A treaty is like a mirror.  One sees in it what one wishes to see. 

A mirror doesn't reverse left and right--it shows what it sees.  It reflects what's in front of it.   

Paraphrases from The Tristan Betrayal by Robert Ludlum 

"Since his death, the Estate of Robert Ludlum has worked with a carefully selected author and editor to prepare and edit this work for publication."    

Thomas ‘Tommy’ Flowers (1905-1998) does not have the same high profile of the likes of World War Two heroes Guy Gibson and Douglas Bader, as examples.  However, the part played by Tommy Flowers during his time at Bletchley Park was so important that along with the work of William ‘Bill’ Tutte, historians have argued that their combined work shortened the war by two years, thus saving tens of thousands of lives.  Alan Turing asked Flowers for help in building a decoder for the Bombe machine, which was used in the decoding of German messages.  The project did not produce a result but Turing was so impressed with the work Flowers put into it that he introduced him to a friend named Max Newman.  Newman was a brilliant mathematician who had closely followed the work of William Tutte on the German Lorenzo SZ40.  However, while Tutte’s achievement had been vital, the decoding process around Lorenzo was slow.   Newman believed that it was possible to mechanise the process that Tutte and his team had to do by hand.  He had a machine that attempted to do this with some success – it was nicknamed ‘Heath Robinson’ – but it kept breaking down.  Flowers was brought in to fix ‘Heath Robinson’.  However, he believed that he was capable of building a different and better machine than Newman’s and he started the task in February 1943 and finished the first machine in December 1943.  ‘Colossus’ also proved to be a powerful machine. Newman’s ‘Heath Robinson’ read 1000 characters a minute when it was working.  With its reliability issues, this figure was frequently a lot less.  ‘Colossus’ read 5000 characters a minute with excellent reliability.  ‘Colossus 1’ and ‘Colossus 2’ (which used 2,400 valves) were ready for D-Day. A great deal of effort meant that both were running by June 1^st 1944.  This meant that Allied Supreme Commanders had almost an instant access to information detected over the Lorenzo system – and the Nazis had no idea that this was happening such was their faith in their system. If the Nazis responded to some Allied initiative, the officers in charge of D-Day could adjust their plans accordingly. For example, a speedy decoding of one message just before D-Day on June 5^th 1944 continued to show that Hitler was convinced that D-Day would occur in the Pays de Calais and that ‘Operation Fortitude’ had worked.  He refused to move more troops to Normandy. No senior Nazi military officer was willing to argue with Hitler regarding this.  Therefore, while a massive invasion of Normandy was bound to result in casualties, they were not as bad as might have been expected for such a large-scale invasion.  The only sizeable casualties occurred at Omaha Beach – and these had nothing to do with the work done by Flowers.  By the time World War Two ended, British intelligence had access to ten Colossi machines.  All but two were dismantled. The remaining two were used at GCHQ and were dismantled between 1959-60.  When World War Two ended Flowers was given a reward of £1000 for his invention – but this sum did not cover the amount of money he had personally invested in the project.  It is a mark of Tommy Flowers that he divided the £1000 up among the team that had helped him and at the end of it, he gave himself £350 – a good sum of money for 1945 but perhaps not a huge amount for the man credited with inventing the modern computer.  In the post-war paranoia created by the Cold War, Flowers work was highly classified and he remained under the Official Secrets Act.  It must have been rather galling for him when in 1948 the Americans announced that they had developed the world’s first computer – something he had done some five years earlier – and he could not say anything about it.  http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/tommy_flowers.htm 

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg 

meed  (meed) noun   Reward; recompense; wage.  

From Old English med.  Earliest documented use:  before 900.

paparazzi  (pah-puh-RAT-see) noun 

Photographers who follow famous people to take their pictures for publication.  Plural of paparazzo, from the name of a photographer in Federico Fellini's 1959 film La Dolce Vita.  Fellini got the name via scriptwriter Ennio Flaiano who picked it from the 1901 travel book By the Ionian Sea.  The book mentions a hotel owner named Coriolano Paparazzo.  Fellini claimed at another time that the name Paparazzo suggested to him "a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging".  Earliest documented use: 1961.

antipodes  (an-TIP-uh-deez)  noun
1.  Two places situated on the diametrically opposite sides of the earth.
2.  The exact opposite of someone or something.
3.  Australia and New Zealand.  

Via Latin from Greek antipodes (literally, those having the feet opposite, i.e. having feet on opposite sides of the earth), plural of antipous, from anti- (opposite) + pous (foot).  Ultimately from the Indo-European root ped- (foot) which gave us peccadillo (alluding to a stumble or fall), pedal, impeccable, podium, octopus, and impeach.  Earliest documented use:  1398.

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From:  Oliver Joyce  Subject:  antipodes 

In the UK, antipodes can often be used to refer to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa and antipodean to the people of those three countries.  Clearly whoever began this broadened definition was neither an etymologist nor a geographer!   

From:  Karl Siewert  Subject:  antipodes 

Since reading Maphead by Ken Jennings and learning about the scarcity of true antipodes, it has become one of my life's goals to visit two antipodal points.  My favorite options are Kergeulen Island and a spot on the US/Canadian border.  Ideally, I would find a friend to visit the opposite point at the same time, and we could make an Earth sandwich.   

In 2006, Ze Frank challenged viewers of his daily webcast the show with zefrank to create an "Earth sandwich" by simultaneously placing two pieces of bread at antipodal points on the Earth's surface. The challenge was successfully completed by viewers in Spain and New Zealand.  The May 19, 2008, official Lost audio podcast gave credence to a theory that the Island (the setting of the show) is located at Tunisia's antipode, in the south Pacific east of New Zealand.  On the popular TV show Angel, the Deeper Well is a hole that goes through the world, with its entrance in The Cotswolds in England and its antipode in New Zealand.   An episode of the fourth series of the science fiction television series Torchwood refers to Shanghai and Buenos Aires as being antipodes of each other.  The tenth episode notes more precisely that they are "perfect antipodes" while acknowledging that is only accurate "give or take a hundred miles or so."  A common misconception, often expressed in pop culture, is that if one were to burrow through the center of the earth from the United States, one would end up in China.  In fact only portions of South America are antipodes with China.  The term China Syndrome takes its name (though not its concept) from this misconception.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes. 

August 2, 2013  This spring, Infamous Brewing, based in Austin, made its first deliveries to retailers, and it plans to produce up to 2,000 barrels in its first year.  The efforts of Infamous Brewing and other craft brewers to gain a foothold in the Texas market received a boost this year with the biggest legislative overhaul the industry has seen in 20 years.  Lawmakers this year approved legislation that allows small production breweries to sell their products directly to customers to drink in the brewery’s tasting room.  The old law prohibited any direct sales by a production brewery, requiring samples to be free.  Now these breweries can sell up to 5,000 barrels at in-house bars and beer gardens.  Additionally, brew pubs, which had been restricted to selling their beers only at the brew pub, can now sell to distributors.  Elena Schneider  http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/02/craft-breweries-get-break/