SGML, HTML, and XML

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Professor Brailsford on the background of HTML and the story of an important workshop with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which he attended. You can watch the three short videos on Computerphile.

The insight here is valuable with regards of early research of markup languages, and where is has intercepted with the history of the Web, and what the academic community was trying to achieve.

Obviously, the later quarrels between supporters of XHTML v.s. HTML5, and W3C v.s. WHATWG was epic, yet it’s important that new technologies are always built on top of the old, no matter how “uncool” the old technologies we think they are.

I hope there are more interviews like this documenting the later history of the Web markup technologies.

Jeremy England 的生物起源論

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Stromatolites.jpg

Stromatolites from Wikipedia Commons.

大約年初有一波新聞介紹 MIT 生物物理學家 Jeremy England 關於生物起源的研究。新聞被轉載又被翻譯之後不小心變成了某種「下一個達爾文」之類的標題 … Orz

但剛剛真的（終於）聽完他接受 7th Avenue Project 的廣播專訪，才大略了解他的論點是

  • 「生命現象」是人工的定義，「無生命」的結構與系統也有可能有朝向有序結構發展的趨向。
  • 這不違反熱力學第二定律，因為生物起源環境是開放的複雜系統。
  • 從無序產生有序的「生物起源」活動可能是個宇宙中無論時地隨時發生的自然現象，甚至發生在現在的生活環境中，但在現在的地球可能是因為被 RNA/DNA-world 的「生物」主宰所以被壓抑，也有可能是發生在我們觀察不到的尺度（或面向）。

他說他的理論可能可以補足現在生物起源論中，人們聽起來漏洞很大的假說（而不是取代進化論等）：原始地球會產生生命是因為有宇宙中獨一無二的環境「剛好」讓一堆無機的胺基酸與核酸碰撞在一起然後「剛好」成功開始複製自己的結構，然後「剛好」和其他結構產生天擇競爭。他希望能實作出數學模型與模擬，來解釋這些「剛好」只是模型可預測的自然現象，不是不可知的「超自然」謎團。

另外一個有趣的事是這位學者是成年之後才歸依猶太教正統派的教徒，廣播當中也有討論到他對於信仰與他的研究的關係的見解。

可以先讀一下維基百科的生物起源論條目，回顧一下高中生物課或是自然科學博物館介紹的主流見解。

The Web We Have to Save

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The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying.
Why is nobody stopping it?

— The Web We Have to Save by Hossein Derakhshan

就像進入了時光機，這位作者因為他的部落格被伊朗政府監禁了 7 年。這是他被釋放之後第一篇英文部落格，詳述了他所看到的 Web 的變化。這篇文章和 Anil Dash 之前那篇「The Web We Lost」有著相似的觀點，只是這次，描述的筆觸多了無盡的個人感懷，畢竟這位作者失去了因而坐牢的那些事物。

Just like being pulled into a time machine, the author of this post was jailed by Iranian government for 7 years because of his blog posts. This is his first blog post in English after his release, detailing the changes of the Web he have seen. The post shared a similar view with the post “The Web We Lost” by Anil Dash — but this time, the descriptions come with an immersive personal touch, since what have changed was the things that the author have went to jail for.