Went to the theatre for the first time in ages, to see Mike Leigh’s 2000 Years. I’ve not been to the Royal Theatre in Newcastle before — it’s quite an impressive building but the seats are uncomfortable and the acoustics aren’t great. The play was good. The father was great, being a crotchity old man of the type that I hope to grow old to be. It was rather like his earlier films; lots of middle class people, all of whom seem to have developed a particularly good line in witty repartee for no adequately explained reason. But you can forgive anybody who can finish a play discussing the political situation Israel, with a bad pun about Noah. Originally published on my old blog site.

Today, I tried some bulgar wheat which I haven’t cooked with for several years. I think it was fairly succesful. Ingredients 1/2 Red Onion Large Handful Bulgar Wheat Spices Garlic Puree Dark Soy Sauce MSG Rice Vinegar Chilli Sauce Pepper Veggie Oxo cube Preparation Fry red onion, with some garlic and pepper and the Oxo cube in a small pan, with olive oil. When half done add decent splosh of soy. Wait till the soy starts to brown somewhat. Add the vinegar to shift the soy stuck to the pan. Wait till most of the vinegar has evaporated off, then ad the bulgar wheat, followed by a cup of water, put a lid on and simmer. The wheat takes about 10 minutes to cook, after which most of the water is poured off, leaving enough to keep it moist. Then, it’s served and garnished with …

Watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s today. It was great. It only feels a little aged, mostly in the styles and some of the attitudes, but the core of it remains. Audrey Hepburn is stunning and George Peppard endearing — you want him to succeed — although you keep expecting him to pull out a cigar, smirk at the camera and say "I love it when a plan comes together". As it happens, he gets the girl, so I guess it does. Originally published on my old blog site.

Was at a workshop on Semantic Enrichment of the Literature. There were a combination of text miners, ontologists and publishers. It was a pretty interesting meeting; however, there was a lack of coherence. The problem is, at the moment, there are too many interacting possibilities of the way scientific publishing could develop, and too many requirements. The big issues that I can see are: Electronic Publishing High Throughput Open Access Electronic publishing give us enormous possibilities, of which we have barely touched the surface. Should we go "wiki", should we enable annotation of papers after publication, and, if so, how do we maintain the provenance the literature curation that we have at the moment. High throughput means that we are suffering from a — data del…

Today, I was in Stanstead Airport after a workshop at Hinxton. One thing which caught my eye was their heavy-duty, hot-air, hand-dryers. Or caught my ear, as there were really pretty loud. They work in much the normal way — they blow hot air — but much more powerfully than normal; you could see the air stretching the skin over the bones. The main reason thing that I noticed was the stickers on them saying that they used 80% less energy than normal dryers. Slightly ironic really that an airport, which has 100 ton hair dryer landing every five minutes, should worry about energy efficiency. Originally published on my old blog site.