panamaus. The true story of David Cholmondeley Palmer^†

As I recall, I first met panamaus at a cryptography conference run by my then employers. At the time he was teaching number theory at Manchester University and I was doing data meta-analysis for Her Majesty's Government in Cheltenham. I was at the conference as part of a GCHQ group who were looking for talent, head-hunting if you will. When I hear stories of how the government recruited people for the WWII Code School at Bletchley Park, I flash back to that conference. This wasn't just a man who knew numbers, could crack The Times' cryptic crossword, he had a refinement rarely found in my circles. Erudite, brilliant, direct and charming, he could easily have booted Benedict Cumberbatch out of his role in The Imitation Game. Of course after the last talk of the evening, I buttonholed him and dragged him down to the pub for a beer, which naturally became several, and led to our lasting friendship.

That

A deviant causal chain or wayward causal chain is any situation in which a casual relationship between two events has unexpected implications due to a deviant chain of intermediate events connecting them. Deviant causal chains were first defined by Donald Davidson in the sixties to provide counterexamples to certain naïve definitions of agency. Counterexamples to the tripartite theory of knowledge, called Gettier problems, may also be thought of

Unicorns are native to the Alps, with a historical range stretching from eastern Switzerland to the western Carpathians, and some ancient isolated populations in the Apennines and the Grampians.

Much reduced in their native territory, they are simultaneously an invasive species in northeastern North America, being descended from the escapes of an