Author: fc1959

Increasingly, we are turning to language models such as ChatGPT not to search information, but to understand it. We ask such questions as “Explain me the food crisis in Uganda”, “Summarize Karl Popper for me”, “What is the legal definition of equitable?”, “Can you

History is full of people that were absolutely certain to be right, until somebody else or some event proved them wrong. The border between a wrong theory, a non-substantiated claim and a superstitious belief can be quite shady, depending on

I wonder whether you ever had the chance to see the glass toy called “the drinking bird”. Maybe the slightly older among my readers could remember it. It is a moving toy shaped as a bird, with a round head

Many years ago, I had to write an essay for an examination in English language. I wanted to surprise my teacher, a very gentle Briton from somewhere around Manchester, so I put together a study halfway between science and literature,

A few nights ago I was watching a funny movie, Barbershop, about a guy trying to keep open his father’s shop in Chicago while under pressure by a gangster that wants to turn the shop into a strip club. I found this old

I was digging into old e-mails, and stumbled on a saved draft about black phosphorus, dating from several years ago. After the 2010 Nobel prize to graphene, the attention around two-dimensional materials, either single-layered, multi-layered, or grown on a bulk support,

Leaning heavily on Alain Aspect’s and other similar experiments on entangled particle pairs, one often associates the notion of entanglement with an effect that is today clearly demonstrated at the smallest scale, but has little, if any, observable effects at

Today is New Year’s Day, according to the old Julian calendar. After celebrating yesterday night, with a magnificent all-Russian menu (including shuba, two variants of Olivier, lots of kilka and sprats, and French champagne, and rewatching again the classic 1975 movie Ironyia Sudby), it is

With the holiday times approaching (have you finished your gift-buying chores yet?) one of the concerns that regularly happen to trouble the festive atmosphere is, “how much extra weight am I going to put on this time, after January 1?”.

Cryptography is today one of the most popular applications of computer science, and we usually think of it as a modern way to hide a transaction behind a complex, machine-generated code. Cryptograms however have been used since the antiquity, to exchange e.g.