Category: Science

There’s a lot more to randomness that you might realise. I actually did a course in it once, but I’ve mostly forgotten it all. This is a good primer (via Boing Boing). Incidentally, it seems that coin tossing isn’t fair.

Go to the NASA site to see this picture of one of Saturn’s moons as seen by the Cassini probe. Actually Mimas looks quite a lot like the Death Star… (Obviously, I’m not the first to notice this resemblence)

The Cassini probe has been sending back some spectacular pictures of Titan from its first close flyby. (Incidentally, last week’s Horizon was all about Saturn and Cassini. If you missed it, you can either read the transcript or watch the signed version very late next Monday night or very early Tuesday morning depending on how…

The press is full of stories today about a new small species of human that was alive in a remote part of Indonesia 18,000 years ago. Both The Guardian and The Independent had pictures of it on their front pages today. And Nature, where the findings are published, has a special section with a certain…

OK – from the outset, can I just point out that I seriously don’t recommend that you attempt to replicate the “experiments” I’m about to describe. I should also point out that while I didn’t plan on doing either of these things, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it’s possible. Experiment 1…

I know, I know. I’m always going on about this. But I don’t apologise for revisiting it, because it’s so important. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Horizon, and the new series started a few weeks ago, and has already produced a couple of very interesting episodes. This week’s was an examination of whether…

Great article on the DES or Data Encryption Standard – neatly summing up where we are with cryptology. This makes a nice follow up to the pieces I talked about previously on hash functions.

Very soon after the death of Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel prize with Crick and Watson, has also died at the age of 87. Read the BBC obituary here and Nature’s first piece here. UPDATE: A fine Guardian obituary is here.

A pair of fascinating articles (article 1, article 2) about hash functions and recent cryptographic breakthroughs and the possibility of many cryptographic strategies being made redundant. Great reading.

I happened to pass by Waterstones on Friday and couldn’t help but notice a display of copies of the new Roger Penrose book, The Road to Reality. This enormous book is 1000 pages long and copiously illustrated. So I picked it up and flicked through it. Let’s just first reiterate that even picking it up…

This month’s Computer Arts magazine has Stitcher 3.1 cover-mounted, and I’ve been having some fun creating those 360 degree QTVR images. I was rather pleased with an effort I created based around our tent at the V Festival. And then I was looking at some of the unfailingly fabulous images at Panoramas.dk and noticed that…

Last Sunday, The Independent on Sunday published a comment piece by the Prince of Wales about nanotechnology. It’s a well argued piece, although while we don’t get the histrionics of “grey goo” that accompanied the Prince’s last thought on the subject (not something he claims to have ever believed incidentally), he does mention thalidomide as…