> But that the first cell just randomly happened in the primordial soup - that looks extremely unlikely,
I don't understand this. Aren't cells just spherical structures that would form naturally from hydrophobic molecules suspended in water/tide pools? That seems likely to me, but I have no background in chemistry/biology.
Nick Lane argues in "The Vital Question" [0] that simple cell membranes are not enough for complex life and complex membranes may have evolved in matrixes around hydrothermal vents.
Sometimes a simulation IS the thing. A simulation of a wall clock IS a functioning clock (e.g. the clock icon on our smartphones). An autopilot that can takeoff, fly, and land an airplane IS a pilot. Chess engines that can beat grandmasters are chess players. A computer simulation of a teacher that can educate students is a teacher. Sometimes these simulations lack some of the capabilities of their human counterparts, and sometimes they far exceed them.
> You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if you were to simulate kidney function, would you?
You would not reject a computer-controlled dialysis machine as "just a simulation" if you had kidney failure would you?
> "Software Stalins," managers who grab onto one indicator and think that driving it to zero (or 100, or 11 for you Spinal Tap Fans) will resolve all other problems.
Paul O’Neill famously did exactly this at Alcoa starting in 1987, focusing solely on worker safety resolved many other problems and multiplied profitability.
>The company's market value increased from $3 billion in 1986 to $27.53 billion in 2000, while net income increased from $200 million to $1.484 billion.
I have a pet theory that '#' and '*' have such prominent roles in C because Thompson and Richie developed B at Bell Labs in 1969 when the first push button phones were appearing with '#' and '*' buttons.
The underground parts of the Colosseum require special tickets for entry so make sure you get those ahead of time if you want to see those.
In the nearby Forum, look for the Temple of Caesar which is where Caesar's body was cremated and don't miss the Palatine Hill Viewpoint overlooking the Forum.
Across town, don't miss the Pantheon, the nearby Curia of Pompey where Caesar was assassinated, and the statue of Giordano Bruno.
And the reason you can't write "Hello world" in Haskell without using a monad is that functions in Haskell are "pure", meaning they cannot have side effects like outputting to the console.
Preventing side effects, including reading and writing global state, helps prevent bugs and makes it easier to understand and refactor Haskell code. Some would argue that the extra layers of abstraction from category theory and unpredictable order and number of lazy evaluations can actually make it harder to understand and refactor Haskell code.
Anyway, in order to perform I/O in Haskell, you evaluate your pure functions as a sequence of actions that are executed by the Haskell runtime. The construct that helps you build the sequence of I/O actions and allows you to bind their intermediate values to arguments to be used by subsequent actions is called the 'IO' monad.
I don't understand this. Aren't cells just spherical structures that would form naturally from hydrophobic molecules suspended in water/tide pools? That seems likely to me, but I have no background in chemistry/biology.
Nick Lane argues in "The Vital Question" [0] that simple cell membranes are not enough for complex life and complex membranes may have evolved in matrixes around hydrothermal vents.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Question