Museum of Hoaxes

Now midday has passed, if there is anybody still trying to download the Planck data from Wikileaks, I can gently point out it was a all a Poisson D’Avril by that naughty Strudel chappie. Stu has lots of other astro-geeky stuff, so check it out.

Planck leaks wins this years April Fool prize for me – funny, near the knuckle, and had me taken in but bemused for a little while as it was the first one I came across. But I also very much enjoyed Jon Butterworth’s “evidence for String Theory” post. Just slightly nutty. But thats String Theory for you. Outside the science world, Google seems to have taken over the role of the BBC as official purveyor of April Fool jokes. I liked “Introducing Gmail Tap” and the “Google Street Roo“. My kids really liked the Quest View in Google maps. (Check it out before it goes !)

Is this an April Fool’s joke ? There seems to be genuine doubt !

So I was tempted to drift through the InterWeb and collect lots of old classic April Fool jokes, like the Spaghetti Harvest and the Flying Penguins and so on, but I stumbled across a web site that has already done it beautifully – the Museum of Hoaxes. As well as the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes, it has lots of other hilarious stuff. My personal favourite is the bloke who convinced Alaska residents that Mount Edgecumbe was going to erupt, by setting fire to hundreds of old tires in its crater. The Museum of Hoaxes web site seems to suggest it has an actual physical presence on San Diego, but maybe they just photo-shopped those pictures…

Alien Seas and the Nature of Science

Went to John Lewis yesterday. A subterranean memory emerged. When I was nineteen I used to get a strange pleasure wandering through the John Lewis Department Store. It was an eery world, detached from my own. I would get a buzz drifting past thousands upon thousands of things I had no desire  for whatsoever. Vast acres of the uninteresting. It was like sailing on an alien sea, gazing upon lifeforms and liquid shapes I would never understand.

Well, thats the smugness of youth I guess. Now of course I wander into John Lewis and within four yards I am picking something up thinking “mmm, that would be useful”. How things have changed. Over the same thirty eight year period, I have noticed that my waistline has slowly but systematically increased. This correlation must mean something. It clearly proves that the desire for household items has a calorific effect.

Spotting correlations is what science is all about ! Did you know that in the twentieth century there was a clear correlation between the average size of feet in China, and the price of fish in Billingsgate market ? There is as yet no good theory for that one. On the other hand, I had a friend who trained spiders to obey his voice commands. Then he would pull their legs off, and found that they no longer obeyed the commands. As he explained to me, this proves that spiders have their ears in their legs.

In a similar vein, a paper about high redshift galaxies I read the other day showed very clearly that … oh, hang on, is that the time ? Must dash. I am sure you can complete the example and several more of your own.

Overtagging

Tagging is one of the key features of Web 2.0, but sometimes it seems to be getting out of control.

The idea is just great – no need for an authority defining categories, no need for standardised metadata structures – just let users make up their own keywords and share them. As well as being simple and spontaneous, a kind of order can naturally emerge – as people see each other’s tag clouds, the keywords they choose will gradually converge. Folksonomies and all that.

I’ve seen two snags recently. The first is that people can use puzzling and even bizarre tags. This was the origin of my strange brush with the world of mystic rectangles, as desribed in this recent post. Kristina filed her post, about finding Golden Rectangles in Leonardo’s pictures, as follows :

Consciousness, Sacred geometry, Quantum physics, Symbols, New paradigm, Love, Philosophy, Life, Science, Relationships, Spirituality, News

It then appeared on the WordPress FrontPage under “Whats Happening in Science” – otherwise I would never have discovered this strange parallel universe. The appearance of the tag “Quantum Physics” kinda threw me as well. Anyway, I don’t want to go on about Kristina and her chums as I already sullied the purity of their Mysterium by introducing a sceptical note. (Not only has she stopped accepting my comments, some of them have even been deleted now…. )

However we can also see the second problem – too many tags !! This morning I found a nice wee blog, 1000 petals, with a good short post about how misleading map projections can be, and the political implications. Very nice. But its filed under :

geography, spirituality, world, enlightened management, women, thoughts, blogging, Religion, Travel, politics, personal

Why ? whats all that for ? It looks like a good summary of what the whole blog tends to be about, but only two of those tags describe the post.

So why does this happen ? It could be a market thing. Everybody can see, but maybe nobody’s looking. You want to put out lots of hooks in case they catch fish. It could be a worry about matching others. Do I use “Astronomy” or “Astrophysics” ? Better use both. It could be a need to capture the feeling that every post is in a context. I am writing this post about foot and mouth in cows, but its really part of a grand series about farming, society, and mammals in general, and its very important that its seen in a context of evolution and the immune system. (I think this is the reason that hits the spot for Kristina’s blog and 1000 petals).

Does it matter ? Maybe not. And maybe Web 2.0 is still young, and we are learning how to do this stuff. Is there a really good tag-browser tool out there ?

Partly I am musing on this because of recent Virtual Observatory work. A lot of thought and effort has gone on world-wide, through the IVOA, into agreeing a standardised set of metadata for describing astronomical resources, services, datasets, column descriptors etc, so that they can be published in a Registry, and so found, browsed, and used. I have been working with one of our ace engineers, Noel Winstanley, who has been developing a browser for VO Registries. (Its called VOExplorer and is still in alpha, but coming up to beta soon).

Its such hard work getting data centres to publish compliant registry entries, with all the metadata entries nicely filled in, that you start to wonder whether its better just to let people make up free form tags and let a useful Registry gradually emerge…

But now I am not so sure…