Mailund on the Internet

While reading something completely unrelated to this post, I was reminded of the essay Uncleftish Beholding, and thought I would share it with you.

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

You can find the full text here.

Essentially, it is atomic theory, explained in the Germanic subset of English.  To the degree that that is possible, at least.

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Another week is gone by.  I didn’t post so much myself, but luckily a lot of other people did, and here is my list of favorites.

Biology

• How does salt melt snails? (Adventures in Ethics and Science)
• There is no missing link (Evolving Thoughts)
• Swine flu: estimating pandemic potential with a computer model using early data (Effect Measure)
• Origin of life: building an RNA world from simple chemicals (Ars Technica)

Computing/programming

• The web browser address bar is the new command line (Coding Horror)
• The basics of SWIG (Programming for Scientists)
• Google: 15,000 searches = 1 cheeseburger (Ars Technica)
• Canonical aims for the cloud with new Ubuntu One (Ars Technica)
• Why do computers suck at math? (Coding Horror) … please ignore the nonsense that addition and subtraction is not equally problematic, that is a truth with modifications…
• A year with Python (Eli Bendersky)
• Copy, load, redirect and tee using C++ streambufs (Word Aligned)
• You can’t write that number; in fact you can’t write most numbers (Good Math, Bad Math)

Copyright and patent rights

• Big Content’s “theater of the absurd” at DMAC hearings (Ars Technica)
• ACLU wants patents on gene tests declared unconstitutional (Ars Technica)

Genetics

• Who can “pass” as white? (Gene Expression)
• More on the X variation conundrum (John Hawks)

Physics

• How massive is the Milky Way? (Starts with a Bang)
• What are the strings in String Theory made of? (The Scientific Indian) … I don’t really see how the Incompleteness Theorem applies, but hey…

Statistics

• Not all causal relationships are created equal (Gene Expression)
• Advice on statistical model building (Statistical Modeling)

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