Coming back to a posting from 2004, I'm happy to report that fiction is now science. The Science Blog has an article on the first official use of MRI to "investigate the potential innocence of a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care."

Link to the source article in European Psychiatry.

During lunch Paul Dale and I talked about self modifying code and how it might apply to real world systems. Later that same day I did a quick check on Wikipedia to read up on the current state of the art. I was surprised to find a link to a paper about self modifying kernel code by Henry Massalin. Reading his PhD thesis about the Synthesis kernel, like learning Lisp, is a mind altering experience. This guy is a genius! My first thought after reading the introduction was: This has to be added to the Movitz kernel!

The Synthesis paper lists four new ideas:

• Run-time code synthesis — a systematic way of creating executable machine code at runtime to optimize frequently-used kernel routines — queues, buffers, context switchers, interrupt handlers, and system call dispatchers — for specific situations, greatly reducing their execution time.
• Fine-grained scheduling — a new process-scheduling technique based on the idea of feedback that performs frequent scheduling actions and policy adjustments (at sub-millisecond intervals) resulting in an adaptive, self-tuning system that can support real-time data streams.
• Lock-free optimistic synchronization is shown to be a practical, efficient alternative to lock-based synchronization methods for the implementation of multiprocessor operating system kernels.
• An extensible kernel design that provides for simple expansion to support new kernel services and hardware devices while allowing a tight coupling between the kernel and the application, blurring the distinction between user and kernel services.

I was curious what a guy like Henry had been doing since finishing his PhD in 1992. Some googling showed that he's working for MicroUnity, a startup that somehow never got any serious traction, filing one patent after another. He is famous for giving people piggyback rides (the inventors of UNIX among them) and he is now known as Ms. Alexia Massalin. Talk about self modification!

Links:

• Synthesis: An Efficient Implementation of Fundamental Operating System Services, Henry Massalin's PhD thesis
• Synthesis, original location of the same paper as Postscript
• Movitz: a Common Lisp x86 development platform, a project started by Frode Vatvedt Fjeld
• Qua, a WIRED article about Henry Massalin
• Superoptimizer: a look at the smallest program by Henry Massalin
• MicroUnity homepage, Alexia Massalin's current employer
• In the Land of the Weird, Standing Out Takes a Little Work, NYTimes article about Dean Dierschow and Alexia Massalin

I've been doing some research into trust metrics and reputation markets. Electronic markets need a way to create trust between market participants. Of course, as John R. Allen pointed out in his keynote alt ILC05, we need to fix the way we build software first. No cryptographic algorithm will save you, if an attacker can just subvert your platform. First you have to design a trust metric, prove it's correctness, implement it, prove the correctness of the implementation and then you might be able to create reputations and maybe reputation markets. Reputations should be transferable between markets and maybe even tradeable (Charles Stross mentions reputation futures).

Links:

• Capabilities and smart contracts: E-lang
• First Monday: Trust in electronic markets
• Ludwig von Mises Institute: Can the Future Do Without Economic Logic?
• Trust Metric Wiki
• Advogato's trust metric
• Peter Thiel on Virtual Money
• The Economics of Network Industries by Oz Shy
• International Lisp 2005 Conference Keynote by John R. Allen: More Ballast
• GPG and the Web of Trust
• The Global Internet Trust Register: 1999 edition

Lately I've been asked to name a paper that could serve as an introduction to type systems and program proofs. I mentioned Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing by Philip Wadler (he gave a similar paper at ILC03 in New York). To my delight Wadler's paper was mentioned at Lambda the Ultimate in a list of Natural Deduction Reading for Beginners .

BTW lispmeister.com has been offline for a couple of days due to a denial of service attack. Seems like that's the kind of risk you have to take, if you do botnet research.

The TV production hosted by Richard Dawkins titled The Root of all Evil is a "one man against human stupidity" kind of show. Hearing people say the things they say in conversation with Dawkins is scary and hilarious at the same time. It's like the last 350 years of scientific progress never happened. I'm paraphrasing W.S. Burroughs here: "Religion is a virus of the mind". Looks like human civilization is in dire need of some heavy duty anti-viral software.

Torrent links to the show:

• mininova : Root of All Evil - Richard Dawkins pt1
• mininova : Root of all evil pt2