Organic codes: Metaphors or realities?

On open source software and the organization of cathedral-building: metaphors and realities

Eric S. Raymond’s (1999) influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar paints contrasting pictures of the orderly, hierarchically controlled programs of planning and execution that built the great cathedrals of Europe, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ferment and seeming chaos of the bazaar. The latter then is offered as a metaphor for the mode through which free/libre and open source s...

A Cognitive Study of Conceptual Metaphors in English and Persian: Universal or Culture-Specific?

In the last 2 decades, studies on conceptual metaphors have profoundly increased. The development in this field was followed by Lakoff and Johnson's (1980b) work on describing the conceptual role played by metaphors and their correspondence with language and thought. This study aimed to compare conceptual metaphors in Persian and English through a corpus-based approach as well as examining both...

Qur’anic Metaphors and Their English and Persian Translations: Dead or Alive?

The present study aims at discussing whether metaphors in the Qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors have been translated in three English and three Persian translations of the Qur’an. The results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only about 32.85% are live metaphors, about 67.14% are moribund, but none of the ca...

Identifying Molecular Organic Codes in Reaction Networks

Studying semantics is strongly connected to studying codes that link signs to meanings. Here we suggest a formal method to identify organic codes at a molecular level. We define a molecular organic code with respect to a given reaction network as a mapping between two sets of molecular species called signs and meanings, respectively, such that (a) this mapping can be realized by a third set of ...

Great expectations or convoluted realities: artificial insemination in flux.