One of the areas that overlaps my professional life and personal interests is the use of the Internet (and specifically the World Wide Web) for scientific research - and although in my professional life I work closely with academic researchers, I’m also interested in how the web can be used by non-scientists to make a contribution.
I’ve just finished reading two interesting books about the modern Internet and where it’s going. They are:
Back in May I wrote about living on the open-source planet. This approach to web-based software development is often associated with the LAMP (I prefer the P to stand for Perl) ’stack’ of technologies.
I recently read ‘Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams‘ by M.J.Simpson, which to be honest was pretty dull, but it did get me thinking about the thing Adams is most famous for, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘.
I recently watched the second episode of the BBC series ‘Mountain (with Griff Rhys Jones)‘ and found it pretty disappointing. It seemed to spend more time talking about Coleridge, Wordsworth and Kendal mint cake than about mountains. I also checked out the book that accompanies the series and my disappointment increased further. Of the 250 pages in the book, fully 150 are devoted to England and Wales.
I’ve mentioned metadata in a few of my previous postings, and something else that is related to metadata is the concept of a ‘controlled vocabulary‘. This is a term that suffers from many misunderstandings so I’m going to try and define what it is and where it sits in the grand scheme of things, using my own experiences.
Regarding my posting of a few month’s back, ‘The curse of metadata’, which was quite negative about the current state of web-related metadata initiatives in general, I thought perhaps I should provide a more positive counterweight so here goes.
One of the best things about my recent trip to the Canadian Rockies was the huge amount of wildlife I saw. An excellent book for identifying the various animals one can see in this area is ‘Handbook of the Canadian Rockies‘ by Ben Gadd. I got this book in Jasper, but it seems to be hard to purchase in the UK. The book also has excellent information about the geology, ecology and history of the area, and was well worth buying.
Here’s a list of of the sightings I had.
Although my recent trip to the Canadian Rockies wasn’t primarily a hiking trip, I still had plans to do some walking in Jasper National Park and possibly get up to some summits. Here’s a list of the hikes I did on the trip whilst staying at Patricia Lake Bungalows near the town of Jasper.
I’ve just finished reading Brooklyn Follies, the most recent novel by Paul Auster, and whilst it’s an enjoyable read, it’s not really comparable to Auster at his best. With his last three books, Auster seems to be heading away from the mystical and mind-bending themes he is so justly renowned for, and which find perhaps their purest form in the The New York Trilogy and Mr Vertigo.
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