Rare Encounter

Cypher machines, street meat shacks, and matter from energy.

Executive producer: boo-bury

Show Notes

Bell Labs

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

The "definitive history" of Bell Labs, home of many technologies and processes that today we take for granted.

Inventions and discoveries

Just a few of the things that were invented or discovered by the scientists and engineers of Bell Labs.

• Statistical process control
• One-time pads
• Radio astronomy
• Electron diffaction
• Photovoltaic cells
• Microwave relays
• Transistors
  • Point-contact transistors
  • Junction transistors
  • MOSFETs
• Information theory
• Gas lasers
• Charge-coupled devices
• Communications satellites
• UNIX
• C and C++ programming languages
• Optical tweezers

HX-63

The HX-63, a rotor machine that had even stronger encryption than the NSA's own designs, approximately equivalent to a 2000-bit binary key.

The Scandalous History of the Last Rotor Cipher Machine - IEEE Spectrum

Published in the September 2021 issue of IEEE Spectrum.

Crypto AG - Wikipedia

The company which designed the HX-63, and was at the center of the Operation Rubicon backdooring scandal.

CIA Secretly Owned Global Encryption Provider, Built Backdoors, Spied On 100+ Foreign Governments: Report

Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths | Natural History Museum

Well, properly they'd be mammoth / Asian elephant hybrids.

We've previously tried restoring the extinct bucardo, but as the article says,

The success was short-lived. The animal only survived for seven minutes, giving it the regrettable record of the being only animal to have gone extinct twice.

Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy | BNL Newsroom

Brookhaven has been able to generate electron/positron pairs from photon interactions.

Photons surrounding near-light-speed gold ions interact to generate an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

Epic Games v. Apple: Judge reaches decision

A solidly middle-road result. Apple loses on in-app purchases, but avoids being considered a monopolist.

Anime