Day: June 10, 2004

Linux star Torvalds moving to Portland

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Oregon Live has good news for all us Linux geeks out here. We’ve had the OSDL for a while now, and Linus has finally decided to come supervise things himself, and to get out of the insanity that is the Silicon Valley.

Everybody’s favorite quote from the article:

“The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I’m told there are implants available) by moving during the summer,” he [Torvalds] wrote.

Fun with definitions

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I wanted to make sure I had the use of the word “meme” correct, so I did a quick dictionary search. The second definition has an interesting point.

Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas
can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some
ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through,
for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to
produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.

(…)

Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans
(and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts)
cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become
more important than biological evolution by selection of
hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for
tolerably obvious reasons.