Genius loci

Passing through Grantchester the other day, I caught this glimpse of the Mill House.

Apart from the fact that it was another beautiful Autumn day, what’s the significance of this? Answer: it’s the house in which Bertrand Russell lived when writing (with A.N. Whitehead) Principia Mathematica. There’s a wonderful photograph somewhere of Russell delivering the manuscript of the book to Cambridge University Press — in a wheelbarrow. The tragedy is that nowadays most people associate Grantchester not with mathematics but with the deservedly minor poet, Rupert Brooke (Stands the village clock at ten to three/ And is there honey still for tea?), or — worse — the unspeakable ‘novelist’, Jeffrey Archer, who has a house in the village, though mercifully is rarely seen there nowadays.

Automated gender detection

There was a lovely piece by Alexander Chancellor in today’s Guardian about an algorithm that, when supplied with a sample of text, can predict (with 80% accuracy) the gender of the author. A simplified implementation of the algorithm is available on the Web. Chancellor found that the algorithm thinks that most of the female columnists on the Guardian are men. I tried it with two samples of my writing — one taken from my book about the history of the Net, the other from an email message to a friend. The algorithm concluded that the first had been written by a man, the second by a woman. Hmmm…