Origins of the Etruscans: Was Herodotus right?
Geneticists have added an edge to a 2,500-year-old debate over the origin of the Etruscans, a people whose brilliant and mysterious civilization dominated northwestern Italy for centuries until the rise of the Roman republic in 510 B.C. Several new findings support a view held by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus - but unpopular among archaeologists - that the Etruscans originally migrated to Italy from the Near East.
International Herald Tribune
When I started writing this tutorial I though that the only way to explain warm, fuzzy things to a newcomer was to show them from the inside, with the use of lambda abstraction. Not only because this is the way Philip Wedler’s paper adopts, but also because I believed, and still believe, that the only way to understand what bind (»=) does is to explain it as a function that takes a warm, fuzzy thing and an anonymous function.
I had this feeling because I am a newcomer, and this is the way I came to understand warm, fuzzy things.
I did not received very much feedback for this tutorial, and I must admit that I would like to. But one person, on the haskell-cafe mailing list, told me that:
imho your tutorial makes the error that is a very typical: when you write your tutorial you already know what are monads and what the program you will construct at the end. but your reader don’t know all these! for such fresh reader this looks as you made some strange steps, write some ugly code and he doesn’t have chances to understand that this ugly code is written just to show that this can be simplified by using monads.
I believe that Bulat is right. In this tutorial you go through some code that is really ugly and then, with some kind of magic, it turns out in the (redundant but) clean evaluator of the end of The Warm, fuzzy Way Part II.
Andrea Rossato on HaskellWiki — I’ve been through most of part I, and, for me at least, this is the tutorial I’ve been looking for.
Here’s the thing, we need a new kind of data store, a new kind of SQL, something that does for storing and querying large amounts of data what SQL did for normalized data.
Sure you can store a lot of data in a relational database, but when I say large, I mean really large; a billion or more records. I know we need this because I keep seeing people build it.
Joe Gregorio on BitWorking
Warp Speed Introduction to CLOS
an extremely short overview of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). Newcomers to CLOS are often intimidated by its apparent complexity and possibly confused by its unusual approach. For a long time I considered CLOS to be “too hairy”, but after working on a large project that made heavy use of CLOS, I found that CLOS is actually one of the simplest and easiest object systems to understand and use.
Joe Marshall — Hardly a complete introduction, but a reasonable start.
Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
Steven Pinker on edge.org — Based on Pinker’s lecture at the recent TED conference. Interesting, but something about it is annoying… but then, that might just be me, I’ve always found Pinker’s writing style annoying.
SEOs: the New Pornographers of the Web
the only difference between SEO “experts” and pornographers is that pornographers are more honest about what they’re actually selling. Hiring a SEO expert to increase the quality of your site’s content is like renting a porn video for the plot and character development. Stop kidding yourselves.
Jeff Atwood on Coding Horror — Nice rant! I know where Jeff is coming from on this, and I sympathise to a degree. I took part in, let’s call it a ‘seminar’, recently on SEO where the discussion was led by someone who actually is attempting to do something useful. Maybe he’s naive but he seems to be doing something along the lines of what you’d expect from something called search engine optimisation. There is a difference between SEO and traffic generation.
Noodle makingMark Pi on YouTube via kottke — There used to be a noodle restaurant near where I lived years ago whose chef made noodles this way. For soup they stopped before the 12 foldings shown here.
FIVE BLOGGERS WHO MAKE ME THINK HARD
One of the challenges of the blogosphere is that articles that really make you think, that make you think differently, have to compete for attention with the firehose of (mostly) more accessible,shorter, simpler articles. Many readers have told me that it is the length, complexity, and seriousness of my articles that have prevented me from becoming an ‘A-list’ blogger. “You make me work too hard, to the point I groan each time I visit, or fall behind” is how one put it.
Dave Pollard on How to Save the World — Interesting list. BTW, if you are not reading Dave’s blog you are missing something, go read it.
Entropy for software isn’t disorder—it’s more features.
Brent Simmons on inessential
