Where's a Mathematician when you need one?

Software version control systems play a crucial role in modern software development: they allow developers to track and control changes to the large numbers of files that make up modern software systems.  Given that version control systems have been in existence for several decades now, one would have thought that the theory behind their operation would be well-developed, but this is not so.  A quote from a recent talk on DARCS, an innovative modern version control system, given by Ganesh Sittampalam to the London Haskell Users' Group:

Patch Theory:  This is the theory underlying DARCS or, rather, what we would like the theory underlying DARCS to be but we cannot quite figure out what the theory should be.

And another:

We would like to know a consistent set of rules that actually guarantee the behaviour that we want from DARCS.

The formalization of DARCS Patch Theory would appear to  be a worthwhile little project for any passing mathematician.

Photosynthesis Cartoon

I would never have thought of photosynthesis as a suitable subject for humour, that is until I came across this.

Evolution and Creationism Compared

From the blog of Henry Gee, Senior Editor for Biological Sciences at Nature:

I cannot put it plainer than this: Evolution is Elegant, Creationism is Crap.

No room for debate there!

Google Maps Street View Horror Video

Via Google Operating System.  More stuff by the Vacationeers can be found here and here.

Why Static Typing Matters

A powerful argument in favour of static over dynamic typing is that the former can allow you to catch a whole class of thread safety errors at compile time.  From a post by Trevion at Nonlinear:

Recently, I've had some fun discovering which parts of the .Net libraries are threadsafe.  While reading the documentation would have helped my quest, and testing did discover the non-threadsafe functions I'd missed (granted, four hours into batch runs), in Haskell I'd have been able to tell from the types whether or not the operations were threadsafe.  That's a stronger assertion than I've seen any testing library be able to make.