TITLE: Quick Hits, Saturday Edition AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: July 07, 2007 7:10 AM DESC: ----- BODY: Don't believe me about computational processes occurring in nature? Check out Clocking In And Out Of Gene Expression, via The Geomblog. Some genes turn other genes on and off. To mark time, they maintain a clock by adding ubiquitin molecules to a chain; when the chain reaches a length of five, the protein is destroyed. That sounds a lot like a Turing machine using a separate tape as a counter... Becky Hirta learned something that should make all of us feel either better or worse: basic math skills are weak everywhere. We can feel better because it's not just our students, or we can feel worse because almost no one can do basic math. One need not be able to solve solve linear equations to learn how to write most software, but an inability to learn how to solve solve linear equations doesn't bode well. Hey, I made the latest Carnival of the Agilists. The Carnival dubs itself "the bi-weekly blogroll that takes a sideways slice through the agile blogosphere". It's a nice way for me to find links to articles on agile software development that I might otherwise have missed. -----