How the Enigma Machine worked
Murlyn Hakon of Bletchley Park explains how the Enigma Machine worked.
The remarkable thing about Enigma, is that when you press a letter on the keyboard and the subsequent enciphered letter lights up to the rear of the machine, the chances of that letter lighting up are nearly 158 million million million to 1.
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
Mavis Batey: Bletchley Park codebreaker
Mavis Batey was one of the codebreakers working at Bletchley Park during World War II. She recently passed away at age 92. Batey was part of the codebreaking team that ensured a successful landing for Allied forces on D-Day.
She initially worked in London, checking commercial codes and perusing the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages. After showing promise, she was plucked out and sent to Bletchley to work in the research unit run by Dilly Knox. Knox had led the way for the British on the breaking of the Enigma ciphers, but was now working in a cottage next to the mansion on new codes and ciphers that had not been broken by Hut 6, where the German Army and Air Force ciphers were cracked. “It was a strange little outfit in the cottage,” Mavis said. Knox was a true eccentric, often so wrapped up in the puzzle he was working on that he would absent-mindedly stuff a lunchtime sandwich into his pipe rather than his tobacco: “Organisation is not a word you would associate with Dilly Knox. When I arrived, he said: 'Oh, hello, we’re breaking machines, have you got a pencil?’ That was it. I was never really told what to do. I think, looking back on it, that was a great precedent in my life, because he taught me to think that you could do things yourself without always checking up to see what the book said."
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
George Romero: It's not about the zombies
Horror film legend George Romero on zombies:
I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism...
I think the zombies could be anything. They could be a hurricane or a tornado. It’s not about the zombies. The important thing to me is the way the people react to this horrible situation, misbehave, make mistakes and screw themselves up.
And I need to get a pair of those glasses too!
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
Quantum Computing and Pizza Bagel Entanglement
Google, NASA, and D-Wave are teaming up to take quantum computing to the next level.
The case or container of the D-Wave is much more empty than I had suspected. It’s so different from portable computing which seeks to maximize internal dimensions for power usage and heat.
The biggest question is the question itself – “we don’t know what the best questions are to ask that computer, that’s exactly what we’re trying to understand now” (Eleanor Rieffel @ 4:52 in the video above).
(via kottke.org)
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025 — I can’t help but think of Everything Everywhere All At Once)
Quantum Computing 101
Quantum Computers Animated, Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics)
The illustrations for this video on quantum computing are fantastic, especially the "0/1" transition at 1:40.
(via Hacker News)
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Rewiring Class Emails and Student Interaction with Piazza
In a previous post I wrote about the experience of teaching an online class as a TA. One of the primary tools we used for the course was Piazza, and it was instrumental in shifting the burden of email to a more open and constructive arena.
Infectious Information: History and the Dissertation Quarantine
On July 22nd, 2013, the American Historical Association published to their blog a statement regarding the embargo of dissertations (Wayback Machine link). The suggestion was for digital embargo periods to be lengthened from around 1-3 years to 6 years, so that new PhD graduates could revise their dissertation manuscript for the purpose of creating a book for publication. As a significant revision of the dissertation, this book would then become a major component within the process of applying for tenure.
The back-end of online classes
In "Who is Driving the Online Locomotive," (Wayback Machine link) Rob Jenkins asks some pertinent questions about the force and direction of online education. There is definitely the feeling that something is coming, and those who aren't prepared will be lost by the wayside...or flattened by the train. However, this feeling of online education as the next-big-thing has been palpable for a couple of decades now. The latest gust of wind in the sails has been the infamous MOOC, but it's really more about the intersection of budget cuts and the ubiquity of social networking. It's also very unfortunate that there is usually little discussion of the differences between types of online classes – a MOOC with thousands of participants is a very different thing from a small online-class of 40 students.
Digital pedagogy and the online classroom
A few days ago I finished grading for an online summer class, The History of Latin America (HIST75V). I was the TA (teaching assistant) for Professor Juliette Levy, and this was the first time that either of us had conducted an online course. We’ve both taught the traditional in-class version of this course many times, and the opportunity to transform our in-class materials and teaching styles into an online presence was quite exciting. Professor Levy and I are both from the University of California, Riverside, and the course itself was hosted through UC Online. This class was an accelerated summer course, only 3 weeks long, and the LMS (Learning Management System) was Canvas. We also used Piazza for a student question & answer forum (I’ll write more about Piazza in another post).
Hipsters and nice-looking web pages
Unintentional Hipster Faculty (Wayback Machine link)
Making a nice-looking Web page is just too hard. The physicists across the street are teleporting matter! But yesterday I had to read a tutorial on how to vertically center an image.
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)