Among Quantum Physicists and Philosophers as a Kind of Underground Manuscript
1. Can you engineer the circadian rhythm?
"Non-scientists generally think of “circadian clock” as a metaphoric term. There’s nothing literally ticking away inside the human body, helping align it to the regular cycle of day and night. But synthetic biologists from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created something just that tangible: a transplantable, bioengineered 24-hour clock, which functioned by itself after being inserted into a bacterium that doesn’t typically have a circadian rhythm."
"Fuchs struggles with these questions, often working through his thoughts in the form of emails. His missives have become legendary. For two decades Fuchs has compiled them into huge documents — he calls them his samizdats — which have made the rounds among quantum physicists and philosophers as a kind of underground manuscript. After Fuchs lost his Los Alamos home to a fire in May 2000, he decided to back them up by posting them on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org as a massive paper, which was later published by Cambridge University Press as a 500-page book. A second samizdat was released 13 years later with an additional 2,300 pages. The emails reveal both Fuchs’ searching mind and his colorful character. As the physicist David Mermin puts it, 'If Chris Fuchs did not exist then God would have been remiss in not inventing him.'"
3. This is interesting: an examination of the programming language, Processing.
"Processing is an enormously popular, very-high-level programming language that began at MIT in 2001. As originally developed by MIT Media Lab alums Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry—both artists and technology thinkers—Processing was intended to be a learning language, a tool to get non-programmers, particularly artists, hooked on code via the promise and delivery of immediate visual feedback."
"The manuscripts are as follows: MS60, copy of 1215 draft (inside a volume commonly known as the 'Black Book of Peterborough') MS544, copy of the 1225 reissue and the Charter of the Forests (commonly known as the 'Halesowen Abbey Scroll') MS701, copy of the 1225 reissue and the Charter of the Forests (inside a volume commonly known as the 'Hart Book of Statutes')."
+ The Charter of the Forests! The Black Book of Peterborough!
5. What would happen if all our satellites were destroyed? A primer.
"All international calls and data traffic would have to be re-routed, placing tremendous pressure on terrestrial and undersea lines. Oversaturation would stretch the capacity of these systems to the limit, preventing many calls from going through. Hundreds of millions of Internet connections would vanish, or be severely overloaded. A similar number of cell phones would be rendered useless. In remote areas, people dependent on satellite for television, Internet, and radio would practically lose all service."
1. harvardmagazine.com | @thisiscristina 2. quantamagazine.org | @robinsloan 3. motherboard.com 4. sal.org.uk 5. io9.com
Among Quantum Physicists and Philosophers as a Kind of Underground Manuscript