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–Canadiana Crossword – Jul 9 2018
-Eugene Sheffer – King Feature Syndicate Crossword – Mar 12 2018
Random information on the term “NUT”:
A nut is a fruit composed of an inedible hard shell and a seed, which is generally edible. In general usage, a wide variety of dried seeds are called nuts, but in a botanical context “nut” implies that the shell does not open to release the seed (indehiscent). The translation of “nut” in certain languages frequently requires paraphrases, as the word is ambiguous.
Most seeds come from fruits that naturally free themselves from the shell, unlike nuts such as hazelnuts, chestnuts, and acorns, which have hard shell walls and originate from a compound ovary. The general and original usage of the term is less restrictive, and many nuts (in the culinary sense), such as almonds, pecans, pistachios, walnuts, and Brazil nuts, are not nuts in a botanical sense. Common usage of the term often refers to any hard-walled, edible kernel as a nut.
A nut in botany is a simple dry fruit with one seed (rarely two) in which the ovary wall becomes increasingly hard as it matures, and where the seed remains unattached or free within the ovary wall. Most nuts come from the pistils with inferior ovaries (see flower) and all are indehiscent (not opening at maturity). True nuts are produced, for example, by some plant families of the order Fagales.
NUT on Wikipedia
Random information on the term “ULTRA”:
The Enigma machines were a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines developed and used in the early- to mid-twentieth century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models, having a plugboard, were the most complex. Japanese and Italian models were also in use.
Around December 1932, Marian Rejewski of the Polish Cipher Bureau used the theory of permutations and flaws in the German military message procedures to break the message keys of the plugboard Enigma machine. Rejewski achieved this result without knowledge of the wiring of the machine, so the result did not allow the Poles to decrypt actual messages. The French had a spy with access to German cipher materials that included the daily keys used in September and October 1932. Those keys included the plugboard settings. The French gave the material to the Poles, and Rejewski used some of that material and the message traffic in September and October to solve for the unknown rotor wiring. Consequently, the Poles were able to build their own Enigma machines, which were called Enigma doubles. Rejewski was aided by cryptanalysts Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, both of whom had been recruited with Rejewski from Poznań University. The Polish Cipher Bureau developed techniques to defeat the plugboard and find all components of the daily key, which enabled the Cipher Bureau to read the German’s Enigma messages. Over time, the German cryptographic procedures improved, and the Cipher Bureau developed techniques and designed mechanical devices to continue breaking the Enigma traffic. As part of that effort, the Poles exploited quirks of the rotors, compiled catalogs, built a cyclometer to help make a catalog with 100,000 entries, made Zygalski sheets and built the electro-mechanical cryptologic bomb to search for rotor settings. In 1938, the Germans added complexity to the Enigma machines that finally became too expensive for the Poles to counter. The Poles had six bomby, but when the Germans added two more rotors, ten times as many bomby were needed, but the Poles did not have the resources.
ULTRA on Wikipedia
Random information on the term “MANIAC”:
Mary Tsingou (married name: Mary Tsingou-Menzel; born October 14, 1928) is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek ancestry. She is known for being one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and for work in conjunction with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became the inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, her parents moved to the US from Bulgaria and were Greek. She spent several years in Bulgaria before returning to the US to attend high school and college. Menzel attended the University of Wisconsin where she majored in mathematics and education.
She is known in the computational physics community for having helped in the coding of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem at the Los Alamos National Laboratory while working as a programmer in the MANIAC group. The result was an important stepping stone for chaos theory.
In 2008, a paper published in Physics Today called to rename the FPU problem to the FPUT problem to give her proper credit for her contribution. Subsequent papers referencing the FPUT problem reflect this change.
MANIAC on Wikipedia