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14/08/2008: 54 Percent

BBC News has an article claiming that:

The new projections suggestion that by 2050, minorities will account for 54% of the [US] population.

Ummm… wouldn’t that be 100% then?

04/08/2008: Charlie Brooker Quote

Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.

(via Richard Dawkins)

31/07/2008: Olympics Monkey

Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett and the BBC have reworked 1970s TV classic Monkey for the Beijing Olympics.

Awesome!

16/07/2008: Extending hCard with RDFa

hCard is an HTML-based format for describing contacts (people, organisations, etc) on web pages. It allows you to mark up which elements represent their name, their address, their birthday and so forth.

While hCard offers many useful properties that can be used to describe contacts, some are considered beyond the scope of the hCard specification. This is where RDFa comes in…

01/05/2008: May Day

Today is May Day and also election day in London. Recent polls have shown alarmingly high support for Boris Johnson (or Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to use his full name — yes, really!). Much as I enjoy Johnson’s antics on Have I Got News For You, I ask how someone who could barely be trusted to competently run a bath, could soon be running a city?

And not just any city, but one of the world’s major financial hubs. London, although just a city, has a GDP of 800 billion USD; an economy roughly the size of, say, the Netherlands, or Mexico. Or to put it another way, two Taiwans, or three Irelands, or six New Zealands, or the entire Spanish-speaking part…

29/04/2008: Twenty Days

Lewes, East Sussex, 6 April 2008

Herstmonceux, East Sussex, 26 April 2008

Source Photos

Here are the source photos in their full ten megapixel glory. Feel free to re-use them for non-commercial purposes, but please give me credit.

Lewes castle — the castle keep in the snow
Roof tops — the snow-covered roof tops of Lewes
Trees and roof tops — more roof tops,…

13/04/2008: Dr Who Goes To Pompeii

OK, so Doctor Who has gone to Pompeii and saved Caecilius and his family. Now the entire Cambridge Latin Course will need to be rewitten!

06/04/2008: Tagliatelle with Fennel and Asparagus

It is nearly asparagus season in the UK (although you can buy imported asparagus all year round). Here’s a recipe I made up tonight…

Ingredients

250 g saffron tagliatelle, or plain tagliatelle
10 asparagus spears
¼ fennel bulb, finely sliced
2 tbsp fennel pesto
lemon-infused olive oil, or plain olive oil
zest of 1 lemon, or 2 lemons if using plain olive oil
1 tsp saffron, if using plain tagliatelle
30 g butter
salt

Method

Boil the asparagus and tagliatelle in separate saucepans of salted water. The asparagus will take about 5 minutes. The tagliatelle may take from 3 minutes to 10 minutes, so consult the packaging. You want to time things so that the tagliatelle finishes cooking about 5–6 minutes after the asparagus.

When the asparagus is nearly cooked, heat the butter and a generous glug of olive oil in a griddle pan. Drain the asparagus and add it with the fennel to the griddle pan.

When the pasta is cooked,…

29/03/2008: Cognition 0.1 Alpha 6

Tonight I’ve released another alpha version of Cognition, my semantic web parser. Changelog includes:

Microformats:
- Add option (disabled by default) to require <head profile> for microformat support. Microformat profiles are treated as opaque strings! Supports the following profiles:
  - http://purl.org/uF/2008/03/
  - http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard or http://purl.org/uF/hCard/1.0/
  - http://dannyayers.com/microformats/hcalendar-profile or http://purl.org/uF/hCalendar/1.0/
  - http://purl.org/uF/hAtom/0.1/
  - http://purl.org/uF/rel-tag/1.0/
  - http://purl.org/uF/rel-license/1.0/
  - No profiles required for rel-enclosure, adr or geo (yet).
- Support for hAtom, WebSlices.
  - In addition to hAtom 0.1, rel-enclosure is supported within hEntries.
- Improve include-pattern support to prevent some infinite loops.
GRDDL:
- Add option (disabled by default) to require for GRDDL.
- Add option to check profile URLs for…

29/03/2008: Earth Hour

The Sydney Morning Herald has just (about 2 hours ago) reported that:

This year, 26 cities joined Earth Hour as official partner cites, including — along with all of Australia’s capitals — Atlanta, Bangkok, Chicago, Christchurch, Copenhagen, Dublin, Manila, Montreal, Odense, Ottawa, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Toronto.

In the US, the lights were going out on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island, and Chicago’s Sears Tower. North of the border, Canada was turning off the lights at Toronto’s CN Tower and the floodlights at Niagara Falls.

In Britain, Brighton Pier was blacked out, and Prince Charles gave Earth Hour royal approval by turning off the lights at Highgrove House, his Gloucestershire home.

Now I do appreciate that it’s very late in Sydney now, and the SMH’s reporters want to be tucked up in bed at home, but that’s no excuse for such…

28/03/2008: Friday Evening: Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

OK, so Amazon kindly delivered my copy of Counting Crows’ Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (MusicBrainz) this morning. I’ve made a point of not listening to any of the new songs that have been floating around the Internet, except Cowboys which Lisa sent to me ages ago. I waited until I finished work this afternoon and am currently listening to the album — I thought I owed it to the boys to listen the whole work so I can judge it as a whole.

Firstly I agree with what’s been said on the newsgroup that this definitely feels like it could be a last ever album. It’s got very much of a retrospective feel to it…

23/03/2008: Best... News... Story... Ever!

Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.

23/03/2008: Easter

According to the venerable Bede, the term “Easter” comes from the Old English word for what we now call “April”. “Eostre-Monath” was “the month of Eostre”.

Of course, back then months were calculated based on the lunar cycle, which is why Easter is calculated using a thoroughly pagan method: it’s the first weekend on or after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Eostre is the old Germanic equivalent of the Roman goddess Aurora, or in Greek, Eos. According to Greek legend, Eos is the sister of Helios, the sun. Every day, she opens the gates of heaven so that her brother can ride across the sky — Eos represents the dawn. It is not surprising that April, the time when the long nights of winter are ebbing away should come to be associated with Eos.

Nor is it surprising that at this time of year, when animals are starting to breed again after the winter, symbols of fertility such as eggs, chicks and bunny rabbits are frequently seen.

What is surprising is…

22/03/2008: CSS Quiz

09/03/2008: The Semantic Web

One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the Web into a huge mine of interconnected data, free to be queried by everyone.

As an example of what I mean, searching for the keyword “train” on Google brings up results related to:

trains, as a form of transport
the band Train
IT training courses
toy trains

In the semantic web, the search engine and my computer would inherently understand the difference between these concepts, so if I wanted to know about the new Train album, I wouldn’t get any result related to locomotives!

What I’m particularly interested in is ways of embedding semantic data in ordinary web pages, so that we have a single web that can be…