Gilberto Schwertner 🌎

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.

Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.

That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age.

The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.

At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.

Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.

Nobody had ever connected these two things.

His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.

Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."

Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.

At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.

During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.

In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power.

When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard.

At 32, he defined what information is.

His 1948 paper introduced one equation:
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)

Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message.

Three things followed:

> He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name.

> He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it.

> He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time.

Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought."

Where his equation lives in AI today:

Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy.

Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it.

He also built the first AI learning device.

In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI."

That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field.

The man:
He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house.

He called his home Entropy House.

When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together."

In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead.

One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."

He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was.

Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

Claude Shannon's 1940 MIT doctoral thesis dealt with the mathematics of genetics. So the person who would later establish information theory actually earned his PhD in mathematics with research connected to genetics.

[Linux News 24/7 @Linux247]

Debian Turns 33 Years Old, Happy Birthday! https://t.co/18Qf7Ezp1s

[Umesh Kumar Yadav @Umesh__digital]

Dennis Ritchie created C in the early 1970s without Google, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or any AI ( Claude, Cursor, Codex) assistant.

- No VC funding.
- No viral launch.
- No TED talk.
- Just two engineers at Bell Labs. A terminal. And a problem to solve.

He built a language that fit in kilobytes.

50 years later, it runs everything.

Linux kernel. Windows. macOS.

Every iPhone. Every Android.

NASA’s deep space probes.

The International Space Station.

> Python borrowed from it.
> Java borrowed from it.
> JavaScript borrowed from it.

If you have ever written a single line of code in any language, you did it in Dennis Ritchie’s shadow.

He died in 2011.
The same week as Steve Jobs.
Jobs got the front pages.
Ritchie got silence.

This Legend deserves to be celebrated.

[KuphDev @KuphDev]

Want to make farming more sustainable?
You're going to need a LOT more labor.

We already know how to grow food without synthetic chemicals; humans were doing it thousands of years ago.

But it required 80%+ of the population to be working in the fields tending to each plant.
That is NOT a world we want to go back to.

What if we could bring back the labor without putting humans back in the fields?

A lot of sustainable alternatives aren't impossible.
They are just too labor-intensive:
• Scouting every plant
• Mechanically removing weeds
• Treating individual plants instead of entire fields

Robots don't magically make farming sustainable.
But they can make precise, plant-by-plant labor cheap and abundant again.

Sustainable farming doesn't just need better chemicals or better farming practices.
It needs cheap, intelligent labor.

That's what we're building at Rowve. 🤖🌱

[Abakcus @abakcus]

If you want to see inside a mathematician's head, Roger Penrose's notebooks are all you need. Cayley algebra, black hole entropy, and calculator programs live side by side on the same page. Some of it marks the road to a Nobel Prize, and some of it looks like the doodles you make while stuck on the phone with a boring person. https://t.co/MpwL3InypW

[Miguel Nicolelis @MiguelNicolelis]

Como escrever um livro em 2026 no auge da Era da Nem Inteligente, nem Artificial!

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

"We are losing biodiversity at a rate unparalleled in human history." Global wildlife populations have sunk over 60% since 1970.

We are destroying ourselves and taking nature with us.

Time to protect people and the planet.

#ActOnClimate #climate #biodiversity #nature

[Night Sky Today @NightSkyToday]

We should have a holiday called "Space Day" where lights are turned off to appreciate our starry night.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Charlie Munger reveals the mental trick he used as a WWII meteorologist to keep pilots from dying

"One of my favorite tricks is the inversion process. When I was a meteorologist in World War Two, they told me how to draw weather maps and predict the weather, but what I was actually doing is clearing pilots to take flights. So I just reversed the problem. I inverted"

"I said, suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots, what would be the easy way to do it? And I soon concluded the only easy way would be to get the planes into icing they couldn't handle, or to get the pilot into a place where he'd run out of fuel before he could safely land. So I made up my mind I was going to stay miles away from killing pilots by either of those"

"If somebody asked me to fix India, I would immediately say, what could I do if I really wanted to hurt India? I'd figure out all the things that could most easily hurt India, and then I'd figure out how to avoid them. You'd say it's the same thing, just in reverse, but it works better to frequently invert the problem"

"Every great algebraist inverts all the time, because the problems are solved easier. Human beings should do the same thing in the ordinary walks of life"

[Cesium @CesiumJS]

Congratulations to new #CesiumCertified Developer Marek Dworecki!

The Cesium Certified Developer Program recognizes the technical expertise of developers who build on the Cesium platform. It's free + open to all.

Learn more: https://t.co/RsqCOhl41F

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

Think of it: of the infinity of real numbers, those that are most important to mathematics - 0, 1, √2, e and π—are located within less than four units on the number line. A remarkable coincidence? A mere detail in the Creator's grand design? I let the reader decide.

-- Eli Maor, E: The Story of a Number (1994)

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Leaving your cat alone for an entire day is now against the law in Sweden.

According to 2026 regulations from the Swedish Board of Agriculture (Jordbruksverket), owners must ensure their pets' social and emotional needs are met alongside physical care.

Owners are legally required to check on and interact with their cats at least twice a day.

[David Schlotthauer @Weatherunited1]

This El Niño continues to gain strength at an unprecedented rate. With peak sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 1+2 region now exceeding 7 to 8°C. Not only that the sub surface warmth now has reached a new all-time record of 10.7C above normal. Now, when looking at the sea surface height map from the Sentinel-6, sea surface heights continue to increase in the central and eastern Pacific, which isn’t a surprise given the record breaking oceanic kelvin wave that is moving eastward. While the difference might be small from the western equatorial Pacific to the eastern equatorial Pacific it is a significant difference of about one to almost 2 feet of sea level change like a seesaw. Now, with that being said the latest CFSv2 model predicts this El Niño to reach a slightly higher peak now at +4.4C which is beyond historical it is unprecedented.

I would not be entirely surprised in the September cycle of climate model predictions if this peaks slightly higher than the August predictions.

This is going to have an extreme profound impact for the upcoming northern hemisphere winter from significant to perhaps life-threatening floods across California, perhaps to droughts and famine problems in other parts of the world.

I’m gonna have a lot more updates on this El Niño today as necessary.

[socioambiental @socioambiental]

A pista tá salgada para ativistas… 🫠

Confiamos que os ministros do Supremo serão coerentes com o futuro do Brasil e a vida no planeta! E que vão derrubar a Nova Lei do Licenciamento Ambiental, fruto do #PLdaDevastação, no julgamento previsto para esta quarta (12/8).

[GeoWGS84 Corp @geowgs84]

How to Use Plotly for GIS Data Visualization in Python

https://t.co/hvNTxFpaeT

[The Scientific Lens @LensScientific]

When the Sun is overhead, its light passes through a relatively short layer of air. Near sunset, that same light must travel through a much longer atmospheric path. Along the way, air molecules scatter short wavelengths (blue and violet) far more efficiently than long wavelengths (red and orange) as a consequence of Rayleigh scattering, which scales roughly as 1/λ⁴.

By the time the light reaches you, much of the blue has been scattered away from the direct beam, leaving sunlight enriched in warm oranges and reds. The beautiful colors of sunset are really a visible record of light interacting with Earth's atmosphere.

[Adalberto Luis Val @val_amazon]

“Quando o clima muda, as crianças sentem primeiro”

Quem vive na Amazônia já percebe: o calor destes últimos dias está muito intenso. E precisamos ter força, organização e conhecimento para enfrentar, mais uma vez, um possível período climático de grande intensidade. Uma reportagem da Amazônia Real mostra uma dimensão particularmente preocupante dessa realidade: as crianças e os adolescentes estão entre os mais vulneráveis. Calor extremo, secas, fumaça das queimadas, dificuldade de acesso à água e interrupções da rotina escolar atingem com especial intensidade quem menos contribuiu para a crise climática.

A Amazônia já enfrentou situações extremas nos últimos anos. Precisamos aprender com elas. Antecipar é melhor do que remediar. Proteger nossas crianças, garantir água, saúde, alimentação e condições ambientais adequadas precisa estar no centro das estratégias de adaptação. Mudanças climáticas não são uma ameaça distante. Elas já fazem parte do nosso cotidiano. E cuidar dos mais vulneráveis é uma responsabilidade de todos nós.

Leia mais em: https://t.co/AW1tq8Ux59

#Amazônia #MudançasClimáticas #CriseClimática #Infância #MeioAmbiente #Ciência #AdaptaçãoClimática #Amazonia

[Programa da ONU para o Meio Ambiente @UNEP_pt]

Elefantes são criaturas inteligentes e emotivas que desempenham um papel crucial em seus ecossistemas. No entanto, eles são ameaçados por caça ilegal, perda de habitat e por conflitos com seres humanos.

Neste #DiaMundialDoElefante, lembre-se de proteger esses animais incríveis