Self-Perpetuating information Strings, The Equation of Life

Kevin Hartnett, writing at Quanta, enters into a Q&A with Chris Adami, Ph.D. - Professor, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics; Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State, discussing the notion of life as self-perpetuating information strings. Today's Must Read.

Sun Shooting →

Andrea Peterson, writing at The Washington Post, reports on the increased education and utility of celestial navigation (as opposed to Computational and GPS navigation). Fascinating.

Steering a ship by the stars fell out of favor with the rise of radio wave and GPS navigation. In fact, the U.S. Naval Academy stopped teaching the skill nearly 20 years ago. But now this ancient navigation is making a comeback at the Annapolis school, thanks to cybersecurity fears, according to the Capital Gazette.

"We went away from celestial navigation because computers are great," Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Rogers, the deputy chairman of the academy's Department of Seamanship and Navigation, told the Gazette. "The problem is, there's no backup." - via Andrea Peterson reporting at The Washington Post

Theory of Incompleteness →

Fascinating post by Derek Brink writing at the RSA blog, discussing Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, or Why Every Organization Needs an Incident Response Capability, Today's Must Read.

WWII Hackers →

Presentation by Anja Drephal detailing a Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик (also known as the CCCP) or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) espionage cell, operating within the national boundaries of Nippon in the 1930s and 1940s along with it's success in crypto. Whilst nearly two years old and delivered to the assembled at the Chaos Communication Congress 2013 (30C3), Drephal's presentation is assuredly worth directing your attention to (the math in the second half of the presentation is chock full of Import & Intrigue); Tuesday's Must View documentary...

Requiescat in Pace: John and Alicia Nash

Requiescat in Pace: John Forbes Nash, Jr., (1928 - 2015) and Alicia (nee Lopez-Harrison de Lardé) Nash (1933 - 2015).

Google Creates Quantum Chip →

News, via Wired's Robert McMillan, of trouble in paradise. In this case, an error prone computational quantum platform the search leviathan Google Inc. (NasdqGS: GOOG) is running, down yonder in Mountain View...

"The crux of the problem is a phenomenon called bit-flipping. This happens when some kind of interference—cosmic rays, for example—causes the bits stored in memory to “switch state”—to jump from a 0 to a 1 or vice versa. On a PC or a server, error correction is relatively easy." - via Wired's Robert McMillan

• Image depicts a D-WAVE branded quantum computational device

Bletchley Park, The History →

Readers who have examined this weblog during the thirteen years plus of it's publication, know of my Interest in Matters Turing and Bletchley; Alan Turning & Bletchley Park, that is... With those Foci in mind, here is a fascinating serial scrutinizing the history of Bletchley Park, the nearly seventy-year-old locale of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland's Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) (now known as GCHQ). Today's MustRead.