The Berlin Conference 1884

Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata from It’s a Continent podcast

We’re incredibly excited to drop the latest episode of PastMaster on Monday featuring special guests Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba from It’s a Continent podcast.

Their show covers the history and unique identity of individual African nations with topics ranging from ‘A food hug from Sierra Leone’ to Cobalt mining in the DRC to European nations’ colonial exploitation of the continent.

In their PastMaster adventure, Chinny and Astrid head back to the Berlin Conference of 1884 where Europe’s elite met to formalise the carving up of Africa. Can they disrupt the conference and alter the course of history?

Find out: Episode 6 is out on Monday 4 December.

Read the full blog here

Machine learning is now able to decipher handwritten scrawls, potentially unlocking secrets from ancient manuscripts, hieroglyphics, and even the scribbly shopping list your partner wrote on Tuesday.

Imagine how intriguing (or indeed mundane) it might be to learn what was on an ancient Egyptian shopping list, or the thoughts of a Roman legionnaire in Britain as he scribbled in his diary.

As is seemingly often the case with AI, no-one knows exactly how the machine learning works once it has been fed with sufficient data – it’s something of a ‘black box’. Although the mystery is frustrating, it somehow adds to the magic.

We’ve lined up a bunch of episodes for the coming weeks, including our long anticipated jaunt to the year 3000 (spoiler: they don’t live under water, your great, great, great granddaughter isn’t pretty fine, and it is a lot like Bladerunner).

Ryan accepted the challenge to try and ‘break’ Tan’s attempt to make the game harder, taking his brand of chaos to Boston with America poised for independence and straining to break away from the yoke of Britain.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to PastMaster to download these episodes automatically when they come out.

PS if you’re enjoying the show please, please mention PastMaster to a friend you think might enjoy it.

PPS You can check out the whole PastMaster back catalogue here. (Keon’s favourite episode is S1 E17 – Olympic Wheelbarrow Racing.)

PPPS if you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to see the PastMaster team try next, get in touch:

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Instagram: @PastMasterPod

Email: pastmasterpod@gmail.com