Wednesday, October 27, 2004

ScienSe: The Science on a Click

The Scientific Searcher is a Free Software project covered by the GNU GPL, developed by members of the Faculty of Sciences and the Institute of Mathematics at the UNAM (http://www.unam.mx) that tries to contribute to solve the problem originated by the privatization phenomenon that the scientific research is suffering and the fragmentation that this generates. Today there is available the first version. More information in the project's page http://sciense.sourceforge.net

Scientific Searcher Development Team

Friday, October 22, 2004

UNIX Shell is the Best Fourth Generation Programming Language

UNIX Shell is the Best Fourth Generation Programming Language

It is the UNIX shell that makes it possible to do applications in a small fraction of the code and time it takes in third generation languages. In the shell you process whole files at a time, instead of only a line at a time. And, a line of code in the UNIX shell is one or more programs, which do more than pages of instructions in a 3GL. Applications can be developed in hours and days, rather than months and years with traditional systems. Most of the other 4GLs available today look more like COBOL or RPG, the most tedious of the third generation lanaguages.

"UNIX Relational Database Management: Application Development in the UNIX Environment" by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen. Prentice Hall Software Series. Brian Kerrighan, Advisor. 1988.

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Organization of Behavior

Modern psychology takes completely for granted that behavior and neural function are perfectly correlated, that one is completely caused by the other. There is no separate soul or lifeforce to stick a finger into the brain now and then and make neural cells do what they would not otherwise. Actually, of course, this is a working assumption only....It is quite conceivable that someday the assumption will have to be rejected. But it is important also to see that we have not reached that day yet: the working assumption is a necessary one and there is no real evidence opposed to it. Our failure to solve a problem so far does not make it insoluble. One cannot logically be a determinist in physics and biology, and a mystic in psychology.

- D. O. Hebb, Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, 1949

Phrase of the day

"And love's the noblest frailty of the mind".

John Dryden

Monday, October 04, 2004

Phrase of the day

"And for myself

- My virtue or my plague, be it either which

- She's so conjunctive to my life and soul, That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her".

Hamlet