I just found, via 43folders (a very interesting site on its own), a thoughtful post by Philip J. Eby, The Multiple Self, which digs into the conscious/unconscius dichotomy, with an eye on what one can do to improve oneself's live. It's a sort of zen-for-geeks article, as this teaser makes clear:
That's right. "You" are just a subroutine, and a recently-added one at that. You're like a user-mode driver that gets access to certain kernel data, but you only see and control what the kernel lets you. You have no direct access to the kernel's process space, but you can make calls into it, and you get notifications from it. The bulk of your nature as a human lies entirely outside your process space, outside your ability to directly perceive or control.
The Free Software Foundation has recently created a testimonials page where people explain the whys and wherefores of their using GNU at work or at home. I've posted my experiencies in the 'at work' section, the first one in here.
My favourite conference of today has been given by Jean-Pierre Luminet. Most astronomers think that the universe is infinite, but recent measurements suggest that it could be finite and relatively small. Indeed, as Jean-Pierre Luminet describes, we could be living in an exotic universe shaped rather like a football. You can read a nice article for non-specialists about this funny theory in Physics Web: A cosmic hall of mirrors.
I am in Oviedo, to take part in the XXVIII Spanish Relativity Meeting, which starts tomorrow. It's been quite a while since i last went to a physics meeting, and i've been studying like mad this last holidays to have a chance of understanding some of the conferences. This year the meeting is quite special, since we're commemorating a century of relativity physics. It's nice to be back home.
So, looks like torsmo is defunct... but it lives on in Conky, a lightweight yet beautiful system monitor which is shattering my dockapp addiction. This is how it looks in a sawfish desktop:
Alice ML is a programming system that deserves much more attention than it gets. It is a functional programming language that "enriches the statically typed, closed world of ML with extensive support for type-safe programming of concurrent, distributed and open systems". The list of features is impressive:
If you want to see all of this in action, you may take a Tour in Wonderland, or maybe browse the Alice wiki. Alice 1.2 has just been released. Give it a try!
Joseph Rotblat, the only physicist to resign from the Manhattan Project, has died at the age of 96. A nuclear physicist by training, he later changed fields to medical physics and was one of the founders of the Pugwash peace movement in 1957. Rotblat and Pugwash shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms".
Read more in this PhysicsWeb article.
A Hitachi-Cambridge team develops a new silicon qubitHitachi Europe Ltd. announced today that a Hitachi-Cambridge team has developed a new silicon device for quantum computing: a quantum-dot charge qubit. This structure, based on years of work on single-electronics, is the first step in the development of a quantum computer based on conventional silicon technology. Read the more in this Physics.org news
There seems to be a lot of fuzz lately about intelligent design/creationism "theories". Personally, i find the whole business ridiculous and hard to believe. But just in case the spaghetti monster argument wasn't enough, you can read this Daniel Dennet's article, where he analyses how in Earth these hoaxes have become so popular.
Directly from Boing, Boing, hilarious essentialist comparisons of English and other tongues. My favourite:
Inglish iz issenshali a langwidje dhat, wen rittun fonetkli, iz ilejibul tu netiv spikerz. --Peter Bleackley
