cyocum's comments

Dame Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley who founded Freelance Programmers in 1962 and hired predominately women who worked from home has died at the age of 91.

I am a BaseX user and I really appreciate it! I actually do not mind XML at all. XQuery and BaseX makes searching large numbers of XML file or just one large XML file really easy.

I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.

I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time.

I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved. Additionally, I have only ever used cursive for signing my name to documents.

I find it baffling because I have an advanced degree in medieval Celtic Studies. I study manuscripts in depth and I have seen some of the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine on the very expensive vellum manuscript page. In some cases worse than mine. Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old. Compared to the history of manuscript writing, cursive is very young so I am baffled that people are worried about it.

I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something so I understand if we continue to teach that. Cursive, however, should only be done by those who want to use it. If you want to have an after school cursive club, great, have fun! Otherwise, leave the rest of us alone and let us have recess.

I am not an expert in any way, shape or form but I wonder how this squares with this other journal article in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry which came out in 2024? "11C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2

Edited to add title of the article

Reading this, I am increasing my belief that this is very, if not exactly, like XSLT. You are searching a tree looking for parents, siblings, children, etc nodes then analysing or transforming them.

Your comment very much reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story "The Feeling of Power" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power). I think it might be worth the time read or, in my case, re-read it.

I am glad to see this as well. I decided to use RDF for my personal project because it was well specified, has many implementations, and a human readable syntax. In the end, it is just data but I wanted to make it as accessible as possible. Does this mean that RDF is always the right choice? No, but it worked for my use case. I wish there were more choices in the open source Triplestore space with good OWL2 support but my project works with what is out there and if someone wants to transform it into something else, that is entirely possible to do.

If you are interested, my project is here: https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen and a few posts about it are here https://cyocum.github.io/.

I will try. I tend to think of "The Celts" linguistically as a set of related languages. However, that is an artefact of my own training and background. How the people who spoke those related languages lived can differ radically wherever you find them. For me, to define Celtic is: did they speak a language that is related to those that we have labelled as Celtic? That means that "Celtic" is a convenient shorthand for talking about these languages and does not necessarily have a meaning outside of that.

I have not yet finished reading the linked article so I will see if it may alter my thinking any.

I have a degree in "Celtic Studies" and while I tend to study the Irish early medieval period rather than the ancient period, I would highly recommend reconsidering the entire idea of "Celtic". A couple of books that might be good to read if you have time are: John Collis, The Celts : origins, myths & inventions (https://www.worldcat.org/title/921219683) and Simon James, The Atlantic Celts : ancient people or modern invention? (https://www.worldcat.org/title/249450858). I have not had the time lately to read up on the state of the question so I will read the recommended article: Rachel Pope, Re-approaching Celts: Origins, Society, and Social Change (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-021-09157-1) with keen interest.

If you are interested in cats in Early Medieval Ireland, I would recommend reading "Catṡlechta and other medieval legal material relating to cats" by Kevin Murray in Celtica 25, pp. 143–159.

If you love wisdom literature. You may also enjoy "Old Irish wisdom attributed to Aldfrith of Northumbria: an edition of Bríathra Flainn Fhína maic Ossu" (https://worldcat.org/title/41404827) and "The Triads of Ireland" (https://archive.org/details/triadsofireland00meyeuoft). The problem with the "Triads" is that the translation/edition is old and it probably needs a new one.

Here is Brian Kernighan mentioning the Unicode work in an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNyQxXw_oMQ

For those interested in the archaeology of early Medieval Ireland, I would highly recommend this survey: Early medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100: the evidence from archaeological excavations (https://www.worldcat.org/title/early-medieval-ireland-ad-400...). The second edition has an updated bibliographic essay as well as some other updates in the text.

The author of this post mentions the Humanities at the end of their post and TerminusDB. I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic Web (https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen) and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times.

The main factor in my choice of technologies for my project was the ability to reason data from other data. OWL was the defining solution for my project. This is mainly because I am only one person so I needed the computer to extrapolate data that was logically implied but I would be forced to encode by hand otherwise. OWL actually allowed my project to be tractable for a single person (or a couple of people) to work on.

The author brings up several points that I have also run into myself. The Open World Assumption makes things difficult to reason about and makes understanding what is meant by a URL hard. Another problem that I have run into is that debugging OWL is a nightmare. I have no way to hold the reasoner to account so I have no way when I run a SPARQL query to be able to know if what is presented is sane. I cannot ask the reasoner "how did you come up with this inference?" and have it tell me. That means if I run a query, I must go back to the MS sources to double check that something has not gone wrong and fix the database if it has.

Another problem that the author discusses and what I call "Academic Abandonware". There are things out there but only the academic who worked on it knows how to make it work. The documentation is usually non-extant and trying to figure things out can take a lot of precious time.

I will probably have another look at TerminusDB in due course but it will need to have a reasoner as powerful as the OWL ones and an ease of use factor to entice me to shift my entire project at this point.

I occasionally work with data in the Humanities. The data here is often very, very small. I talk to other Humanities researchers and I often find that they really want to get on the ML bandwagon but they do not realize the sheer amount of data that they need to make ML as practiced today work. I have not looked into small dataset techniques in a long time (I have a day job so I do not get much chance to do this often) but I hope that one day we can find a technique that will work.

One side note, when I speak to other Humanities researchers about this, I always tell them that I have yet to find a technique that will give them novel insights. These techniques almost always tell the researchers things that they already know. I usually follow this up with a note that even formalizing Humanities knowledge in statistical or other computational terms is highly valuable and worth doing. Maybe someone else can take that formalism and build on top of it something truly new.

If you would like more information on what the Irish ate before the potato, I would recommend these two books to start:

* Early Irish Farming by Fergus Kelly (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/462769441) * Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100 by Aidan O'Sullivan, Finbar McCormick, Thomas Kerr, Lorcan Harney (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1257790078)

After looking around a bit, this strongly reminds me of Václav Havel's play, "The Memorandum" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memorandum).

To help answer your first question, I would recommend reading Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. by K. W. Nicholls (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/471778201) and A New History of Ireland, Volume II and III (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/495293791 and http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/299242437 respectively). As for your second question, I am not an expert enough to answer because I tend to study the earlier period before the Norman invasion.

For those who want more on this topic, you will want to read Early Irish Farming by Fergus Kelly (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/462769441) and Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100 by Aidan O'Sullivan, et al. (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1257790078).