Tim Bray on Ruby

Reasonable Doubt

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on Spinoza.

What is this Snowclone of which you speak?

That They May Face the Rising Sun

The Writer's Choice article on Normblog this week is by Peter Mair and discusses John McGahern's That They May Face The Rising Sun.

Creative etymology

About a month ago I read this article about the (supposed) influence of Irish on American English in Counterpunch and was very dubious about it. This Language Log post has confirmed my suspicions. The Lexicographer's Rules is even more dismissive.

Cat herding

Don't let anyone tell you it's easy.

The Gulf Stream isn't keeping us warm

The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth.

John McGahern has died.

IBM's Octopiler, or, why the PS3 is running late.

Banville wins Booker

John Banville wins the 2005 Booker Prize.

Timeline of the Irish Language.

John McGahern

John McGahern interview in The Observer. Also this one from 2002 and a Guardian interview.

Ante-disciplinary science.

Onomasticon Goedelicum

The Locus project at UCC is creating a new historical dictionary of Irish placenames and tribal names.

Surname Distribution Maps of Ireland.

It's always the quiet ones

From a Times leader about Pete Sampras:

“Laconic” is the eponym of the Lacedaemonians. Philip of Macedon wrote to them: “If I enter Sparta, I will level Sparta to the ground.” The ephors replied with a monosyllable: “If.” For a century Sparta ruled the world and defeated the chatterbox Athenians.

A Virulent Eruption of Paddyism

Salon has an article on Flann O'Brian as an antidote to the usual Patrick's Day whackery. Worth reading if only for this quote from one of his Irish Times columns:

If you are Irish, write and tell me about it. Write frankly, secure in the knowledge that no eye other than my eye will peruse your communication. Explain what it feels like to be Irish. State at what age you first realized you were an Irish person. When did you have your first fight? At what age did you make your first 'Irish' witticism? At what age did you become a drunkard? Please tell me all, because there can be no cure until the pathological background has been explored ... It is in your own interests to tell all. Remember that I too was Irish. Today I am cured. I am no longer Irish. I am merely a person. I cured myself after many years of suffering. I am sure I can help you if only you will have faith in me and write to me in confidence. Mark your envelope Irish in the top left hand corner.

Oscar Wilde loses duel with wallpaper

The Onion marks St Patrick's day with an Irish-Heritage Timeline.

It's a Long Way to Tipperary.

The Molecular Biology Toolkit

The Molecular Biology Toolkit is a Java toolkit for structural bioinformatics developed by Phil Bourne's group.

The Paulie Exclusion Principle

J. Westprog explains the Paulie Exclusion Principle.

Obituary for Max Perutz

The grand old man of structural biology died yesterday. Guardian obituary.

W.G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald killed in a car crash in East Anglia.

Fourth ICFP programming contest

The results of the Fourth ICFP programming contest are out. The Dylan Hackers came second, mostly using Gwyddion Dylan, which the website says is still developmental. The write-up of the contest entry says that:

A major design goal of Dylan is to produce a language in which complex programs can be rapidly prototyped in the same way as with dynamically-typed languages such as Smalltalk or Lisp or "scripting" languages, while at the same time enabling performance comparable to statically typed languages such as C or ML.

Bruce Eckel not impressed by Ruby

Bruce Eckel is not impressed by Ruby. I've tinkered with Ruby and I like the object-oriented design but there are two reasons why I don't see myself doing much with it. First, it's not as concise as Perl for writing small scripts. Second, and more significantly, there are no Ruby libraries that make it worth my while learning it. By contrast, there are at least two Python molecular modelling projects, Pmv and MMTK, both of which are fairly mature and featureful. Even if I didn't care about Python having a cleaner design than Perl, these two libraries would be a compelling reason to learn it.

A New Kind of Science

New Scientist has an interview with Stephen Wolfram about his new book. He may or may not be "the Isaac Newton of the 21st century" but the book sounds interesting. This kind of simulation is going to be hugely important in bioinformatics.

I've been trying to get my head around Mark De Pristo's notes on bioinformatics programming in Scheme. Someday I'd like to work my way through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

The Navajo Know

s.c.i.'s infiltration of the Irish Times letters page continues with a letter from Julian West in response to John Water's column on road deaths. Tuesday's page had a letter from Kate Hagerty correcting an error in the opening lines of Kevin Myers's column.

Life's Grand Design

Life's Grand Design is a Technology Review article by Kenneth R. Miller on the flaws in Intelligent Design.

A Designer Universe?

Steven Weinberg pours cold water on the notion of A Designer Universe?

Pioneers of the Fortran Programming Language

O'Reilly jump on the bioinformatics bandwagon.

Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries

Stephen Jay Gould is Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries.

Free Software as appropriate technology

Danny Yee: Free Software as appropriate technology.

Malignant Sadness

Guardian review of Lewis Wolpert's book Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression.

Edward Said

"I was drawn to figures such as Conrad, a man of two or three traditions, and to men like Vico and Swift who made a conscious effort to appropriate the world to themselves," he said. With Giambatista Vico, the 18th-century historian, "it was the notion that people make their own worlds; you don't feel that your nation is the heart of anything but the individual is, and it is the individual that makes history. Vico was an outsider too, a Neapolitan: you might say he was an Italian Arab." - Edward Said

Zadie Smith wins the Whitbread first novel prize.

Atwood wins Booker Prize for Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood wins the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin.

The Magic 8-Ball

One of the characters in Glamorama mentioned the Magic 8-Ball. So that's what it is.

Shall I compare thee to a bunsen's flame?

As part of my continuing mission to seek out new ways to avoid working on my thesis, I've hyperannotated the latest flowering of Bren Vaughan's genius on s.c.i.:

Shall I compare thee to a bunsen's flame?
Thou art more lovely and have higher temperature:
Carcinogens do shake your Darling threads of DNA,
And the butter substitute is past it's Best Before Date,
Sometimes too loud the transgenic mouse whines,
and often is his third ear trimmed:
And every electron's glare sometime declines,
by chance or a giant atomic particle accelerator, unrimmed.
But thy eternal plutonium shall not degrade,
nor lose possession of that fair thou glowest;
Nor shall Gore brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in ISDN lines to time thou goest:
So long as men can PCR or HPLC,
So long tests this, and this gives Science to thee.

What Mad Pursuit

"By the time most scientists have reached age 30 they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. Since I knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.".
- Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit

Koyaanisqatsi

CamWorld's review of Koyaanisqatsi offers this definition:
ko-yaa-nis-qa-tsi (from the Hopi Indian language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living. Life out of balance.

Not the Dead Parrot Sketch

A while ago Paul claimed that parrots can live up to 200 years and that Captain Cook's pet parrot survived until the 1950's. The blue fronted amazon parrot is described "one of the longest lived of all parrot species, with potential lifespan of nearly a century in captivity". This is more believable.

WebCollage picked up a fragment (an ear, in fact) of the homepage of William H. Press, one of the authors of Numerical Recipes.

Melmoth's homepage includes a selection of poems from Soundings.

The Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank a Union ship off Charleston in 1864 and then itself mysteriously sank, has been recovered. Coincidentally, there was some discussion of John Holland on s.c.i. a while ago.

Nuclear Blast Mapper

The Nuclear Blast Mapper lets you map the effect of a nuclear explosion on a location of your choice. Fallout can kill people up to 90 miles from the bomb site, depending on the direction of the wind. A large (25 megaton) bomb exploded in the air would wipe Dublin off the map.

UNIX history

UNIX history traces the Byzantine genealogy of the the Unix family.

I now have an entirely unearned blue on Advogato, thanks to all of two people deciding that I deserved to be a Journeyman. I suspect the trust metric isn't quite as stringent as it should be.

Faster than a speeding bullet

Faster than a speeding bullet is a New Scientist article discussing the use of supercavitation to build very high speed torpedoes and submarines. It was linked to from a Slashdot article reporting that the sinking of the Kursk may have been caused by an accident with a rocket-powered cavitation torpedo. The New Scientist's comparison of supersonic submarines to Concorde, just three days before the Paris crash, now seems eerily ironic.

WebCollage

WebCollage does exactly what it says on the tin.

Design Yes, Intelligent No

Design Yes, Intelligent No is a critique of the latest attempt to breathe life into the intelligent design theory. The argument from design was wrong when Paley made it 200 years ago in Natural Theology and it's still wrong today. Behe's Empty Box on the World of Dawkins has a long list of links on the controversy stirred up by Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box. In an excellent review of the book in American Scientist, Robert Dorit remarks that "The hand of God may well be all around us, but it is not, nor can it be, the task of science to dust for fingerprints."

Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite

Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite traces the inspiration of the Beatles song to a Victorian circus poster.

Famous Dead Non-theists

Famous Dead Non-theists has a quote from Isaac Asimov that pretty much sums up my own position:
"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

The Celebrity Atheist List

But does it run on an O2?