‘Leaving the Herd’: How Queer Was Cowper?

How the quest was won

Not long after Jim Watson's The Double Helix appeared, there was talk about making a movie about the DNA story. The author of the book took this very seriously and did not find all the many suggestions made to him very helpful. One idea put forward was that Jim should be played by Woody Allen and Francis Crick by Peter O'Toole. Another was to do it as a musical with a dance based on the entwini...

How Infectious Was #Deflategate?

On Monday January 19, 2015 a story broke that the National Football League (NFL) had started an investigation into whether the New England Patriots deliberately deflated the footballs they used during their championship win over the Indianapolis Colts. Like an infectious disease, discussion regarding Deflategate grew rapidly on social media sites in the hours and days after the release of the s...

How Was Your Day?

We describe a ‘How was your day?’ (HWYD) Companion whose purpose is to establish a comforting and supportive relationship with a user via a conversation on a variety of work-related topics. The system has several fairly novel features aimed at increasing the naturalness of the interaction: a rapid ‘short loop’ response primed by the results of acoustic emotion analysis, and an ‘interruption man...

How Was F6 Factored?

In 1880 at the age of 82 Fortuné Landry factored the 20 digit number F6 = 264 + 1 . How did he do it? Landry himself never described how he factored F6 ; however, he did leave enough clues in his work and letters to provide some indication of the ideas with which he was working. In this paper we present a likely reconstruction of Landry's technique.

The 1988 election: how important was health?