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Bill Nye has been pissing off crazy Texas fundamentalists by pointing out that the moon is not - contra Genesis 1:16 - a source of light, but just reflector of light. Funny that. I used an anti-creationist cartoon in a recent talk and had no problem. Oh, wait, it was in front of an audience of geeks and biologists in a lab in Cambridge where they helped sequence the human genome. Know thy audience. 2007-09-06T13:06:33Z
Nicole Simon reports that Google Reader has a search interface. It's pretty good. They also now have a more accurate readout of how many unread items you have (it's gone from "100+" to "1000+"). 2007-09-06T12:57:36Z
Snitter is a Twitter built in Adobe AIR. Now, if only Twitter worked... 
2007-09-06T12:55:18Z
FFXI Servers XML Feed 2007-09-06T17:04:34Z
I've put up an XML source that contains details of the current status of different Final Fantasy XI servers. It will be a maxmim of five minutes out-of-date (due to caching) and pulling data from here.
I may build some nice widgets to show you the status of servers on your home page or desktop etc.
W3C announce working group to produce next-generation of OWL 2007-09-06T22:06:02Z
The W3C have announced that the OWL Working Group has been reformed to work on OWL 1.1: "adding a small set of extensions and defining profiles identified by users and tool implementers". This is following a submission request back in December 2006.
The first co-chair is Ian Horrocks, Professor of Computing Science at Oxfor University, who worked on the previous WebOntology group, was involved with OIL and DAML+OIL, and also worked on FaCT and FaCT++ - an open source, C++ reasoning engine. He also won the BCS Roger Needham Award.
The second co-chair is Alan Ruttenberg from Creative Commons' Science Commons project. He's involved in a number of biological ontology projects including BioPAX, OBI and BFO, as well as the W3C's Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG).
The staff contact for the OWL Working Group is Sandro Hawke.
The deliverables and charter have not changed substantailly since the group was proposed recently. This includes making disjoint unions easier, extending OWL to cover qualified cardinality restrictions and property chain inclusion axioms. There is also planned support for XML Schema datatypes, which seems like a good idea to me.
I look forward to seeing the results of the OWL WG's work.
I am a vegetarian, an atheist, like to code in Ruby and Scala (and Java, but let’s not talk about that), and noodle about with microformats and the Semantic Web.
I have an MA in philosophy from Heythrop College, University of London. My philosophical interests are in analytic metaphysics, ontology, modality, the work of Armstrong, Lewis, Kripke, Russell and Plato. I have a strange, unfulfilled interest in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I’ve been influenced by Gadamer, by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rawls and Nozick.
Musically, I like jazz fusion, soul and P-Funk. My musical nirvana would be a mixture of Beethoven, Miles Davis and George Clinton topped with a side-serving of Erykah, Jill and Angie.
I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.
