Enlaces a Biografías e Historia

Algunas biografías interesantes, la mayoría en Inglés. Contienen ideas para elaborar posts similares a estos que he escrito por unas u otras razones.


Sefton Delmer: Denis Sefton Delmer (b.24 May 1904, Berlin, Germany – 4 September 1979, Lamarsh, Essex) was a British journalist and propagandist for the British government. Fluent in German, he became friendly with Ernst Röhm who arranged for him to interview Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. During the Second World War he led a black propaganda campaign against Hitler by radio from England.

Julian Assange, Bajo la Ley de los Hackers.“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”

La nueva vida del Soldado Manning (A Typical Day in the Life of PFC Manning). Wikipedia. Private First Class (PFC) Bradley E. Manning (born 17 December 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of U.S. classified information. He has been held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico since May 2010. He faces a court-martial in 2011. Manning was an intelligence analyst assigned to a support battalion with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Contingency Operating Station Hammer, Iraq. Agents of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command arrested Manning based on information from Adrian Lamo, in whom Manning had previously confided. Lamo said that Manning claimed, via instant messaging, to be the person who had leaked the "Collateral Murder" video of a helicopter airstrike on July 12, 2007, in Baghdad. Additionally, a video of the Granai airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables were released to Wikileaks.


Nathan Myhrvold  (born 1959 in Seattle, Washington), formerly Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, which is seeking to build a large patent portfolio.Myhrvold, usually with coinventors, holds 17 U.S. patents assigned to Microsoft and has applied for more than 500 patents.  In addition, Myhrvold and coinventors hold 115 U.S. patents assigned mostly to The Invention Science Fund I, LLC

Hugh Everett III (November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he called his "relative state" formulation.

Jon Krakauer (12 de abril de 1954), periodista, escritor y montañero estadounidense, reconocido por sus libros sobre alpinismo.

Stefan Banach (March 30, 1892 – August 31, 1945), Polish mathematician who worked in interwar Poland and in Soviet Ukraine.

Erich Warsitz (18 October 1906 - 12 July 1983), German test pilot of the 1930s. He held the rank of Flight-Captain in the Luftwaffe and was selected by the Reich Air Ministry as chief test pilot at Peenemünde West. He is remembered as the first person to fly an aircraft under liquid-fueled rocket power, the Heinkel He 176, on June 20, 1939 and also the first to fly an aircraft under turbojet power, the Heinkel He 178, on August 27 the same year.

William Adams (September 24, 1564 – May 16, 1620), also known in Japanese as Anjin-sama (anjin, "pilot"; sama, a Japanese honorific, corresponding to Lord/Excellency) and Miura Anjin (三浦按針: "the pilot of Miura"), was an English navigator who travelled to Japan and is believed to be the first Englishman ever to reach that country. He was the inspiration for the character of John Blackthorne in James Clavell's bestselling novel Shōgun. Soon after Adams' arrival in Japan, he became a key advisor to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and built for him Japan's first Western-style ships. Adams was later the key player in the establishment of trading factories by the Netherlands and England. He was also highly involved in Japan's Red Seal Asian trade, chartering and captaining several ships to Southeast Asia. He died in Japan at age 55, and has been recognized as one of the most influential foreigners in Japan during this period

Walter Pitts (23 April 1923 – 14 May 1969) was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology. He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, together with what has come to be known as the generative sciences. He is best remembered for having written along with Warren McCulloch, a seminal paper entitled "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943). This paper proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network. The unit of this model, a simple formalized neuron, is still the standard of reference in the field of neural networks. It is often called a McCulloch–Pitts neuron.

Oliver Heaviside (18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925), self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations (later found to be equivalent to Laplace transforms), reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of mathematics and science for years to come.

Nikola Tesla (Serbian: Никола Тесла; 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943), inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor. This work helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

William James Sidis (April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities. He became famous first for his precocity, and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from the public eye. He avoided mathematics entirely in later life, writing on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms.

Loui Alvarez. "I had originally gone to the University of California at Berkeley, in 1964, to become a nuclear physicist. I finished most of my course work within a year, but I knew I still had a lot to learn. The real problems to solve are not the ones at the end of each chapter in the textbook. The real problems come in dealing with the unexpected. The questions are vague and fuzzy. How do you pick a research topic? How long do you study a subject before you publish? What do you do when things don't look like you expected them to look, when your results surprise you? How do you recognize when to quit a not-completely-hopeless endeavor? Coping with these problems is the art of physics, and it is very similar to the art of business, or the art of art. You can learn it only from another physicist. So once you have finished your graduate courses, you are expected to apprentice yourself to one, your thesis adviser."

Ambassador Eustace Chapuys (played by Anthony Brophy in The Tudors) Wikipedia. Imperial ambassador to England. Chapuys was born at Annécy in Savoy, around 1490, son of Louis Chapuys and Guigonne Dupuys.1 He studied at Turin (1507) and Rome (1515) and, after receiving his doctorate in law, took holy orders. He was made a canon of Geneva and Dean of Viry,2 until entering the employ of Duke Charles III of Savoy. He served on various diplomatic missions for the duke, 1517-1519. In 1525, he was in the service of Charles de Bourbon and went with him to Spain. Soon after, he entered the service of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and achieved the position of "Master of Requests" by mid-1527. Chapuys served the emperor in a diplomatic capacity for some two decades.

Kevin Poulsen, his best-appreciated hack was a takeover of all of the telephone lines for Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller, and the potential prize of a Porsche 944 S2.

Adrian Lamo, hacker del CouchSurfing. Threat analyst, grey hat hacker, government informant known principally for breaking into a series of high-profile computer networks (most prominently The New York Times, Yahoo! News, and Microsoft), his subsequent arrest, and instigating the arrest of military whistleblower Bradley Manning, who he alleges to be the source of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike video leak to Wikileaks. 

Linus 'Linux' Torvalds y su Sinclair QL. Wikipedia. Born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, is a Finnish software engineer, best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel and the git revision control system. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator.

Discurso de Mario Vargas Llosa dedicando el Nobel a Patricia, su mujer: "Es tan generosa que, hasta cuando cree que me riñe, me hace el mejor de los elogios: "Mario, para lo único que tú sirves es para es para escribir"

Seymour Cray, father of the Supercomputer, 'just dig while you work'

Edward 'High-Low' Thorp (born August 14, 1932, Chicago) is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack player. He was a pioneer in modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain. He was the author of Beat the Dealer, the first book to mathematically prove in 1962, that the house advantage in blackjack could be overcome by card counting. He also developed and applied effective hedge fund techniques in the financial markets, and collaborated with Claude Shannon in creating the first wearable computer.

Philip Hazel, computer programmer best known for writing the Exim mail transport agent and the PCRE regular expression library. Author of From Punched Cards To Flat Screens, PDF, 2009

List of inventors killed by their own inventions (Darwin Awards).

Christopher Johnson McCandless (February 12, 1968 – August 1992) was an American itinerant who adopted the name Alexander Supertramp and hiked into the Alaskan wilderness with little food and equipment, hoping to live a period of solitude. Almost four months later, weighing only 67 pounds (30 kg; 4 st 11 lb), he died of starvation near Denali National Park and Preserve. Inspired by the details of McCandless's story, author Jon Krakauer wrote a book about his adventures published in 1996 titled Into the Wild. In 2007, Sean Penn directed a film of the same title, with Emile Hirsch portraying McCandless.

David J. Frum, Canadian American journalist and former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He went on to Harvard Law School, and received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1987. Frum has described one of his study methods: "When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I'd wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I'd flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I'd pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were — and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking" —David Frum (January 1, 2008), National Review

YouTube - Charlize Theron

YouTube - George Clooney


Tommy Flowers: Thomas (Tommy) Harold Flowers, MBE (22 December 1905 – 28 October 1998) was an English engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.

Highgate Wood telephone exchange

Post Office Research Station

ERNIE: a hardware random number generator. The first ERNIE was built at the Post Office Research Station by a team led by Sidney Broadhurst. The designers were Tommy Flowers[3] and Harry Fensom.[4] It was unveiled in 1957,[1] and generated its bond numbers based on the signal noise created by a bank of neon tubes. ERNIE 1 is currently on display at the Science Museum in London.

LEO (computer): The LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) was the first computer used for commercial business applications. Overseen by Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson of J. Lyons and Co., and modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC, LEO I ran its first business application in 1951. In 1954 Lyons formed LEO Computers Ltd to market LEO I and its successors LEO II and LEO III to other companies. LEO Computers eventually became part of English Electric Company (EELM) and then International Computers Limited (ICL). LEO series computers were still in use until 1981.

Samuel Fedida ,British telecommunication engineer responsible at Prestel for the development of Viewdata, a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate channel. Samuel Fedida was credited as inventor of the system. The access, request and reception are usually via common carrier broadcast channels. This is in contrast with teletext. Prestel (abbrev. from press telephone), the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979.

Gigabyte (virus writer), Gigabyte is a virus writer from Belgium. She is known for being one of the few female virus/worm writers, as well as being very public and ethical about her virus/worm writing. Her feud with Sophos Anti-virus expert Graham Cluley is also notable. A few of her viruses are humorous, while others, such as Sharp are intended to demonstrate new concepts. None of Gigabyte's viruses or worms has ever made it into the wild.

Pito Salas (Pivot Tables)

Interview with hh86 (virus writer)

Hacking the Hacker Stereotypes

AN/FSQ-7 "Whirlwind II" & AN/FSP-8 Intercept Computer (SAGE)


Bell Labs Photos 1960's