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The Year in Review
The Editors
As the end of the year approaches, we are delighted to present our second annual review, highlighting the essays that best represent our aims, ambitions, attitudes, and even our animadversions.
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The Chinese Civil Examinations
Hilde De Weerdt
From the end of the sixth century onwards the written civil service examinations became a staple of life in Imperial China. Hilde de Weerdt retraces the development of the examination system.
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The Origins of Python
Lambert Meertens
Since its debut in 1991, Python’s accessibility and rich functionality has helped it gather a huge userbase. Its design was influenced by creator Guido van Rossum’s involvement with an earlier language, ABC.
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The Scent of Flavor
Linda Bartoshuk
It was only in the nineteenth century that flavor was recognized as a sensation distinct from taste. Linda Bartoshuk retraces our understanding of flavor, drawing from her life’s work on the topic.
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When Existence is Inefficient
Allyn Jackson
How hard is it to solve a problem when a solution is guaranteed to exist? It is to address questions like this that the theoretical computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou invented the complexity class PPAD.
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Wacky Jabber
Douglas Hofstadter
A sweetish suite of machine translations of a pseudo-Swedish paragraph concocted by Douglas Hofstadter. The resulting gobbledygook reveals the zombie-like nature of these highly vaunted programs.
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A First Year of Discovery
Casey Papovich
As one of the scientists who will be using the James Webb Space Telescope, Casey Papovich examines how the Webb may answer deep questions about exoplanets and the formation of the first galaxies.
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Bacterial Swimming
Nicholas Taylor
Bacterial motility is powered by the rotation of its filaments, or flagella. Over the past fifty years, imaging advances have allowed the piecing together of the flagellar motor’s organization.
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A Mirror of Nature
Mike Edmunds
The Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in a first-century BCE shipwreck, has proven to be mechanically more sophisticated than anything known from the subsequent millennium.
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