Kendall Grant Clark: A Web of Rules

“if the Semantic Web is to happen, it will be because of a loosely coupled collaboration between three communities: the academics, the industrialists, and the hackers. This view gives me some pain, however, since the hacker community (by which I mean people who develop open source software for fun and for profit) is perhaps the one least engaged in the Semantic Web effort.”

“There are some obvious inflection points at which hackers are engaged with the Semantic Web; these points include FOAF, RDF, RSS 1.0, and n3. By and large, however, the hackers are not engaged with the Semantic Web effort and, more to the point, it hasn’t yet generally ignited their technical imagination.”

Even if the “hackers” aren’t involved in the formal semantic web effort, my guess is that this is where it will evolve in a ’survival of the fittest’ fashion rather than by committee.

Weblog publishing tools and weblog analysis tools are moving towards the idea of the semantic web as they extend away from journals and news, to other types of data such as job postings, reviews and classifieds.

Cory Doctorow points out the real story on Broadcast Flag:

“it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that’s already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC.”

Copying digital media will always be possible since human beings respond to analogue signals, whether they are air-pressure fluctuations or lights that shine on our retina.

Any hi-fidelity analog signal can be reconverted to digital without copy protection.

However… as more and more protection schemes are embedded in the devices we use to manipulate and transfer digital files I wonder whether there will be a market for obsolete uncompromised hardware in the future.

Ebay in ten years: “Clean” PC from 2003.

Calatrava’s Vision for a Trade Center Transit Hub via Anil

Architecture is like computer programming in that the details suck you in, and its sometimes difficult to see the big picture, the overall design. In fact ability to see the wood from the trees is the principal skill that architects have to offer when they use their skills in other disciplines.

Detailing has become a fetish in architecture as projects follow where the money is. Corporate buildings are designed like Porsches, but there are still architects like Rem Koolhaas that don’t get drawn into details at the expense of the space they are trying to create. Even Corbusier’s detailing wasn’t that great.

Calatrava is undoubtedly a master builder, but sometimes the overall form is dictated by impressive structures rather than the space they create, and as such shows the difference between great engineering and great architecture.

“‘There are two figures you need to know. One is what our estimate of how many civilisations there are in the universe that are sending out signals into space [about 10,000] and the second is how long will it take to search through enough stars in the universe to statistically have a chance of picking up those signals.’ Put these numbers together, she claims, and we will encounter aliens by 2025.”

I’ll put it in my diary.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Aliens are out there, say scientists

“The head judge of the city’s appeals court said a penal inquiry was being carried out by the police.”

I am an atheist, and pro-choice, but unlike Hitchens, Mother Theresa is a personal heroine of mine and her views on abortion had integrity.

Despite being a non-Christian, I voyeuristically attended a church service in the Tenderloin this Sunday where the sermon was on the subject of making actions out of your convictions. This church spends $25,000 feeding poor people each week. I don’t think I need to believe in god for this to make sense. The singing was also a whole lot better than other places of worship I’ve been to.

Because I don’t believe that there is a spiritual moment of conception I think you have to choose at what point a life is a life and until birth the interests of the person carrying a child are paramount. The necessity to let women choose seems sensible to me.

Two weeks ago the House approved a partial anti-abortion bill again, something I personally don’t think is a good thing. But the difference between conservative politics and Mother Theresa is that she said that she would personally look after any unwanted child that was brought to her - and the evidence is that she would have acted on her conviction.

Right or wrong, Mother Theresa had integrity. A political stance that is anti-abortion and does not provide a welfare state to support unwanted children, has no integrity, right or wrong.

My Diana conspiracy theory is that Dodi Fayed never existed because his father is too preposterous to be real. Even if he were, Siegfried and Roy’s stylists already have all their work cut out to have time to cultivate such an entity.

Today, the UK tabloids are all a flutter with the publication of a note written by Princess Diana that predicts someone would try and bump her off by tampering with the brakes on her car.

In this note, she names the person but the press are refusing to reveal who it is. Only a matter of time before someone blogs it - but until then, Conspiracy Planet have a large picture of Prince Phillip under the headline” Princess Diana Names Her Killer“.

Diana conspiracies are particularly entertaining due to the aforementioned weirdness of her partner, Dodi Fayed’s father, Al Fayed, who is often to be found fueling them.

The photo accompanying this post is actually endorsed by big Al. Check out this and other hysterical items on the utterly bizarre official Al Fayed website.

Great Independent interview with maverick, Robert Hughes, the worlds most renowned art critic who has just written a book about Goya.

“I think he [Goya] is genuinely anti-war, anti- the degradation caused by war, which is a function of human desire for cruelty, which is at least as deep-rooted as mankind’s desire for sex”.

Hughes is a superb writer and a no-bullshit critic, with a distaste for the fashion driven whims of the art world, so I can’t wait for Hughes’ next book which is about my old boss, Norman Foster.