Categories
Culture

Nigerian sight and sound

Dare Obasanjo posted music videos and photos from his recent trip home to Nigeria.

The music is both English and Yoruba, the language of the Yoruba people, and one of the languages spoken in Nigeria. English is the official language. Dare referred to the music as Nigerian hip-hop and R&B. The first video definitely has a hip-hop feel, including some objectification of women. Most of the music he linked, though, seemed more R&B and without the angry edge I’ve come to associate with hip-hop.

The photos are from his Dad’s birthday celebrations. I’d sure love a description of the outfits–the native ones are exquisite. It looked like in some of the photos that the material used in several outfits was the same, so I wondered if there were specific associations with the fabrics and style of outfits.

Dare is well known and respected in tech circles, but what might not be as well known is that he’s the son of Olusegun Obasanjo. Nigeria is in for some challenging times in the near future, and it’s good to see Dare back home.

Categories
Writing

More Mark

I prefer the preface in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narra- tive will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Categories
RDF Technology

Accessibility, Microformats, and RDF as the Bezoar stone

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Really nice writeup on the conflict between Microformats use of abbr with hCalendar and accessibility:

The datetime-design-pattern is a way to show a readable date (such as “March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time”) to humans and a machine-readable date (such as the ISO 8601 formatted “20070312T1700-06”) to the Microformat parsers. When crossed with the abbr-design-pattern, the result is this.

<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”20070312T1700-06″>
March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time
</abbr>

As you may have guessed from the previous examples, screen readers expanding the abbreviation will try to read the title element. JAWS helpfully attempts to render numeric strings into human-readable numbers, so “1234” is spoken “one-thousand two-hundred thirty-four” instead of “one two three four.” Given a title value of “20070312T1700-06”, JAWS and Window Eyes both try to read an ISO date string never intended to assault human ears:

Twenty million seventy-thousand three-hundred twelve tee seventeen-hundred dash zero six. (JAWS 8 on IE7: MP3, Ogg)

I particularly liked this article because it provides details as to exactly how the concept in question is being rendered in screenreaders. You’re not left to guess, based on some vague, “Doesn’t work with screenreaders”. It really gives weight to the authors’, Bruce Lawson and James Craig, concerns.

I can’t figure out, though, why RDF always gets slammed whenever discussions of this nature arise:

Some have proposed using custom attribute namespaces for Microformat data, but the Microformats group is strongly opposed to this, and for a simple and valid reason. Microformats are intended to be “simple conventions for embedding semantic markup in human-readable documents.” Opening the floodgates to custom DTDs and namespaces would quickly raise the complexity level of Microformats to that of RDF, greatly reducing its adoption and therefore its relevance.

Here I was, tripping along on a well presented argument defining a tricky problem when, bammo: it could have been worse, it could have been RDF.

It’s as if RDF has become the bezoar stone of metadata–people invoke RDF to draw out all the evil.

“Ohmigod, an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we’re all going to die!”

“It could have been worse. It could have been RDF.”

“You’re right. Whew! I was really worried for a moment.”

First update

We’re going to be coming at you with …AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!… custom DTDs! The horror!!!

Damn near stopped my heart with that one. You want to be more careful, Tom.

Second Update

Here is the first entry of the microformats discussion thread on this item. It gets quite interesting as the thread progresses.

I’m not making any editorial comment on the thread. Nope, not a word. Not a single word. I’m just going to sit back and play with my triples.

Categories
Photography

Bees 2.0

Bee in flight

Here’s a great rumor to start: too much cellphone use makes one think and act like Tiny Tim:

Tiptoe through the window
By the window, that is where I’ll be
Come tiptoe through the tulips with me.

Oh, tiptoe from the garden
By the garden of the willow tree
And tiptoe through the tulips with me

Knee deep in flowers we’ll stray
We’ll keep the showers away
And if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight
Will you pardon me?
And tiptoe through the tulips with me

Red Tulips

Up to 90% of honeybees have suddenly died in 27 states in this country, as well as other countries. Tell that to your friends on Twitter.

Bee in flight

Apple makes sexy hardware, but nothing as sexy as a lusty red tulip.

Tulips

Have you ever noticed how delicate a honeybee is?

Honeybee on Grape Hycanith

This is my idea of ‘more is better’.

Bunch of flowers

Categories
Photography Places

Lady of the Lake: Mingo National Reserve

I went to the Mingo National Reserve this week–the last bit of bottomland left in the delta region of Missouri’s boot heel. It’s full of cypress swamps, marshes, a river and a lake, and is an important breeding ground for migratory birds. If the sounds I heard were any indication, the number of species that inhabit the grounds must be enormous.

I walked one trail and the songs were so loud and diverse that I found myself spinning about, trying to identify even a few of the birds I heard. No matter where I went, my movement always triggered a rustle in bushes, leaves, or water. What was both tantalizing and frustrating is that I would only catch a glimpse of whatever moved: a black and white hint of a woodpecker wings, the shadow of a eagle overhead, a heron peaking out at me from the trees. Never, quite seeing the whole.

As I drove the auto tour–a rough twenty mile road open four months of the year– biting and stinging insects would immediately come in through the open windows whenever I stopped, which was frequently. When I started back up again, the insects were just as quickly gone–not before leaving a souvenir, or two. I didn’t care, as it was a small price to pay to be surrounded by such mysteries.

I grew up in the Northwest, in a land full of white water rivers, huge open lakes, tall mountains, and vast fields. It is so unlike the small, secretive swamps and marshes unique to the south. There is no habitat that speaks to me more of being in the south than to walk in a cypress swamp, which is probably why I find them both compelling and disconcerting.

We rose from the depths of swamps such as these. They represent the last bit of ‘original life’, though the world’s rush to make them useful is destroying most of them and their important cousin, the rain forest. The problem with the Mississippi delta is it’s considered some of the richest farmland in the world. Deposits from the river overflowing its banks have built up a top soil that is literally feet deep in some places. However, with such richness is a price: the land is wet, boggy, swampy, and flooding is a natural part of the ecosystem.

Still, people persevered, and much of the original land where indians camped for over 12,000 years–to hunt and fish in the dense forests, the rich waters–is gone; replaced by neat hoed rows and small towns. Replaced until the Old ‘Sip reminds us, from time to time, that we don’t own the land on which we live.

cypress swamp

yellow bird

cypress swamp

white heron

dragonfly

butterfly

cypress swamp

lone duck on log