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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 283bd6e | Heck's attempted rewilding serves to reinforce a very important fact: Europeans are now the mind over their land. What they desire, the land will become. And if their desires are toxic and dangerous, then that will manifest itself in nature. Europeans cannot escape responsibility for shaping their environment; as even withdrawal from management will have profound consequences. | Tim Flannery | ||
| 194309e | beg them to compare the Oostvaardersplassen not with their dreamtime Europe of the classical age, but with a long-vanished continent where large mammals, rather than agricultural practices, shaped landscapes. | Tim Flannery | ||
| f44c2aa | Dear friends and enemies, Season's greetings! It's me, Serge! Don't you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams "you're close to my heart" like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that's going on in their lives. "Had a great time in Memphis." "Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain." "I think the neighbors are dealing drugs." But this letter is different. You are special to me. I'm just for.. | Tim Dorsey | ||
| 49fda59 | But more than anything else, the species owes its spread to a strange phenomenon discovered in 1930 by the biologist Lancelot Hogben. Heavens knows what led him to do it, but Hogben found that if you injected an African clawed frog with the urine of a pregnant woman, within hours it would lay eggs. Before chemical pregnancy test kits became available in the 1960s, African clawed frogs were kept in labs and hospitals worldwide for confirming.. | Tim Flannery | ||
| 4631770 | There are now more wolves in Europe than in the United States, including Alaska! | Tim Flannery | ||
| 74b17d6 | Goodstein demonstrated that in every case, when compared with the actual costs paid, the estimates were grossly inflated.6 His examples range from asbestos to vinyl, and in all instances but one the estimated cost flowing from regulatory change was at least double the actual cost paid, while in some cases estimates were even more exaggerated. | Tim Flannery | ||
| 3c9395b | In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away." | Bill Bryson | ||
| d7a6535 | Defining Europe is a slippery undertaking. Its diversity, evolutionary history and shifting borders make the place almost protean. Yet, paradoxically, Europe is immediately recognisable. With its distinctive human landscapes, once-great forests, Mediterranean coasts and Alpine vistas--we all know Europe when we see it. And the Europeans themselves, with their castles, towns and unmistakable music, are every bit as instantly recognisable. Mo.. | Tim Flannery | ||
| c65bec9 | When, in 1970, palaeontologist Lambert Beverley Halstead pointed out that Scrotum is a scientifically valid name and the first ever proposed for a dinosaur, a shudder went through the normally stolid taxonomic community. Things may not have been helped by the fact that Halstead seems to have been obsessed with dinosaur sex. His most memorable work is an illustrated compendium of dinosaurian copulatory positions--a sort of reptilian Kama Sut.. | Tim Flannery | ||
| 4b324f3 | I would rather be a poor man with honest friends than a rich man with none. | Kristiana Gregory | ||
| c8a8b80 | I also wonder about gold fever, why it make some men crazy and others wise. Such as Sam, my father, and Captain clinkingbeard They suffered heartbreak and loss just as Jesse Blue had, but they didn't become thieves or liars. Why? I asked papa. What makes the difference? His eyes were gentle when he looked at me. "It seems that true character of often isn't revealed until a person is faced with temptation"." | Kristiana Gregory | ||
| 6e9a162 | In fact, Britain had captured thousands of Enigma machines, and distributed them among its former colonies, who believed that the cipher was as secure as it had seemed to the Germans. The British did nothing to disabuse them of this belief, and routinely deciphered their secret communications in the years that followed. Meanwhile, | Simon Singh | ||
| 01f37c7 | Had the Arabs merely been familiar with the use of the mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, they would not warrant a significant mention in any history of cryptography. However, in addition to employing ciphers, the Arab scholars were also capable of destroying ciphers. They in fact invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key. While the cryptographer develops new methods of secret writing, it i.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 9eb9c5d | Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that 'the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it'. | Simon Singh | ||
| 055c51c | Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the .. | Simon Singh | ||
| bfebd4d | At the same time as acquiring knowledge, the Islamic civilization was able to disperse it, because it had procured the art of paper-making from the Chinese. The manufacture of paper gave rise to the profession of warraqin, or 'those who handle paper,' human photocopying machines who copied manuscripts and supplied the burgeoning publishing industry. At its peak, tens of thousands of books were published every year, and in just one suburb of.. | Simon Singh | ||
| e642707 | impenetrability of the Navajo code was all down to the fact that Navajo belongs to the Na-Dene family of languages, which has no link with any Asian or European language. | Simon Singh | ||
| d01c41b | He took the messages to a local brewer, who wrapped them in a leather packet, which was then hidden inside a hollow bung used to seal a barrel of beer. The brewer would deliver the barrel to Chartley Hall, whereupon one of Mary's servants would open the bung and take the contents to the Queen of Scots. The process worked equally well for getting messages out of Chartley Hall. | Simon Singh | ||
| d502830 | No escribe uno acaso para entenderse mejor a si mismo y al mundo? | escritura writers | Carlos Ruiz Zafón | |
| 2c65a90 | In addition to a greater understanding of secular subjects, the invention of cryptanalysis aslo depended on the growth of religious sholarship. Major theological schools were established in Basra, Kufa and Baghdad, where thelogians scrutinized the revelations of Muhammad as contained in the Koran. The theologians were interested in establishing the chronology of the revelations, which they did by counting the frequencies of words contained .. | Simon Singh | ||
| 92578ce | The core principle of the trial is simple and can be traced back as far as the 13th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II conducted an experiment to find out the effects of exercise on digestion. Two knights consumed identical meals, and then one went hunting while the other rested in bed. Several hours later, both knights were killed and the contents of their alimentary canals were examined. This revealed that digestion had pro.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 3f565e5 | In April 1977, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman spent Passover at the house of a student, and had consumed significant amounts of Manischewitz wine before returning to their respective homes some time around midnight. Rivest, unable to sleep, lay on his couch reading a mathematics textbook. He began mulling over the question that had been puzzling him for weeks--is it possible to build an asymmetric cipher? Is it possible to find a one-way functi.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 27647c1 | Al-Kindi's technique, known as frequency analysis, shows that it is unnecessary to check each of the billions of potential keys. Instead, it is possible to reveal the contents of a scrambled message simply by analysing the frequency of the characters in the ciphertext. | Simon Singh | ||
| 439acb1 | I am a liar! | Simon Singh | ||
| 0ebbd27 | The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished. | Simon Singh | ||
| 4370290 | I had written this paper on pancake numbers with help from my adviser, Manuel Blum, who's a well-known computer scientist, and we submitted it to a journal called . I subsequently left graduate school to come and write for . After the paper was accepted, there was an extremely long lag between it being submitted, revised, and published. So, by the time the paper was published, I had been working at for a while, and Ken Keeler had also b.. | Simon Singh | ||
| f54f231 | I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue in my life what had been my childhood dream. I know it's a rare privilege, but if you can tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything imaginable." - Andrew Wiles" | Simon Singh | ||
| f5af5cf | He'd asked Simon about that. Why would the archangels potentially sabotage an organization that made their lives a hell of a lot easier? "It's a game," Simon had said. "They need us, but they'll never allow us to forget that they're the more powerful. Attacking me, attacking Sara, isn't about stopping the Guild--it's about reminding us the Cadre is watching." | Nalini Singh | ||
| 30c53b5 | Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols. | Simon Singh | ||
| 1267456 | Vigenere's work culminated in his Traicte des Chiffres ("A Treatise on Secret Writing"), published in 1586. Ironically, this was the same year that Thomas Phelippes was breaking the cipher of Mary Queen of Scots. If only Mary's secretary had read this treatise, he would have known about the Vigenere cipher, Mary's messages to Babington would have baffled Phelippes, and her life might have been spared." -- | Simon Singh | ||
| b0e068a | As a society, we rightly adore our great musicians and novelists, yet we seldom hear any mention of the humble mathematician. It is clear that mathematics is not considered part of our culture. Instead, mathematics is generally feared and mathematicians are often mocked. | Simon Singh | ||
| ba8676f | many shipwrecks and engineering disasters were blamed on faulty tables. These mathematical tables were calculated by hand, and the mistakes were simply the result of human error. This caused Babbage to exclaim, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!" This marked the beginning of an extraordinary endeavor to build a machine capable of faultlessly calculating the tables to a high degree of accuracy. In 1823 Babbage desi.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 40c1f85 | a Navajo verb is conjugated not solely according to its subject, but also according to its object. The verb ending depends on which category the object belongs to: long (e.g., pipe, pencil), slender and flexible (e.g., snake, thong), granular (e.g., sugar, salt), bundled (e.g., hay), viscous (e.g., mud, feces) and many others. The verb will also incorporate adverbs, and will reflect whether or not the speaker has experienced what he or she .. | Simon Singh | ||
| 48bb2f4 | the Vigenere cipher belongs to a class known as polyalphabetic, because it employs several cipher alphabets per message. The polyalphabetic nature of the Vigenere cipher is what gives it its strength, but it also makes it much more complicated to use. The additional effort required in order to implement the Vigenere cipher discouraged many people from employing it. | Simon Singh | ||
| 1d8b28f | Major General Howard Conner, "without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." | Simon Singh | ||
| 568e6ab | had the cipher machines been used properly--without repeated message keys, without cillies, without restrictions on plugboard settings and scrambler arrangements, and without stereotypical messages which resulted in cribs--it is quite possible that they might never have been broken at all. | Simon Singh | ||
| 69d8463 | Proof is what lies at the heart of maths, and is what marks it out from other sciences. Other sciences have hypotheses that are tested against experimental evidence until they fail, and are overtaken by new hypotheses. In maths, absolute proof is the goal, and once something is proved, it is proved forever, with no room for change. | Simon Singh | ||
| b3ec3b8 | I told Ron to take my name off the paper," recalls Adleman. "I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused and we got into a discussion about it." | Simon Singh | ||
| d7a2038 | I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on." Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography." | Simon Singh | ||
| 5ed8174 | copies were passed to the cryptanalysts, who sat in little kiosks, ready to tease out the meanings of the messages. As well as supplying the emperors of Austria with invaluable intelligence, the Viennese Black Chamber sold the information it harvested to other powers in Europe. In 1774 an | Simon Singh | ||
| 8a8dc2f | Stat, ktery veri, ze neni spravne cist cizi dopisy, casem zacne verit i tomu, ze jeho korespondenci take nikdo necte... | Simon Singh | ||
| 44b7768 | baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous."9" | Simon Singh | ||
| cce6c71 | Nastesti nahore nevedeli, ze Turing je homosexual, jinak bychom take mohli prohrat valku. | Simon Singh | ||
| aa91b93 | Kazdy, kdo premysli o kvantove mechanice, aniz by se mu zatocila hlava, ji nerozumi. | Simon Singh |