Posts Tagged ‘Giordano Bruno’
“The sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.”*…
Mary, Queen of Scots wrote 57 encrypted messages during her captivity in England; until recently, all but 7 of them were believed lost. Meilan Solly tells the tale of their discovery and decryption…
Over the course of her 19 years in captivity, Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote thousands of letters to ambassadors, government officials, fellow monarchs and conspirators alike. Most of these missives had the same underlying goal: securing the deposed Scottish queen’s freedom. After losing her throne in 1567, Mary had fled to England, hoping to find refuge at her cousin Elizabeth I’s court. (Mary’s paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was the sister of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII.) Instead, the English queen imprisoned Mary, keeping her under house arrest for nearly two decades before ordering her execution in 1587.
Mary’s letters have long fascinated scholars and the public, providing a glimpse into her relentless efforts to secure her release. But the former queen’s correspondence often raises more questions than it answers, in part because Mary took extensive steps to hide her messages from the prying eyes of Elizabeth’s spies. In addition to folding the pages with a technique known as letterlocking, she employed ciphers and codes of varying complexity.
More than 400 years after Mary’s death, a chance discovery by a trio of code breakers is offering new insights into the queen’s final years. As the researchers write in the journal Cryptologia, they originally decided to examine a cache of coded notes housed at the National Library of France as part of a broader push to “locate, digitize, transcribe, decipher and analyze” historic ciphers. Those pages turned out to be 57 of Mary’s encrypted letters, the majority of which were sent to Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador to England, between 1578 and 1584. All but seven were previously thought to be lost…
What they found and how they made sense of it: “Code Breakers Discover—and Decipher—Long-Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots,” from @meilansolly in @SmithsonianMag.
* Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters
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As we crack codes, we might spare a thought for a rough contemporary of Mary’s, a man who refused to communicate in code: Giordano Bruno. A Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer whose concept of the infinite universe expanded on Copernicus’s model, he was the first European to understand the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno’s views were considered dangerously heretical by the (Roman) Inquisition, which imprisoned him in 1592; after eight years of refusals to recant, on this date in 1600, he was burned at the stake.
Atavistic Tendencies: what’s old is new…
A team of astrobiologists, working with a a group of oncologists, has suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago. The genes that controlled the behavior of these early multicellular organisms still reside in our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check. It’s when these newer “control genes” fail that the older mechanisms take over, the cell reverts to its earlier behaviors– and cancer does its growing-out-of-control damage.
Reporting in the journal Physical Biology, Paul Davies and and Charles Lineweaver explain
“Advanced” metazoan life of the form we now know, i.e. organisms with cell specialization and organ differentiation, was preceded by colonies of eukaryotic cells in which cellular cooperation was fairly rudimentary, consisting of networks of adhering cells exchanging information chemically, and forming self-organized assemblages with only a moderate division of labor…
So, they suggest, cancer isn’t an attack of “rogue cells,” evolving quickly to overpower normal biological-metabolic routines; it’s a kind of atavism, a throwback… In conversation with Life Scientist, Lineweaver elaborates
Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when[life was] nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells.
We think that the tumors that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago…
The explanation makes a powerful kind of sense, at least at a systemic level: cancers occur in virtually all metazoans (with the exception of the altogether weird naked mole rat). As Davies and Lineweaver note, “This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics.”
The good news, Life Scientist observes, is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.
Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they’re susceptible to treatment, it’s unlikely they’ll evolve new ways to get around it.
“Given cancer’s formidable complexity and diversity, how might one make progress toward controlling it? If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism,” [Davies and Lineweaver] write.
[TotH to slashdot]
As we resist the impulse, remembering that there are other good reasons not to smoke, we might recall spare a thought for Giordano Bruno, the Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer whose concept of the infinite universe expanded on Copernicus’s model; he was the first European to understand the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno’s views were considered dangerously heretical by the (Roman) Inquisition, which imprisoned him in 1592; after eight years of refusals to recant, on this date in 1600, he was burned at the stake.
B-ing all that they can B…
As the emphasis at American Movie Classics has slid every more completely from “Classics” to “American,” viewers have had to take consolation in channel originals like Mad Men and (the less-well-known, but arguably even better) Breaking Bad…
Now, as though in penance, AMC has fielded “BMC”– “B-Movie Classics“– a web site on which one can stream the best of the worst…
Bikinis! Monsters! Motorcycles! Welcome to BMC, your new go-to site for B-movies by the likes of John Carpenter (Dark Star) and Roger Corman (Saga of the Viking Women). Now online and in full screen, watch unsung classics like Asylum by Psycho screenwriter Robert Block or Corridors of Blood with the inimitable Christopher Lee. Want to see international icons before they made it big? Check out Raquel Welch in A Swingin’ Summer or kung fu king Sonny Chiba in Terror Beneath the Sea. Looking for the unexpected? How about The Ruthless Four, a spaghetti Western starring Klaus Kinski.
Now updated with even more B-movies featuring femmes fatales (The Cat Girl), jungle adventures (Curse of the Voodoo) and talking ventriloquist’s dummies (Devil Doll). Whatever your B-movie taste, BMC has got you covered.
(As a special treat, check out Carnival of Souls— a B-Movie that transcends…)
As we salt our popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1593 that the Vatican opened the seven-year trial Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno– whose championing of heliocentrism and an infinite universe landed him in the dock. Bruno’s theory went beyond the Copernican model in identifying the sun as just one of an infinite number of independently-moving heavenly bodies; indeed, he was the first person (Western person, anyway) to have understood the universe as a continuum in which the stars one sees at night are identical in nature to the Sun… Not a view comfortable to the Orthodoxy. Bruno was convicted of heresy in 1600, and burned at the stake. All of his works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603.
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