Carnaby Street Christmas decorations ...

Psychedelic decorations,
originally uploaded by Pikesville.

Carnaby Street's Christmas decorations are pretty funky this year. They are mobiles, centrally lit and constructed from old CDs. MP3s just won't make such effective festive baubles when they become redundant!

Friday, December 03, 2004

Dublin Sky

dublin sky,
originally uploaded by Pikesville.

The view across Dublin from the Jameson Distillery Tower (with a little Photoshop assistance of course)

More pics from my Dublin album

More Dublin pics from Flickr

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Guinness Factory

machines slogan

Ok so it was a marketing exercise dressed up as an historical/cultural attraction but a visit to the Guinness Factory in Dublin is well worth the 13 euro entrance fee. The Storehouse building alone is worth a look: the first "Chicago School" steel framed building in Europe (the modern high rise finds its root in the Chicago School which in a practical sense prospered due to the need to rebuild that city following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871)

"a time when machines were works of art ..." - have they never seen an ipod?!
More of my Guinness Factory photos ...

St Kevin's Monastery, Towers & Viking Raids

st kevin monastery

Very eery place in Wicklow Mountains just outside Dublin.

The first tower sits on top of "St Kevin's Kitchen". The second is a lookout. It was built in the 9th Century (I think) in order to protect the Monastery from Viking invaders. The door is about 3m above the ground. The tower could only be accessed via a ladder.

The reason for this: When the vikings came, the Monastery's monks put anything of value: religious relics; jewellery; chickens and ipods inside the tower. They then pulled up the ladder and hid inside. At least a few of them would. The rest would run away. A sensible move really. It can't have taken a determined Viking oo long to figure out where the door was and how to get in. Also, monasteries can be rebuilt but only if there are enough living monks around to rebuild them ... the Vikings were a pretty tough bunch to contend with.

I was going to confirm this with a link to Wikipedia's account of the Vikings. However, their version of Viking history is disappointingly tame. Now, I'm a fan of Wikipedia but their policy of neutrality can produce some uninspiringly vanilla analyses. And so, according to Wikipedia, Vikings "exerted influence throughout the coastal areas of Ireland". "Exerted influence"!!? Did they have a quiet word with them over tea and bisccuits? This weapon wielding horde's idea of "exerting influence" extended to bloody murder, ransack and pillage.

Some interesting primary source accounts of Viking raids, although not relating directly to Ireland, provide a fuller account.

Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales - the founder of Wikipedia - came into R&Mi yesterday afternoon. He gave some background on the Wikipedia project, how it works and some insights into just what you can accomplish with the help of a hundred thousand volunteer members of the public!

So, what is Wikipedia all about? Here are some of my notes and some stuff stolen from Tom Coates' summary ...

Wikipedia is a multilingual encyclopedia that's been created collaboratively by thousands of members of the public. It is powered by Media Wiki which is similar to - but much more powerful than - the slightly less famous pikesville wiki. One is a project for the good of humanity, the other contains my Christmas present wishlist!

Wikipedia contains around 400,000 English language (mix US and UK English) articles. 3,000 new articles are added each day. It has been updated over 8 million times by over a 100,000 people.
This all makes Wikipedia larger than the Encyclopedia Brittanica!

All Wikipedia content is free to use and re-use. This is there "copyleft" policy:

"The goal of Wikipedia is to create an information source in an encyclopedia format that is freely available. The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom."

Incidentally this policy places Wikipedia content high up in google's page rankings. This is because each site using Wikipedia content must link back to Wikipedia (the basis of google's rating system_

So, an organisation is free to use Wikipedia content rather than pay for proprietary content. Certainly a public service organisation has ideals which converge with those of Wikipedia, among them neutrality; high standards; the free dissemination of information; education; entertainment etc plus limited resources!! The main rub would be the issue of moderation. A media organisation such as the BBC has to avoid appearing responsible for violations decency, accuracy, libel, copyright etc ... how do you moderate such vast amounts of content?

There also exists:

Wiktionary (a free dictionary), Wikisource (a collection of public domain or FDL-licensed texts), Wikibooks (free textbooks for schools and universities), and Wikiquote (a collection of notable quotations).