On the 18th December 1987, the initial version of the programming language Perl was announced by Larry Wall on the news group comp.sources.mis. During the years Perl has become one of the most popular programming languages and is especially known for its great ability to process text.

Perl is often included in the standard set-up for both Unix and Linux systems, and is widely used for executing local applications and as scripts in various web solutions.

The last main update from Perl, Perl 5, came back in 1994, but the language is still maintained. The latest version is 5.8.8, but Perl 6 is currently under development.

Perl is one of few languages that can do a lot from only a few lines of code. This again can make it difficult for anyone but the author to interpret what a piece of code actually does.

Perl supports modules, which is used extensively. CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) is a collection of alomost 13.000 Perl modules that offers tons of pre constructed routines available for other Perl developers.

Once again, Happy Birthday and best of luck!

Daniel Paul Tammet is a British high-functioning autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematical calculations, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy. Experiencing numbers as colours or sensations is a well-documented form of synaesthesia, but the detail and specificity of Tammet’s mental imagery of numbers is unique. In his mind, he says, each number up to 10,000 has its own unique shape and feel, that he can “see” results of calculations as landscapes, and that he can “sense” whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful. Tammet not only verbally describes these visions, but also creates artwork, particularly watercolour paintings, such as his painting of Pi.

Tammet holds the European record for memorising and recounting pi to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. He also speaks a variety of languages including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh and Esperanto. He particularly likes Estonian, because it is rich in vowels. Tammet is creating a new language called Mänti. Tammet is capable of learning new languages very quickly. To prove this for the Channel Five documentary, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic in one week. Seven days later he appeared on Icelandic television conversing in Icelandic, with his Icelandic language instructor saying it was “not human”.

More videos: Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Clam — 400 Years Old — Found In Icelandic Waters

ScienceDaily (2007-10-29) — A clam dredged from Icelandic waters had lived for 400 years. Is this the longest-lived animal known to science? Can you imagine living for four centuries? Scientists believe they have found an animal which did just that, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica, which was living and growing on the seabed in the cold waters off the north coast of Iceland for around 400 years.

Source: ScienceDaily

A team of scientists has found that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) growth has increased 35 percent faster than expected since 2000. The findings are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study found that inefficiency in the use of fossil fuels increased levels of CO₂ by 17 percent, while the other 18 percent came from the decline in the efficiency of natural land and ocean sinks which soak up CO₂ from the atmosphere.

The research by the Global Carbon Project, the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) shows that improvements in the carbon intensity of the global economy have stalled since 2000 after improving for 30 years, leading to the unexpected growth of atmospheric CO₂.

Continue reading, and let the car stay home during the week…

Besides running your computer Microsoft now wants to read your mind too.

According to Microsoft it is hard to properly evaluate the way people interact with computers since questioning them at the time is distracting and asking questions later may not produce reliable answers. “Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,” they say.

Instead, Microsoft wants to read the data straight from the user’s brain as he or she works away. They plan to do this using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to record electrical signals within the brain. The trouble is that EEG data is filled with artefacts caused, for example, by blinking or involuntary actions, and this is hard to tease apart from the cognitive data that Microsoft would like to study.

So the company has come up with a method for filtering EEG data in such a way that it separates useful cognitive information from the not-so-useful non-cognitive stuff. The company hopes that the data will better enable to them to design user interfaces that people find easy to use. Whether users will want Microsoft reading their brain waves is another matter altogether.

Read the full Microsoft mind reading patent application