Plucked from the Web July 2019

The internet can be a place of great time wasting and pointless procrastination. But there is also a lot of inforation online which would probably have never reached me in a pre-internet age, or at least only with a delay of months to years.

I came across this mention of a new programming language, Gen, built on on Julia. It promises fast performance, and easy programming for advanced AI tasks. Is this worth learning? Will it find a user community, or will it die out in the face of more popular languages like Python? I might give it a shot anyway. More…

Ed Yong had previously impressed me as a knowledgeable and clear popular science writer. The picture emerging from human evolution is more and more an entangled one, contrasting the previous than previously held view of a relatively linear succession of more and more sophisticated human species, with one big exodus from Africa. There were dead ends in terms of species and migrations. More…

Religious dogmatism predisposed people to holding irrational beliefs in other domains as well?Really? Who would have thought? Not picking on one particular religion, of course, I think almost all of them are deeply flawed! Anti-vaxer science denialism is especially dangerous since it has public health consequences, in contrast to, for example, creationism. More…