A good read from <I>The New Yorker</I>. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.
I love these re-imaginings of film trailers. What if the ultimate two-hankie movie was much, much creepier?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks affects how he or she perceives the world. It has been a lightning rod of controversy ever since it was proposed. A new paper suggests that it's half true—sort of.
I'm not sure what makes it so special; I'm not sure if it <i>really is</i> as special as Mark Levinson says it is. "This is about life. This is going to bring digital music <i>life</i>."
Most of the reviews I've read of Edmund Morris' Beethoven biography didn't encourage me to read it, but Tim Page's beautifully written appreciation has catapulted it to the top of my list.
Soup or sparks? How we figured out how they work.
These are more addictive than potato chips.
I've spent my time throwing bales of hay onto wagons and into barns. To think that I now complain of a hard day's work at the keyboard!
A close up view. Not what I expected.
Just relax and enjoy it—as Feynman said.