Author: Sam Bail

Slow, Slowly, Sloes*: Sloe picking in Chorlton

Sam Bail

First things first: You want sloes? Go and get sloes! Check out my carefully drawn map of Chorlton Water Park (jelly-bean-shaped area marks the spot) and go sloe picking while they’re still there.

We’ve been wondering for a while where to find sloes from in and around Manchester. Due to lack of a vehicle, the tip-off about the sloe bushes at junction 19 of the M60 wasn’t exactly helpful. We were just about to head down to Stockport and wander around the parks there, looking for prickly bushes, as the mighty @robotswanking received a Twitter message from sloe expert Cormac. Plans were changed quickly and mission: sloes headed south-west instead, to Chorlton Water Park.

Just by accident (we did actually get lost on the way to the orchard, taking a right turn after the bridge rather than just heading straight on) we wandered down a small path in a field that seemed completely overlooked by the many visitors. And there it was: a sloe bush. Not very big, not many fruit, but it was what we were looking for. As we had picked what would have been enough for at least a glass full of sloe gin, we moved on further down the path – and discovered what can only be described as (drum roll) sloe valley (ta-dah!). Dozens of sloe bushes, easily accessible by the side of the path, just waiting to be picked. As we got closer to the gate that was leading back to the main path, the sloes got bigger and bigger, until we finally found one bush that kept us busy for almost an hour.

We returned home with scratched hands, muddy boots, black dirt under our nails and a small blue Ikea bag filled to the brim with big round sloes. Several hours of pricking and several bottles of booze later, we had these beauties in our kitchen:

So – if you fancy picking some sloes around South Manchester, Chorlton Water Park is the place to go! Don’t worry, there’s enough for everyone. Just make sure you’re careful and don’t trample down everything, yes?

* And I do apologize to Liam Frost for the sloe-pun in the title.

Something About Airplanes: A day out at the airport

Sam Bail

Back in June, when the weather was all nice and sunny… haha, just kidding, of course it wasn’t. Anyway. Back in June, I spent a day out at the airport. As you do.

There are many British stereotypes lingering in the minds of Germans, ready to surface and be proved true whenever you do something that could be considered slightly odd. A penchant for weird hobbies is one of those stereotypes, and, no offense, but you Brits do like to confirm them on a regular basis. Rolling cheese down a hill and chasing after it in a potentially fatal race? Check. Playing a game that lasts over several days, incorporates lunch and tea, with inexplicable rules, where half of the team on the pitch don’t actually seem to participate? Check. Check. Check. Check. A drinking game that has actual rules and standard-sized equipment you can purchase from the shop? (Okay I know, beer pong is an American invention, but popular enough here in the UK). Check. And finally, spending hours in a crowded car park watching planes take off and landing, while you’re equipped with a radio, expensive binoculars and even more expensive cameras? Ch-omg-eck.

Back in the olden days, plane spotting made some kind of sense: those flying things were miracles of modern engineering, flights were hardly affordable, tons of metal defying gravity was something unusual and unbelievably exciting. And while the latter certainly is still the case, I cannot imagine how anyone could get a thrill out of watching planes driving around the runway and noting the different types of planes while taking photos.

The Airport Hotel is a pub popular with plane spotters, as it is conveniently located right next to the runway, with its spacious beer garden only separated from the huge machines by a wire fence. As we went there on a Sunday afternoon it was completely packed out with spotters and families alike. The beer garden had a rather bizarre fun fair meets playground meets military training feel to it, as children were playing on the bouncy castle and the swings, waving the toy machine guns their loving parents had bought them at the nearby stall, while plane spotters with giant binoculars and radios were gathering at the fence. Probably the only place in the world where parents are happy to let their children run around in close proximity to men with binoculars.

Unfortunately the food ordering process (order on the kitchen door, then wait for the cook to come out and shout your number) was a little confusing and the food leaving the kitchen didn’t look particularly appealing (ok, it looked awful), so we only had a quick drink while watching the plane spotters. Every takeoff was preluded by the approaching of the plane, then turning to have the turbines point right at the beer garden while causing storm-like hot wind – this, and the deafening noises, made me wonder why on earth anyone would want to spend more than a few minutes in that place, let alone a family day out. I have yet to understand the appeal of planes.

List of helpful OWL API Tools

Sam Bail

500px-glazier_tools

The OWL API is a Java interface for creating and modifying OWL ontologies, an essential (or, the essential)  component of any OWL tools. Mike Bergman compiled a list of tools that make use of the OWL API, including the popular ontology editor Protégé with its plugins, various OWL reasoners, and software of the more exotic variety: Thirty OWL API Tools – www.mkbergman.com

[Photo by Hans Bernhard (Schnobby) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons]

In other news: 168 days of rabbit

Sam Bail

When I’m not busy ranting, I spend a fair bit of time looking/chasing after the furrier one of my flatmates. Dave (aka the rabbit person) over at “Do a Barrel Roll” asked me to write a guest post about my life as a rabbit owner and it got a little out of hand. Hop* over to his blog for the rather epic three part rabbit diary, 168 days of rabbit. It’s like 500 days of Summer, but with more poop and bite marks.

Part 1 – Day 0 to 27

Part 2 – Day 31 to 96

Part 3 – Day 97 to 168

Update: In only just noticed that the rabbit has his own tag on Dave’s blog. I told him that he’s famous now. He nibbled on some cardboard and ran off to celebrate.

* Yeah… I know. I’m sorry.

‘MANCHustifications’

Sam Bail

At this year’s International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2011, Manchester will be heavily present with 4 papers in the research track, of which 2 focus on justifications.

In the first one, which we presented in similar form at DL, we discuss our user study on the cognitive complexity of OWL justifications. It is quite interesting that, despite the fairly large body of work on explanation for entailments, there have only been few attempts at analysing the effectiveness of explanation approaches with regard to how understandable they are to the average OWL user. Starting with fine-grain justifications (Kalyanpur, Parsia, Cuenca-Grau, DL 2006) which were then defined formally as laconic & precise justifications (Horridge, Parsia, Sattler, ISWC 2008 – won best paper award at the conference), there has been a line of research dealing with making justifications easier to understand by removing superfluous parts (i.e. parts of the axioms in the justification that are not necessary for the entailment to hold). The notion of (non-)laconicity is based on the assumption that superfluous parts distract the user and therefore make it harder to understand why the entailment holds – which, intuitively, seems sound. Moving away from distracting parts only, we want to have a general picture of how easy or difficult justifications are to understand, and why. These ideas are captured in a complexity model (again, Horridge, Parsia, Sattler) which considers certain properties of a justification and the respective entailment, and gives us a score for the cognitive complexity, or hardness of the justification. The considerations behind this model, issues related with cognitive issues, and the validation of the model are discussed in the paper “The Cognitive Complexity of OWL Justifications”, which we’re presenting at ISWC in October.

The second paper is part of my own PhD research and deals with “The justificatory structure of the NCBO BioPortal Ontologies”. Again, this is a topic which has hardly been touched yet by other researchers who deal with explanation in the form of minimal entailing subsets (i.e. MinAs, MUPS  – if for unsatisfiable classes, justifications… maybe we should simply call them MEHs – minimal entailment-having subsets?). While we generally focus on a) finding efficient mechanisms for computing all MEHs, errmm, justifications, or b) analysing the cognitive complexity of individual justifications, there is only a small body of work that looks at multiple justifications. This seems an obvious step, since we know that considering individual justifications for an entailment in isolation does not give us the full picture of why an entailment holds in an ontology. The consequences can be only partial understanding, ineffectual repair attempts, or over-repair (removing or modifying more than necessary). Further, we even know that those multiple justification have relations between them, as they can share axioms, entail each other, be subsets of one another (if we consider justifications for multiple entailments), etc.  To which degree multiple justifications occur in an ontology, and what relations there are between them, can tell us more about the ontology than the simple metrics we see in ontology editors – in the paper I call it ‘making implicit structure explicit’. An analysis of the prevalence of multiple justifications and their relations in a set of BioPortal ontologies is the focus of the paper, which, again, will be turned into a talk at ISWC.

And, in a amusing move, we have had the research track session which contains the two talks named after us: The ISWC organisers decided to call it “MANCHustifications”. You know where you can find us.

I heart MCR, Part 2.

Sam Bail

Someone’s stolen our bikes. Last night (Saturday, 17th September) from our house in Withington, South Manchester (so they might still be in the area). If you see one of the bikes, please give me a shout (sam@mightaswell.co.uk), report them to the police (crime stoppers on 0800 555 111), steal it back or take a picture of whoever has it. They’re not worth much, but I’m generally not very fond of having my stuff nicked by scumbags, so it would be nice to have them back. Or cause someone pain. Or both.

Mine is a light blue Raleigh ladies road bike with a D-lock, an Edinburgh Bicycle co-op pump, and a big bell that says ‘Ring Me’.

Matt’s is an Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Op ‘Revolution Streetfinder’ bike in dark grey, like the one below.

I’m not surprised. Or disappointed. Just angry. Very, very angry.

What I find slightly more unsettling is the thought that someone must have been into our house/stairwell in the middle of the night to take the bikes, which were wedged in under the stairs and took me 10 minutes to get out last time. If people just used the copious amounts of criminal energy they seem to have for something productive, this country would be flourishing.

Update: Our landlord just told us that the door was actually broken into, at 3 in the afternoon. What a warm welcome, 2 weeks after moving in. I love Manchester.

I heart MCR.

Sam Bail

I imagine Marketing Manchester posting out THANK YOU letters to every single one of the rioters who destroyed the city centre two weeks ago. Finally, someone actually buys those ugly I heart NY knock-off t-shirts that have been sitting on the shelf of the visitors centre for years. Call me bitter, but how is wearing a t-shirt (and yes, the profits do go to Manchester-based charities) and ‘showing your pride’ going to change the problems we have here?

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one who isn’t too keen on the I Heart MCR campaign. Richard Goulding over at Manchester Mule has written an article on the campaign, Marketing Manchester, and social issues in Manchester: I heart Coportate MCR.

We Are Nowhere, And It’s Now: Ancoats.

Sam Bail

I don’t quite get Ancoats. On the outskirts of the city centre, separated from the hipsters of the Northern Quarter by the moat that is Great Ancoats Street, lies an area full of old mills, tall, modern apartment buildings and… wastelands. The things that I consider characteristic for Ancoats are building sites, unused properties, grass, gravel, soil. After the ‘Gelato in July’ festival which celebrated Ancoat’s Italian heritage (oh what a disappointing event. The queue in front of the only decent looking stall, Ginger’s Comfort Emporium, seemed neverending and the only other ice cream stalls were selling 99ers… there wasn’t a single ‘real Italian ice cream’ stall… I mean… what kind of Italian ice cream festival is that? I was part shocked, part reaffirmed that people here have no idea of Italian food, and part longing for the ice cream parlours and pizza restaurants of my hometown, where family-run Italian business have been priding themselves on having the best home-made gelato in town for generations. I should add ‘sounding like a food snob’ to my list of skills.)… now, where was I? The ice cream festival, right. We made an attempt to explore Ancoats along the canal, which was yet another disappointment, as the footpath along the canal is currently under construction. Following the signs to the canal, we passed said old converted mills, car parks, wastelands, a row of terraced houses that looked like gingerbread houses (Urban Splash? Was that you again? Of course it was!), finally arriving on Old Mill Street.

To me, Old Mill Street has always been one of the weirdest places in Manchester, showing all signs of an ambitious regeneration project gone terribly wrong. The street is lined with rusty street lamps, benches, completely out of place looking bus stop shelters covered in bright black and pink/green flowers – it all seems to be waiting to be turned into a shop-lined boulevard, the centre of a new community where residents go for a little stroll sunny Sunday afternoon. But there is one thing missing: people. In the many times I drove down Old Mill Street, literally since the very first time I visited Manchester (which is exactly 4 years ago on the 31st August, hip hip!), and even on this exceptionally friendly Saturday afternoon, the only sign of life was the odd car on the road.

Developers Urban Splash have a vision in mind of turning Ancoats into ‘New Islington’ (which is the name of a very small street in the area and, according to unknown sources, used to be the name for Ancoats in the olden days), a crazy, colourful community of crazy, colourful buildings, with crazy, colourful and, most importantly, exceptionally rich residents who can afford to buy flats in those crazy, colourful buildings. Only recently, Urban Splash attracted some criticism that went beyond the actual occasion when the company  announced they were going to demolish the old hospital building on Old Mill Street, with comments such as “Urban Trash. Some buildings are beautiful, yours are not.” and “It is money-men greed. They have no care or concern for our community.”

I have some ideas on how these urban regeneration experiments with fancy new ultra-futuristic buildings can end, the ‘Plattenbauten’ in East Germany (this is a lovely picture of Grünau, a residential area in my old dwelling place Leipzig) or, more locally, Hulme Crescent being some good examples. I wouldn’t be very surprised to see Ancoats, or New Islington, turn from wastelands into what is considered modern housing in this decade, followed by a decline into yet another slummy problem area, and, 30 years from now, people shaking their heads in disbelief: “Why the hell would anyone even consider putting human beings in anything like that?”

Giant bird hotel on Old Mill Street.

Not quite Ancoats, but Castlefield-feel on Ducie Street. Didn’t know that was there!

Linda’s Pantry. I call it Linda’s panty and think it’s funny.

Manchester Riots. The aftermath.

Sam Bail

We don’t know yet whether it’s over or not. Manchester seemed pretty quiet today (I have seen the odd tweet about people witnessing arrests) and I know we all hope that it stays like that. The torrential rainfalls might help.

Matt has posted a short report along with a set of rather shocking photos from yesterday over on www.hipstr.co.uk, showing young kids bragging with their loot, laughing as they’re running away with stolen goods, and the police tackling rioters on top of bin bags.

PYC sessions is back on his computer and running the live-blog: http://www.pycsessions.com/2011/08/riots-in-manchester

Minimize Me! Day 4 & 5

Sam Bail

I’m still on the minifood! And still alive, obviously. I skipped breakfast on day 3 and had a random selection of mini foodstuff for lunch (mini sub with a tiny little sausage shaped smoked cheese, cherry tomatoes, a small can of lemonade…) – the real highlight of the day however was the afternoon which was filled with teeny tiny little mini versions of biscuits. Along with my mini cup of coffee, I had the smallest chocolate digestives and incredibly realistic mini jammie dodgers, which are just adorable. Mini biscuits = mega win.

My rather lovely dinner consisted of an omelette with mushrooms, (over)cooked in a ridiculously tiny frying pan, and a ramekin full of salad.

Danger Bear!!

Overcooked omelette on a saucer. I could probably call this art. The shot glass contains water, not vodka… just saying.

After dinner I decided to decorate the remaining cupcakes with butter cream frosting – can you possibly imagine how many mini cupcakes you have to eat to feel sick? Oh boy.

They did look pretty though – pink, green and peanut butter (yes, that’s a colour. Peanut butter.)

Unsurprisingly, my breakfast the next morning was nothing but a small pot of Petit Filous (pictured after I had eaten it… my blog is thrilling isn’t it!) and a mini cup of coffee.

Lunch was boring (tomato soup and a mini quorn sausage roll… or 2 mini quorn sausage rolls, if you cut them in half!), so we’re moving straight onto after work drinks – it’s Friday after all! I had (after a couple of real size pints I must admit) a tiny little half pint of Kronenbourg from a lovely little glass which tried to look just like its bigger brother. Aww.

Thanks to Josh’s left arm (pictured) and the fabtastic Clare (of Words & Fixtures-and-so-many-other-places-on-the-webs-where-people-write-things-fame… that’s what people actually call her!*) who I bumped into on my way home and provided rather marvelous company for the duration of this tiny drink. Seriously, you should go out and party with Josh’s left arm one day, he’s hilarious.

Eventually I made it back home and got ready to assemble not one, but TWO mini burgers. TWO EFFIN BURGERS. Complete with tomatoes, lettuce, cheese and gherkins. Mini gluttony strikes again.

And The Bear goes WHOOP WHOOP BURGERS!

I want a girl with big hands and a tiiiiiiny burger.

Tonight, The Bear will appear in your dreams.

* No it’s not.