Curious Minds Podcast Ran Levi

The Mir Space Station was a true Soviet engineering wonder, an achievement comparable with the US landing on the Moon. Yet in its later years, Mir survived some horrific & hair-raising accidents...

Archimedes is famous for being Ancient Greece's greatest engineer. Yet a random discovery - a prayers book found in an old church in Turkish Istanbul, casts this mysterious genius in an even more surprising light.

In 1989, a message was found in a virus: "Eddie Lives…Somewhere in Time!". 'Eddie' was a particularly nasty virus, and its discovery led a young Bulgarian security researcher down a rabbit hole, on a hunt for the prolific creator of the Eddie virus: The Dark Avenger. 

After describing the Software Crisis in the previous episode, we discuss the various methodologies and practices implemented over the years to combat the complexities of software development. We'll tell the sad story of the FBI's VCF project - perhaps the most expensive failed software project ever - and hear about Dr. Fred Brooks' classic book, 'The Mythical Man-Month'.

Software errors and random bugs are rather common: We’ve all seen the infamous Windows “blue screen of death”... But is there really nothing we can do about it? Are these errors – from small bugs to catastrophic mistakes – inevitable? In this episode, we'll tell the story of FORTRAN, the groundbreaking high-level computer language, and the sad, sad tale of the Denver Airport Baggage Disaster. Don't laugh, it's a serious matter.

In 1983, president Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced that the United States was developing an ultra-modern defense system against intercontinental ballistic missiles. Hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in the system’s development - But then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it – the Star Wars initiative. Was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative the reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse?