925), the longest film I’ve ever experienced at a single sitting. It was shown at the Barbican in London, two comfort breaks and a supper break along the way. Neil Brand provided the live piano score, as he had withRead More
If I’m asked what my eight desert island discs would be – and to date I have to admit the question has yet to be asked – then six of the choices are always changing, but two remain fixed. One is Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Time is Tight’ (which I’m going to make theRead More
Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance … It is so organized that at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action which characterizes all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own; two individuals are pitted against eachRead More
To the Arcola Theatre in Hackney to see Tamburlaine, a play I’d not seen staged before (two plays, to be precise, since Christopher Marlowe wrote a sequel after part one had been a success). Studio 2 at the Arcola is a brick-walled basement that in other circumstances might have served well enough as a doubleRead More
Somewhere in the stars beyond, quite a few milliennia from now, long after our civilisation will have pushed its self-destruct button, one or other of the Voyager spacecraft will be detected by some advanced species. That species won’t be so advanced as to have developed its own self-destruct button, but it will be smart enoughRead More
Here’s what tomorrow looks like. At last week’s Google Cloud Next Conference held in San Francisco, Google announced a new API (application programme interface) entitled Cloud Video Intelligence. With such an application, developers will be able to detect objects within videos and make them word-searchable, as well as detecting scene changes and tagging objects accordingly.Read More