Totality (8:10:57 PM) 
By the time I finish writing this, the last sliver of silver on the very right edge of the moon's increasingly ruddy face will have been consumed by shadow. It's a cold, perfectly clear night in New England - so crisp you can almost hear the air crackle as you move through it. The eclipse is gorgeous, and I feel like something magical should be happening in the next 30 or so minutes while the totality lasts.
I have a cup of coffee which I just obtained from Dunkin Donuts during my walk, and things feel pregnant with potential. I'm writing tonight, and having kind of a rough time getting in the groove. Perhaps I'll take a half hour or so and hack on something new to get my brain in gear.
Incidentally, I finally got around to reading Clay Shirkey's great critique of the semantic web tonight. I liked reading it a lot, but I don't really agree with it. Sure, there is certainly a segment of the semantic web community who think we'll be able to do the "strong semantic web", which can somehow make inferences without much human work in the metadata space, but the bulk of the folks I've talked to about it are well aware of the difficulty of that kind of problem - and they are much more focused on, as Ken Macleod puts it, the "relational model of RDF and its ability to integrate decentralized data models". This, natch, puts me in the mindset of policy/feature based composition of extensions in the web service world, which I also believe can work really well even though it may not free us from all the work....
As an aside, I'd have been more impressed if Clay's examples about logic actually said what he claimed they did... case in point:
- Count Dracula is a Vampire
- Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
- Transylvania is a region of Romania
- Vampires are not real
Clay sez the only valid conclusion from this is that "Romania isn't real", which is actually not something you get from these premises at all. "Dracula is not real", yes. And even "Dracula lives in a region of Romania", but just because the class of Vampires is "not real" and one of that class happens to live in Transylvania says nothing about Romania.... true, this is more a nit than anything, but it's harder to take criticism seriously when it includes erroneous examples....
OK, let's get to that hacking bit - only 25 minutes of totality left.
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