An Exercise in Irrelevance

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.