YGingras^.net

There are fashions in the markup world. There was a time when using colons (':') to split fields in /etc/passwd was enough, a time when no one had a problem with using TABs as command delimiter in Makefiles. Then came the era of heavy markup, "more semantic!", they all asked for, and we received XML.

More semantic is a good thing but anyone who wrote documentation using DocBook knows that the heavy syntax gets annoying really fast. No wonder no one documents his programs. Fortunately, some lazy programmers wanted, for some obscure reason, to document their programs; they propelled us into a new era of light weight markup.

There are quite a few really good light weight markups out there, and Gazest supports most of them. For simple formating, my favorite is definitely Markdown. It reads like text emails: the syntax doesn't do much but the essentials are there and the syntax actually helps to read the source instead of obfuscating it. For blog comments, or anything that won't need much semantic, in applications where you can't use for HTML, for security reasons or just because it's a pain to type, Markdown is the way to go.

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In Waikiki, money is wet. 'Mahalo,' a cashier with a flowery shirt tells you, 'here is your change.' Wet change. It's hard to avoid, when you have such a beach, people will take a dip. Money is wet because of all the surfers. Probably not just them, but surfing in Waikiki is a good excuse to let your money enjoy a dip with you.

Some people are not here for surfing. Neither are they here for tanning, snorkeling, hiking, golfing, nor looking at women in grass skirts and coconut bras. Well, maybe they are, but unlike most people, that's not what they told to the custom agent. Hawaii, with its tropical flora, its young geology, its underwater volcanoes, its high mountains far from light pollution, and its coral reefs, is a paradise for scientists.

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Last sunday I presented my very first research paper in a scientific conference. That's an intimidating experience but I survived and I was able to expose our work properly, if I can trust the comments on my performance.

This is an aspect of scientific research that is completely skipped from science classes: how peer review works and why is it effective at separating science and religion? One first point to clear up is that there is absolutely no consensus. You often read non sense like "scientists believe foo and blah". Scientists don't believe anything and what explanation they use for natural facts is not the same for everyone. As an example, since it was a conference on comparative genomic, probably everyone in the room would agree that saying that a super being created all life as we know it around 10k years ago isn't a useful model to explain what we see. Even though the general idea that there is some evolution going on is considered reasonable, we had a presentation on how a tree of life don't make sense and the speaker wasn't torched as an heretic. He revised the model of the tree of life to include lateral gene transfer: something that we observe. This is exactly how science differ from religion. A dogma must be accepted or you are anathema. A scientific theory is exactly that: a theory. Everyone know that it is likely to miss some details and it's part of its goal to be revised.

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The idea behind bioinformatics, at least for some people, is that since the information encoded into DNA is sequential, you can parse it more or less the same way that you parse an English text. You can apply a regex to DNA and you can search DNA just as you can search text. But how far can you push it?

The part of information processing science formerly known as AI developed a whole range of "machine learning" techniques. Most never made it into the real world but once in a while, a new idea is ripe and you see it spread like a storm. Most techniques that tried to model how the brain works are miserable failures, but it happens that someone understands how people use information and apply really simple pasterns turn worthless data into the most valuable repository of knowledge.

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