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2012

Biological modelling and domain-specific languages

In "The Layer-Oriented Approach to Declarative Languages for Biological Modeling", Raikov and De Schutter propose a "layer-oriented" declarative language to map high-level biological concepts to computational representations. The layer-oriented approach was chosen because "additional functionality can be transparently added to the language by adding more layers".

This is an area that has interested me ever since I began my PhD. Domain-specific languages are a very neat way to express computational problems in a manner that (hopefully) captures the essentials of the problem domain with a minimum of noise. And declarative languages (e.g., logic languages such as Prolog and Mercury, and functional languages such as Haskell and OCaml) are more readily able to express the logic of a problem without (overly) digressing into the algorithmic details of solving the problem.

  • in Ethics
  • 1 min read

Ethics and organ donation

"What makes killing wrong?" ask Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller. Not the loss of life or consciousness, but the loss of all remaining abilities. It's an interesting proposition, whose practical consequences they outline with regards to organ donation. I'm somewhat envious of this work, because it deals with fundamental concepts we're all familiar with and situations whose complexities we can all appreciate. Almost anyone could read this paper and appreciate the arguments and conclusions.

Meanwhile, other fields of science continue to pursue knowledge on smaller and smaller scales, at higher and higher levels of precision. As per the oft-used quote (un-attributed, to the best of my knowledge): "you learn more and more about less and less, until you know everything about nothing."