A Prospect of Success by Purposely Failing the 97th Time

Walking, a lottery, failure, frenzy, the number 97… this study has all of those, and perhaps other things as well: “Failure is Also an Option,” Antoine Amarilli, Marc Beunardeau, and Rémi Géraud, and David Naccache, in The New Codebreakers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 161-165. The authors report: “The Nijmeegse Vierdaagse is the world’s most […]

Comparing (almost) identical papers – a steganographic exercise

As those keen on encryption and decryption will know, there are quite a few documented methods by which ‘secret’ messages can be concealed within apparently straightforward-looking chunks of text. Indeed, the original meaning of the word ‘Steganography‘ is simply ‘concealed writing’. For example, two blocks of text which at first glance appear alike can have […]

Zowie: “Wow”, the DNA code, interstellar communications

Many strands of thought weave together in this study: “The ‘Wow! signal’ of the terrestrial genetic code,” Vladimir I. shCherbak, Maxim A. Makukov, arXiv:1303.6739v1, March 27, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Kazakh National University and the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, both in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, […]