Author Archives: Dan Siemon

The Vatican’s astronomer

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Quirks and Quarks is the CBC‘s weekly science and technology radio show. It is also available as a Podcast.

This past week’s episode contains an interview with the Vatican’s astronomer. He has a very interesting take on the intersection of science and religion. Definitely worth listening to.

Many people think that science and religion don’t mix. But Brother Guy Consolmagno couldn’t disagree more. He’s a Jesuit, and also an accomplished astronomer – in fact, he works for the Vatican Observatory. And for Brother Guy, science and religion aren’t in conflict in the least. He sees them as two compatible and complementary ways to seek the truth about the universe. This Easter weekend, Brother Guy tells us how he views the cosmos – both literally and spiritually.

Linux and proprietary (graphics) drivers

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From New Linux look fuels old debate:

For Nvidia, intellectual property is a secondary issue. “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” said Andrew Fear, Nvidia’s software product manager. In addition, customers aren’t asking for open-source drivers, he said.

The open-source community already maintains many drivers. Even if NVidia’s drivers are somehow better at present, I bet NVidia would be very surprised how quickly the community would improve them. “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” sounds like something people would have said about building a high-quality operating system like Linux 10 years ago.

Secondly, as an NVidia customer, I am asking for open-source drivers. I am sick of the driver dance that closed drivers force me to go through. I want my graphics driver to be packaged and updated as necessary by my distribution just like the rest of my system. I want an open-source driver so that the Xorg developers can modify the driver to take advantage of new features and architectural changes. As the speed of development on Xorg increases (which appears to be the case in recent history) proprietary drivers are going to have more difficulty keeping pace.

The next graphics card I buy will have good open-source drivers, even if it slower than the alternative with proprietary drivers. From the article linked above, it looks like it may use an Intel graphics chip.

Note: If you don’t understand why the Linux kernel developers dislike the idea of closed-source drivers so much you should read Linux in a binary world… a doomsday scenario by Arjan van de Ven (also linked to in the quoted article).

Business as Morality

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Doc Searls: Business as Morality reprints an email written by Doc Searls discussing business morality. As with most of Doc’s writing it is worth reading. However, I would like to draw a little attention to one of the comments posted in response. It starts with the text “Wake the dragon”. This comment discusses the effects of the enormous cost reductions that the Internet has brought to content creation and distribution. The main idea is that the cost of content creation and distribution has been reduced to the point where content is being created without a profit motivation. This leads to a situation where for-profit companies must compete with entities who do not need to make money.

The main difference in the scenario above [media consolidation] and the current one that exist in the internet business sector is that the old scenario of market domination, and consolidation has been super imposed as a belief model in an space that it will not fit.

They [newspapers regarding on-line classified ads] also viewed the internet in an old world economic framework that postulates that business are only created and survive when revenue can be generated that makes the endeavor profitable.

Blogs, search engines and WordPress

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One problem with the blog format is that the same content can show up on several URLs. This content layout is nice for humans. In the case of my blog, the same post content can show up on the main page, a category URL and an archive URL.

Unfortunately, what is convenient for humans is not so good for search engines. There are two aspects of the standard blog format which cause search engine problems. The first is the dynamic nature of some blog URLs. Consider the main page of an active blog. Most only show about ten posts; older posts are removed as newer ones are created. Often this results in a particular URL not containing the content the search engine thinks it does. Personally, I find this incredibly annoying since I often have to search the site using a local search engine after Google has directed me to the main page of a blog. The second problem of the blog format with respect to search engines is that some URLs, like a category URL, contain many posts which are not directly related to a particular search. This results in having to search the page with the browser’s find function after the search engine gets you there.

Both of these problems have been annoying me for some time now. So today I did a little digging. Fortunately there is a solution, the robots meta tag. This tag specifies, on a page by page basis, whether or not the content on the current page should be indexed by the search engine and if links on the current page should be followed.

The solution then, is simple. URLs which contain multiple posts should be marked “noindex,follow” while individual posts should be marked “index,follow”. This should result in the content of each post only being in the search engine database once. I also found a post called A critical SEO Tip for WordPress which describes a way to accomplish this in WordPress. The slightly modified version of this solution which I have added to my WordPress theme’s header.php is below. Unless there are downsides to this approach that I don’t know of, I think every theme author should add something like this to their theme.

<?php
if (is_single() || is_page() || is_author()) {
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index,follow\"/>\n";
} else {
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,follow\"/>\n";
}
?>

Isn’t it semantic?

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Isn’t it semantic?: An interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. There are some interesting comments on the semantic web in this interview.

In physics, to take the behaviour of gases as an example, you visualize them as billiard balls, model the rules they follow and then transpose that to a larger scale to account for the effects of temperature and pressure – so physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

So we could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically, where we have an informed electorate and accountable officials. To do that we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.

OpenSPARC

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Sun sure is doing some really interesting things these days. First they release a chip with 8 cores, each capable of running 4 threads simultaneously. Now they have released the design of the chip under the GPLv2.

Speculations on the future of science

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Speculations on the future of science by Kevin Kelly

Science will continue to surprise us with what it discovers and creates; then it will astound us by devising new methods to surprises us. At the core of science’s self-modification is technology. New tools enable new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovery. The achievement of science is to know new things; the evolution of science is to know them in new ways. What evolves is less the body of what we know and more the nature of our knowing