Tue 2008-09-16 From a post by John Hawks:
... Recent human evolution is not progress toward a pinnacle. The human population is a snowdrift where ten thousand trade-offs have blown together, mostly by the luck of mutations.
Mon 2008-09-15 
A crane fly, probably of the species Tipula paludosa. The blunt end to the abdomen means that this is a male. Female crane flies have sharp-ended abdomens which are easier to push into the ground when laying eggs.
Photo taken in Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2008-09-14.
Sun 2008-09-14 
A hemipteran bug of some sort. Photo taken this morning by my daughter Zoe in Reading University grounds.
Sun 2008-09-14 When I first came across nomograms in my early teens I was mystified by them. They looked interesting but the article on stellar evolution they accompanied gave no clue on how to use them. They looked a bit like graphs, but had three or more graduated scales, and these scales didn't have to be at right-angles to each other, indeed, they might even be curved! It was only a few weeks later that I discovered that you were meant to lay a ruler or straight-edge across the graduated scales, and by doing so you could perform various calculations. Nomograms are a sort of graphical generalization of a slide-rule, and like the slide-rule they became extinct following the introduction of pocket calculators.
Anyhow, these long dormant memories were triggered when I came across the following awesome series of posts by Ron Doerfler at Dead Reckonings:
Sun 2008-09-14 From a comment by Kamyar Navidan on a post at Damien Katz's blog:
I think the problem with Erlang is that it's more than 20 years old and for most of this time haven't been exposed enough to developer community at large. It's like raising a child in a cellar for all its childhood and don't let it interact and learn from his/her peers. Erlang definitely needs something like Python's PEPs.
