Thread.
Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing … and Victory!
A Cambridge post-graduate student has recreated the “cyclometer”, the decryption device devised by Polish mathematicians that informed Alan Turing’s later code-breaking efforts.
While Turing has rightly been celebrated, Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski intuited the workings of Enigma and devised machines capable of decrypting Enigma-coded messages. The cyclometer was their first effort and a later project a later “bomba kryptologiczna” was an even better codebreaker.
When Apollo met Soyuz: 45 years ago, Americans and Russians played together nicely… IN SPAAAAACE
It is 45 years since US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts first shook hands in space. The Register presents “When Apollo met Soyuz”.
Conceived during an all-too-brief warming in relations between the US and the Soviet Union, the mission (known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project – ASTP – in the US, and Soyuz-Apollo Experimental Flight – EPAS – in Russia) was the culmination of discussions around a joint spaceflight that included a potential joint mission to the Moon.
Pretty much all King Arthur stories are historically inaccurate… It’s fanfic all the way down…
@Wanderfound re. Josephine Baker
Isabelle de Borchgrave is a Belgian artist who was on the edge of my social circle when I lived in Europe. She and an acquaintance reproduced one of Josephine Baker’s dresses in paper for a Paris exhibit on Ms. Baker’s life in 2001. I remember being quite taken both by the stunning and talented Ms. Baker and for the genuine and lasting affection for her in Paris.
I’ve always said that if I were stuck in the Middle Ages in Europe, I’d get me to a nunnery, STAT.
IIRC “nunnery” was Ye Olde Anglishe slang for brothel.
The past isn’t over… it isn’t even past… (Faulkner).
There’s a lot of early American history bound up in this story:
