[jasonhong]

Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s...):

He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.

[warner25]

My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.

[ahazred8ta]

An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940) -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 -- https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 -- Bear in mind, this was a Mendelian analysis almost 20 years before they worked out that DNA was a sequence of nucleotides.

[jeifneioka]

Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Ah yes, the "Useless Machine". Fun little thing to build...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine