Resonance in My Feed Reader
My feed reader today had a series of oddly-related articles stacked right in a row.
First, I watched bits from the 1903 Princeton-Yale football game, the oldest surviving college football film (apparently it is just barely old enough not to have Keith Jackson doing the play-by-play). It is amazing how much more this looked like rugby than modern football. The formations look just like rugby scrums except that the players are not locked together. Note there are no huddles, just power scrum after power scrum. Sort of like a missing link between the two games, and oddly less interesting than either.
I then was met with this post from Zero Hedge, discussing the current Greek bailouts in terms of a Nash Equilibrium, the game-theory concept developed by Princeton grad / professor John Nash (who was famously profiled in A Beautiful Mind).
It's not often I run into John Nash even once in a month, but two articles later I found this really interesting early letter, recently de-classified, from John Nash to the NSA, wherein he apparently anticipated many of the foundation of modern cryptography 10-20 years ahead of his time.
And its only a short walk from John Nash and cryptography to Alan Turing, and from Princeton to tiger stripes, so the next article I ran into was this one discussing a group of scientists who apparently have proved a Turing hypothesis for how tiger stripes (and other recurring patterns in animals) are formed.
