In the month since I last posted about my Perplex City card addiction, I’ve spent a lot of dosh on individual cards and gained lots of points, and am ecstatic to report that I’m now at 264th place (as of last night).
However, as only the black and silver (hard and very hard) cards are left, scoring any higher than this is going to be problematic… Not that that will stop an addict like me from trying. Heh.
We’d all be in a very different place now if it were not for Colonel Stanislav Petrov, a man who literally changed the course of history in 1983. That’s something to put on your Curriculum Vitæ.
. . . for the next couple of months. Ever wanted to read the original papers by Crick and Watson or Maxwell’s original work on the propagation of light? Well, now you can. The past 300-odd years of scientific discovery is open to inspection. Davies’ paper on Hawking evaporation is a goodie too!
Update: Sorry about this, but the TinyURLs used above to link to the RS pages don’t work consistently (probably because the RS site seems to be re-writing the incoming URI), but they generally point there and the search page is correctly linked.
You can keep the new supercomputer that IBM have built out of Cell Chips. It may be able to do thousands of trillions of calculations in a second, but it has none of the elegance and charm of the wonderful device that has been lovingly recreated at Bletchley Park. I caught the unveiling on the news yesterday and watched, beaming, as the rotors ratcheted around in the little dance of decoding they do. If you’ve not heard of Station X and the Turing Bombes, then you’re unaware of one of the most amazing technological developments made during World War II. And sometime next year, I shall be visiting Bletchley Park and watching the Bombe do its work.