A few random facts and news clippings that have captured my attention recently:

Free museums get more visitors
Visitor statistics for England’s national museums and galleries have increased dramatically since admission fees were universally abolished three years ago (the tab is now picked up by the National Lottery). Kind of a no-brainer really, but nice to see the proof in the numbers.

Clean and Quiet Hydrogen Fuel Cell Motorcycle
A prototype motorcycle powered by a hydrogen fuel cell has been demonstrated in the UK. Built by a company called Intelligent Energy, the Emissions Neutral Vehicle (ENV) has a top speed of 50 mph, can travel for at least 100 miles on a single “charge” of hydrogen, emits nothing but water vapour that is clean enough to drink and is so quiet that it’s fitted with an artificial engine noise maker to alert pedestrians to its presence! I’m totally convinced that hydrogen fuel cells are the future of motorized transportation.

School Dinners
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed support for a campaign by a TV chef, Jamie Oliver, to improve the quality of school dinners. Personally I have very good memories of school dinners in the 70’s and 80’s, but apparently these days it’s all frozen burgers and chips, so this has to be a positive step in promoting healthy eating and reducing child obesity.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
I’m currently reading “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson, and it’s a very readable and entertaining primer on the history of science, covering everything from subatomic particles, through earth and life sciences and on up to cosmolology and the origins of the universe. I knew most of the actual science already, but the stories of how the various discoveries were made, and the personalities involved, were fascinating. It’s easy to forget how much the human race has learned in the last 200 years.

Here’s a random interesting fact that I read today: a typical human body comprises of about ten thousand trillion cells, and each cell contains approximately 2 metres (about 6 feet) of densely packed DNA. This means that, if you stretched all the DNA from your body into a single continuous strand, it would be something like 20 million kilometres long — long enough to stretch to the moon and back 26 times!

Anyway, it’s a good book, so here’s the filthy lucre Amazon link:

Rockstar Games

I spent rather too many hours playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City while I was “detoxing” earlier this year, and so I was curious to learn from a BBC article about the UK computer game industry that Rockstar Games, the developers of GTA, are based in Edinburgh (although on reflection the humour in Vice City is quite distinctly British).

Anyway, I clicked through to their website and ended up spending a long time there: Firstly, they provide a free web-based sequencer called Beaterator that enables you to create convincing techno/house tunes quickly and easily. Secondly, they offer free downloads of “Rockstar Classics,” older games such as Grand Theft Auto I & II and Wild Metal, providing you sign up for a mailing list.

Anyway, here’s the Amazon link to GTA: Vice City (be warned: This game is a SERIOUS time sink):

I just got back from a short trip to Washington D.C., where I was attending a partners/planning meeting for the CLiMB 2 project. CLiMB is an acronym that stands for Computational Linguistics in Metadata Building, a fascinating project exploring the use of computational linguistic techniques to partially automate the process of cataloguing scholarly image collections.

This is a very good idea, because museums, libraries, archives and visual resource collections are facing an explosion in the number of digital images that they need to manage, but without a corresponding explosion in resources to adequately catalogue them — and without good cataloguing, it will be more difficult for curators and end users to find the images that they need.

The CLiMB toolkit works by locating references to target objects in digitized scholarly texts (catalogues are ideal, but other texts can be used too), determining the limits of the relevant section of the text, and then using something called a “chunker” to extract noun phrases from the text. These noun phrases can be optionally matched against controlled vocabularies and thesauri, which is another very nice feature, and after being reviewed by a human cataloguer, can be added to the catalogue record for the target object as useful subject terms that will facilitate end user retrieval.

The first phase of the CLiMB project resulted in a prototype toolkit with a relatively user-friendly web-based front end that demonstrated the feasibility of the approach, whereas the second phase of the project is looking to both refine and extend the functionality of the toolkit, and demonstrate the utility of the toolkit in real-life cataloguing scenarios.

I enjoyed the meeting very much; in addition to being an interesting project in its own right, the Primary Investigator Judith Klavans assembled an excellent group of people, so it was also a great networking opportunity for people “in transition” like myself!

Plus I got to hang out in Washington D.C. in decidely spring-like weather with old and new friends, drink Chimay and listen to live jazz at the Eighteenth Street Lounge (former home of Theodore Roosevelt and current home of the Thievery Corporation), and check out the Modigliani exhibition at the Phillips Collection.

I need to atone for the tedious nature of my last post… Why should anyone care that I wasted a perfectly good day faffing around with software on my computer?

Anyway, obviously I needed to get out more, so tonight I went to see the fabulous Emily Zuzik at Rockwood Music Hall. I’ve seen Emily several times previously (primarily because of our mutual friend Carrie), but this was by far the best and most intimate performance I’ve seen her do — plus she gave me a lift back to Brooklyn afterwards! Can’t say fairer than that.

I’ve spent altogether too many hours today fighting with iTunes, the supposedly user-friendly music jukebox, store and iPod interface software.

I pretty much use iTunes all the time that my computer is switched on, and normally I think of it as a fairly reliable piece of software. However, when I tried to update my iPod today for the first time in a couple of weeks, it said that the interface software wasn’t functioning correctly, and I should reinstall iTunes. I did this, several times (each time necessitating a lengthy system reboot), but it still wouldn’t talk to the iPod. Then I downloaded and installed the iPod Updater, but that told me there was an “iPod Service Error.”

Eventually I found a help page on Apple’s website that told me what I had to do (it seems this is not an isolated problem): Completely uninstall iTunes, delete lots of folders manually, reboot umpteen times and then reinstall everything from scratch. Even this went wrong a few times, and I had to completely uninstall Quicktime too before the installation would successfully complete.

It’s working now finally, but I’ve probably spent a good 4 hours or so on this today. What a complete waste of time.

I’ve been having fun in New York with various visitors from out of town recently.

Over the weekend, a big posse of folks from San Francisco were in town to see Christo and Jeane-Claude’s Gates, resulting in much revelry, and then on monday I caught up with a former flatmate from London and his girlfriend over oysters before going to a private party in an East Village restaurant.

Overall, I’ve been on a very effective “re-tox” programme! for the last few days!

So farewell then, Carly Fiorina. You are no longer the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Having spent several hours this weekend wrestling unsuccessfully with flaky and bloated printer drivers for my HP Officejet All-In-One printer/fax/scanner/copier (great hardware, appalling software), I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy for you. That, and the fact that you got an absurd $21m golden handshake for presiding over a 63% drop in HP’s share prices.

With any luck, perhaps your successor will realize that it isn’t acceptable to sell a home/office peripheral that requires the user to install a GIGABYTE of crap flaky software in order to use all its features.

I went snowboarding this last saturday for the first time this winter (primarily as a result of finally getting some cheap basic health insurance), and I had a really good time.

I took the Scandinavian Ski & Sport Shop bus trip to Hunter Mountain, which was a pretty good deal at $64 for both the bus and the lift ticket (although getting to midtown Manhattan for 6:45am was a little brutal).

The conditions at Hunter were pretty good, at least as far as east coast skiing goes; a cold sunny day with clear blue skies, a decent cover of reasonably good man-made snow, and surprisingly few crowds for a holiday weekend all contributed to a fun day.

My gear all coming was another factor that helped make the day fun and hassle-free, as a lot of it was new:

• New Quiksilver gloves; a Christmas gift from my parents, and much warmer than the pair they replaced;
• New RED HiFi Audio helmet (see blog passim); comfortable, warm and very well-designed. The built-in speakers sounded great with my new replacement iPod, and the external mute button was extremely useful.
• New boot liner laces; the helpful folks at Northwave sent these to me in the mail for free — thanks!

I finally got a new replacement iPod last week! My father used his homeowner’s insurance to replace the one he smashed over the holidays (thanks Dad!).

This time I bought a silicone rubber iSkin Evo2 to protect it; $30 seems ludicrously expensive for a bit of moulded rubber and a square of clear plastic, but I have an unfortunate habit of destroying consumer electronics, and my previous iPod got pretty beaten up even before it got destroyed, so it seemed like a sensible precaution.

I finally downloaded and installed Firefox 1.0, Mozilla’s open source web browser today, and so far it seems very good — it works pretty much the same as Internet Explorer, but has various useful security and usability features built-in, such as pop-up blocking, default disabling of ActiveX controls, tabbed browsing, RSS support and Google search right from the main button bar. It’s also a compact application — the installer is only 4.7 MB, and automatically imports existing favourites from IE — and genuinely seems faster than IE too.

It’s probably 5 years since I finally gave up on Netscape because of increasingly irritating incompatibilities and general bugginess, and reluctantly switched to Microsoft’s bloated Internet Explorer; perhaps Firefox will finally replace IE as my default browser?

I have one question that deosn’t seem to be answered in the FAQ’s… Why is a web browser named after a Russian fighter plane in a dodgy cold war movie from the 1980’s starring Clint Eastwood?

Last night I began the arduous process of re-toxifying my body, starting with a nice juicy piece of steak au poivre with “frites” washed down with beer in a local French restaurant, then on to the Brooklyn Social for more beer and pool with a good selection of friends.

Feeling a little the worse for wear today (more from poor quality sleep than anything else I think), but damn it was good to go out and join the rest of the world again!