1913 A Boy's Will
Revelation
WE make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
-- by Robert Frost
Monthly Archives: May 2008
The universe on a string
In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to Superstring Theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. This is a wonderfully visual and accessible Ted Talk.
Seeing sights around Beijing
After the WWW2008 conference ended me and guys stayed on in Beijing for a couple of days in order to take in some of the local sites. Armed with our camera’s and a subway map, Rob, Paul and Myself managed to find our way to Beijing Zoo and saw an assortment of wonderful animals – but for me it was the Pandas, that I had really wanted to see.
We also a section of The Great Wall in Ba Da Ling. The sheer immensity of this 6000 km structure is breathtaking. You can’t help but feel small and insignificant as you walk along the wall and and take in the view around you:
We also visited The Temple of Heaven, which is situated near the center of Beijing. There was something wonderfully serene about the temple, that made you feel as though you’d stepped from the hustle and bustle of one world into the magical calm of another. It’s a site rich with tradition and as a temple it is beautiful to behold.
We also walked through Tiananmen Square. In some ways it felt surreal, as we walked through it taking pictures, I couldn’t help but recall as a teenager seeing images on television of students demonstrating and vividly remember seeing images of tanks bearing down on demonstrators. Yet as I looked around there were thousands of people, mostly chinese, milling around the square, there were also many tourists everyone seemed cheerful, it was a far cry from those images on TV:
We tried to visit The forbidden city, but unfortunately by the time we arrived there were hundreds of people queuing to buy tickets to get in and because it would have taken at least an hour to queue there we opted not to given we only had a few hours left. So we decided to walk around the grounds outside The Forbidden city and take some pictures:
Following that we finally visited The Summer Palace, which for me was the highlight of the trip. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We took a boat out on the lake and took some pictures of the palace:
I loved the visit to China. I wish I could think of a bad thing to say but I really can’t – everyone we met was polite, approachable and kind; the sites we saw were amazing; the food was great!. I must confess there was a huge difference between the China I experienced and the China that is reported in the media here in the UK – which is the real China? I honestly can’t say, but I will cherish my memories of the place. As usual all my photo’s are on flickr, but I should warn you that I have uploaded roughly six hundred of them (out of the 1500 I took!). To make things easier if you click on any of the photos above they’ll show you pictures tagged with that specific location. Or if your prefer you can view the whole lot here.
You can also see Rob’s pictures here and you can see Chris’ pictures here.
WWW2008 – Day Four
The day got off to a very slow start I wasn’t feeling very well so I missed the keynote. I made my way to the Dev Track and got there in time for the first session. The opening talk was by Giovanni Tummarello on Semantic Web Pipes which seemed like a great idea. Semantic Web Pipes are analagous to the Yahoo! Pipes framework but differ in that the Yahoo framework uses RSS and the item lists in RSS do not lend themselves to the graph based modeling that RDF has. Giovanni explained that with Semantic Web Pipes you can fetch, mix and process RDF files published on the Web because the output of a Pipe is an HTTP retrievable RDF model, simple pipes can also work as inputs to more complex Pipes.
There were a couple of other memorable talks one by Rajat Agarwalla on Scrabulous, in which he explained how and why they developed the game., and what they experienced having to scale up very rapidly to satisfy the phenomenal demand they had. The one thing Rajat said that resonated deeply with me was (im paraphrasing here because I can’t fully remember it) “if you build something you love you’ll make money eventually, but if you build something just for money then you won’t“. This sentiment echoes what Confucius once said:
"Choose a job that you love and you will never
have to work a day in your life"
- Confucious
The other talk that both Rob and I wanted to listen to was by the Sebastian Kruk on MarcOnt Mediation Services. He told us that they had completely rewritten the MarcOnt portal and it should now be available, but it wasn’t clear to me that they were planning to do anything with Marc21 or that they had engaged with any of the other people working in this area, which was disappointing.
There were other talks during the day, after which we all got carted off to the evening Banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square. Our colleague Jingye had told us how rare it was for anyone to be invited to dine there and that it was a very special venue – and he was right! My only regret was that I didn’t take my camera or phone with me. We had been told earlier in the day that camera’s weren’t allowed and that phones with camera’s might not be allowed either, so we decided to leave them in our hotel rooms. When we got there it was apparent many others had brought theirs with them and no-one was stopping them taking pictures – so I was kicking myself all evening.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave his keynote before the banquet and shared with us his hopes for the WWW, many of which seemed to be centered around the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement, both of which we at Talis are heavily involved in. Tim talked about the need to get better at communicating our ideas and to engage with each other more., about breaking down barriers and get better at communicating with each other across both the physical and social/political borders and barriers that exist. Paul has a done great writeup of the keynote over on ZDNet, so I won’t dwell on it too much – suffice to say that I thought it was great keynote, and quite inspirational in some ways.
After the keynote the banquet and the evenings entertainment got under way. The food was great as were the performances, particularly one by the Peking Opera. We all had a great time. It was a very memorable evening.