Phlogiston

A voice in the widerness, huh? If only Stephen Green and the rest of Christian Voice would piss off to the wilderness. This BBC article gives a little background on the people behind the uproar over the “blasphemy” of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Here’s a choice quote:

The “blasphemy and profanity” exemplified by Jerry Springer: The Opera are only two of his concerns. Others include familiar evangelical targets such as divorce and homosexuality; he has a particular concern over gay police. Less obvious enemies include globalisation, GM crops and the EU (”an antichrist totalitarian regime”).

He is currently angered by the royal wedding, which he condemns, whether in church or registry office.

Well, thank goodness he’s concentrating on the important issues of the day. Bloody pillock.

Ana: at least it may cheer you up to know that we have these nutcases over here too. They aren’t running our country, though.

Yesterday my friend Ana invited me to join Friendster, which, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a social networking website, an “online community that connects people through networks of (trusted) friends”. Similar sites are Orkut or Tribe. I’ve played around with this kind of thing before, namely Tribe. The idea is that each member of the site is connected to their friends, and by two degrees of separation to the friends of their friends, three degrees to the friends of the friends of their friends, etc. As the degree of separation increments, you have less access to the details of the people you are connected to, or ability to contact them. However, you can also search for people with similar interests, or people who live near you, and invite them to join your circle of friends. Orkut and Tribe are more focused on facilitating work relationships, whereas Friendster is more focused on friends and dating. I got bored of Tribe in the end, mostly because it was entirely dominated by the San Francisco and New York City crowd. Friendster is much more international.

When I joined up I already had Ana in my friends category, because she had invited me. I also knew that my friend Hannu was a member, so I looked him up and added him to my friends. So, within a matter of minutes I had two friends, seven people connected to me by two degrees of separation, and three hundred and seventy five people by three degrees. That’s not bad, but of course for this to work properly you need not only to get your friends to join, but also for them to get their friends to join, and their friends to invite their friends, etc. I won’t nag any of you to join, but if any of you want to you can drop me a line and I’ll invite you.

What blew me away is how this proves the six degrees of separation rule. I started searching around to see if any of my other friends were already members and discovered that Stephanie was. But more surprisingly, Friendster said “you are not closely connected to Stephanie” which is Friendster-speak for saying I am connected to her, but just by several degrees of separation. How?—I hadn’t even added her as a friend at this point, all I’d done was look her up. I clicked the link that offered to explain this connection and got this:

Me ⇔ Hannu ⇔ Autumn ⇔ Ken ⇔ Michu ⇔ Stephanie

You have to realise that Hannu and Stephanie have never met, weren’t ever in Edinburgh at the same time, that Stephanie lives in Taiwan, and that I haven’t the faintest idea who the three people connecting Hannu and Stephanie are! Small world, eh? Perhaps that’s the ultimate fun of Friendster—playing six degrees of separation with your friends.

I’ve just upgraded this blog to the new release of WordPress, the server-side software that runs it. It was a bit hairy, as the upgrade didn’t go quite according to plan, and the whole blog just returned an HTTP 500 error, which means internal server error. It turns out that my .htaccess with all the mod_rewrite rules in it got borked. I just deleted it and let WordPress recreate it and all was well again.

The announcement—WordPress > Development Blog > Announcing WordPress 1.5—explains the new features. There’s lots of good stuff in there, but most notable is the fact that WordPress has matured from being purely for blogging into more of a personal content management system. I actually think it would work well for small companies and organisations as well, and I think it will be one of the things I use as a platform for those kinds of clients.

The plugins architecture is particularly powerful, and I think I will be evaluating plugins for this blog for two of the most obvious features: threaded comments (i.e. the ability to reply to a comment) and the ability to preview a comment before posting. Also I don’t understand why the nice interface I get for quickly inserting hyperlinks and the most common kinds of markup is denied the posters of comments. There’s probably a plugin for that too.

One feature you lot might be interested in: supposedly there is an options somewhere for you to be notified by email if someone comments on a particular post. I’m not sure yet where that is to be found. It may be an option when you post a comment, or it may require registration and then be made available as an option (i.e. something like “Notify me by email of comments to posts I have commented on”, or something like that). Poke around for yourselves and see what’s on offer.

It looks like all the Ximian Monkeys (well, technically, they’re Novell Monkeys now) are blogging about this: Hula, which is basically an open-source Exchange killer, drawing heavily on Gmail. Nat Friedman seems to have the most detail, including screenshots (which are very pretty thanks to Garrett LeSage’s great graphic and UI design).

As Nat goes on to say:

We will build a JavaScript-based rich client for mail and calendaring, in the style of GMail. Those of you who follow my blog may have noticed me waxing optimistic about the power of web clients over the last few months; even before maps.google.com came out and blew everyone’s mind.

I searched for weeks to find an open source project that is working on implementing an open source version of GMail. I even posted to Google answers looking for one. It doesn’t exist. Well, today we’re starting one, and we’re inviting the world’s crack JavaScript/DHTML hackers to help us.

It looks like this is something I should get involved in when I have a little more time on my hands.

Kris: isn’t this exactly what you’ve been looking for?

I received this message this afternoon from Jelena: “Hannah was born at 12:50. She is fine and cute and little. I’m in heaven.”

Yay!

My friend and sometime colleague/collaborator/client, who should probably remain nameless, rang me today to discuss a potential business opportunity. I hope you’ll forgive me if I can’t remember the precise details of the conversation. At some point very early in the conversation all of my synapses fused together. “I’ve got these neighbours,” he says, “they’re really good friends of mine, really lovely people. They’re a bit ‘out there’, but in a liberating way, you know? Anyway, they’re a gay couple and they want to set up a gay porn site.”

Me: **blink**

“They’ve got a really high end DV camera, and basically they’re going to go out and find young, good-looking guys and film them jerking themselves off.”

[Do you mind if we just pause a moment here? How does this work again? Can you really just casually walk up to people and ask them if they’d mind you filming them while they crack one off? At what point do you broach the tricky issue of financial incentive? And does the average person know what the going rate for such things is? I’ve half a mind to go out and buy such a motion picture recording device myself (or at least something that looks like one) and wander across to the student hall of residence opposite my flat and see if any of the young ladies over there would mind me filming them while they smacked the pony (for purely sociological reasons, of course). I wonder what my chances of emerging without the camera wrapped around my head—or shoved up my arse—would be?]

“It’s not like it’s heterosexual porn”, he continues. “That’s just exploitative and nasty. Gay porn is completely different.”

Me: **blink**

“And anyway, everyone knows we’re straight, so it’s not like anyone could accuse us of having some lascivious or exploitative interest in this.” Now I’m really worried: that last bit actually made sense to me.

Of course, what’s really odd is that after I recovered from the initial shock the two of us just started talking about the technical details like it was any other web project. What would we use as a streaming multimedia server? Flumotion, the completely free, open-source streaming multimedia server from Fluendo (based, I believe, around the GStreamer multimedia framework) would be the obvious choice. And I know the Flumotion hackers would love to see it stress tested on a high volume site. Would they mind if it was gay porn? Maybe I should ask them.

Then there are the legal complexities. Is this kind of material legal in Britain? Neither of us knew. To be on the safe side the site should probably be hosted abroad. Holland, probably. Everything is legal in Holland. But does it matter where the material is hosted? Perhaps what counts is where the company is registered. Who knows? More importantly, who is going to be the one to find out? I don’t think I’ll be the one calling at my local Citizens Advice Bureau for some free legal advice on gay porn websites.

How do you make things like this safe from children? I’ve heard of Net Nanny and Cyber Sitter but that is the full extent of my knowledge of them. Do ordinary credit card handlers deal with sites like this? Or do you have to go to some special “adult” handler? And what about the hosting service? Presumably most hosting service aren’t interested in hosting adult sites, if for no other reason than for the vast amount of bandwidth they take up.

I can just see this going in my portfolio. One thing is for certain: I’m not sourcing the graphic designer. “Hi, it’s Darren. Yeah, I was wondering if you’d be interested in a project I’m working on. We’re kind of looking for a sort of young, muscular, handsome man having a wank look.”

Excellent! jgwebber has gone to the trouble of dissecting how Google Maps works in this article: Mapping Google.

First with Gmail, and now with Google Maps, Google prove that really rich client-side web applications are possible.

Here’s a quick XHTML tip. Image captions sometimes present a bit of a puzzle to people trying to do proper semantic markup. The result is that either completely the wrong markup gets used (a caption is not a paragraph) or absolutely no semantic markup is used and the image and caption are simply wrapped in <div>s and <span>s, the generic block and inline elements.

In fact the proper way to attach a caption to an image is to use a definition list (<dl>). A definition list is a list of pairs of elements, a definition term (<dt>) and a definition description (<dd>); the first is an item about which the second gives further information, which is exactly the relation between an image and its caption. The “definition” in “definition list” is potentially misleading. Presumably it’s called that for want of anything better. The important thing to note is that each list item is a pair: a term followed by its description. (Actually, definition lists are a little more complicated than that. See comment 4.)

So, here’s how to markup an image and its caption:

<dl class="image">
  <dt>
    <img />
  </dt>
  <dd>
    caption
  </dd>
</dl>

All that’s needed is some CSS to give us the right visual presentation:

/* this first rule is probably unnecessary, */
/* but better safe than sorry               */
dl.image,
dl.image dt,
dl.image dd {
  display : block ;
  list-style-type : none ;
}
dl.image {
  margin : 1.2em auto ;
  border : none ;
  padding : 0 1.2em ;
  text-align : center ;
}
dl.image dt {
  margin : 0 ;
  border : none ;
  padding : 0 ;
}
dl.image dt img {
  display : block ;
  margin : 0 auto ;
  border : 1px dotted #38abc8 ;
  padding : 15px ;
  color : #38abc8 ;
  background : #eee ;
}
dl.image dd {
  margin : 0 ;
  border : none ;
  padding : 1ex 1ex 0 1ex ;
  font-size : 90% ;
  font-style : italic ;
  color : #38abc8 ;
}

and the result will look like this:

Mmmm … Scarlett Johansson, she purdy

Of course, that was just an excuse to put a picture of Scarlett Johansson on my blog.

The only semantic issue that might give one pause for thought is whether a list can contain only one item—or pair, in this case. I would suggest that any misgivings about that are misplaced. A list with no items is no list at all. But a list with only one item strikes me as a perfectly legitimate limit case of a list.

There is a nice article in The Economist on the economics of sharing:

The characteristics of information—be it software, text or even biotech research—make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a “non-rival” good: i.e., your use of it does not interfere with my use. Better still, there are network effects: i.e., the more people who use it, the more useful it is to any individual user. Best of all, the existence of the internet means that the costs of sharing are remarkably low. The cost of distribution is negligible, and co-ordination is easy because people can easily find others with similar goals and can contribute when convenient.

Good stufff. It’s nice to see the mainstream media not only paying attention to FOSS, but actually beginning to understand it and recognise its value and advantages.

I decided to have a quiet night last night with a big dinner, a bottle of wine and a couple of DVDs: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, and Michael Mann’s Collateral. I’ve not much to say about either: both were the kind of film that I’d have been disappointed in if I’d seen them in the cinema, but are perfectly good “quiet night in with a DVD” movies. Shyamalan has an incredible ability to just build an atmosphere of creepiness; his films seem to start in a deliberately flat, almost boring way, and then minute by minute he just cranks up the tension. Surprisingly, given his previous films, the big twist to The Village became rather obvious, and I pretty much guessed what was really going on even though I was trying not to. Collateral was an okay thriller, but I think the high point for me was a scene in a jazz bar where the music was Miles Davis’ Spanish Key from Bitches Brew.

During the 17th century and the first part of the 18th century, before Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen and the beginning of modern chemistry, phlogiston was part of a hypothesis concerning combustion. Phlogiston was a substance believed to be lost during combustion:

“Phlogisticated” substances are those that contain phlogiston and are “dephlogisticated” when burned. Since any substance could be observed to burn for only a limited time with limited air (for instance in a sealed container), air was thought to have a specific capacity for phlogiston. For this reason, the residue of air left after burning (actually a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide), was sometimes referred to as “phlogisticated air”, having taken up all of the phlogiston. Likewise, when oxygen was first discovered it was thought to be “dephlogisticated air”, capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion.

Phlogiston and its accompanying theory were a curious mix of the ancient and the modern: one foot was firmly planted in Aristotelian science, with its elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and in alchemy; however, it was also part of the new empirical, experimental method that eventually became chemistry. Phlogiston theorists, through experimentation, discovered that the corrosion of metals (rusting) and respiration in animals (breathing) were also forms of combustion, and phlogiston was part of a theory to explain these phenomenon. Its roots in alchemy hinted at magic, its roots in experimentation hinted at science.

Of course there is no such thing as phlogiston. Lavoisier showed that oxygen is responsible for combustion, and that it is gained, not lost, in the process.

So, why call my blog “phlogiston”, other than it has the nice property of containing “log” as a substring? Well, let’s see: one foot gingerly dipped in the modern world but the other firmly planted in the past; clever, but completely wrong nonetheless; dark powers of combustion which don’t exist. Remind you of anyone? Yeah, me too.

As I prepare to announce this blog properly, it occurs to me that a lot of my friends probably have no idea what a blog is. So this entry is for them. (And can I just say from the rest of us, welcome to the 21st cenury).

Years ago, after the web explosion, people started keeping a “log” of the cool and interesting sites that they’d found whilst browsing. They put this “web log” on the web itself so they could share the information and links with friends. Soon this took off and lots of people started doing it. After a while the “web log” started to evolve, as people not only “logged” the interesting sites they’d found but started to comment on them. After a while not only did people comment on what they’d been visiting, but they allowed their friends to add their own comments to their comments. After a while, web logs, by now abbreviated to “blogs”, became a peculiar mixture of online diary (in some cases very personal), micro-community (because of the blogger’s friends’ comments), and do-it-yourself journalism. Blogs sprang up that spanned the whole gamut from Samuel-Pepys-style personal reflection to political activism and/or commentary. Blogs were a major feature in last years American election.

Another striking feature of blogs is that they are at the forefront of the kinds of web technologies that I am most interested in: the semantic web and web ontology. Most blog software publishes your innermost thoughts not only as a web page but also as something called a “feed”: a feed is a compressed form of the headlines from your site. These feeds are aggregated (i.e. signed up to and published) all over the web. There are sites called “Planets” which aggregate the feeds from the blogs of people who are involved in some particular activity, be it political or social or to do with IT. These “Planets” form a virtual community.

Also, most blogs have something called a “blogroll” which is a list of other bloggers who you have something in common with: “blogrolls” themselves are also published nowadays in a semantic form, detailing how exactly you know the person in question, whether they are a friend, an acquaintance or a colleague, whether you have physically met or just know each other through the internet. These allow the automated mapping of social networks.

There is a longer, more detailed article at the excellent WikiPedia (a free, online encyclopedia).

The “blogosphere” is connected to the so-called “smart mobs” phenomenon … what do you mean you’ve never heard of smart mobs?

This article, Evolution as a taboo subject, from the ever wonderful International Herald Tribune paints a depressing picture of science education in America:

In districts around the United States, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.

Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from religious fundamentalists in their communities.

What struck me as truly depressing was this:

But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea.

That last sentence struck me as just being so bizarre: it’s simultaneously shocking, terrifying, and hilarious. I wonder to what extent Americans, even the ones who are well travelled, educated, and believe in evolution, realise that the rest of the world finds their countrymen simply comical. There is an odd incongruity about America: it’s one of the most culturally significant countries in the West, both in terms of science and the arts, it’s the World’s only remaining superpower, it has some of the most beautiful, sophisitcated cities in the World, and yet it’s also kind of a joke.