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
Evolution Butler’s word games 11 Sep 2009 Gary Nelson recently sent me a paper from G. G. Simpson, published back around 1961: Simpson, GG. 1961. Lamarck, Darwin and Butler, three approaches to evolution. The American Scholar 30 (2):239-249. Unfortunately, this is not online, even through JSTOR, but it’s a wonderful essay, in which Simpson excoriates Samuel Butler’s… 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
History Bones of the founder of Christianity confirmed 29 Jun 2009 The bones are likely to be Paul’s, says the Pope. Who did you think I was talking 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.