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April 30, 2003
En ordentlig øl
Charlie's Bar på Alt om København - AOK
Charlie's Bar got its Cask Marque last year. Since then, Iain and Andy have added cask conditioning cabinets (one holding four venting casks, the other six serving) and have as I write, I believe, ESB, HSB and Abbot Ale. Charlie's won the AOK "Best Pub 2002" award with a stonking 37.5% of the vote. Can they pull it off again this year? We'll see ...
Posted by daen at 10:57 PM
Three cities
Webcams in Copenhagen, London and San Francisco
Posted by daen at 09:56 PM
April 29, 2003
Nuevolution : drug discovery through evolution
Someone I know very well will be working here soon:
Nuevolution A/S is a Danish biotech company founded May 2001, with focus on discovering and developing highly selective drugs with high potency, through our unique ChemeticsTM technology that bridges molecular biology and synthetic chemistry. The ChemeticsTM technology allows small molecules to be encoded by DNA and thus enables molecular evolution of small molecules. Nuevolution will use ChemeticsTM to discover and develop drug candidates for pharmaceutical applications.
Posted by daen at 12:23 PM
h2m : Holistic Management
h2m is a consultancy where an old friend, Hamish, works. Visit them and get your business sorted out.
Posted by daen at 12:07 PM
April 28, 2003
Ding dong, Avon calling
Blake's 7 / Blakes 7 / B7 (hermit.org / Blakes-7.com)
The science fiction series Blake's 7 was created by Terry Nation, for the BBC. It was set in the "third century of the second calendar", and showed a near omnipotent totalitarian government, the Federation. By stifling freedom and creative endeavor, and filling the air and water with tranquilizing drugs, they ruthlessly suppressed or eliminated their opponents.
Such is to be the fate of Roj Blake, former resistance leader, who is convicted on false charges and put aboard a prison ship. They escape with some fellow prisoners in an abandoned alien spaceship, which they rename the Liberator. Blake becomes an intergalactic Robin Hood, leading his dogged band of raffish outlaws against a tyrannical empire with the same persistence that made his Sherwood counterpart a thorn in the Sheriff's side.
The original seven were Blake, cold computer genius Kerr Avon, cowardly thief Vila Restal, gentle giant Olag Gan, smuggler Jenna Stanis, Auron telepath Cally, and Zen, the Liberator's on-board computer. Later in the series other characters joined the band as others left. They were the mercenary Del Tarrant, weapons expert Dayna Mellanby, blonde gunslinger Soolin, and two new computers, Orac and Scorpio's (the ship that replaced the Liberator on-board computer Slave. On the Federation side, the pursuit of Blake was controlled and run by chief villainess Servalan, and her henchman Travis.
Blake's 7 (or B7 to the cognoscenti ...) first aired on 2nd January 1978, ran for four seasons and 52 shows, ended on 21st December 1981 (regularly picking up 9 or 10 million viewers) and involved travelling in spaceships where closing a door too hard caused the walls to wobble. :-)
Posted by daen at 10:00 PM
Ultrasound scans
Posted by daen at 04:26 PM
April 27, 2003
Open Bioinformatics
Creating a bioinformatics nation
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation
Lincoln Stein wrote this as a keynote speech for the 2002 O'Reilly Open Bioinformatics Conference in Tucson, Arizona. It later appeared in Nature, where I read it last year. It reminded me of my own experiences and the financial software industry's travails over the last 20 years which I have written about in this very blog.
A web-services model will allow biological data to be fully exploited.
During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Italy was fragmented into dozens of rival city-states controlled by such legendary families as the Estes, Viscontis and Medicis. Though picturesque, this political fragmentation was ultimately damaging to science and commerce because of the lack of standardization in everything from weights and measures to the tax code to the currency to the very dialects people spoke. A fragmented and technologically weak society was vulnerable to conquest, and from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries Italy was dominated by invading powers.
The old city-states of Italy are an apt metaphor for bioinformatics today. The field is dominated by rival groups, each promoting its web sites, services and data formats. Unarguably, this environment of creative chaos has greatly enriched the field. But it has also created a significant hindrance to researchers wishing to exploit the wealth of genome data to its fullest.
Despite its shaky beginning, the nation of Italy was eventually forged through a combination of violent and diplomatic efforts. It is now a strong and stable component of a larger economic unit, the European Union, with which it shares a common currency, a common set of weights and measures, and a common set of rules for national and international commerce. My hope is that bioinformatics will one day achieve the same degree of strength and stability by adopting a universal code of conduct along the lines I propose here.
Read more of Lincoln's article for his hopes of salvation, but I'm not giving too much away if I direct you to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation website ...
Posted by daen at 12:17 AM
The Industrial PhD in Denmark
Guide to applications for projects under the Danish Industrial PhD Programme
Objectives and target group
The objectives of the Industrial PhD Programme are:
Posted by daen at 12:09 AM
April 26, 2003
Danish cookbook incorporating "empty the fridge" recipes
The "empty the fridge" ("tøm køleskabet" in Danish) section is especially useful :-)
Posted by daen at 11:27 AM
April 25, 2003
Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python
My aim in this talk is to present a comprehensive overview of each and every one of the main themes endured by analytic philosophy in the last sixty years or so, and to argue the bold historical claim that the whole lot is well represented-indeed, often best represented-in the work of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, collectively and henceforth referred to as "Monty Python." Since I have all of fifty minutes to make my case, I expect we'll have time for a song at the end. So let's get to it.
A very funny transcript of a talk from 1993 by Gary Hardcastle at the University of Wisconsin on Monty Python and their role in analytic philosophy ... links to sketches (the Parrot Sketch, the Cheese Shop, Argument etc), and here are some audio clips (at the bottom), too. You lucky people.
Posted by daen at 09:28 PM
Canning spam
BBC NEWS | Technology | Where spam comes from
For anyone plagued by junk e-mails, the question that often baffles most is how did the spammers get your address.
US researchers at the Center for Democracy and Technology set out to answer this question in the summer of 2002.
They found that e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam.
Spam is estimated to account for up to 40% of global e-mail traffic and is causing a massive headache for businesses, which are losing billions in productivity.
Posted by daen at 05:53 PM
April 24, 2003
Verse and prose : #3
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis by Wendy Cope
To round out my strange imbalanced troika of odd verse and prose, here's some Wendy Cope. Enjoy.
He Tells Her
He tells her that the Earth is flat -
He knows the facts and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
Her arguments he calls unsound.
He often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.
A Green Song To Sing At The Bottle Bank
One green bottle, drop it in the bank,
Ten green bottles, what a lot we drank,
Heaps of bottles, and yesterdays a blank,
But we'll save the planet, tinkle tinkle clank.
We've got bottles, nice percussive trash,
Bags of bottles, cleand us out of cash,
Empty bottles, we love to hear them smash,
And we'll save the planet, tinkle tinkle, crash.
Posted by daen at 02:24 PM
Architecting reliable software
Software Architecture by Nigel Leeming
Who needs software architects?
If, for a fleeting moment, you imagine a city built the way we build our software, it would be a city of uniform greyness. It may or may not include a water system, depending on whether or not one was asked for. Ninety percent of the buildings would remain unfinished, or would have toppled to the ground as unsalvageable waste for want of better foundations.
Traffic would flow, but only because someone had found a giant to lift cars from the end of one jam and place them at the foot of another. And as you know, the cars would rarely fit the roads. Worst of all is the unending string and continuous maintenance required to hold the buildings together.
There in the midst of this rubble, picking a way through the web, walks the hastily hired architect with a simple brief: 'Please make our rubble into the glorious living spaces we imagined.'
Before you enter the city, I should warn you, we haven't yet looked at the buildings. The doors are not where we want them, and no-one measured a person to see if they would fit in.
Excellent on-line book by Nigel Leeming about software architecture and how to avoid the pitfalls and problems that beset modern software systems. This is the first of two books.
For more information on software architecture, visit The Worldwide Institute of Software Architects (WWISA).
Posted by daen at 11:58 AM
April 23, 2003
Verse and prose : #2
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.
HECTOR HUGH MUNRO, who wrote under the name SAKI was born on 18 December 1870, at Akyab, Burma. His father was an officer in the Burma police. Saki was sent to live with two maiden aunts in Devon at the age of two. Although these aunts were probably well-intentioned, they brought him up in a regime of strictness and severity. This left an indelible mark on his character, and is immortalized in a number of his short stories, especially Sredni Vashtar and The Lumber Room.
Munro was educated at Exmouth and at Bedford grammar school. He joined the Burma police but soon turned to journalism. He wrote political satires for the Westminster Gazette, was foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia, and Paris. He moved to London in 1908.
He wrote four series of short stories: Reginald in 1904, Reginald in Russia in 1910, The Chronicles of Clovis in 1912, and Beasts and Super-Beasts 1914. His stories frequently reflect the manners and attitudes of Edwardian society, from the standpoint of the sardonic insider. They are beautifully polished, epigrammatic pieces of writing. The stories often involve a vein of cruelty, and often resolve on a surprise twist in the last sentence.
Saki died in the trenches of France in 1916.
Posted by daen at 11:11 PM
Verse and prose : #1
Short stories by Daniil Kharms
Daniil Kharms (1905-42) mainly made a living writing children's books in Leningrad. He also wrote poems and absurd short stories, often published in underground magazines, after the avant-garde literary societies that Kharms was associated with were banned by the Stalin regime.
In 1931 Kharms was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and spent a year in prison and exile in Kursk. In 1937 his children's books were confiscated by the authorities, and deprived of his main source of income Kharms was often on the brink of starvation in the following years. He continued to write short, grotesque stories, which weren't published, but merely stored in Kharms' desk drawer.
In August 1941, shortly before the terrible siege of Leningrad, Kharms was arrested a second time, accused of "spreading defeatist propaganda". During the trial Kharms was declared non compos mentis and was incarcerated in a military prison. In February 1942, while Leningrad was ravaged by famine, Kharms starved to death in prison.
Read and enjoy.
Posted by daen at 11:05 PM
PhD research topics at Copenhagen Uni
København Universitets Satsningsområder
Posted by daen at 04:39 PM
April 22, 2003
Ooops, Prime Minister
BBC NEWS | Europe | Danish film shows EU warts
Anders Fogh Rasmussen has taken some stick for a documentary aired tonight on Danish telly which shows his Foreign Minister, Per Stig Møller, in a less than flattering light ...
"Did I tell you that Joschka Fischer had three different points of view in less than 12 hours on the question of Turkey's application?" Mr Moeller asks Mr Rasmussen.
"First he told me that Turkey would never be a member of the European Union, then that we needed some form of membership. And finally (he said): 'No, no forget about it, those were just ideas,'" Mr Moeller is shown saying.
Mr Rasmussen says: "There is not a complete match between what they (Germany) say in public, and their real attitude."
Where's Sir Humphrey when you really need him to advise you, eh?
Posted by daen at 11:40 PM
St John's Wort
St. John's Wort - Hypericum perforatum
Used against depression ... and as a snaps flavouring in Denmark where the plant is known by the popular name of "perikum".
Posted by daen at 11:26 PM
The fretful porpentine ...
St Tiggywinkles is an animal hospital in Buckinghamshire, England. They look after an enormous number of sick wild animals each year, releasing most of them back into the wild. I worked there for a short while, in the summer of '94. I will never, ever forget the smell of a room full of sick hedgehogs on a hot summer's day ... Still, all in a good cause, eh?
Posted by daen at 02:15 PM
delete from the_living where name = 'CODD'
Mercury News | 04/20/2003 | Computer pioneer, dead at 79, revolutionized database system
Posted by daen at 11:35 AM
April 21, 2003
Giornale Nuovo
"Mr H" writes his excellent Giornale Nuovo entries with great panache, and almost always includes some splendid images. He covers topics as diverse as the Bibliothèque nationale de France's online exhibition of Stanislaus Lubinetski's 1667 treatise Theatrum Cometicum through contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov to mezzotints depicting the five senses by 17th century Dutch graphic artist Jacob Gole, and much much more.
Posted by daen at 01:55 PM
Cache me if you can
A kind of geocaching clearing house, this site shows geocaches from the major geocaching sites (geocaching.com, navicache.com etc) on the map (above).
Posted by daen at 01:39 PM
Come together, right now ...
"The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here." (from the Degree Confluence Project website)
If you like geocaching, you might like this too. They don't count the ones in the oceans or near the poles, but that still leaves 13,667 degree confluence sites to visit!
Here's a few country statistics about primary confluence points (ie not near the poles or in the ocean) to ponder over ...
| Australia | 212 visited out of 737 total |
| Denmark | 15 visited out of 15 total |
| Spain | 55 visited out of 89 total |
| UK | 27 visited out of 37 total |
| USA | 802 visited out of 1073 total |
Posted by daen at 11:54 AM
April 20, 2003
My current course with the Open University
This is the course I'm studying this year towards a MSc with the Open University (OU). Last year I studied the companion course, S807 (molecules in medicine) and next year I plan to finish with S810 (the project module).
"The Open University admitted its first students in 1971. It is the UK's largest university, with over 200,000 students and customers. The OU represents 22% of all part-time higher education students in the UK.
The university is ranked amongst the top UK universities for the quality of its teaching. Of the 23 subjects assessed by the Quality Assurance Agency, 17 have been placed in the top 'Excellent' category.
Courses are available throughout Europe and, usually by means of partnership agreements with other institutions, in many other parts of the world. About 26,000 learners are studying OU courses outside the UK. "
(from the OU website)
Posted by daen at 11:22 PM
Our first cache
Cache: (GCFA6B) Sayalonga Road Cache by Daen and Johanne de Leon
This cache is hidden by a quiet road in the rolling hills of Andalucia with beautiful views across the orchards, vineyards and white villages to the Mediterranean. If you drive all the way, you will need a 4WD vehicle for the last few kilometres. However, hiking from one of the nearby towns is recommended. Bring water; there is little shade! The elevation is around 570m.
Posted by daen at 11:04 PM
April 07, 2003
Weather, weather, altogether, what's it going to do?
| København | Malaga |
See you soon!
Posted by daen at 01:28 AM
War as a Winnebago metaphor ...
GEORGE W. BUSH stands before a WINNEBAGO and addresses the gathered CROWD.
BUSH: Hey everybody! You remember that old woman who's been stranded on the ice these past 6 months, who we've been ignoring up until now? Today, I'm sending this Winnebago fulla Boy Scouts out there to RESCUE HER!
Also, check out "Barracuda : The Scotty Zaccharine Story".
Posted by daen at 01:19 AM
April 06, 2003
Finger on the pulse - see those data packets go!
Network Overview /// Internet Traffic Report
This is the overall state of the internet. Watch it rise, watch it fall. Or, get a life and go outside in the fresh spring air.
Posted by daen at 04:18 PM
April 04, 2003
WHAT did you say about me?!
Find out what Google says about you. For example, some select Googlisms for me:
daen is with his lovely half friesian son
daen is available for purchase
daen is oval shaped
daen is a small mutt
daen is 0
daen is not here yet
daen is amazed at the woman's nerves
daen is withdrawing on all front
daen is hru'hfirh of the house radaik
daen is retiring from the front office
daen is interested in the social security of ethnic minorities
daen is a monster
daen is more than willing to pay attention to the fair isobel
daen is ranked 4 and has played for 32m in 30 days
daen is more on target
Update 24/4/2003
DAEN is 16.3 hand Friesian stallion and has been described as majestic - fantasy horse - gentle giant. With his shining black coat, long heavy mane and tail and fetlock hair, he represents a horse of the greatest royalty. All descriptions are true. His bold, high action trot and rolling canter are combined with an attitude and disposition that allows him to be used as a school horse or just ridden by children with a halter and lead.
Posted by daen at 02:40 AM
MP with MT
Tom Watson has got recent exposure with his "Teens!" page, extolling involvement in politics for the hormonally challenged juvenile, which recently got showcased at boingboing. Unfortunately, taken in isolation, it's not possible to tell whether TW's "Teens!'" page is ironic or clueless. But read the rest of the blog, which is some inspired and witty observation from the backbenches going back to July 2001, and "ironic" is the only verdict.
Posted by daen at 02:02 AM
April 03, 2003
BACmac : ya wha'?
I used to work for these good people. They are, alas, no more (oh, hey, the company I mean - the people are all well, as far as I know).
Those were the days - writing trading room pricing and display systems for OS/2 version 1.3 (here's a picture of the pretty box) using MS C 5.1 (here's a picture of that pretty box, too).
I joined in September 1992, and for about 18 months, we coded away on a trading system for Berliner Bank (or Bank Gesellschaft Berlin - BGB - as it later became).
Later, BACmac got bought by the Arab Banking Corporation, becoming ABC (IT) Service Ltd. And a culture clash unfortunately ensued ... I left.
Still, nice logo, eh?
Posted by daen at 09:57 PM
Michael Rodd : found alive & well and working in NW5!
Michael Rodd, doyen of 70's TV, is running a production company, a little bird tells me. So, if you need anyone who works with "media logistics for business and industry", pop on over to their website. (Thanks Eli!)
Posted by daen at 09:38 PM
"Hi! I'm on the train!" *zzzap*
Oh yessss... Pavlovian revenge.
Posted by daen at 09:29 PM
April 02, 2003
Networking
David Irvine IRVINE TECHNOLOGIES LTD Home Page
I've known David Irvine for nigh on 12 years via the "BACmac connection" (explanation forthcoming in a future episode - yes, foreshadowing is a vital ingredient of the modern blog). So do an old relationship a favour and visit his website. Better yet, engage his services as a security consultant. I would, if I had something I wanted to secure, but it all seems to have been pinched :-)
Posted by daen at 09:41 PM
"Buy"! ... eh, I meant "Sell"! Oh, never mind ...
BlogShares - Fantasy Blog Share Market
BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links
Don't forget to buy some Daenmark shares, now!
Posted by daen at 03:51 PM