The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery by Douglas Woodruff The case of the Tichborne claimant was a sprawling legal and media story in the second half of the nineteenth century which tied up the courts, worried the establishment and provided an endless source of gossip, argument and outrage for the whole of Britain for several decades – and even, see Zadie Smith’s novel The Fraud (2023), to this day. At its heart was the loss, supposedly at sea off South America in 1854, of the young heir to the Tichborne estate and baronetcy in the south of England. His mother, hoping he was still alive, advertised far and wide for news of her son, offering a reward. A man came forward from a village in Australia called Wagga Wagga, claiming to be the lost Roger Tichborne. From the start, what should have been simple was complicated: the Claimant bore a certain likeness to the lost son but while the son had been slim, this man was huge. And despite having had a good private education, this Roger...
I’ve been trying Google’s Notebook LM to create podcast-like conversations from uploaded academic papers. My reaction to what it came up with reminds me of how I felt when Google itself first came along. Early users were so impressed that Google grew its customer-base by word of mouth alone - my mouth being one of them. I’m not going to be evangelising about NotebookLM in the same way because its practical value is still limited. But it’s still an impressive demonstration of what AI is already capable of. Notebook LM is a service that focuses on the material you give it, in addition to drawing on more general AI knowledge. You provide it with sources in collections it calls Notebooks, which are separate projects each devoted to a particular subject. The sources can be documents, websites, videos or pasted text. These are the ingredients of the meal it will cook for you. Once you have given it material to work with, you have the chance to interact with your project in many ways - aski...