A Brief History of Superorganism Theory, Part One
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A top scientist in the storied, sometimes controversial field explains how a population of creatures can be viewed as a high-level organism unto itself rather than a collection of disparate individuals.
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A bizarre scenario takes theories of modern cosmology to the limit.
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On the KillerPHP blog today, Stefan Mischook has written up a book review of a popular book from Sams Publishing - "PHP 5 in Practice" by Elliott White and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer.   This is a very good book, actually one of the best recipe books I've read period. You can tell that the authors are still actively writing code - you can feel it as you read the chapters.   The review also lists out some of the contents of the book including sample recipes and the "quick hits" section.
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Padraic Brady has put together a very comprehensive post on his blog today about using the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework to help with the aggregation of content from other sites (like RSS and Atom feeds).   In this entry I explore Zend_Feed from the perspective of someone aggregating RSS and Atom feeds with a view to building a database of uniquely identified content for later presentation in a "Planet" style application. [...] In fact all we create here is a simple command line script to aggregate content frequently (e.g. just set up cron to run it every hour or so) into a database for later presentation.   He guides you through each step of the way:   Setting Up Database And Models The Aggregator Script Foundation Using Zend_Feed to get common data for RSS/Atom entries Putting It All Together   There's plenty of code (and SQL to insert) in the post and he explains each point well, helping to make the development process smoother. There's even a summary section to toss in a few extra bits of information just in case you missed them along the way.
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One recent Saturday morning, I woke with one seemingly simple thing in mind: cleaning out and organizing the closets in my bedroom. If my closets were a database system, the contents would be stored as BLOBs (binary large objects) of varying sizes with no defining structure â just a dumping ground for stuff. As I began dragging things out of the closet, I found items as varied as a backpack, a pair of old ski gloves, about 10 square feet of foam padding, and pocket change in three different international currencies (anyone need Thai bahts?). Faced with a mound of the messy detritus of my own life, I did what most people would probably do: I went to the store to buy even more stuff to organize the stuff I already had.
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Gordon Rugg cracked the 400-year-old mystery of the Voynich manuscript. Next up: everything from Alzheimer's to the origins of the universe. By Joseph D'Agnese from Wired magazine.
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"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
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Neural networking pioneer Stephen Thaler is adapting his Creativity Machine theories to power self-organizing swarms of cockroach-size robots for the military. Is an artificial intelligence breakthrough on the horizon? By David Hambling.
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Matt Cashner provides a high-level introduction to POE, the Perl Object Environment, examining the concepts that POE brings to bear when designing long-running Perl applications.
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Nutrition, obsession, global business:  an exploration of our second most basic desire.
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Save the caribou via disk Supermicro has a new line of 3U SAS storage systems its punting as "Earth-friendly" boxen. Which is fine. Everyone says that. But let's step back and consider that.â¦
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As a companion to the podcast version of his review, Matthew Turland has posted his comments in text form over on his blog today.   I received an e-mail recently from a very nice gentleman at Packt Publishing - their representative asked if I would be willing to review one of their books, namely PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects by Shu-Wai Chow. Reviewing books is not something I had done before, so I thought I would give it a good old-fashioned college try.   He mentions the size of the book (and how it's not an indication of the quality) and the basic structure of the book, including spotlights on some of the specific topics covered.
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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Evolutionary biologists have long theorized that the pace of evolution quickens when a species faces great environmental stress. This idea, of course, is a tough one to âprove,â but we can see examples of it all around us. Just look at the IT security industry, where something akin to drastic environmental change is happening right now: Organized cybercrime groups are punching truck-size holes in enterprise security defenses as regulators, shareholders, and attorneys general are putting pressure on companies to lock down sensitive data. The pressure for change will make this weekâs RSA Security Conference in San Francisco less an industry shindig than a live experiment in evolutionary biology. So walk quietly and keep your field glasses handy to spot some exotic new species in these areas:
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The complexity of life took    billions of years to push and stretch and reshape the biological niche that    is Earth. It would seem prudent Â if one had the means Â to save some portion    of the blueprints of this majesty, so that the process would not have to start    over from scratch in the event of a global cataclysm.
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Anisotropy--there's a word you don't hear everyday
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In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.   To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.   He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.