drinking the koolaid
PLoS Computational Biology has a regular series on “Ten Simple Rules”. Last week the series stole their ten simple rules from Richard Hamming’s 1986 Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar transcript. The PLoS editorial brings attention to this wonderful transcript which should be read by everyone.
A pair of letters appeared in this week’s Nature which are quite interesting. Pagel et. al. have a piece on how the frequency of word-use predicts the rate of lexical change in Indo-European history [Nature 449:717-721]. This is complemented by the Lieberman et. al. piece on quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language [Nature 449:713-716], which focuses in on the use of conjugation. There is also a corresponding News and Views written by W. Tecumseh Fitch which puts these two papers into the context of the larger field of linguistics.
