A literary thriller set in Lisbon
Novissima
“The machine never lied. That was the problem.”
A dead technologist. A roofless church in Lisbon. A voice that has never lied, and thirty hours to decide what that means.
Behind the books
Articles
The real history, ideas and places behind the books, each with its sources.
Behind the book
The world of The Ghost Patch
Near misses
The near miss nobody heard about: TWA 514, December 1974
Six weeks before TWA 514 hit a Virginia mountain, another crew made the same mistake and got away with it. Nobody else was told. Then aviation changed.
CertificatesExpired certificates: Equifax, Ericsson and a date nobody watched
An expired certificate left Equifax blind for 19 months and took mobile networks down in two countries. Why a date fixed in advance still causes outages.
ServersZombie servers: the machines running for nobody
One study found about a quarter of physical servers did no useful work for six months. Why nobody switches them off, and what an unpatched one is worth.
Behind the book
The world of Novissima
Lisbon, 1755
The church with no roof: Lisbon’s Carmo and the earthquake of 1755
How the Carmo convent lost its roof on 1 November 1755, what the quake did to Lisbon, and why the same ruin turns up again in 1974.
IdeasThe last invention: Butler, Wiener and Good on thinking machines
Warnings about thinking machines from 1863, 1960 and 1965, quoted from the sources, and the clause in Good’s famous sentence that carries the argument.
PortugalFour Portuguese places in Novissima, and what’s true about them
The Chapel of Bones in Évora, the bats of the Joanina Library, the well at Regaleira and the cliff at Cabo da Roca: the facts behind four settings.
The books
The work
A technological thriller
The Ghost Patch
“Something has been keeping the lights on.
On Friday they switch it off.”
Toma Albu audits other people’s promises for £950 a day. Then he finds a server that was meant to be wiped, and a process that has been quietly fixing the system.
A practical handbook
AI at Work
“Use AI well. Check it properly.
Keep other people’s details safe.”
A plain-English handbook for UK workplaces, from your first prompt to assistants and automations that do real work.