JMA-PSOS

He kept busy. Talked to colleagues, brainstormed, found passwords on desk notes, tried them out. And finally, revelation. World-turns-upside-down, everything-makes-sense now revelation. Not what he was looking for, not what he was expecting, but oh my God what a revelation! An explanation for everything! Changing everything! The world must know! But he can’t speak.

He’s on a research outpost, effectively under martial law, surrounded by military personnel, overseen by an Omega class AI who is most certainly “in” on it. If he yells what he learned into the ether, it would go nowhere. They would know. They have the capabilities to intercept and filter him out.

He has a plan though. This plan was worked out months in advance. When you can’t trust your encryption, when hyperintelligence helps develop your algorithms and promises you it’s uncrackable but you don’t take its word for it, when you can’t out-math it, you need to go back to basics. Primitive cryptography. Your signal can’t contain valuable data, it will be intercepted, read, used against you. You need the human connection. Your signal is just a codeword. It means only “I have something to tell you, let’s meet up.” All pre-arranged.

Yesterday he sent a message to his friend, complaining about his shoulder. He injured it playing sports a couple of decades ago, and it tends to flare up from time to time. All on medical record. Nothing to see here.

The message means “Pick me up from Verdant, I have vital information.” His friend is a Spark contact; he won’t be the one picking him up. He will just relay the message, get help, get him out of the sector. No decryption could tease the meaning from the payload. The Doctor will deliver the secret, in person, to someone who can make best use of it. If he survives. If they don’t nab him before he leaves the system.

We started watching Foundation on AppleTV (3 episodes so far), and since I never read the books, I was curious how far have the writers strayed. This article summates it nicely (with spoilers). Reviews so far have been mixed to put it mildly: The Independent (with a nice summary of previous and current SciFi book->screen adaptation attempts), Vulture, The Guardian, Geek Tyrant, metacritic, Roger Ebert, reddit, NY Times, WaPo, BBC, Empire.

PS: Paul Krugman covered his admiration for the original books back in 2012.

PS2: Asimov wrote about how he came up with it and one can find the original short story from Astounding May 1942 on archive.org (see also the 2nd , 3rd , 4th , 5th, 6th [a , b], 7th, 8th [a, b, c] installments from 1942-1950 in the same mag @archive.org).

PS3: A few thoughts: 

* The idea of the Encyclopaedia Galactica reminds me of a bit of the futility and limitations of Principia Mathematica project.

* The timespan and wide angle of the series reminded me of Card's Homecoming saga. Until now, I did not realise that Card's Homecoming has some overlap/similarities with LDS and BSG :)

* Converting words into pictures will always fail to deliver due to screenwriter's liberty with the original (e.g.  relations between Empire, Anacreon and Terminus) and losing all the nuances of the original (e.g. humor such as "by the Emperor's left big toe").