Some things never change—or do they?

Evolution: They Never Come Back, or Do They?

There is a notion in evolution that traits, once lost, cannot re-evolve. A new species of bone-eating worm defies this notion. Its males are free-living and look nothing like the dwarfed bags of sperm of its relatives.

Some Things Algorithms Cannot Do

A new, ‘behavioral’ theory of algorithms, intending to capture algorithms at their intended abstraction level, has been developed in this century in a series of papers by Y. Gurevich, A. Blass and others, motivated initially by the goal of establishing the ASM thesis. A viable theory of algorithms must have its limitative results, algorithms, however abstract, cannot do just anything. We establ...

Universal Grammar and Chaos/Complexity Theory: Where Do They Meet And Where Do They Cross?

  Abstract The present study begins by sketching "Chaos/Complexity Theory" (C/CT) and its applica-tion to the nature of language and language acquisition. Then, the theory of "Universal Grammar" (UG) is explicated with an eye to C/CT. Firstly, it is revealed that CCT may or may not be allied with a theory of language acquisition that takes UG as the initial state of language acquisition for ...

Things my mother never taught me.

Some wells never dry

According to a criticaster Wehkamp owns “fossil COBOL in rock”. In 1995 Wehkamp decided to get rid of her mainframe. Her strategy was to stop development on her GCOS8 platform. The idea was that the mainframe would dry and eventually could be carried to her grave. Unfortunately this strategy did not work. In fact complexity has grown beyond control. In the first part of the talk we will give a ...