Turing: A poem 14 Sep 2009 By Matt Harvey from here: POEM: ALAN TURING here’s a toast to Alan Turing born in harsher, darker times who thought outside the container and loved outside the lines and so the code-breaker was broken and we’re sorry yes now the s-word has been spoken the official conscience woken – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted – and the story does suggest a part 2 to the Turing Test: 1. can machines behave like humans? 2. can we? H/T Language Log History Science
Biology Does life exist? 11 Jan 2014 Life, I believe, is what physics does on one particular planet on a Wednesday. More exactly, it is a series of chemical and physical dynamics that occurs between 3.85 billion years ago and now on this planet. Ferris Jabr, an editor at the Scientific American site, has a piece entitled “Why… Read More
Evolution The Essentialism Story 22 Aug 2007 Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural… Read More
Evolution More on the really bad journalism 26 Jan 2009 An excellent fisking by Johnny at Ecographica is here – including the cover that New Scientist should have used… More from Larry at Sandwalk here, on the cover and the intent of the article. Marco F at Leucophaea has a blog in Italian that I think says complimentary things about… Read More
On the topic of Turing and poetry, here (http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html) is a proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in the form of a poem! Written by linguist Geoffrey Pullum with the help of computer scientist Philip Wadler.