iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Got started on @edconway.bsky.social's fascinating "Trade World" this afternoon, after enjoying the pre-publication posts at edconway.substack.com. (Now hungry for French sourdough, and still surprised at the round trip that British fish makes via China on its way to becoming British fish fingers.)

Cover of "Trade World" by Ed Conway. The cover image shows a container ship with containers labelled "bread", "clothes", and "cars".

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Pea and ham soup always meant Finnish "hernekeitto" to me. But in Heston Blumenthal's "Is This a Cook Book?", I find a pea and ham soup-in-a-sandwich - filled with fresh petit pois bound with creme fraiche, topped with shredded smoked ham hock - which also looks tasty!

A tin of Jalostaja Finnish pea and ham soup.

A photograph of pea and ham soup-in-a-sandwich from Heston Blumenthal's "Is This a Cook Book?" - a sandwich filled with a mixture of peas and creme fraiche, topped with pulled/shredded ham hock.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Another visualisation using MapSplit: the UK split into east-west bands based on population deciles (10% bands). (Data and map based on puntofisso.net/MapSplit/ from @puntofisso.bsky.social - decile bands added to image manually.)

Map of the UK split into east-west bands based on population deciles (10% bands), using data and a base map from MapSplit.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

MapSplit is interesting: an interactive web page where you drag a line wherever you like across the UK and see what percentage of the population is on either side (or explore other datasets or load your own) - from @puntofisso.bsky.social puntofisso.net/MapSplit/

Map of UK with a north-south line showing the line where c.50% of the population is either side - running approximately between the Isle of Wight and Newcastle upon Tyne. Generated by https://puntofisso.net/MapSplit/

Map of UK with a east-west line showing the line where c.50% of the population is either side - running approximately through Birmingham. Generated by https://puntofisso.net/MapSplit/

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I remember seeing #Forth for the Sinclair #ZX81 on shop shelves alongside the cassettes of computer games back in the early 1980s, but never spent my pocket money on it...

Tape inlay for Forth on the ZX81.

Cover image: abstract cubes and spheres, with mountains in background.

Back text:

"The language of Forth combines the simplicity of Basic with the speed of Machine Code. This compact compiled code multiplies your program speed by ten and your virtual memory by four.

The power of Forth comes from its unusual philosophy, which allows you to add new functions (called Words in Forth) to the language in order to match it to whatever you want it to do. In other words you use Forth to define your own language."

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I'd read about Reverse Polish Notation in the Usborne "Pocket Calculator Book" (by John Lewis, 1982), thought it sounded curious at the time (although once I learned about stacks as a data structure, the idea made more sense...), but have never come across a calculator which used it!

Extract from the Usborne "Pocket Calculator Book" (by John Lewis, 1982).

"Some calculators have no = key. These have an unusual system for entering numbers called Reverse Polish Notation (it was invented by a Polish mathematician). You enter all the numbers first, pressing a key marked "enter" after each number, then you press the appropriate function key."

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Of course, classic "Dragon Books" would be the textbooks "Principles of Compiler Design" (1977) and "Compilers: Principles, Techniques & Tools" (1986, 2006) by Aho, Ullman, Sethi, and Lam, with the editions distinguished by dragons which are colour coded for your convenience.

Cover of of "Principles of Compiler Design" (Aho and Ullman, 1977): a green dragon labelled "complexity of compiler design" fights a knight whose armour and lance are labelled with compiler engineering techniques

Cover of first edition of "Compilers: Principles, Techniques & Tools" (Aho, Sethi, and Ullman, 1986): a red dragon labelled "complexity of compiler design" looks through a monitor screen at a knight whose armour and weapons are labelled with compiler engineering techniques

Cover of second edition of "Compilers: Principles, Techniques & Tools" (Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman, 2006): a purple dragon labelled "complexity of compiler design" fights a knight whose armour and weapons are labelled with compiler engineering techniques

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

The 1980s programming book I had and remember best featuring a dragon was the Usborne "Write Your Own Adventure Programs" (Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth, 1983) - now freely released along with other Usborne programming books (from which I first learned to program) at usborne.com/gb/books/com...

Cover of "Write Your Own Adventure Programs" (Tyler and Howarth, 1983): a knight in armour fights a fire-breathing dragon. (The cover states it has program listings for Spectrum (48K), TRS-80, Apple, Dragon, Vic, ZX81, Oric, BBC, & PET)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

When the cinema in St Albans reopened 12 years ago, it was named after the 1968 science fiction classic from Stanley Kubrick (who lived at nearby Childwickbury Manor) - so now, it will be possible to see #TheOdyssey at The Odyssey!

Photograph of the Odyssey cinema in St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

London this summer has #Escher at Somerset House and #Bach at the Proms (including the fantastic Mass in B minor) - but without anything for mathematician and logician #Gödel, some might think it's somehow... Incomplete? #Hofstadter

"Relativity" (1953) by M.C. Escher - from Somerset House exhibition page https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/mc-escher-the-exhibition

Cover of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

"Slide rules - anyone still use them?" on Hacker News reminded me of children's maths/puzzle book "Nut-Crackers" (1971) I once had, with cut-out paper slide rule at the back. And I now spot it was an early book (the first?) from subsequently prolific mathematician & writer Ian Stewart!

Cover of "Nut-Crackers" by John Jaworski and Ian Stewart (1971). Cover illustration: a water-wheel is driven by an endless stream in an impossible ever-descending channel.

Page from "Nut-Crackers" by Jaworski and Stewart, with a slide rule to cut out, with a range of 1-50 on each paper strip.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

My own copy of The British General Election of 2024 arrived today - and the back cover recalls the surprising, rainy May afternoon which started it all.

Back cover of The British General Election of 2024, including a photo of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling the election at Downing Street in heavy rain.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Polya's "How To Solve It" has related method under generic name "Variation Of The Problem": reduce it to a simple/degenerate case with known answer, to identify characteristics of general solution. E.g. for volume of a pyramid frustum, set the top to zero (pyramid!) or to match the bottom (prism!)

Frustum of a square pyramid. A pyramid frustum is the three-dimensional shape that remains after the top part of a pyramid is cut off by a plane parallel to its base.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usech_kvadrat_piramid.png)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Enjoying John Caird's "Theatre Craft", a hefty A-Z on working as a director. I don't expect to be directing a play (or doing any more than sitting in a theatre watching one!), but liking the insights on how it all works, run through with entertaining anecdotes and dry humour. #theatre #books

Cover of "Theatre Craft: A Director's Practical Companion from A to Z" by John Caird

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Now curious about how the #Sinclair #ZX81 managed screen memory, after manual's warning that filling whole screen black would exhaust the store of a machine without expanded memory (i.e. the wobbly RAM pack). Retrocomputing Stack Exchange explains: retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/79...

From the ZX81 BASIC Programming manual: "Make a cheese nibbler by altering the measles program so that it first fills the screen with black (a black square is an inverse video space), & then unplots random points, if you have only 1K of memory - that is to say, the standard machine without any extra memory, - you will find yourself running out of store, so you will have to fix the program so that it only uses part of the screen."

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

My first "graphics programming" was the "measles" program from the Sinclair ZX81 Basic Programming manual (64 x 44 pixels - and you could have any colour you wanted as long as it was black).

Example code from ZX81 BASIC Programming manual. "Try this measles program: [code omitted] THis plots a random point each time you press NEWLINE."

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

I recall "Complete BBC Computer User Handbook" (1989) had a few pages on computerising an office/workplace, but forget what it covered. The book (fascinating compendium - wish I still had my copy!) also had overview of popular software for the BBC family. www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6642/The...

Cover of "The Complete BBC Computer User Handbook" by Dr John Lockley and Douglas Tate

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

"Micro User" (for BBC/Acorn machines) had checksums with its type-in listings to help catch typos. In Apr 1988 they had a (mercifully short) program claiming to reverse the process: you could enter the checksums for it to convert back to a program. But the output with the test data... "APRIL FOOL"

April Fool "Checksum converter" program listing from Micro User magazine - April 1988.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Some more sophisticated version control in shared documents would be nice in principle, but making that simple, intuitive, and predictable feels a Hard problem - and I don't think offices are ready for industrial-strength "git"-style versioning when people just want to write a simple Word document!

XKCD cartoon "Git": https://xkcd.com/1597/ . Two people are at a computer.
- "This is Git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model"
- "Cool. How do we use it?"
- "No idea. Just memorise these shell commands and type them to sync up. If you get errors, save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy."

Original XKCD alt text: If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of "It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as..." and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Looking at Spotify playlists curated for boardgames after finding suitably tranquil music for "Dorfromantik". Pleasant historical European-esque themes fit many winners of "Spiel des Jahres" award; "Codenames" gets classic spy music; and railway game "Ticket to Ride" avoids obvious Beatles track...

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Another trend I think I've noticed for Penguin's orange-spined non-fiction: dropping the traditional "what's the book about" from the back, leaving bookshop browser with *only* (often less informative) writer/review quotes for clues. (Examples below, where I prefer the Dennett style.)

Back cover of "Intuition Pump" by Daniel C. Dennett.

"Intelligence, insight and flair... They don't come much bigger than Daniel Dennett". Julian Raggini, Guardian

Thinking is hard. A few of us may be natural geniuses, others are blessed with reserves of willpower. Then there are the rest of us: not prodigies and short on time, but still aspiring to understand the world. What can we do?

Acclaimed thinker Daniel Dennett reveals a collection of his favourite thinking tools, or "intuition pumps". From Occam's Razor to the benefit of mistakes, the 90% rule to avoiding "deepities", this entertaining guide will enable you to tackle life's most fundamental questions - evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will - and teach you to think independently and creatively.

[In addition: quotes from Richard Dawkins, Melvin Konner (Nature), Jennifer Schuessler (The New York Times), Observer, and Daily Beast]

Back cover of "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker.

Quotes from Richard Dawkins, Economist, Dominic Sandbrook (Daily Mail), Fraser Nelson (Spectator), Yuval Noah Harari, and William Davies (Guardian)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Played Carl Wehrle boardgame "Arcs" for the first time. Directing fleets of spaceships, building cities, levying taxes, securing guild support for special abilities (I should have done more of that...) - now I understand the rules, looking forward to another game where I may have more strategy!

Photo of game board for "Arc" from Meeple Mountain review: https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/arcs/

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Reading Adam Bloom's "Finding Your Comic Genius: an in-depth guide to the art of stand-up comedy". I'd gone to a recording of his Radio 4 show "The Problem with Adam Bloom" years ago where he interestingly digressed into the art of *constructing* comedy, so nice to get a lot more of that.

Cover of "Finding Your Comic Genius" by Adam Bloom - the main cover image is a microphone with a light-bulb screw fitting.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Loggins describes instrumental "The Weak and Strong Nuclear Force" as combining "progressive rock, fusion and new age" - despite reminiscent title, very different from Flanders & Swann's thermodynamic "First and Second Law" ("Heat won't pass from a cooler to a hotter... That's entropy, man!")

Cover art for recording of Flanders and Swann show "At the Drop of Another Hat"

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Thought "House of Cards" had been on BBC iPlayer, but seems nothing lasts forever... Search for it now finds 558 episodes of "House of Commons", "Bleak House" for another Andrew Davies adaptation with Ian Richardson - and, curiously, a solitary episode of 1980s Monkhouse quiz show "Bob's Full House"

BBC iPlayer image for "House of Commons"

BBC iPlayer image for "Bleak House" (2005)

BBC iPlayer image for "Bob's Full House"

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Would I be right in guessing you might not recommend adding a *pizza base* under the whole carbonara dish? I've seen this in the supermarket, but haven't ventured to try it...

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 27/08/2024

Nick Payne’s two-hander play "Constellations" features a cosmologist, a bee-keeper, and branching scenes showing the alternative ways their story could have gone. A blog post on drama branching and switching - both there and for another way to see Middle Earth: www.eclecticstacks.com/post/constel...

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 27/08/2024

Our pub quiz ends with jackpot round: one team plays "Play Your Cards Right"-style higher/lower game to win the pot. So I did Monte Carlo analysis in Python to work out the chance of a win (low) & if there is useful strategy beyond the obvious (only a bit): www.eclecticstacks.com/post/play-yo...

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 27/08/2024

On Hanabi, a card game of co-operative counting with scope for intricate and exotically-named strategies (gentleman's discards, trash bluffs, & replay double ignition?) - and its echoes of puzzles with logicians condemned to guess the colour of their hats: www.eclecticstacks.com/post/coopera...

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 27/08/2024

I tried out the Inform 7 interactive fiction tool by implementing Peter Killworth's example MINI adventure in natural English (this isn't 1984's BBC BASIC!), finding interesting language features - and an in-browser playable version - on the way: www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-ad...

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

The game "Humanity" has similarities to 1990s classic "Lemmings", but the graphics are obviously 30 years more impressive :-)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

Started "Humanity", an interesting puzzle game, on the Economist's recommendation. You play a dog, shepherding a stream of humanity across 3D constructs by placing orders across the map, averting their plunge into oblivion and guiding them to their ascension. Review: www.ign.com/articles/hum...

Screenshot from "Humanity", showing the people progressing across the map and following the "turn" instructions.

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