Month: May 2001

Clay Shirky writes about new software agents that evolve language on FEED. I’m glad FEED is still alive and kicking (at least for now). They cover a lot of good stuff.

David Gelernter is a Yale computer scientist with a vision of how software ought to work. He formed a company called Scopeware to capitalize on those ideas. The big idea is that time is the chief organizer of our lives, and so chronology ought to be the chief organizer of our data. Here’s a piece in Plastic about his New Desktop.

Incidentally, Gelernter is also famous for having been targeted and severly injured by the Unabomber. Here’s a copy of the letter Ted Kaczynski sent him. Creepy.

The cheesecake that came back: longtime readers of the Star Chamber may remember a piece in which I offered an Eli’s cheesecake to the first person who sent me a postcard. It took a while, but by the following June someone had actually claimed the cheesecake. Skip to the present… I just received an email from Marc Schulman, president of Eli’s Cheesecake. He was tickled to hear that I sent a reader one of his cheesecakes, so now he’s sending me one. Now that’s technology working for you: if it hadn’t been for search engines, I never would’ve gotten a cheesecake. Thanks, Google!

Read all about bioinformatics research at IBM. IBM Research | Projects | Blue Gene

FEED dude and UI maven Steven Johnson talks about OpenCola with the clever Cory Doctorow (also of BoingBoing fame).

Watch the entire NOVA show called Cracking the Code of Life. The show’s website has some nice Flash demos, one on sequencing, and one on exploring a length of code.

It’d be some fun if they can pull this off… Agilent in Deal for Technique for Speedy Reading of Genes. The article talks about a gadget that would pull DNA through the eye of a “needle” and simply read off the base pairs going by. Eventually someone will succeed at this… RNA does it all the time. But it would be pretty cool if it happened in the next few years.

The InvisibleWeb, yet another index of indices.

StreetTech.com. Worth a look.

Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex in England has been doing some good work on evolving electrical circuitry. Here’s an article from the Raleigh News & Observer on Computers that improve themselves.