February 2007

I attended a sustainability forum in Wadham tonight, followed by a fancy dinner. I even got to see a well situated and previously unexplored room in college. Much more enjoyable, however, was spending a couple of hours later in the night reading aloud from Stanislaw Lem’s Mortal Engines, Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorum, Vladamir Nabokov’s [...]

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The following is the article I submitted as part of my application for the Richard Casement internship at The Economist. My hope was to demonstrate an ability to deal with a very technical subject in a comprehensible way. This post will be automatically published once the contest has closed in all time zones.
Cryptography
Making a hash [...]

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Largely because of the thesis, I have fallen behind in what are normally two everyday activities: reading fiction and keeping up with my correspondence. The latter is the more embarrassing lapse, as messages of various kinds accumulate. Still, if I am to have a chapter written by Wednesday, I need to keep cracking. This one [...]

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Anyone who has even been curious about the game of Go should try this interactive tutorial. Wikibooks also has an introduction, though it does not seem to have been fully written yet. The game is an attractive looking and tricky one, as employed as a dramatic device in the film A Beautiful Mind. Notably, Go [...]

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During the initial coverage of Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change, I wondered why the media was paying so much attention. After all, the man is an economist reporting on something that scores of scientists have addressed comprehensively through the IPCC process. Now that I have heard him lecture, and spoken briefly [...]

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