
Synesthesia and the Poetry of Numbers:
Daniel Tammet was born with an unusual mind — he was diagnosed with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome, which meant his brain’s uniquely wired circuits made possible such extraordinary feats of computation and memory as learning Icelandic in a single week and reciting the number pi up to the 22,514th digit. He is also among the tiny fraction of people diagnosed with synesthesia — that curious crossing of the senses that causes one to “hear” colors, “smell” sounds, or perceive words and numbers in different hues, shapes, and textures. Synesthesia is incredibly rare — Vladimir Nabokov ...
Remembering Alan Turing: from codebreaking to AI, Turing made the world what it is today
Alan Turing achieved more in the space of a few decades than anyone could hope to achieve in a lifetime. His ability to imagine the unimaginable and put these lofty theories down on paper, and then into practice, show a highly-disciplined character capable of becoming an expert in pretty much anything he had an interest in.Turing went from drawing up a basic model for all computers to breaking down the constructs of complex chemical reactions with enviable ease.Turing's achievements may not all be war-winning discoveries like the Enigma-cracking Bombe, but each theory or inven...
‘Common Sense’ and the War: George Bernard Shaw in 1914
By the winter of 1913 George Bernard Shaw was at the height of his creative powers as a dramatist and already a major figure in political debate and activism in London and internationally. During 1913 he had appeared on platforms supporting suffrage, Irish Home Rule (with Roger Casement) and the Dublin Lockout workers (with James Connolly); he had founded the political magazine The New Statesman with Sydney and Beatrice Webb and had begun to focus in his journalism on the dangers of international conflict - without, as he admitted, much impact. He had warned against the likely prospe...
'Literary tragedy' of Bulwer-Lytton's dark and stormy night under debate
The great-great-great grandson of the much-maligned author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is to take part in a debate to defend his ancestor's writing. The Honourable Henry Lytton Cobbold, of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, is travelling to Bulwer-Lytton's namesake, the town of Lytton in Canada, to take on the founder of the International Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Professor Scott Rice.Bulwer-Lytton has been ridiculed by the contest since 1982, when Rice came up with the idea for a competition to compose the opening sentence to the worst possible novel, inspired by Bulwer-Lytton's no...
Stories of inventors and their inventions: Alessandro Volta and the Voltaic pile
We all read stories about the innovators of today and how their products or services make a difference. In this series of publications, we shed light on a side that remains often dark and unknown to the public: their patented inventions and what impact they have had on other innovators across society. We did the research and summarized our findings.Credited as the inventor of the electric battery, Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist, chemist, and pioneer of electricity and power. In 1799, he invented the ‘Voltaic pile’ to p...