Embedded - 281: Tame Geek

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Combining a love of engineering with a love of words, Jenny List (@Jenny_Alto) is a contributing editor at Hackaday (@Hackaday). Jenny’s writing at Hackaday including Debunking the Drone Versus Plane Hysteria and Ooops, Did We Just Close An Airport Over a UFO Sighting? Previously Jenny worked for Oxford English Press working on computational linguistics software. While there she wrote post about the word “hacker”. Elecia has been secretly dreaming of being a lexicographer since reading Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, here with Christopher White. It's been a while since we talked about Hackaday, and we've never talked about what it is like writing for them. To fill that gap, this week we are chatting with Jenny List, Contributing Editor at Hackaday. Hi Jenny, thanks for joining us today. Hello. Could you tell us about yourself? Okay, I'm, as you can probably tell from my accent,

I'm sitting here in the United Kingdom in Oxfordshire. My background, I'm an electronic engineer by training. I ended up not working in electronics i ended up working in the publishing industry um this started with cd-rom multimedia and then computer games sort of working on the technical side of it i progressed through that um sort of i had a stint working in a very very minor way for the major search engine you probably use various web companies i ended up at oxford university press now oxford university press are the publishers of the oxford dictionaries You probably use various web companies. And I ended up at Oxford University Press. Now, Oxford University Press are the publishers of the Oxford Dictionaries. And my job was best described as tame geek for the Oxford Dictionaries.

I wasn't a lexicographer, but I worked in a big room full of very, very clever, very wordy people. One of the most happening places I have ever worked. Some awesome people and i ended up doing writing i wrote for their blog on all sorts of fun things and i ended up doing um uh manipulation of language databases sort of computational linguistic kind of work and eventually i end up moving on from the Oxford Dictionaries and starting out on my own, trying to follow a few lines, which we'll probably talk about in a bit, and almost by accident I saw Hackaday periodically publish one of their We're Hiring things,

and I thought, hey, I've read Hackaday every morning for years. You know, I'll send it, do it with a little piece and send it in. And Mike Stitch practically bit my hand off because I hadn't really appreciated. I'm actually the only electronic engineer who has ever worked for the Oxford Dictionaries and has Oxford Dictionaries trained literacy. There may be other engineers who've worked there since, but I didn't realize I had a pretty unique resume. And so I've gone from, I think that was, was that 2015 or 2016? And from then on in, it's just become something that I spend most of my time doing. And I'm very happy doing it.

Wonderful. So we have this thing called lightning round. Okay. And sometimes we try to theme it appropriate to the guest. So I'm hoping this works out. Are you ready, Christopher? I'm ready. I hope this works. Jenny, you ready? Okay.

Should you quench in oil or quench in water? Water. MIG or TIG welding? MIG. And or power to hammer? uh water mig or tig welding uh mig and or powered hammer uh hand hammer favorite temperature oh that's a difficult one i'll go by i'll go by color sort of yellow heat since we're on a blacksmith kind of theme coal oral or gas? Coal. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Never lose your curiosity. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen?

Oh, I'll certainly start a dozen, and I'll probably never finish any of them. Okay, now on to the longer answers portion. That was actually lightning. That was actually really good. That was the first time in 300 shows. What's a typical work day like for you? Oh, a typical work day for me.

I work from home. And home is a small farm in the British countryside. It's actually the place I grew up. I live with my dad. My dad's getting on in years and it's, I have two sisters and I'm the one who's staying around home. And so there's no commute. I sort of work as I see fit. So I'm sorry for all you people who sort of stagger into offices in the daily grind. I'll sort of wander downstairs and sort of fire up my laptop with a cup of coffee and I'll sort of check Hackaday and I'll probably write us. We have shorter daily stories and longer original content pieces. I'll write a daily story. I'll do my daily scheduling.

I schedule part of the and edit part of the sort of hackaday's output uh so i've depending on sort of what the workload at the moment is i'll have either a very relaxed day sort of moseying around the world of tech or a desperately panicked day because i have a deadline coming up or something. So a typical work day is me sitting around with my laptop with the cat on my knee and I guess doing the kind of stuff that if I worked for a living in an office, if I still worked for OUP, I'd probably do at home anyway if I got paid to do something else, if that sounds right. Yeah, getting paid to do the thing you do anyway.

That's always a nice gig. What I will say about writing for any publication, and I think any journalist in a similar role will agree with me, publications are relentless. So I noticed this with, I mean, i've been a director of a hack space and there were some people who were also involved with the hack space who had 95 jobs and almost at the end of the day they viewed it as their time that they powered down and they would almost not get involved with the hack space or they would at the weekend they wouldn't put the time in because they viewed it as their time whereas with a publication there is never your time because it is relentless you complete one day's scheduling there is instantly

tomorrow's scheduling you can complete one month's worth of articles and you instantly have to be constantly thinking about the next issue i mean i guess the print people publishing a magazine every month they must have a cycle and they're constantly while one's going to press they're thinking about the next one with hackaday it's more constant but in a way it never lets up so it'd be nice to say i have weekends off but obviously one does take weekends, but one is never completely off. One is never completely off work. It's exciting because one's always on the finger on the pulse, but sometimes it feels relentless.

How do you choose what to write? That's a difficult one because for the short pieces, obviously we'll get stuff coming in on the tip line. We will see interesting stuff. We'll have our own sources. We'll see it on social media. We'll see it on blogs. We'll see it places we've seen stuff before.

We'll come up with things. People will send us things. For the longer pieces, we have an editorial meeting once a week where we all sort of brainstorm ideas. We will have things that just occur to us randomly. We will have things that come from personal experience. So, for instance, in your lightning questions, you asked me a bunch of blacksmithing questions. If any listener is unaware and wonders where that came from at the moment i'm doing a

series of pieces on blacksmithing because my dad is a blacksmith he's retired now but i grew up around a blacksmith forge so i'm drawing on that personal experience to write about setting up a small blacksmith's forge and starting blacksmithing as a an inexperienced blacksmith i would hasten to add i am not a hardcore blacksmith i grew up around a working forge and i have the basic skills and the interest but i know blacksmiths they can do amazing stuff and i can't do amazing stuff like they can so i guess it's a mixture of all those things we take our muse wherever we can find it and in a way not having a sort of tired formula means that hackerday can keep itself fresh and that's important the tip line do you do you get pr or do you get press releases we get all sorts of things obviously

we get some spam sort of people you know all the usual spammy things we do get press releases and we get a lot of people within the community submitting their projects um i mean it is hugely obvious whether something is a hackaday story in that we're not going to just regurgitate a press release for something commercial there has to be a hack um i can't think of an instant example but it has to be something that will get our readers interested our readers don't want to see a an endless succession of not very interesting regurgitated commercial products with no hack but if somebody has done something interesting that's a hack and it's a commercial company doing it making a press release then yes we would we'd feature that but it has to be has to have that crucial hack um it's it's a bit of a um uh cliche in our comments uh um uh not a hack uh somebody

considers something isn't hacky enough and it has to it has to pass that basic sort of is it a hack will they post not a hack uh if that makes sense partially oh but what is a hack i mean that means so many different things yeah no it's a there's hackers and and whether is that is that a good thing or bad thing is a hack something that's some about to fall apart or something is it a bodge or is it something clever yeah yeah there are many there are many different sort of uh takes on it i mean you'll see this in hacker spaces some people say oh we're not hackers spaces we're a maker space or whatever um i'm going to return to my um previous employment in the dictionary oh my god this is perfect we've asked the one person who can formally define what hack is.

I can't formally define it in that my lexicographer colleagues would do a far better job than that. But I can say that I've done quite a lot of research. I actually did look and I helped them find antecedent sources. OK, let's start from the beginning. What is the antecedent source for hack? Well, I can tell you exactly where it comes from. It comes from the TEP Model Railroad Club, which is the model railway club at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And in the 1950s, it was the place where all the geeks and the people you now call hackers sort of congregated because they're into model trains

and they made some of the most amazing automated model rail layouts and they coined the term hack for a cool or elegant piece of work um dictionaries some people think of a dictionary they want to be told um a prescriptive dictionary is one where it tells you what the lexicographer thinks it should be so for instance noah webster's original dictionary of american english was a prescriptive dictionary he applied his standards his particular standard was that he wanted to remove evidence of french from the language so that's why for instance uh Brits spell the word color with a U and Americans spell the word color without a U because Noah Webster decided, no, the U is a French influence. I will take this out for American English.

But now dictionaries are descriptive. Like they try not to put their stuff in. Modern lexicography is very different. They will look at how a word is used in the language so they they have a massive corpus which is a huge body of millions of words and they will say right how is hack you so we'll type hack into it and they'll find all the examples they'll say oh it's used so so many percentages in this sense and so many percentages in that sense so if we come back to the tech model round road we would take something closer to their view of the word hack a hack is an elegant or interesting

piece of work i mean in in you may take it as something where you've adapted something to do what it couldn't necessarily have done before or something like that how could they we definitely take that kind of view now of course in course, in the public domain, sorry, in the public sphere, no, public domain is something different. In the public sphere, you'll see hack and hackers being used to something completely different. I mean, in the newspapers, I don't know. I mean, OK, you guys are American, I'm British. If you look in the British newspapers, you will see hacker being used in the tabloid newspapers

to mean computer criminal. And of course, we're not computer criminals um i would take hack to mean an elegant or interesting piece of work in the context of hackaday it's more hardware but you will also see it as in elegant or interesting pieces coding or something so for instance, a particular type of Linux kernel programmer might call themselves a kernel hacker. So yeah, that's definitely how Hackaday sees the word anyway. Okay, so what did it mean to the train club? Was it the same thing did it mean clever workaround yes i think it did um there is somewhere there is a document online from a guy who uh sort of tried to write down the language

in use and he describes in something in those terms um interestingly i found the earliest in print um uh occurrence of the word hacker that i found was in the tech which is mit's newspaper and i think it was from the early 60s might have been 62 or 63 and it's describing a bunch of people as hackers who using the campus deck pdp, I think it was, mini-computer. They set it up to war dial all the numbers in the local area to see if they could find other computers to dial into. And they were described as hackers. Now, the lexicographers want print-published examples, and I instantly, when I found this, sent it off to my lexicographer colleagues.

It's amazing to me that of all the years of doing this stuff and hearing the word hacker and reading it, I didn't know any of this. This is great. Have you written about this? Yes, I have. Now, it's somewhere on the Oxford Dictionaries blog. That will probably be a few years

ago now. It's probably about, oh, I know, 2014 or so, I guess somewhere. But I think i did write about hacker on the oxford dictionaries blog for a very different audience from hacker day it's much more sort of public appreciation of language kind of audience but if you google oxford dictionaries blog you would probably find it and if you did a search so you'd probably find what i wrote now i'm not getting worried what on earth did i write all those years ago? I'm going to be ashamed of it. I doubt it. I love how words are put together. Being able to explain where they come from is just so amazing.

Believe me, working in a dictionary and having lexicographers as colleagues was amazing. They were some of the most happening people I have ever worked with. I read a book by a lexicographer, Corey Stamper, Word by Word. Oh, yes. Yes. And she writes about what it's like actually defining words and how it's not what you think. It's hard and weird and neat. Yes.

I mean, it's not something – I probably can't comment directly on that in that I'm not a lexicographer and I'm not going to take their. I'm not going to sort of effectively assume their mantle because I probably get it wrong anyway. But yes, very much so. It's not the way you think. I certainly wasn't when I learned about how they do it. It was not what I expected before I went into the job um were you a writer or more of an engineer when you started working for the OED um I was more of a web specialist and engineer certainly I mean I wrote I sort of blogged and did things like that, but definitely more of a web specialist. Personally, I like writing.

I mean, I wrote a book. I've written stuff. I must like writing. But most engineers don't. I like writing. I think my interest in language probably comes from I certainly read from a very early age read voraciously um I'd love to say I read sort of highbrow stuff and booker prize winners but no I read trashy novels um but that and listening to um speech radio um and by speech radio i don't mean sort of

shock jock kind of speech radio i mean the bbc bbc radio 4 i mean i think you get a lot of bbc content on is it pbs your speech radio quality speech radio and i big one. NPR, that's the one. NPR, that's the one. You get a lot of Radio 4 content on there, I believe. And if you want to learn the English language at its finest, listen to Radio 4. Radio 4 is the more fun one as opposed to the more newsy one, right? No, it's probably the more news and speech radio yeah i mean yeah cool i didn't expect to be discussing british radio stations okay back to hackaday which is what i used to trick you to come on the show so um let's see

uh we talked about what you choose to write which sounds like it comes from the ether what just happens yes there have yeah no there has there has there has to be something to write about and it's it's terrible there are times sometimes when it all dries up there are times when everybody's back home and wants to play with their soldering iron or whatever and there are times when uh nobody's done anything i believe now one of now is it the thanksgiving holiday after that nobody does anything in this December yeah famine there's this week of famine where everybody's stuffed with turkey or whatever it is and uh or is it independence day holiday? Yeah.

Probably it's 4th of July, isn't it? Yeah. Now my apologies for being a Brit. Um, uh, um, yeah, after that,

of course, you know, they're all, their minds are on other things. Of course they're not hacking. And so we're desperately sort of combing the world for stories. I mean, on other times there are way more stories and we've got a backlog and we're

happy because it's times of plenty. So, yes, it's you are following what's happening at the moment. And so you're never quite certain where the next week's stories are going to come from. But we have such a wonderful community that produces such amazing hacks to write about i mean in a way it's probably best to say this about hackaday and probably other similar sites hackaday isn't about the writers it isn't about me my colleagues mike or whoever it's about its readers and its community. Without our community, we would be nothing. Our community are amazing. I am bowled over.

I've never ceased to be amazed by the incredible things that Hackaday readers can do. Now, I can do stuff. I'm an engineer. I can do a basic level program. I can solder to a reasonably high level. I'm more of an analogue engineer. I can design you a hi level, program. I can solder to a reasonably high level. I can, I'm more of an analog engineer. I can design you a hi-fi to die for.

But the things that Hackaday readers come up with are amazing. The fields in which Hackaday readers work, the experiences which they bring to the comments, never cease to bowl me over. And that's one of the things that keeps me coming back more, really. Are there any skills you wish you could just magically matrix style put in your brain and be able to use every day? Oh, that's interesting. I think tech-wise,

there isn't much you can't learn. If I could have a magic skill, though, it would be to learn languages. And that's not stupid but i mean a lot of wet with a lot of effort with a huge amount of effort i learned i learned french at school and this might sound like an odd choice but it makes sense with a lot of effort i've learned welsh over the last few years bad wel Welsh. If any Welsh listeners are listening, to be in Sherwood, Cymraeg and Wyle Yown,

I speak Welsh really badly. Now, you might think, why Welsh? Well, for a start, it's the other major language of the British Isles. There are, I think, four languages, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic on the island of Great Britain. And it's important as a Brit that, I mean, so many Brits are very insular about, they expect everybody to speak English, and they're particularly bad when they go abroad. And when you are in your neighbouring country of your own country,

it's very rude not to speak the language. your neighbouring country of your own country, it's very rude not to speak the language. And I love Wales as a tourist. So I thought after sort of so many years of visiting, I really need to speak the language. And I'm in a bit of a difficult position at the moment because I'm going to spend a lot more time on the continent, going to hacker camps and the like. And I realised I was spending a lot of the time

in the company of Dutch um company of dutch people and so with lingo i'm you know painfully word by word learning um learning dutch so ixbreken beech in netherlands i speak a bit of dutch but it's teaching you useful phrases like de jongenheft and botterham the boy has a sandwich and what i really want to know is what is the ip range of this network but it's you know it's an important thing if you're dealing with people around the world if you're an anglophone it's too easy to expect everybody to speak your language and often that may be the case but if you make the effort it's amazing how much more you can get about your trips overseas. I like the languages just for themselves. Oh, yes. I mean, the idea, the things you can learn about how other people think because of the way they have puns.

And the words that they have a single word for that English doesn't. And I'm just kind of gobsmacked by, oh, that's a neat concept. We should have that too. Yes, but we have gobsmacked. Is it true? Really a compound word. What I will say about English

is English is very, very good at appropriating loan words. Best. Well, no, it's very true. And you'll sometimes see with other languages that they get very worried about loan words. But I would say loan words are a sign of a very healthy language. English is very healthy because it takes on words. And I know words come from English into other languages,

but if words are coming from English into another language, it means that that language is healthy and it is being used. Yeah, change is critical because the world changes. Yeah, it's evolution. What else have you written for besides Hackaday? I've written for Hackspace magazine. Hackspace magazine is a publication of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. And it is their play into the non-Raspberry Pi maker world.

I don't know if it's available outside the UK. It's only available in the UK, and I think they've marketed it more globally. They also have Magpie, which is a very educationally Raspberry Pi kind of magazine. What is the editorial process like at Hackaday? It sometimes feels like something happens and an hour later there's an article

about it. But I think there's more process than that. Is that right? Well, there are several levels. I mean, a lot of the sort of daily pieces where it's somebody has made something cool, we'll write that up and it will sit in the pile and it will be scheduled by editors to fill slots and try and gauge which slot would be better for a particular thing. A good example, for instance, is the 10 o'clock. OK, our server runs on Pasadena time. So the 10 o'clock in the evening Pasadena time slot is early in the morning uk time and if there was a particularly european slanted story um i can't instantly think of an example but if there was particularly european slanted story we would try to put it in that slot for instance or the one in the morning slot which

might sound like the graveyard shift but it's perfect to catch europeans um then there are other things as you notice yes there are things where it happens and uh it goes out quickly and yes we have a bit of a process for that uh somebody will either notice it write it up and then drop the editor's line saying this one's timely i think you should send this one out and yes oh yes well caught or other times uh mike or one of the editors might see a thing and say so and so you have uh expertise in this area can you write this one up and they will bang it out and we will schedule it as quick as possible in terms of actual editorial work um everything passes by one of the editors for checking english and grammar and spelling and just general fact check not not fact check sorry um look and feel check effectively um that's to ensure a consistent

quality very occasionally we miss something and of course then the commenters so gleefully pounce on it but that's a very important step because we're the best win in the world. We all make spelling mistakes and things. And to keep the quality up, I mean, I certainly make spelling mistakes. I prefer to call them typos. Absolutely. It's the typing's fault. It's the typing's fault.

That's fascinating to me that, you know, I never would have considered that for, you know, a website that's continuously updated, that there would be different times for different audiences. And that makes perfect sense hearing you say it, but it's almost like editions of a newspaper. It's like, well, we have the morning edition about the magical diversity of the Hackaday community. I also want to point out that it's a worldwide community and genuinely worldwide. You know, anywhere there are people who speak English. I know it's a running joke of Brian Benchoff. I think it's Brian Benchoff does a review of the year at some point in January. And he goes on about how many viewers we've had from North Korea. And it's something like one or two or something um but pretty much everywhere we will have readers obviously the most of hackaday's readers are in the usa because that's the country from which the original hails but significant numbers of our readers come from all around the world and that's fantastic because we get so many

different types of thing come our way i mean a good example is some uh i think fairly recently or just about to go out some some russian guys who run a car modification garage have made a lada with four engines uh and that's probably not something you would see from a western european hacker or probably for an american hacker you might see things with multiple engines but it would have be a i'd know say a muscle car with four v8s and uh that's the wonderful flavor you get from different places in the world. You get their own, the things that matter to them. And I say it comes back to this is what keeps me coming back to academic. What slots, I mean, other than, you know, 10 o'clock p.m. our time is starting to be morning in europe and and uh midday in in asia

what uh what times are good for what i mean are there things that go off well in the morning at any location that would that don't do as well in the afternoon or afternoon stories? I would probably tend to put software stories later in the day myself, but that's probably a personal view. Certainly our main sort of peak of the day ones are where we try to put the sort of more signature stories at the moment. I mean, I guess it depends on what stories are coming on the day. There's no hard and fast rules.

Yeah, okay. That makes sense. I just wanted to know for my own personal edification what time I should tweet important tweets. I like the afternoon for software stories. It makes sense. In the afternoon, software engineers are starting to run out of steam. They're starting to surf on the internet.

Click around the internet. That's perfect. I do hope I'm not giving away the family silver and Mikey's going to give me an indignant phone call. But I don't think there's anything too earth shattering in that. Oh, well, let's go on to things that he can fuss about. Do the commenters bother you? Do the comments, sometimes the Hackaday comments lose a bit of civility? Well, I think everywhere that has public comments will have its good moments and its bad moments.

I am pleased with the quality of Hackaday comments. Yes, we do have the odd troll, we do have the odd bit of argument, contradom, going off topic, but in general, Hackaday commenters are insightful, funny,

and interesting. And that's not just me sort of buttering up my audience. Good job, though. But there are some wonderful things that come in the comments. I don't think a commenter has ever got under my skin. I do have

an unfortunate line in when you get the inevitable grammar troll. I'll say, oh, I don't remember you among my colleagues at my five years at the Oxford Dictionary. Yeah, there's some niceness to being able to resist that one. Yeah.

Do you have any favorite articles you've written? I think my favorite, well, it's a favorite topic. It's a big story at the moment, drone proximity reports with aircraft. I mean, if you follow, I don't know if it made the news in the States, but round about Christmas, before Christmas, London's Gatwick Airport was closed for about two or three days because there were drone reports. Yeah, I did see that. I think just after christmas was it um heathrow was closed the other main london airports closed uh for about

two hours or something drone reports now it's a subject that i've covered quite a bit back there over the last sort of couple of years and it's something i find of great concern that we're in the middle of drone hysteria now i'd better strike right from the start if you fly a drone near an aircraft you are endangering many lives and you need to go to jail you need to be casted off locked up and the key thrown away now the problem is that we're getting a lot of hysteria about drones and almost no physical or tangible evidence of there having been drones and if you sit i mean i i was alerted to this originally because i sat i was quite interested in the topic and i read through a load of um air proximity incident reports these are british ones

but i'm guessing there are similar things in other parts of the world. And a lot of the descriptions of what was reported and solemnly recorded as a drone incident was just preposterous. For instance, the one that always sticks in my mind

is there was an airliner, I can't remember, I think it was a Boeing of some description, climbing out of London Stansted Airport, which is one of the slightly smaller london airports um it was climbing steeply at i think sort of 5 000 feet or something uh so it's going quite quickly it wasn't hanging about and a drone appeared from 12 o'clock so directly in front of the aircraft, shot up to the aircraft at great rate of knots, and then performed an about turn and flew off at another great rate of knots at one o'clock.

So more or less in front of the aircraft, a bit to the right. And if you sit and read this, this is solemnly recorded as a drone. Yet I don't think a fighter aircraft could do that. If a drone can do that, I want that drone because it's awesome. And I went through a whole load of different drone reports. And they were all, when you actually said, how does this match a drone? None of them really matched up. There were things like drones at heights to which a drone would have severe

difficulty flying and staying in flight because the battery just wouldn't be big enough. There would be drones travelling at speeds which were unfortunately too high. The only one that year where a proven culprit was found for an incident was an actual collision with an aircraft, and it was found to be a plastic bag. Yeah. The trouble is, yeah, we have an atmosphere in which everything is reported as a drone. The standard of proof required is so low as to be almost non-existent. If somebody says it's a drone

it's recorded as a drone and we have a very low standard of both incident investigation and incident reporting from the media so the hype about drones is at fever pitch. So, for instance, when the Gatwick drone was seen, now, that was late at night. So it's about six o'clock in the evening on a cold and windy, I don't think it was raining, evening in the southern UK. It's not very nice outside. An airport worker or whoever, under the glare of the um arc lights sees something in the air it could be a bird it could be the plastic bag caught in the wind but it's reported in as a drone and thereafter you have uh the security people take it seriously and to be fair the security people have to take it seriously because if it is a drone it's bloody serious and they report there's a drone and suddenly there's 10 000 people

in the airport or whoever they're all looking for drones and surprisingly enough they see drones because they don't know what a drone looks like most people don't know really most people don't know what a drone looks like especially at night and yeah and they're seeing drones everywhere now let's backpedal a bit yes it's night it's not very nice weather these drones are continuously in the air for hours on end yet again it is possible to fly a drone at night but the story just starts to fall apart and particularly fall apart when there's no actual tangible proof now i'm not saying it wasn't a drone but there's certainly no actual proof of a drone and eyewitness reports of something in the air are not of a high enough standard but it gets very serious because of

course the first thing that happened in catwick was the police went and rounded up some local drone enthusiasts which are confidently reported as they've got their man and of course they had to climb down embarrassingly after a day because guess what the person had nothing to do with it then we were shown there was some video did the rounds it was the daily mail british tabloid newspaper was uh tweeting it everywhere and it was a drone flying over in some sky. And there was somebody in the back saying, there's the bastard. And the only trouble with this was that it was just some sky. There was nothing actually that said this was Gatwick.

Now, I'm not saying that the Daily Mail hat stood in the car park outside the Daily Mail and filmed a drone in the sky. But realistically, that could have been anywhere. And surprisingly, after about half a day, it disappeared and was never seen again. And it just went on and on and on. There was some drone wreckage found, which was suddenly not talked about. And then eventually, some police spokesman finally admitted that it was a possibility that there hadn't been a drone at all. And but this was by that point, it was fixed in the public imagination as this was a drone attack. The trouble is, this is serious because drone enthusiasts will be harassed because of this.

Politicians will demand that there are more laws and because they don't realize that criminals the defining feature as a criminal is that they have no regard for laws and there are already plenty of very good laws about drones if you really do fly a drone here a aircraft and they catch you you're going to jail and you should go to jail but this feverish atmosphere meant that the truth is a casualty so a couple of weeks later we had the same thing at heathrow they were much more careful about it they didn't close the airport for three days they closed it for two hours while they investigated and of course the media just outside london the media were there everywhere and they were saying oh we've seen the drone there it is in the sky there are some lights now anybody with a web browser can pull up the aprs data publicly available and spots that yes there were some lights over heathrow at the time there was the metropolitan

police helicopter the thing is the public's the standards of reporting, the standard of official investigations is low because somebody says it's a drone, it's a drone. And the standard of reporting by the press is low. Nobody questions, OK, it's a drone. Show us the drone. Show us the evidence. And you get, to make it worse, you get experts called on who know nothing about drones. Now, typically, for instance, they would call on an airline pilot. Now, airline pilots truly are experts in what they do.

But calling an airline pilot in to talk about a drone is the rough equivalent of calling a supertank captain in to talk about a kayak. They're both boats, but they're not comparable and i feel that that is an issue it affects the hackaday community because there are a lot of community who build multi-rotors build drones fly drones and it affects their community rather badly and will result in probably i will probably within the next year be writing about police harassment of drone fires. And it's all so unnecessary. If there is a problem, then there needs to be tangible proof produced and there needs to be action taken against miscreants.

There doesn't need to be hysteria. There doesn't need to be witch hunts. And there certainly doesn't need to be witch hunts and there certainly doesn't need to be rounding up the nearest drone enthusiast i feel we just need much higher quality action on this front i should say i am a drone flyer in a very um hobby manner when i got interested in this subject i thought if i'm going to book the talk, I need to walk the walk. I actually bought myself a reasonable sized toy drone and learned how to fly it. That's the limit of my drone flying.

I'm not coming from this with an axe to grind. I'm coming to it having spotted an interesting story that affects everyday readers. And I've written several articles about this. There's not one particular of them that is my favorite article. Now, that was a huge wrong answer for a favorite article question. No, that's great. I mean, we have a lot of drone flyers. In this room.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm right with you. And I think we've talked about this before, maybe a couple of years ago now. But yeah, I think I said at one point that drones are the new UFOs. It's like, well, UFOs are fake, but drones, now those are real. And so whenever we see something, we don't know what it is,

we can call it a drone. Yeah, there's a meme that you may have seen, Airline Pilots Guide to Drone Identification. And it's got a load of silhouettes of, I think one's a tree, one's a kid with a balloon as the start of the prize and various other things. Yes, it's difficult.

We need higher quality. I think probably since the dawn of flight, pilots have seen things. They've been variously German super weapons. They've been Foo Fighters. They've been Russian weapons. They've been Nazi weapons. They've been UFOs, and now they're drones. Tomorrow it'll probably be something else. But right now, the quality with which this subject is being dealt with is very low.

Do you think part of the solution is being able to prove the negative or at least to be confident about the negative to build tools that say there are no radio signals in drone bands nearby that's a very difficult one because how does one detect a multi-rotor i mean if you're looking for radio signals yes that would catch most hobby multi-rotors it would catch for instance my little taiwan but it's quite possible to create one that is entirely autonomous you can say i've got a gps uh receiver on the machine and i'm telling it fly to this spot hover there then five minutes later fly back i don't know no radio no nothing it just goes and does it i believe doing that is illegal under

british law but tech wise there's nothing to stop you doing that you wouldn't detect that from radio signals i was told by somebody who deals with aircraft radar that the radar at airfields is set up to detect airliners, not to detect small Oh, very small. It's like detecting birds. I'm not a radar expert, though, so this is what I was

told. It's always dangerous as a journalist to sort of confidently state something when it's not your field, so that has that caveat. We should require drones to constantly emit big clouds of chaff behind them to sort of confidently state something and it's not your field. So that has that caveat. Yeah, no, it's a tough problem. We should require drones to constantly emit big clouds of chaff behind them so we can detect them in this radar.

Well, the trouble is you could require drones to have something similar to ADS-B. Yes, transponders. But the trouble is, of course, the villains... Just turn them off. They don't care about laws. I mean, I know recently the um uh oh dear is it the what's the american equivalent of our civil aviation authority the regular the faa sorry my apologies the faa have recently required um american multi-rotors to have registration numbers on the outside of the craft

yeah i think that's a very good idea but of course the villains probably won't bother but at least the legal ones can show their legality and show that they are not the culprit if a drone is photographed with no reg on it and they come and look at your drone and it's got a reg clearly on it, then hopefully that will help prove your innocence. Also, it helps retrieve your plane from a tree when you give up on it.

Which Christopher knows really well because if it hadn't had our address on it, they would never have brought it back. They were very nice. We were very confused. Well, on this small farm i have certainly retrieved my multi-road from more than one tree okay a different subject do you have an article or series or subject that you thought was particularly good but no one seemed to notice? Gosh, that's a difficult one. Let me think.

Well, probably it's, well, naturally, everything I write is a pearl of wisdom that everybody should recognise. It's brilliant. I mean, there are certainly one or two. Yes, exactly. There's certainly one or two where you put a lot of work in and then you find that it only has a few comments. Off the cuff, I can't instantly think of one.

But you never know what will catch the spirit of the moment. Okay, what about the other side? Something will fall in one day and go crazy another day. Yeah, what about the other side? That something went viral that you were like, oh, I just phoned that in. Better to admit that you phoned something in. Pretty nice.

This is rather embarrassing. I know we've had viral pieces that go crazy, and I can't instantly bring one to mind. It's good that you're not focused on these. You can tell what Alicia thinks about them. Well, the multirotor one went viral. The, I think, was it the Heathrow one?

I mean, with the drone one, I don't want to slag off the authorities. I don't want to slag off the authorities i don't want to be one feels as though one's climbing onto a grassy knoll and the next thing you'll be talking about the lizard people when one says something it's so ingrained in the um received opinion that when one goes against it one feels though really one is sort of stepping out of line. But yes, the multiriter one, I think, sort of went more viral than I expected. Is that partially because Hackaday likes the hacks and the more transgressive articles? That's interesting. Yes, there is certainly an element of our community that appreciates that

kind of thing i think different hacker communities in different parts of the world have more of that kind of thing than others um i don't think hackaday's community is mostly of that nature in that they are technology enthusiasts the people they're there for the tech um but for instance there are more sort of activist hackery types in some of the european communities um this summer for instance um i will be going for chaos communication camp which is the big european hack camp in germany now i know the chaos communication club people generally tend towards the more activist side and would be more interested in that kind of thing. But I'd

hesitate to make generalizations about the Hackaday readership. Well, and from the comments, it does seem like it is more about the tech and the interesting applications and methodologies. And when I first found Hackaday, it was like, it's all black, and some of these people aren't very nice, but the articles are nice. And it took me a long time to get over the idea that it was full of people I didn't want to associate with.

Sorry, Mike Stish. I am very sorry if you've had that sort of experience with the comments. Well, no, most people have been nice. It's when I read comments for other articles. Okay. I mean, the back theme is an interesting one because very much of our community's type of thing, you know,

I mean, I was associated with computer gaming kind of sites because, what, 20-odd years ago, I worked in computer games companies. And there, just a regard for everything to be black background. Some people complain about it. Generally, I think our... Oh, you could never change it. Well, yeah, exactly. It's one of those things that once you, you know,

the complaints we get if we changed it, it might, I mean, the trouble is with a big site, it's difficult to sort of enact large changes. You'd have to change it like one setting every day for like five years to change it to any other color. Yes, exactly. Yes. Slowly brightened over time. Yeah. Yes, it community is, my apologies if you have ever found it to be difficult.

We strive to make Kakaday a welcoming and accepting place. And you succeed. And I think the thing that I'm saying is I didn't expect that. It's kind of like when you walk into a room and you're like, oh, these are not my people. And then you sit down and you actually talk to someone and they introduce you to someone else and you're, oh, yeah, okay. I shouldn't have made a snap judgment based on the lighting and clothing. I should hang out. And once I did, I mean, I like Hackaday.

So it was just the first impression. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there are times when very – I mean, Hackaday doesn't do politics, for instance. We don't do sort of news. Thank you for that. We very carefully stay away from that kind of thing. There are plenty of places that do that.

But it's not our bag our bag is hacks and if we stay on the hacks we stay true to who and what we are very occasionally we will write on topics which are slightly further away from that for instance i wrote a piece i believe it was last year about about harassment in our community. It was very important. I never want an event or a hacker camp or anything like that to be an unwelcome environment for anybody. But the fact is there are events in certainly the hardware and hacker kind of world which people do find intimidating. And I wrote a piece. I used John Draper, Captain Crunch, sort of legendary phone freaker.

And he had some stories attached to him sort of me too kind of stories um i used him as a hook to get in to talk about how we should deal with me too in our community and i got some flack from that but we all felt that it was an important thing to talk about uh so we do sometimes slight strides trade slightly away but that was very much with relevance to our community. I haven't asked you about Language Spy, which is your website, and it is political in that it is computational linguistic software. What do those words mean when you put them together? Okay.

It comes back to what I was talking about with respect to the hexacoccalers at the dictionary earlier. It's the use of computers to query very large bodies of language and extract conclusions from it the kind of thing that you couldn't do by yourself or which if you did it by yourself you might take sort of years of work to find because nobody can search by hand through billions of words of uh english written english and whereas a computer could maybe do it in seconds um the lexicographers would use it to as i said to say i want to know how people use this word has changed over time i will ask the corpus for examples of its use and i will look at them and work out my conclusions from it in my case it's something that fascinated me and i this is actually fascinated me quite a while before I worked at OUP. It's one of the reasons I got the job at OUP, actually.

I worked in some search engine marketing kind of companies. Now, before anybody gets enraged, this wasn't your sort of black hats, SEO companies. This was very much a white hat kind of thing where you were using, you were looking at words in an industry and effectively telling people how to write the content of their website. And that doesn't mean keyword stuffing. That means using the right language using the right words because if there's one thing a search engine wants to see it's high quality it's not low quality keyword stuff rubbish it's high quality well-written stuff so if you want good stuff on a search engine you have to

write it well but the fact is if you're writing for a particular market or about a particular thing it helps to use the right language so So that's where I came to it from. And I started writing my own computational linguistic stuff. This is before I even knew it was called computational linguistics. I hadn't actually met a linguist. I'd started by saying, right, I'm gathering together this word data and I'm writing a little analysis system. And it shows you how long ago it was.

I actually wrote it in PHP with a MySQL database, which, you know, people will be aghast at this. I should have written it in Rust. You should always write it in Rust. No, yeah, exactly, exactly. Insert cool language of choice. Probably back then it was Ruby or something. And one thing led to another,

and I sort of developed this into something i actually created a database of political news which you could query you could sort of at the time it was uh i think it was still tony blair was british prime minister at times but you could track the usage of the word tony blair versus the usage of the word gordon brown the usage of the word Gordon Brown over time. I mean, I use political data because it's an interesting thing. I was pulling in political news stories and stuff. And this developed into something which I could run on my laptop and I could pull these queries out. And I remember I pulled this out in my interview for the OEP job.

And one of the people interviewing me was a computational linguistics, linguist rather. And he was gobsmacked that he'd never seen somebody pull out a functional corpus analysis system in an interview. Just, oh, yeah, by the way, this is a side project I've been working on because I didn't really know about his field, but I'd stumbled into it. And obviously I went off and worked for the press this just remained a little side project um but after i left the press i wanted to i thought hey i can develop a product here um and so i did a lot more work on it i created a general purpose corpus i abandoned my long abandoned my sql by then because when you've got multiple many tens of millions of words and you're querying across it, you'd find a simple query would take half an hour,

which obviously is far too much. And so I learned a lot about flat-file databases. I actually ended up with a database. I realized that computational power, the processor, is the expensive bit of computing, and the cheap bit now is storage which is fairly obvious you can buy multi-terabyte hard disks for not a lot and so i realized that the fastest database in any computer is the file system you can find a hierarchical uh tree very

quickly just by a file system path and it will retrieve it very quickly so what i tried to do was i tried to pre-compute every possible answer and give the results of a little json file and store it in a hierarchical database which was effectively formed of a tree of directories so i ended up with enormous hard drive full of bazillions of tiny little files but the flip side was that i could get very very quick access to almost any query and i ended up with a pair of raspberry pies just sitting full time uh they would get new uh words in they would number crunch them into the system and they could take their time because they weren't doing much you know the number of new words coming in a day was manageable by them they sit and they only use two watts each so you can leave them on 24 7 and they end up with quite

a an efficient system and i thought hey this is good i have an application somewhere and of course the problem comes in selling it so So it never made me any money. It was fantastic and interesting to write. And somewhere I still have a fully functional corpus analysis system, but I've never really done anything with it. It's funny because another little side project turned into something that did actually make me some money during that period. I'm a radio amateur i'm not a very um uh prolific radio amateur i don't actually do much on the radio my big thing with amateur radio was building stuff so uh i started

turning some of my little projects actually mainly projects for the raspberry pi and amateur radio into electronic kits which i started selling selling. And I would have, they're starting to develop, it's starting to make some money, be a reasonable little business. And then, of course, Hackaday happened, and I started to do better money writing. And so the kit business and the language business languished a bit. And so anyway, this isn't me plugging my company, it's me giving a bit of a post-mortem for two of the things i've done with it and of course now i write all time so i'm kind of wrapped up both enterprises but both interesting things i did side projects that turned into

potential businesses i don't regret putting a lot of time into a corpse analysis system of my own because I learned a hell of a lot about how they work and probably became a better coder at the time. By then it was Python, not PHP. And that Python experience now comes over into I'm using Python on microcontrollers. I'm using it on Adafruit feathers or um micropython rather on um i'm doing a lot of work at the moment with uh electronic conference badges things like the um kind of badges you would have at a summer hacker camp and a lot of them have micropython on so

that experience of python proper python has led me to be able to do MicroPython, so I don't regret it. But I suppose that's the key to trying to set up on your own, is have multiple irons in the fire and be prepared to move to new things if the thing you're on isn't working out. And learn stuff. As you say, you learn stuff from that. And it did lead to other directions. The first corpus analysis led to what sounds like an amazing job. And then that amazing job, of course, Hackaday was like, oh, you can write and do electronics?

Wow. Oh, yes, definitely. Everything's an odd progression one to the other. I never expected it to take that direction, though. I have a couple more questions about Hackaday. And then since it is late afternoon here, it must be early, early morning there. Oh, gosh, it's past one in the morning here

is hackaday looking for new authors i would say no and i would say yes in that no hackaday isn't looking for new authors at the moment but the way that mike does it is periodically he will put up a we're hiring piece it's usually in the region of every six months as you search back through hackaday you'll find previous ones um i think he puts it up when he feels that our number of contributors has fallen a bit because we will we'll have turnover contributors we'll have people they will have the time to do it and then they'll get another job or permy job or something and they suddenly won't be able to contribute they will move on i believe we had uh one of our contributors had a youtube channel and his youtube channel started taking off so uh he regretfully had to hang up his Hackaday keyboard.

So, yes, or rather no, we're not hiring in that we're not hiring at the moment. But we are regularly hiring in that every so many months, Mike will put up a We're Hiring piece. So if you want to write for Hackaday, keep an eye out for the we're hiring piece now if you really want to write for hackaday you should have a you should be able to demonstrate you can write so at least write a blog write a blog about tech pieces if you have nothing else if you can get pieces in somewhere else we'd love to see them do awesome hacks write up your hacks well i mean if you i mean i would say to anybody if you want to get your thing written up on hackaday throw us a bone don't just tell us i made this thing tell us i made this thing and here is a full write-up with decent quality pictures

if you can prove to us with good text that you can write then you're ahead of the game i don't do the hiring but i believe what mike wants to see is he'd like to see the task that he sets done so it was normally write a daily hackaday piece about 200 words or so uh on a topic of the moment and which what he's looking for there is well written cogently assembled story uh with which follows hackaday's style in other words would this make a good hackaday story but he'll probably also be looking what's this person done in the past you know have they well i can't see previous writing of theirs and if you don it's true, not everybody has a byline in the New York Times. But if he can find a blog or something that you've written pieces about tech or something like that, then he's going to get a picture of, yes, if I hire this person, they can deliver.

Does that answer? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And do you have any advice for engineers who are writers? I mean i mentioned radio 4 as an example just read learn to love the language i'd also never lose your sense of fun obviously you have to write in a style suitable for where you are going to be read um you know if you're writing a scientific paper you shouldn't write it as though you're writing for variety magazine for instance but if you are writing for somewhere which has the scope for a sense of fun it's that's some fun the past masters at this in the tech writing world are there's a british it publication called the

register they're not the razor sharp thing they were maybe 10 15 years ago but they're still pretty good but they've got a wonderful sense of fun in the way they write i've always liked their writing um never lose your sense of fun i think maybe this next question you have just answered but maybe not jenny do you have just answered, but maybe not. Jenny, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Gosh. Yes. I suppose I said this earlier too, actually.

Never abandon your curiosity. Never stop looking for the next hack. Never stop asking why. Never stop pulling out the screwdriver and taking the back off whatever piece of kit you've got. Never stop looking. I like that. Our guest has been Jenny List, contributing editor at Hackaday. Thank you for being with us. Well, thank you very much for having me. Thanks, Jenny. Thank you to our Patreon supporters for Jenny's mic.

Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded.fm where you will find some nice show note links if you are so inclined to look up more. And now a quote from one of those links, the book Word by Word by Corey Stamper. We learned as children that if words have the same cluster of letters at the end,

they rhyme, hop on pop, cat in the hat. And then we encounter through, though, rough, cough, bow. Five words that all end with O-U-G-H and not only don't rhyme, but don't even have similar pronunciations. But one, done, and shun rhyme? Are you telling me Dr. Seuss lied about English? Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.