Lambda the Ultimate

The following personal request is not directly LtU related, but I know it might be of interest to some LtU members. I hope I am forgiven this minimal interruption.

Together with a colleague I am writing an introductory textbook on biological computation. The book is intended for people with limited or no background in biology and biological computation and introduces cellular automata, evolutionary computation, molecular computation, and neural networks. The book also includes more cursory introductions to several other techniques.

We are now finishing the draft, and will welcome comments about the material and the presentation from people interested or knowledgeable in this area who would like to review drafts of one or more chapters.

If anyone is interested, please drop me a line. Due to various constraints, we will only be able to send drafts to a limited number of people.

For future announcements related to the book please follow @BioComputing on twitter.

Seems like its been a while since we last grated our linguistic experts. From How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? by Lera Boroditsky, the age-old discussion gets reopened:

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results.

Being the Programming Languages weblog, issues surrounding languages in general are somewhat tangential. Unlike the linguists, it is generally accepted that programming language syntax and semantics does have a significant effect on design and construction of programs. But like liguistics, one would be hard pressed to isolate the language from the community (culture). My take would be that a large measure of the benefit of looking at new PLs derives from being exposed to differing communities - not just in learning the details of a language.