Mssv

I finished watching Life on Mars a few weeks ago, and have become mildly obsessed with it. This tends to happen with any good book, TV show or movie that I see - I end up wanting to use elements in games or other projects, until the next shiny thing comes along.
After a few beers […]

A phenomenon well-known by psychologists, and pretty much everyone else, is called ‘tip of the tongue’, and it’s described in this American Scientist article:
When we have something to say, we first retrieve the correct words from memory, then execute the steps for producing the word. When these cognitive processes don’t mesh smoothly, conversation stops.
Suppose you […]

One of the many sad results of Perplex City being put ‘on hold’ is that I can’t explore the effect of cognitive enhancement on society. As a former neuroscientist who studied experimental psychology at university, I always enjoyed writing about my pet fictional company, Cognivia, and its range of cognitive enhancements including Ceretin (wide-spectrum enhancement), […]

Naomi Alderman, Perplex City lead writer, author of Disobedience, etc, wrote an article in the Sunday Times about the future of books. I’ve talked to Naomi often about eBooks and was quoted in the article:
Imagine, for example, a novel designed to take advantage of the features of the new must-have geek hipster accessory: the […]

Imagine a device, similar in appearance to the iPhone, that you could point at a street sign in a foreign language, and it would display that sign on the screen - translated. I described this dream device to some friends a few weeks ago, explaining that there was nothing technically insurmountable about it - optical […]

The acronym TTS is well known among those who develop call centre software, GPS car navigation devices and software for the blind. It means ‘Text To Speech’, and is more commonly known as voice synthesis, such as the conversion of written text (e.g. ‘Take the first turn on the left into Coronation Street’) into a […]

This is almost exactly a year late, but Vernor Vinge, one of my favourite SF authors and perhaps the most insightful prognosticator I know of, gave the keynote lecture at the Austin Games Conference in 2006. He covers so much ground in the lecture that I suspect he lost a few people not familiar with […]

The device that set off such a furore on this blog about The Death of Publishers and also resulted in a feature in the Bookseller has finally arrived in my hands. While I’ve only been using it for a week, I think it would be useful to share some first impressions of the Sony Reader […]

Update: Virginie Clayssen has done a wonderful French translation of this post on her weblog teXtes. 
Adrian Buys an eBook Reader
A couple of weeks ago, I idly visited mobileread.com and discovered something incredible - Tiger Direct in the US were selling Sony eReaders for $100, a discount of $250. Thanks to the rampaging power of the […]

Several months ago, I read about a project at Media Lab Europe that showed a lot of promise (I was shocked as anyone else) - Amble Time. Amble Time basically factors time into geographical maps, telling you where you could walk in a certain amount of time.
By using a GPS system and your average walking […]