It was the highbrow face-off of the century: Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player, vs. Deep Blue, an IBM computer that can evaluate 100 million board positions per second.
Articles from June 2021
Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash
Princess Aura and Flash Gordon as portrayed by Priscilla Lawson and Buster Crabbe (1936)
And they’ll all speak English
If memory serves me right, my first true love was Princess Aura, daughter of Ming the Merciless of the planet Mongo.
Red-winged blackbird • Photo © Tom Raymo
It’s not pretty, but it says ‘spring’
One day this week we’ll hear the red-winged blackbird.
Photo by Paulo O (CC BY 2.0)
Drivers take byte out of computer
The newspaper recently ran a story about a computer traffic model developed by MIT traffic researchers that is being used by the builders of the Central Artery/Third Tunnel project to find trouble spots that may need redesigning.
Photo by Ivan Dostál on Unsplash
The worst weed of all
Here’s one of the most important philosophical questions of our times: What is a weed?
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
The universe of the mind
By now, you have probably seen the Hubble Deep Field photograph of the early universe. Many newspapers and news magazines have published this extraordinary image of the most distant galaxies ever observed.
Tropic of Cancer, Little Exuma, Bahamas • Photo by Venture Minimalists (CC BY 2.0)
The ancients’ forgotten think tank
Just back from a sunny sojourn on the Tropic of Cancer. Not far along the beach from where I was staying is a concrete slab with “23° 26′ 22.07″ North of the Equator” in big letters.
Photo by Prabir Kashyap on Unsplash
Dining on energy at the ants’ table
“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” writes the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mary Oliver.
The double helix stairway at the Vatican Museum • Photo by ctbroek (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Searching for a metaphor for the miraculous
Every high school biology student learns something like this: “Before a cell divides, the DNA replicates itself. A complete copy of the DNA moves to each side of the cell. Then the cell splits down the middle.”
Photo by Ryan Hutton on Unsplash
Direct from NASA, the universe!
In a poem titled “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” William Butler Yeats muses.