Terry Boon

@terryboon.bsky.social

304 Followers 1595 Following

Games & stories; maths & language; technology & risk; and thoughtful politics & law. Living in London, UK. Views my own, not representative of employer or anyone else, & reposts and follows are not endorsements. Also on Mastodon: @terryboon@hachyderm.io

1968 poster for "2001: A Space Odyssey"
"Relativity" (1953) by M.C. Escher - from Somerset House exhibition page https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/mc-escher-the-exhibition
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.
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.
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)
Cover of "Theatre Craft: A Director's Practical Companion from A to Z" by John Caird
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."
Example code from ZX81 BASIC Programming manual. "Try this measles program: [code omitted] THis plots a random point each time you press NEWLINE."
Cover of "The Complete BBC Computer User Handbook" by Dr John Lockley and Douglas Tate
April Fool "Checksum converter" program listing from Micro User magazine - April 1988.
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.
Box art for "Dorfromantik"
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]
Photo of game board for "Arc" from Meeple Mountain review: https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/arcs/
Cover of "Finding Your Comic Genius" by Adam Bloom - the main cover image is a microphone with a light-bulb screw fitting.
Cover art for recording of Flanders and Swann show "At the Drop of Another Hat"
BBC iPlayer image for "House of Commons"
Screenshot from "Humanity", showing the people progressing across the map and following the "turn" instructions.