Monks Practicing Evolution

Before the printing press allowed exact copies of texts, such as Bibles and other works, scribes would copy manuscripts by hand. These copies were imperfect and these mistakes would then be replicated as other scribes made further copies. The implication is that the church was practicing evolution before science had even discovered it. Darwin could've just popped down to his local monastery or church instead of cruising around the world.

Scientists have used phylogentic software to look at these texts in order to discovery the original document sources (creating a book of life if you will). Like evolution in the natural world, the mutations aren't random and you get errors such as recombination, lateral transfer, deletions, and even convergent evolution. There are some interesting relationships that can be determined, such as certain areas of text are more likely to have mistakes in them than others.

What's cool about a theory, such as evolution, is that it can be applied to many different areas such as natural languages, behavioural patterns, archaeological artifacts, and written works such as chain letters and medieval manuscripts.

More information, Manuscript evolution and Phylogenetics of artificial manuscripts.

You Are Here, Now

• Mammal rise 'not linked' to dinos Perhaps the best part is the beautifully rendered result of evolution for the last 166 million years. Good global warming? "However, the supertree shows that the placental mammals had already split into these sub-groups by 93 million years ago, long before the space impact and at a time when dinosaurs still ruled the planet."


• Guice Talk by Google Listing all the good ways DI makes your code better - and yes testing is the main one, more OO is another, better than service locater (J2EE) etc. Not much new here, except for no XML, for people who have been doing this for a while.


• Another Google talk by the Cyc people referenced in Priming the Pump and Threshold Conditions . With many examples that will be familiar for Semantic Web proponents.


• Closures for Java JSR Scala gets a mentions as does the BGGA proposal.


• Three reasons that REST is not RPC "Being able to do state transition processing at disparate locations is hugely powerful...A single process can span machines offering differing levels of scalability, reliability and security."


• Six of One, a Half Dozen of the Other "Closures vs. objects should really be a koan". I think this was off a reddit post at some stage. Leads to a purely functional OO system in Scheme.

Behind Blue Links

• The other DL, defeasible logic.
• SableVM: A Research Framework for the Efficient Execution of Java Bytecode "...using our bidirectional layout, a gc only accesses the following memory locations while tracing: reference fields and lock word, for all instances (objects and arrays), and at most three additional accesses for objects with many fields..."
• Speaking of things Sable, Martin Fowler on SableCC "So far I'm not convinced by the approach of removing parser actions and automatically generating a parse tree. Since it's a parse tree, you have to walk it to do anything useful...One plus in tree walking is that if I'm making changes to the tree walker I don't need to re-generate - which keeps me in IntelliJ."
• Evolution rapidly evolving, Horizontal Gene Transfer Adds To Complexity, Speed Of Evolution, "...the speed of evolution has increased over time because bacteria and viruses constantly exchange transposable chunks of DNA between species...", via "The Coming Revolution in Biology".
• And the song to which or rather who the title alludes to.

Dog vs Cat

So maybe killing other human beings in the name of religion is bad, but at least people can defend themselves, I came across, "Dogs in Islam", which says, "Last Ramadaan, I wrote an article highlighting the phenomenon whereby misinformed Muslims took their dogs (and/or cats) to the animal hospitals or mobile clinics during Ramadaan, to have them put to death by lethal injection. The reason given by the majority of these Muslims was that Islam forbids them to keep a dog."

"Healthy, happy animals belonging to Muslims are also brought in to be put to death. This is a very disturbing and un-Islamic action..."

Not that Christians are much better, the most famous being Descartes and his views that animals can't feel pain. His views were used to justify cruel experiments that were performed on animals. At the same time he is said to have had a pet dog that he appreciated, I always thought "Descartes' Dog" would be a good title for a book.

Dog's saliva has a bactericidal effect on E. coli and S. canis, whereas cat saliva can cause Cat-Scratch Disease. Of course, they both eat rather suspect things and don't brush their teeth so it's not all good.

Also, dogs and cats can make their own vitamin C. Does that show a bias or just a cunning plan? The point of my initial Googling was to work out why my dog's food had all kinds of ingredients but not vitamin C. I came across these other interesting facts in the process.

Still Evolving

Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story "Some are genes involved in digesting particular foods like the lactose-digesting gene common in Europeans. Some are genes that mediate taste and smell as well as detoxify plant poisons, perhaps signaling a shift in diet from wild foods to domesticated plants and animals."

"Dr. Pritchard's test for selection rests on the fact that an advantageous mutation is inherited along with its gene and a large block of DNA in which the gene sits. If the improved gene spreads quickly, the DNA region that includes it will become less diverse across a population because so many people now carry the same sequence of DNA units at that location."

Via Slashdot.

Evolution not creation

Another speech by Adam Bosworth He talked mostly on a TDD/Agile theme where applications are developed in 2 week iterations based directly on customer usage. This offers a better alternative to software architects spending years in seclusion developing the be-all and end-all API and developers hoping that they will get what they need. He cited Windows as an example of this approach. Unsurpisingly, this leads to more tightly coupled code as reported in the recent article about Microsoft rewriting Windows by the Wall Street Journal.

Bosworth calls this approach intelligent reaction rather than intelligent design. Google, eBay and Salesforce were given as examples of this application driven rather than API driven development.

Relating this back to RDF and agile databases, the experience at Salesforce is that the most significant amount of effort is spent customising the data not in other areas such as the user-interface or processing logic. While he doesn't give a reason for data over processing he does say that customised user interfaces are too expensive because they require more user training.

A transcript of some of the talk is available at: Bosworth: The new model is, 'run like mad'.