Archive of posts

Reverse chronological archive of posts on this blog

• A wearable robot – computer-powered exoskeletons
• The Knights Templar Cipher
• DoodleDraw a snowflake
• Lego Computer Science: sequence, selection and iteration
• Unicode Poo
• Instant 3×3 Magic Squares
• Synthetic Speech
• Film Futures: A Christmas Carol
• Hear and … their magic square
• Sounding out a Sensory Garden
• Film Futures (Christmas Special): Elf
• Scéalextric Stories
• Tony Stockman: Sonification
• Clapping Music
• The Machine Stops: a review
• Going Postal: A review
• The Alien Cookbook
• Shh! Can you hear that diagram?
• Jerry Elliot High Eagle: Saving Apollo 13
• Service Model: a review
• Crystal ball coupons – what your data might be giving away
• Hacking DNA
• Password strength and information entropy
• The robot always wins
• He attacked me with a dictionary!
• Ninja White Hat Hacking
• RADAR winning the Battle of Britain
• Transitional Automaton: a poem
• Sea sounds sink ships
• Shouting at Memory: Where Did My Write Go?
• AI owes us an explanation
• Perceptrons and the AI winter
• Lego Computer Science: Algorithms and computational agents
• Mary and Eliza Edwards: the mother and daughter human computers
• The Digital Seabed: Data in Augmented Reality
• An experiment in buoyancy
• Ammonite propulsion of underwater robots
• Film Futures: The Lord of the Rings
• Why do we still have lighthouses?
• The first Internet concert
• Let the brain take the strain
• Margaret Hamilton: Apollo Emergency! Take a deep breath, hold your nerve and count to 5
• Pots fixing problematic acoustics
• You cannot be serious! …Wimbledon line calls go wrong
• An AI Oppenheimer Moment?
• Dr Who? Dr You???
• How did the zebra get its stripes?
• If you go down to the woods today…
• The Sweet Learning Computer: Learning Ladder
• Signing Glasses
• Sign Language for Train Departures
• Was the first computer a ‘Bombe’?
• Delia Derbyshire: Say it sounds like singing
• The virtual Jedi
• Bits with Soul (via a puzzle)
• Film Futures: Brassed Off
• Designing a planet’s road network
• Film Futures: Tsotsi
• Annie Easley: putting rockets into space
• Torchwood: in need of some backup
• Moon and Mind-Body Dualism
• Bank holiday bunting!
• Robot runners
• Anne-Marie Imafidon’s STEMettes
• The CS4FN Easter Egg Hunt
• Bullseye! Mark Rober’s intelligent dart board
• A Sea Hero Quest to understand our navigation skills
• Robert Weitbrecht and his telecommunication device for the deaf
• Debugging your sandwich maker
• Making mistakes creatively – putting error messages to good use
• You wouldn’t fall for that, would you?
• Always check the text before sending to print!
• Super-plant supercapacitors
• The wrong trousers? Not any more!
• Language-mangling rude word filters
• Google’s “PigeonRank” and arty-pigeon intelligence
• I’m (not) a little teapot
• Broadband, by carrier pigeon
• Music-making mates for Mortimer
• Philippa Gardner bringing law and order to a wild west
• Soft squidgy robots
• An Wang’s magnetic memory
• Aaron and the art of art
• Sue Sentance: Teaching the world to program
• Ancient Egyptian Numerals
• Hiroshi Kawano and his AI abstract artist
• Piet Mondrian and Image Representation
• Maria Cunitz: astronomer and algorithmic thinker
• Maria Kirch: human computer of the 1600s and 1700s
• ELIZA: the first chatbot to fool people
• Dina St Johnston: Kickstarting a software industry
• The logic behind syntactic sugar
• Turn Right in Tenejapa
• Peter Landin: Elegance from Logic
• A puzzle, spies … and a beheading
• Designing an interactive prayer mat
• A sound social venture: recognising birds
• Oh no! Not again…
• I wandered lonely as a mass of dejected vapour – try some AI poetry
• Conjuring with logic: the remote control red-black mind meld
• Adrian Stokes: Internet pioneer
• Herman Hollerith: from punch cards to a special company
• A handshaking puzzle
• Tanaka Atsuko: an electric dress
• Electric Dreams and Solid Light at the Tate Modern
• My first signs
• Join the crowd with swarm intelligence
• Nemisindo: breaking the sound barrier
• The logic piano
• Mike Lynch: sequencing success
• Superhero Syllogisms
• Eating at Quonk: a tough puzzle?
• From a handful of sand to a fistful of dollars
• To be (CEO) or not to be (CEO)
• The Blue Planet?
• Mixing Research with Entrepreneurship: Find a need and solve it
• Avoiding loneliness with StudyBuddy
• Why is your Internet so slow?
• Global Entrepreneurship Week
• Wanna Be A Rock Star?
• The illusion of good software design
• Marc Hannah and the graphics pipeline
• Claude Shannon: Inventing for the fun of it
• The logic of Queens
• Byte Queens
• Sonifying zebrafish biology
• Solving Railway Timetabling Problems with Data Visualisation
• This quantum message will self-destruct in 10 seconds…
• The Teleporting Robot
• Cooking up computer style
• Ask About Asthma
• Working in Computer Science: An Autistic Perspective (Part 2)
• Working in Computer Science: An Autistic Perspective (Part 1)
• Scilly cable antics
• Sarah Angliss: Hugo is no song bird
• Bank holiday fun: website whimsy, and try your hand at making 3D pictures
• Much ado about nothing
• Double or nothing: an extra copy of your software, just in case
• Navajo Code Talkers
• Involving disabled people in the design of ICT tools and devices
• Finding work experience, or a job in computer science
• Photogrammetry for fun, preservation and research
• Music & Computing: TouchKeys: getting more from your keyboard
• Joyce Weisbecker: a teenager the first indie games developer?
• Happy #WorldEmojiDay 2024 – here’s an emoji film quiz & some computer science history
• Art Touch and Talk Tour Tech
• Accessible Technology in the Voting Booth
• The basics of Quantum Computing: Qubits
• Gutta-Percha: how a tree launched a global telecom revolution
• Even the dolphins use pocket switched networks!
• NASA’s interstellar probe Voyager 1 went silent until computer scientists transmitted a fix that had to travel 15 billion miles!
• Coordinate conundrum puzzles and vector graphics
• Mary Ann Horton and the invention of email attachments
• From Egyptian Survey puzzles to computational thinking
• Pac-Man and Games for Girls
• The invisible dice mystery – a magic trick underpinned by computing and maths
• T. V. Raman and his virtual guide dogs
• Designing for autistic people
• Can you trust a smile?
• Testing AIs in Minecraft
• Computers that read emotions
• Neurodiversity and what it takes to be a good programmer
• The top 10 bugs
• Do something computationally funny for money
• Calculating Pi for Pi Day
• Could AI end science?
• Find your own time zone
• The Social Machine of Maths
• Software for Justice
• Designing robots that care
• A visit to the Turing Machine: a short story
• Lego Computer Science: Turing Machines Part 3: the program
• AMPER: AI helping future you remember past you
• Lego Computer Science: Turing Machines Part 2: the controller
• Lego Computer Science: Turing Machines Part 1: the tape
• Singing bird – a human choir, singing birdsong
• Eggheads: helping us to visualise objects and classes
• Ethics – What would you do?
• Collaborative community coding & curating
• CS4FN Advent Calendar – Day 25 bonus Christmas crackers: have you ever seen this cracker joke?
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 25: Merry Christmas! Today’s post is about the ‘wood computer’
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 24: Santa’s Sleigh – track its progress through the skies
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 23: Bonus material – see “Santa’s sleigh” flying overhead
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 23: Father Christmas – checking his list, spotting the errors
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 22: wreaths and rope memory – weave your own space age computer
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 21: stars and celestial navigation
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 20: where’s it @? Gift tags and internet addresses
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 19: jingle bells or warning bells? Avoiding computer scams
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 18: cracker or hacker? Cyber security
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 17: pocket-switching networked reindeer
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 16: candy cane or walking aid: designing for everyone, human computer interaction
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 15: a candle: optical fibre, optical illusions
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 14: Why is your internet so slow + a festive kriss-kross puzzle
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 13: woolly hat: warming versus cooling
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 12: Computer Memory – Molecules and Memristors
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 11: the proof of the pudding… mathematical proof
• Virtual reality goggles for mice
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 10: #AI – Holly, Ivy and Alexa – chatbots & the useful skill of file management. Plus win at noughts and crosses
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 9: gingerbread man – computing and ‘food’ (cookies, spam!), and a puzzle
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 8: gifts, and wrapping – Tim Berners-Lee, Right to Repair & another computing puzzle
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 7: Computing for the birds: dawn chorus, birds as data carriers and a Google April Fool (plus a puzzle!)
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 6: patterned bauble: tracing patterns in computing – printed circuit boards, spotting links and a puzzle for tourists
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 5: snowman: analog hydraulic computers (aka water computers), digital compression, and a puzzle
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 4: Ice skate: detecting neutrinos at the South Pole, figure-skating motion capture, Frozen and a puzzle
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 3: snowflakes – make your own six-sided HexaHexaFlexagon with our templates
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 2: Pairs: mittens, gloves, pair programming, magic tricks
• CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 1: Woolly jumpers, knitting and coding
• Cartoons, comics and computer games – Ada Lovelace’s graphic novel
• Blade: the emotional computer.
• Exploring mazes, inventing algorithms (part I) 
• Why the Romans were pants at maths
• Beheading Hero’s mechanical horse
• How far can you hear? Modelling distant birdsong.
• Threads & Yarns – textiles and electronics
• 3D models in motion
• Frequency Analysis for Fun
• Keeping secrets on the Internet – encryption keeps your data safe
• Composing from Compression
• Balls, beams and quantum computers – performing calculations with patterns of light
• Getting off the beach, fast
• “A mob for the Earth”
• Competitive Zen
• Pit-stop heart surgery
• Cyber Security at the movies: Rogue one (Part II: Authentication)
• Happy World Emoji Day – 📅 17 July 2023 – how people use emoji to communicate and what it tells us about them 😀
• Cyber Security at the movies: Rogue one (Part I: Physical Security)
• When a chatbot acts as your “trusted” agent …
• Nurses in the mist
• Negligent nurses? Or dodgy digital? – device design can unintentionally mask errors
• Screaming Headline Kills!!!
• Putting your hand up a cow’s bottom
• Bitten blue
• Creating great game worlds
• Hallucinating chatbots
• Protecting your fridge
• The gender shades audit
• Playing the weighting game
• Collecting mini-beasts and pocket monsters
• “Tlahcuilo”, a visual composer
• Follow those ants
• The first computer wizard
• A Godlike Heart
• Mary Clem: getting it right
• Black in Data
• Reclaim your name
• Al-Jazari: the father of robotics
• Mark Dean: A PC Success
• In space no one can hear you …
• The last piece of the continental drift puzzle
• Digital lollipop: no calories, just electronics!
• The tale of the mote and the petrel
• Fran Allen: Smart Translation
• A gendered timeline of technology
• Operational Transformation
• Engineering a cloak of invisibility: manipulating light with metamaterials
• Alexander Graham Bell: It’s good to talk
• Manufacturing Magic
• Solving problems you care about
• Sameena Shah: News you can trust
• Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe
• Stretching your keyboard – getting more out of QWERTY
• Is ChatGPT’s “CS4FN” article good enough?
• Understanding Parties
• A machine wrote this post – OpenAi’s ChatGPT
• Mood Gloves
• What the real Pros say
• Susan Kare: Icon Draw
• Celebrating Jean Bartik: 1940s programmer
• What’s that bird? Ask your phone – birdsong-recognition apps
• Inspiring Wendy Hall
• Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays
• Marissa Mayer: Lemons Linking 41 Shades of Blue – A/B Testing
• Opinions, Opinions, Opinions
• Joyce Wheeler: The Life of a Star
• The Devil is in the Detail: Lessons from Animal Welfare? (Temple Grandin)
• Ingrid Daubechies: Wiggly lines help catching crime
• Mark Dean: An Inspiration
• 100,000 frames – quick draw: how computers help animators create
• Edie Schlain Windsor and same sex marriage
• Understanding matters of the heart – creating accurate computer models of human organs
• The Dark History of Algorithms
• Lego Computer Science: Logic with Truth Tables
• Lego Computer Science: Truth Tables
• Jacquie Lawson: the multi-million pound greeting
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: tautology and truth tables
• Alan Turing’s life
• Cognitive crash dummies
• Chatbot or Cheatbot?
• Daphne Oram: the dawn of music humans can’t play
• Kimberly Bryant: Black Girls Code
• Bringing people closer when they’re far away
• Hedy Lamarr: The movie star, the piano player and the torpedo
• Gary Starkweather: the laser printer and colour management
• Lynn Conway: revolutionising chip design
• Sorry to bug you: Grace Hopper
• The first computer music
• Swat a way to drive
• Future Friendly: Focus on Kerstin Dautenhahn
• The last speaker
• The joke Turing test
• The Chinese room: zombie attack!
• The paranoid program
• How does Santa do it?
• Pepper’s Ghost: an 1860s illusion used in ‘head-up displays’
• Making sense of squishiness – 3D modelling the natural world
• Watching whales well – the travelling salesman problem
• Recognising (and addressing) bias in facial recognition tech #BlackHistoryMonth
• Happy Hallowe’en
• Devices that work for everyone
• Facing up to ALL faces
• Hidden Figures: NASA’s brilliant calculators
• Writing together: Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis
• Mark Dean: An Inspiration
• Freddie Figgers – the abandoned baby who became a runaway telecom tech star
• Gladys West: Where’s my satellite? Where’s my child?
• Kakuro, Logic and Computer Science
• Cold hard complexity: learning to talk in nature’s language
• Love your data
• Delicious computing
• Hiding in Skype
• Naked Mole-Rats Go Digital – monitoring colonies remotely (while respecting their privacy)
• The heart of an Arabic programming language
• Escape from Egypt
• Chocoholic Subtraction
• Chocolate Turing Machines (edible computing)
• Microwave health check
• Microwave Racing
• Can a computer tell a good story?
• Patterns for Sharing
• Your own electrical sea
• Playing Bridge, but not as we know it – the sound of the Human Harp
• Strictly Judging Objects
• Cryptography: You are what you know
• Cryptography: Shafi Goldwasser and the Zero Knowledge Proof
• The First Law of Humans
• Dressing it up
• The Mummy in an AI world: Jane Webb’s future
• The naked robot
• Lego computer science: What is computation? (simple cellular automata)
• Shirts that keep score
• More Encrypted Deckchairs
• Full metal jacket: the fashion of Iron Man
• Lego computer science: binary
• Let buttons be buttons
• Encrypted Deckchairs
• Back (page) to the drawing board
• Tempest Prognosticator: look out, leeches!
• Quipu: tie a knot in it
• Bullseye! The intelligent dart board
• The Ultimate (do nothing) machine
• Simone Giertz: A pat on the shoulder
• Christopher Strachey and the secret of being a Wizard Debugger
• Sophie Wilson: Where would feeding cows take you?
• The Hive at Kew
• The beach, the missionary and my origin myth
• Hoverflies: comin’ to get ya
• Edge-notched cards and relational databases
• The Wood Computer
• Babbage’s barrels
• Ada and the music machine
• Ant Art
• Ant Track Algorithms
• Diamond Dogs: Bowie’s algorithmic creativity
• The algorithm that could not speak its name
• I Ching binary
• Predicting the future: marble runs, binary and the I Ching
• Mary Coombs, teashops and Leo the computer
• A custard computer
• The taming of the screw
• Quicksilver memory
• A storm in a bell jar
• Pass the screwdriver, Igor
• Babbage’s triumph over brutal reality
• Nikola Tesla: the invisible genius
• Babbage’s Adders
• Making core rope memory
• Core rope memory
• An ode to technology
• Swallow a slug-bot to catch a …
• “The thundering engines vibrate throughout your body”
• If the Beagle had landed…
• Fencing the moon
• Ada Lovelace in her own words
• Dickens knitting in code
• Understanding Ultron: A Turing test for world domination
• April Fooling with computing – IP over avian carriers, PigeonRank
• A Wookie for three minutes please
• The cure that just folds away
• Executable Biology
• Lego computer science: Gray code
• Lego computer science: representing numbers using position
• Lego computer science: representing numbers
• Lego computer science: compression algorithms
• Lego computer science: pixel pictures
• CS4FN Advent Calendar – bonus material: HexaFestiveFlexagons to make and colour in
• Meet the chatbots
• How to get a head in robotics
• The machines can translate now
• Letters from the Victorian Smog: Braille: binary, bits & bytes
• Only the fittest slogans survive!
• What are birds actually saying?
• Stopping sounds getting left behind: the Bela computer
• Ada Lovelace: Visionary
• I know where your cat lives
• The red sock of doom – trying to catch mistakes before they happen
• Playing Tantrix: P=NP?
• Emoticons and Emotions
• Knitters and Coders: separated at birth?
• Die another Day? Or How Madonna crashed the Internet
• The Emoji Crystal Ball
• Back (page) to health
• Gadgets based on works of fiction
• How do you solve a problem like arthritis?
• Are you there yet?
• So, so tired…
• Is your healthcare algorithm racist?
• Solving real problems with Bayesian networks
• Diagnose? Delay delivery? Decisions, decisions. Decisions about diabetes in pregnancy
• Bayes’ theorem as an algorithm
• Cloudy with a chance of pain
• A simple Bayesian network for having a virus
• Here
• A graphical explanation of Bayes theorem
• What are the chances of that? The church minister’s hobby and clever machines
• The ping pong vaccination programming challenge
• Smart health: decisions, decisions, decisions
• I’m feeling Moo-dy today
• Standup Robots
• Sabine Hauert: Swarm Engineer
• What’s on your mind?
• In a New York nanosecond
• Hiding in Elizabethan Binary
• The optical pony express
• Smart bags
• Punk robots learn to pogo
• The computer vs the casino: Wearable tech cheating
• Sick tattoos
• One in the eye for wearable tech
• Smart tablets (to swallow)
• i-pickpocket
• AI Detecting the Scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls
• Losing the match? Follow the science. Change the kit!
• DragonflyAI: I see what you see
• Studying Comedy with Computers
• Every Breath You Take: Reclaim the Internet
• Why would you accept inefficiency?
• The Cyber-Security Honeypot
• The very first computers
• A recipe for programming
• Florence Nightingale: rebel with a cause
• The Tactful Watch
• HMS Belfast: destroying the destroyer
• Machines Inventing Musical Instruments
• Return of the killer robot? Evil scientist?! Helpless woman?!?
• Who invented Morse code?
• Cyber Security at the Movies: Guardians of the Galaxy (Fail Secure security)