An Exercise in Irrelevance

The flight from Dhaka is belayed due to the weather; while the ever-present smog has saved my a fortune in suntan cream, now it’s not nearly so good.

We managed to avoid the madness of airport security by means of the VIP lounge; the name of our gracious host proved less effective on the way out than on the way in, but they seemed to accept the magic incantation of an EU passport. Inside the airport secure zone, it’s calm and relaxed; I don’t discount the possibility that this due to the absence of planes. Wandering around a photo of the Pink Palace from yesterday blares out at me, lurid in it’s impossibly pink false colour. It makes me want to see it, even though I know that the reality is more muted.

It’s been a strange experience. This is a country of extremes and contradictions, which sums up how I feel about it. I got to see Old Dhaka and the river; but was this out of a genuine desire to see how others’ life is lived or is it an unpleasant voyeurism for those less well off; I feel compassion for the beggars, with an abiding wish that they would just go away.

Today, we went to the bazaar in old Dhaka. After a long drag across town for an hour in polluted air, we got to Sadarghat ferry terminal where we took a dubious ride across the river; again, we were the focus of attention at the river. It’s clear that they don’t get too much crazy westerners down there.

The boat trip which is a narrow, flat bottomed boat, skulled by one of the three people who appeared to make their living from it. The river, again, was polluted with an oily surface and lots of nasty things floating in it; surprisingly, it even had some plants floating on the surface; it was slow-running and smooth.

Many of the boats shuttle sand up and down the river; these amazing vehicles float unloaded about 3m out of the water, proudly displaying their load lines high above our heads; when loaded they almost disappear, the water from their bow wave splashing over their deck. Travelling through the boat yards, it’s all done by hand; they are building massive ships here, riveting them and shaping their with sledgehammer, painting them with brushes.

We finish to with quick trip to Ahsan Manjil, the Pink Palace. Not that great, although I get my photo taken many times, while hanging around in the grounds.

Bangladesh has been an amazing and depressing experience in equal measures. There is, perhaps, surprisingly little between this society and my own; modern technology is here, but it didn’t develop alongside the organisation that we have in the UK. Everybody might moan about the system at times, but in the UK, it’s not so bad.

Not much to say about yesterday; it was new year, so we had a party and food. All good, but not particularly notable.

Today, we had a tour of Old Dhaka. The chaos of Gulshan is nothing compared to there; in Old Dhaka, the rickshaws and tuk-tuks far outnumber the cars — cheaper are far more suited toward the smaller and narrow streets.

We saw the local university and Lalbagh Fort — the grounds are impressive although the building is, perhaps, less so. The museum is mostly 18th century — the manuscripts and paintings being most impressive. Throughout, we were as much a centre of attention as the other artefacts on show.

Later, back at the hotel, ready for a nap, clearing the results of pollution and the car drive from my head.

The Ontogenesis knowledgeblog meeting has now finished; it’s been a fascinating experience and one that I’ve enjoyed very much.

I was hoping for two things out of the meeting; the first was to get some content. There has been a pressing need introductory material on ontologies for a long time now. We were never going to address this completely in a two day meeting even with the significant number of people that we had in the room. But, we managed to write quite a number of articles between us — I rather let the side-down with only one small article, but I have the excuse that I was busy answering questions. Most of these have not achieved the required number of reviews yet, although I’ve just done the second reviews for Mikel’s, so once that’s posted, we should be there for at least one article. I think that people enjoyed the process enough that some more articles will appear over time, although, inevitably, once the immediacy of being in the same room will mean that this process will not happen as rapidly.

The second question was to get a clear understanding of whether the idea of knowledgeblogging has legs; it seems reasonable in theory, but does it work in practice. There were some issues — the server crashing twice out of memory was not ideal, although quickly resolved. Quite a number of people who hadn’t blogged before found the wordpress interface, particularly the editor, fairly nasty; it’s not really designed for large posts. The review process also was a little clunky and there were many questions and ideas about this. However, for my money, the 80/20 rules comes in; we got 80 percent there with a more-or-less modified wordpress. Well, maybe, 70/30.

The rest is going to require more thinking about.

I’m on my way down to Manchester for the Ontogenesis meeting while I was sad enough to blog about on Christmas Day. I’m looking forward to this meeting a lot; the idea has been in gestation for five or six months since Bio-Ontologies last year. In summary, we are getting a number of people together to write articles for a book, but instead of going through the tedious and difficult process of getting it published we are going to use a blog.

I finished fiddling with wordpress yesterday and, hopefully, all is ready (fingers crossed that our server doesn’t get hacked as happened to this blog a few days ago). I’m hoping that we manage to get a number of articles written during the meeting; in practice, getting people in one room is the best way of getting these things done. However, this is not a closed process; I’d welcome articles from anyone, as well as those not at the meeting. Being blog based, the system is inherently distributed. So, if you have an ontology-related topic that you have a burning desire to write about, please contact me and I’ll let you know whether if anyone else is doing it. Alternatively, there is a list of topics that we hope to make a start in covering. The articles will be peer-reviewed and available for the world to see, fully-credited to your name.

I can’t guarantee that it’s going to be included in the REF, but I am working on it.

I started today with a late breakfast — I went for a combination Bangladeshi-English breakfast with both curry and hash-browns. Tomorrow, I’ll drop the rice, and have the fresh bread that they are make on the spot.

Later, we went out for shoes and currency. Roads here are scary; there are no real pavements, lanes are an expression of broad intentions — 2 lanes mean no more than 4 vehicles abreast. Despite this, it feels less dangerous than Brazil; everyone wanted to get on, but fewer people wanted to be a forumla one driver. As elsewhere, the begging is bad, with a gauntlet surrounding the hotel. Again, it didn’t feel aggressive, just unpleasant. On the way to the bank, we pass a small food market, with waste food rotting in a skip, picked over by feral sheep.

Back in the hotel, read the newspaper. The English is beautiful, with a slightly archaic feel and an overly formal style. The content of the paper was also interesting, with a in-depth analysis of the electricity supply in different parts of the country.

The outward journey was uneventful; never flown on Jet Airways before, but they have good planes with large individual video screens and good food (well, I’m a sucker for a curry).

Films of the flight were Surrogate with Bruce Willis and Death at a Funeral. The former is a sci-fi flick, with everyone living through controlled robots. It was exciting enough, with James Cromwell as the inventor of surrogates; this is a strange hattrick, as he’s also invented the positronic robot (in I, Robot) and the Warp Drive (in First Contact). Not a great movie, but good for a flight. Second up was Death at a Funeral, which was superb; funny, well-paced and very dark. I’ve just found out that they are remaking another version of this due to the shortage to American accents in this one. Strange but true.

With a brief stop over in Delhi (not a nice terminal), we arrived in Dhaka. The airport runs without the precision of the west; we ended up in a huge, huge queue, full of Muslims in formal dress, maybe returning from Haaj, although they had been a bit slow if they were; shortly afterwards, we well picked-up from here, and whisked through another “VIP” entrance, virtue of our host.

First impressions of Dhaka — it’s disorganized and chaotic, though I’ve seen similar elsewhere. The driving is terrible, although less belligerently suicidal than Brazil or, even, Italy. The divisions in society are evident here; from the cosseted environment of car and western hotel, to the beggars at traffic lights.

The hotel is nice; outside the chaos of a big city, many trees and a football pitch. The air is thick and foggy, a combination of the cold and pollution from the 2-stroke Tuk-Tuks.

My foreign adventure is now well over; I’ve even been back to work for several days, gone shopping, the prosaic garbage of life.

As I blogged before I left, I didn’t life blog because I didn’t have a computer; I did buy the promised notebook (I said notebook not netbook), although in Dhaka, cause I forgot it in the airport. I really enjoyed the experience, actually; it was fun to write notes as I was going, to put down my thoughts; it was a long-enough and varied-enough holiday that it was good to read what I had written also. I will post here, slightly cleaned up, what I wrote, because it’s the easiest way of storing it so I can read it again in the future.

Blog posts will come as they are written, which will probably take a while to do. I’m going to leave the blog date as is, but I’ll put the original date into the title.