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A Spooky Tale
When I arrived in Cambridge the very first thing I did was join the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR), a society run by SPR member and investigator Tony Cornell, who co-authored one of the best books on poltergeist phenomena. He owned a couple of houses undergoing renovation in Victoria Road in Cambridge and we used them ( Read more... ) -
Causal Closure
For the ancients it was inconceivable that matter could self-organise, any more than sand on the beach at Weston could spontaneously form likenesses of the Spice Girls. An external agency had to be involved, an agency that imparted shape, coherence, dynamism, and purpose. Without this external agency matter would fall back into its natural ( Read more... ) -
Dead Things, Live Things
When a bullet is fired into a forest it knows nothing about the forest. It follows a parabolic trajectory until it hits something, and if it does not hit something, it goes into orbit. It doesn't see the wood, and it certainly doesn't see the trees ( Read more... ) -
Three Pipe Problems
I came back from Steampunk By the Seaside with a renewed determination to crack on with the Intelligent Pith Helmet. I've done a lot of preparatory work - I have charity shop webcams, face tracking, speech recognition, a novel system for scripting speech dialogues, RC servos, passive IR sensing, multicolour LEDs etc etc - but there is a huge amount ( Read more... ) -
Hernia Repair
It has been four weeks since I had my operation to repair an inguinal hernia. I thought I would write down my experience just in case I ever feel like coughing or sneezing again. As there is a 27% lifetime risk for guys, I though this would be of general interest ( Read more... ) -
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Thomas Ligotti has been hailed as a successor to H.P. Lovecraft, though not from any similarity of style or theme. The comparison comes from an intuition that Ligotti has a unique, interior sense of the horrific, the weird and the uncanny that brings to mind the unsettling originality of Lovecraft. He seems to be plugged into the same power conduit ( Read more... ) -
Rebecca
There are few books whose opening lines are as famous as the books themselves. Most people will recognise "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," and "Call me Ishmael". Some will recognise "It was a dark and stormy night", if only from Snoopy's constant attempts to ( Read more... )
