Posts Tagged: numbers

  • Sherlock Holmes sits in a chair behind him is a wall of heiroglyphics-representing our word of the week cipher.

    Ciphers and codes—zeros and naughts

    Is there a difference between cipher and code? I have always considered cipher and code to be synonymous—meaning a message translated into symbols to hide its meaning (indeed this is how a lot of dictionaries define them). But consider Morse Code—it was designed not to be secret but to be easier to transmit and receive […]

  • Robot B9 from the 1960s TV sci-fi program Lost in Space with speech bubble "It does not compute"

    I reckon its a computer

    Is computer a new word? If there was a word that you would expect to have been coined in our times it would be computer. A computer is defined as an electronic device for storing and processing data. It does so in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program (according to […]

  • IMAGE of a Roman centurion—after a very serious offence by a Roman army such as mutiny or cowardice in battle, the commander of the legion would take the decision to punish the cohort by decimation. An officer would assemble the men into groups of ten and then one man from every ten men was chosen by lot. The remaining nine men were ordered to club the man to death.

    Devastated by decimation

    I always struggle with a bit of personal pedantry when I hear the word decimate. Its literal meaning is quite different from its modern usage. It originally meant the destruction of one in ten but now means to destroy a significant proportion. Decimate comes from the Latin word decimare which meant the removal or destruction […]