The nice thing about blogging is that you get to mix-n-match your thoughts together in a way that you couldn’t do in the constituant parts of your life. This post brings together the notion of Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) from my world of work and Buddhist notions of identity. It…
My First ‘Serious’ Edinburgh Gigapan
View this full screen! This is my first reasonably high resolution Gigapan. It is around 760 megapixel. It was a dark day on Saturday but I am quite happy with the results. You can see this pan along with some of my other efforts on my Gigapan home page. What…
SpeciesIndex: A waste of midnight oil?
Back last year at TDWG2008 in Fremantle there was a Wild Ideas session where people could propose crazy things that might not be serious or urgent. I gave a presentation called SpeciesIndex?: A practical alternative to fantasy mashups. This was meant to be a bit of fun but actually went…
Mukking Marvelous
My Mukka coffee maker just arrived. It is great! It is like a regular stove top espresso maker but you put milk in the top and it has a clever-valve-thing that froths the milk as it makes the espresso thus creating a cappuccino. Bit tricky to get used to at…
Hittite Sheep Hit the Semantic Nail on the Head
I have been wanting to push people in the direction of semantic technologies for quite a while now. Mainly this has taken the form of weaning them off the notion that well formed or valid XML is a generic solution to data interoperability rather than just a application level data…
My Maternal Grandparents Wedding
My maternal grandparents were in the Salvation Army. This is their wedding in 1928. It is worth clicking on the image and having a closer look. It is one of those photographs where you feel you can connect with the people in it. I wonder why it has that feel…
Ceci n’est pas un dodo
With apologies to René Magritte. Imagine you are a judge in a small court and I am the accused. I have been caught stealing coconuts from the local supermarket. In my defense I say I did it to feed the last remaining flock of dodos that I have living in…
Now PESI Project Officer
Today I start a new job at the Natural History Museum London. For the next two years I’ll be working on Pan European Species Infrastructure as the project officer for Work Package 4 – which is all about standards for exchange of taxonomic data between databases in Europe. I’ll still…
Fish – I wish I could see this in myself.
I am an ethical vegetarian who perhaps one day, when the kids have grown a little, will become vegan or nearly so. I also have an allergy to fish. Back in the days when I was a flesh eater I would throw up and have a histamine reaction within thirty…
John Simpson: Not Quite Arrogant
When I was impressionable and even more naive than now I was warned not to trust anyone who started a story with “When I was in …”. This was tremendously good advice. For some reason the society I swim in rates travel above all else and fails to see it…
Royal Museum of Scotland – as it was in April ’08
Back in April when I knew the RMS was going to close for three years for renovation I decided to do some panoramas to capture its pre-renovation state. As with many projects it reached a set level then sat on my hard drive without being launched. A chance conversation reminded…
St Andrew’s Day Poem
Joscelyn (8 years old) came home with an assignment to write a poem about Scotland because it was near St Andrew’s day. The instructions on what was required were a bit confusing. She has a piece of paper with SCOTLAND written vertically down the edge so each line began with…
An evening with Jo Barker’s Tapestries
I spent a fun evening recently helping Jo Barker photograph her tapestries for an upcoming catalogue and exhibition. Her work is amazing. This one is my favourite of the session. Jo’s exhibition is at the Scottish Gallery and opens on 7th January.
View From Scott Monument Zoomified
I wonder if it is more satisfying to zoomify this kind of image rather than have it as a panorama.
Scott Monument on a Winter Morning
On my way to work in the morning I often walk past the Scott Monument. Usually the guy who sells tickets to go up the monument is just opening up. Each time I think I’d like to go up but never do – until today. It was glorious I had…
Herbarium Digitisation: Is 600dpi Evil?
I have been doing some thinking about capturing images of herbarium specimens so as to facilitate the “taxonomic process” – whatever that might be. The trigger for writing this down was a quote from an excellent series of papers on digitisation of specimens: “Plant sheets are usually scanned at somewhere…
UUIDs may be Dangerous
There is no doubt that Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) are important and not just because I have been hammering on about them for the last few years. It is hard to imagine a world where biodiversity data can flow from one application to another without some kind of tagging of…
Eco PC Nuts?
Here is a story on the BBC about a USB device that you plug into your PC to enable it to be put to sleep at the touch of a single button. It is incredible that some one is selling a product to do that. For starters my Macs do…
Nuts sent off
The nice people at Julian Graves wrote straight back to my email and sent me a post paid envelope so that I could send the nuts back to them for analysis. Lets wait and see what they say. BTW Julian Graves has be bought by Holland and Barrett. The bitter…
More Nuts
The bitter taste in my mouth continues so my investigation goes on. The suspect ‘baby pine nuts’ came from Julian Graves store in Livingston a couple of weeks ago. I remember they had both regular and small pine nuts and we bought the small but as I quickly discarded the…
Bitter taste after eating for days – caused by pine nuts?
I started to get a bitter taste in my mouth after eating. At first I thought I was going to die so I Googled on it – how many people a minute go through that process! My scatter gun approach to diagnosis came up with a series of suggestions. I…
Another bleeding lefty
Well I got a link to a US political on line test and I am just another bleeding lefty – ah well no great surprise there then though I would describe myself as a liberal… Take the test if you like. Link at the bottom. You are a Social Liberal…
Starling – a ghost story
On a recent BBC documentary about bird mimics wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson told a wonderful ghost story that has that great quality of raising questions in the heart about our place in the world and the nature of causality. Have a listen: Starling Ghost Story (5 min MP3 3.6mb)…
Edinburgh goes down hill?
Last year Channel 4 declared Edinburgh the best place to live in the UK according to a comparison of facilities, house prices and jobs etc. But today the BBC news website reports a study that says it is the least cheerful place in the UK. Does this mean living in…
Where am I?
Just stopped at a motorway services on the way ‘down south’. I had to ask the lady who sold me coffee where I was because from the inside it could be any service station. This isn’t globalization this is regular human homogenization. It is Keel apparently.
iZendo – Let’s shelve it.
Well I wrote a basic application that would allow people to sit together virtually and I tried it out on my own. I logged in and logged out at the beginning and end of a couple of sessions and the whole thing seemed really unsatisfactory. This means I must break…