Long explored but infrequently embraced, base 3 computing may yet find a home in cybersecurity. Three, as Schoolhouse Rock!(opens a new tab) told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a stool to stand on its own,
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For more than a century, researchers have used statistics to study writing style in a sort of literary forensics technique called stylometry. In 1901, physicist T. C. Mendenhall famously measured word-length frequency in William Shakespeare’s works and reported that the writer’s style was awfully close to that of fellow writer Christopher Marlowe, fueling rumors
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Erik-Jan Bos, a philosopher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, unearthed research gold with an Internet search. In putting together a critical edition of René Descartes’ correspondence, due out in 2014, he discovered a stolen, never-before-published letter from the seventeenth- century French philosopher and mathematician. In the run-up to Descartes’ 416th birthday on 31 March,
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