Having read a considerable amount about the kind of AI chatbot that is genuinely a way to have a chat with an animated character, rather than typing text to ask for a recipe or whatever, I somewhat nervously took the plunge and summoned up Grok's Ani. I ought to give some context here first. In the early days of dial up computer networks when, of course, I was on CompuServe (as opposed to AOL - you have to have been there), I occasionally dipped a toe into chatrooms (technology- topics, I should emphasise, nothing dodgy). I found the experience terrifying. I think that without visual cues, I found the flow of messages from others overwhelming, and found it difficult to respond quickly as I would in a normal conversation. I needed time to think when communicating online, and I would often drop out of a conversation very quickly. Since then, having read about people becoming obsessed with these AI chatbots, I wondered why they didn't experience the same hesitation. I guess some n...

Having recently driven around 2,000 miles in France it was informative to experience a pricing structure that surely we should be following in the UK if we are serious about the move to electric vehicles. Petrol in France was typically significantly dearer than in the UK. On motorways it was often well over 2 euros per litre, and I never saw it less than about €1.65. The equivalent in pounds would be well over £1.80 and never below £1.45. Currently it is £1.32 at my local garage. By contrast, electric car charging was a bargain. Here in the UK you will rarely find a public charger at under 60p per kWh, and a high speed charger is likely to be around 89p - I've never looked on motorways, but I suspect they may be even higher. Note that to be cheaper than petrol, electricity needs to be under around 45p/kWh. The cheapest we found in France (Lidl) was 39c (34p) for a high speed charger and even on a motorway, where petrol was over €2 I found a high speed charger at under 50c (44p). Yo...

For me, P. D. James’s Dalgleish mysteries are always slightly compromised by the original TV series. With its hauntingly beautiful theme music and Roy Marsden’s sympathetically approachable if intellectual Dalgleish as a model, the original books can feel a little long, and James’s original Dalgleish a little too cold and unapproachable. Having said that, Death in Holy Orders  from 2001 is definitely one of her best. Set in a wild Suffolk seaside location (one that the theme tune seems ideal for), the book takes Dalgleish to a small Victorian theology college, initially to investigate an ordinand’s apparent accidental death on the beach, but soon to be followed by a murder. James is great at sense of place, and gives an impressive feel for the college, its resident priests and the assorted others that are thrown into what amounts to a traditional country house murder in a much more interesting setting. The book is unnecessarily long at over 500 pages, but I hardly ever felt it was ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from September 2015 In the book I was writing when this post was written ( Dice World ) I considered the relationship of the arrow of time to entropy, the measure of the disorder in a system that comes out of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy can be calculated by looking at the number of different ways to arrange the components that make up a system. The more ways there are to arrange them, the greater the entropy. As an example of why this is the case, I was talking about the letters that go together to make up that book, and the very specific arrangement of them required to be that actual book. Assuming that there will be about 500,000 characters including spaces in the book by the time it's finished, then there are 500,000! ways of arranging those characters. That's 500,000 factorial, which is 500,000x499,999x499,998x499,997... - rather a big number. It's not practical to calculate the number exactly, but there are approximation ...

As a big fan of UK-based urban fantasy, I'm always on the lookout for something new:  Fiends in High Places promised to deliver that difficult combination of urban fantasy and humour. It has some engaging points - but on the whole doesn't quite make it. In D. C. Farmer's world there is a small establishment that tries to operate as an immigration control for fae - creatures from other intersecting realities, often with magical abilities. The central character Matt Danmor is thrust into this unseen world when he witnesses an attempt to sacrifice one of those in control of immigration and gradually discovers that he is, himself, not just an ordinary person on the street (after falling in love with the would-be sacrifice's niece). Unfortunately, the humour is heavy handed. At one point, for example, our hero (accompanied by a sweary talking vulture) travels to an alternate world where shops include Bloops (the apothecary), Harpy Nix, Herods, Starstrucks, Mage & Septre...

It is somehow appropriate that I read this as as result of listening to a podcast where two of the contributors debated whether the BBC was biased. The book stresses both the need for the Beeb to change in the face of a changing media landscape, what that change should be, and how the BBC should be funded. Like most books comprising a whole list of essays from different contributors there is inevitably both conflict and overlap. And a handful of the contributions were dull corporate speak. Nonetheless there was plenty of genuinely engaging content for anyone who wants the BBC to exist but realises it needs fundamental change. It was certainly interesting to see how the same problems could result in very different suggested solutions as pros and cons were discussed of subscription and taxation, hybrid or otherwise, and even some genuinely original suggestions like building a BBC AI that would act as the interface to its material. The only major irritation I had as an older person who o...