About the Shannon number, chess and nostalgia

In 2020, chess became a trend thanks to the series ‘Queen's Gambit’ that tells the story of Beth Harmon, an orphan girl who learns how to play chess with the janitor and becomes a prodigy player.

The story is a fiction based on the novel written by Walter Tevis; but the plot takes up the true atmosphere that existed around chess during the decades from 1960 to 1990.

In those years, people were avidly following chess games in newspapers, magazines and on television. The championships were quite an event, especially the duels between the Soviet and the American grandmasters. However, that era ended on May 11, 1997 when Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat the world champion Garry Kasparov.

We currently live in another kind of world in which computers and artificial intelligence have become part of our lives and it is in this world, precisely, in which the number of chess movements known as ‘Shannon number’ takes relevance.

The most weird objects in the universe

In our universe, there are objects that seem to arise from the most creative imagination; some of them have photos that look like a fantastic artwork.

Although we are used to hearing about black holes, if we think about them, these objects seem to come from a fantasy not our world... but they are not the only weird objects in the universe.

Have you heard about quasars, pulsars, dark matter, nebulae, supernovae, or magnetars?

Here I tell you about these and other curious objects of our universe.

Science food: Sugar polyhedra

3D printing was proposed around 1981 when the first patent for a printer of this type was registered in Japan, but it was not until 1984 when the American inventor Charles Hull made the concept of three-dimensional printing a reality.

3D printing, however, did not become popular until the 21st century. Today, a 3D printer can print impressive models using plastic filaments deposited by layers.

However, can a 3D-printer print food?

Collection of brief poetic-scientific thoughts (Twitter)

Scientific poetry is in the minds of scientists who do not always know the words to describe it.

It is also in the minds of poets who marvel at a science they may not fully understand.

Poetry and science seem to be antagonistic at first view but at some point, they find the chemical bonds that join the words. The verses follow the correct curves in the three-dimensional space of the world. The emotions of the endocrine system spill out into stanzas: and a soul of schists becomes sensitive when writing a poem…scientific, of course.

Here is a collection of brief poetic-scientific thoughts that the polyhedron has found in its virtual trips through Twitter.

 

Laika, lost dog...

It is cold outside these days...

Cold waves follow each other like the waves of the sea. A sea that she does not know. She has known the gray pavement and the dark soil at the back of the patio and the gray color of the dishes she fiddles with sometimes when she is bored.

At night she knew that dark room with the little squares and her pink bed, a pinkish gray, she would say. The room darkens at night and only a very dim light pass through the window, up there, a window that cannot be reached.

And so the hours passed. She sometimes dreamed. She dreamed of pleasant smells that she did not often perceive: smells of caresses and laughter. And she remembered that time they took her out for a walk. What a wonder world! Smells everywhere! Smells of other dogs and other people, scents of plants and grass, fragrances of the morning when the sun comes up very bright, and smell of hot and tasty things. Smells of quiet afternoons when other children play with their pets. Scents accumulated at night that tell secrets from other lives.

She did not know much about that world. She had built a world for herself with bits of memories of what she had lived through intermittently, at times, even when she ran away some other time in the past.

In the morning people used to greet her. Those lively blue eyes shone in the rays of sunlight reaching the patio. She likes people and she did not understand why they did not spend more time with her.

She used to run from here to there. She raced with her dimmed shadow or with an imaginary friend who was formed from the scents of other friends she knew for brief moments.

One day they left the door open.

How could she resist to run away and discover that world she dreamed of when she slept!

Of course, she escaped.

Today we do not know if she sleeps peacefully and dreams. Or if she has aromas of human beings next to her that give her food on time.

Or maybe everything darkens and even she dreams of going back to the patio and playing again with her shadow but she does not know how.

Laika is a husky dog that got lost. If you can, help her find her home.

If you can, help any lost or stray dog find a home.

Scientific (and technological) poetry: Two poems for Laika, the space dog

On November 3, 1957, the dog Laika was sent into space on a journey of no return. 

Laika was a stray dog ​​and she was the first living being in an Earth orbit as well. Today, she is remembered on the list of the fallen Soviet comonauts in the Star City, at the Northeast of Moscow. We now know that she died few hours after the launch due to a failure of the capsule's thermal insulator.

Although I already knew about Laika and her travel to the space, I did not know the whole sad story of this little dog. I recently learned about what happened and it impressed me very much. In this post, I share a poem of that time and a poem that I wrote to her.

Mad about time IV. The urban legends of time travelers

You can read this post here using the translator button!