horrible moments in the history of philosophy
January 18th, 2008time for an infrequent post categorised under Philosophy. Here is a link to a nicely written blog post about horrible moments in the history of philosophy http://drjon.typepad.com/jon_cogburns_blog/2007/11/horrible-moment.html. The part on Turing served as a reminder of the great man’s belatedly publicized accomplishments and subsequent shabby treatment by the British government.
FOAF and SIOC
January 16th, 2008Just wanted to blog about the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) projects, as I recently installed Wordpress plugins for these two Semantic Web initiatives.
FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.
FOAF is an extension to RDF and is defined using OWL. Computers may use these FOAF profiles to find, for example, all people living in Europe, or to list all people both you and a friend of you know. This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person’s e-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person), which is used when defining these relationships.
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC) is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.
Plugin Links:
FOAF: http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress-plugin-foaf-output
SIOC: http://sioc-project.org/wordpress/
American Food Requests For Australia
December 4th, 2007Having just returned from the U.S., there are two things I am going to miss: Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and Dunkin Donuts. I tried out 16 flavours of Ben and Jerry’s, with my favourite being Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. As for Dunkin Donuts, I consumed a lot of Vanilla Chai beverages and Boston Cream donuts.
Until I return to the U.S., all I can hope for is that Ben and Jerry’s and/or Dunkin Donuts will expand their markets into Australia. Hopefully someone with the power to make this happen will read this post and grant me my wish.
Move Over GI Joe, It’s Johann Sebastian Bach
November 23rd, 2007Recently made an unusual acquisition at a music store in Rockville, Connecticut. An ‘action figure’ of the baroque German composer and organist Johann Bach. This is not the first time I have come across a music-related action figure. Of course, the band’s merchandise machine has ensured that figurines of the members of KISS can be found at the local toy or novelty shop. Last time in the U.S., I picked up a figurine of Metallica frontman James Hetfield.
But an action figure of a classical musician is something I didn’t expect to see. If I recall correctly, I saw one or two other classical musicians in the series, but I opted for the Bach figurine. Will have to find a place for it when I get back.
Coke and Mentos
September 28th, 2007This video shows what happens when you mix Coca-Cola with Mentos, by now an often performed trick. To read more about it, including why it happens, go here. I tried it back in Australia but the reaction was very small. Currently in the U.S., so I thought I would try it out here, as this is where I have seen it done. This time the reaction was great. Must be a difference in the Diet Cokes and/or Mentos of Australia and the U.S.
Sustainability on The Web
August 16th, 2007Some cool sites associated with the environment and sustainability:
Sustainable Melbourne - http://www.sustainablemelbourne.com
Sustainable Cities Network - http://www.sustainablecitiesnet.com
Victorian Eco Innovation Lab - http://www.ecoinnovationlab.com
Life On Mars
July 28th, 2007In general I prefer British television shows to American television, and one recent British television drama series that I found absolutely outstanding was ‘Life on Mars’. A two-part series, the second and final series ended on 10 April 2007 in the U.K. I highly recommend to anyone who reads this post to try and watch series 1, by which time they will be very much wanting to watch series 2.
The Simpsons Movie
July 28th, 2007
Have just come back from watching The Simpsons Movie. Being a fairly hardcore fan of the show, this movie is required viewing. The movie was excellent and further consolidates the preeminent position this show holds. The movie starts of with an abundance of great moments and then moves into a good storyline filled with classic Simpsonian moments. In particular, the many subtle and less subtle references made to things which are part of the show’s history will satisfy the avid fans. One such scene which left me very happy was right towards the end. When the scene first began a strong sense of familiarity immediately hit me, and I soon realised it was a take on the scene from the Season 2 episode ‘Bart the Daredevil’, where Homer takes the skateboard from Bart and ends up falling down the Springfield Gorge. As I recall, this was my first classic Simpsons moment. When Homer was recovered from the gorge the first time and placed in an ambulance only to have the ambulance crash into a tree straight away, leaving Homer to fall back into the gorge, that ambulance crash had me laughing hard. Well, Homer falls again and that ambulance makes a cameo appearance and this was brilliant.
Semitone Scales Within The Octave
June 30th, 2007The musical octave is divided into 12 semitones or the following musical notes: A, A sharp(B flat), B, C, C sharp(D flat) D, D sharp(E flat), E, F, F sharp(G flat), G, G sharp(A flat). A recent discussion of musical scales with a friend led us to work out something I have thought about a few times before. Where 1 <= n <= 12, take a scale to be defined as a collection of n unique notes within an octave. For example, the common major scale has n=7. Now, my question was, what is the total number of scales which can be derived based on this definition? In other words, how many 1 note scales are there, + how many 2 note scales are there … + how many 12 note scales are there?
Wordpress Plugin: Wikipedia Search Widget
June 11th, 2007Overview
With this Wordpress plugin, you can add a widget that displays a search form to search Wikipedia.
