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I set myself the task of writing about a fictional character for this blog post, so this post is about Jackson X. His surname isn’t really X, it’s just one of the details about him that I haven’t fleshed out yet. This is because Jackson X is the one of the protagonists of the novel I’m (not) writing.

We hear a lot about our rights but these are given to us in return for fulfilling our responsibilities. One of these is engagement in the democratic process, and in particular voting. You should register to vote, that’s a no brainer. You should take an interest in what politics means for you locally, nationally, and internationally. On the day you to get to the polling station and cast your vote. Then you need to hold you representative accountable afterwards, even if he or she isn’t the person you voted for.

Album Digest January 2015 rounds up a few albums from the tail end of 2014 that I didn't get much time to write about. The only one of these six to be released this month is the excellent "No Cities To Love" by Sleater-Kinney.

One of the first lines of "The House That Guilt Built", the soft cricket-laden lament that opens The Meadowlands by The Wrens, is "I'm nowhere near where I thought I'd be". The last line of the whole album is "this is not what you had planned". These bookending lines set the tone for this shimmering, ramshackle masterpiece - a fatigue and careworn pride in failing to meet impossible standards writ large over its first and last eighty or so seconds. "The Meadowlands" is probably the best record you've never heard, and once you have heard it, you will never be the same. Even better, it changes and you change with every single listen. If you're living your life and you really mean it, then this is the record for you.

Feersum Endjinn is one of Iain Banks' few non-Culture sci-fi novels. Like the Culture novels, an existential crisis drives the plot: in this case the action takes place on Earth in the far future and the sun has aged to a point where it will grow and swallow the earth. This is referred to as the Encroachment. The characters are divided between the good guys who seek to find a solution for the greater good and bad guys who use the Encroachment to consolidate their power and influence.

Just a brief message to wish everyone a happy new year. Getting my flat connected to the internet continues to be a trial so it's still not as easy to post as I would like. However, I have some workarounds now and I hope to write (and post) more often from now on.

Overlong reflection upon the past is one sure way to make yourself unhappy so I try to avoid it. Nevertheless it becomes unavoidable at this time of year, especially if, like me, you are somewhat prone to reflection.

I recently started a new job and moved in to a new flat. This means I'm too busy to write any long blog posts at the moment. Also I'm still not quite at home there, so I tend to spend my evenings tidying up or setting up new things. It's a shame because I have plenty of things to write about (even without observations on moving, starting a new job, etc) but I guess the writing will happen eventually...

This is a longer form post about artificial intelligence inspired by reading a little bit of "The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace and putting a picture of a "ghost" up on Instagram. This might be the last of these that I'm able to write for a while.

Album Digest September 2014 contains four amazing albums, including the long-awaited return from the Aphex Twin, and an album from Cymbals Eat Guitars released about a week after I wondered what had happened to them. Spooky. Rounding out the selection this month are a cool punky-disco album by The Juan Maclean and a truly remarkable offering by Vessel.

This post deals with how to generate random numbers in R. It is good to know how to generate random numbers with a particular language or software package for at least one of the following three reasons:

I recently finished reading All The Birds, Singing, the second novel by Evie Wyld. It’s about a woman called Jake who lives alone on a farm with a dog called Dog on an island somewhere off the coast of Britain. She has sheep to look after but something keeps coming in the middle of the night to kill them.