We made it home Saturday night. Thanks a good friend in Portland for keeping our minivan while we were away. By Sunday the kids felt at home.
We made it home.
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Author Archives: Hugh Paterson III
Lidl in New York
Lidl is one of those low cost groceries in Europe which is trying to exercise its brand in the United States.
My experience with Lidl is that its product line is not all that great.
Most chocolate bars in the dark chocolate area have “chocolate liqueur” rather than cocoa as its ingredient.
When I looked at its granola options each granola had high fructose corn syrup as an ingredient.
Finally, we bought a can of black peas and sixty percent of the can was water.
In the USA Lidl as experienced in New York may be a low cost grocery, but it is also a low value product line.
In hope of family
Becky we did it again. Cookie day really did happen! Thank you!
Plastic in sawdust
As woodworkers, we use a lot of resins, plastics, and other synthetic materials which get filed, ground, shaved, or sanded, along with wood and disposed of along with sawdust.
This means that woodworkers in their modern art context often contribute to the production and proliferation of microplastics. It also means that the “sawdust” isn’t 100% biodegradable.
What methods are there at the individual workshop level to filter it these plastics from biodegradable materials?
VRA Core and its use of xml:lang
Some information professionals might be confused about the use of language identification metadata in larger bibliographic metadata standards. For example, VRA Core (Visual Resources Association)is a metadata standard which is used to describe visual artifacts. It is implemented in XML and therefore takes on all the descriptive power of XML. Including the use of the xml:lang attribute.
The following observations are made using the VRA (Visual Resources Association) Core 4 XML Schema, version 0.42. This schema implements the final VRA Core 4.0 guidelines, 2007-04-09. It is important to note that in these metadata standards implemented by memory institutions there are really two parts, the first is the "guidelines" and then there is the "implementation" of those guidelines (in this case as an XSD validation file). These two documents may not always be congruent even if that is the intention. In these cases I argue that what is valid is the technical implementation over the guidelines as that seems to be the best way to argue the definitive authority.
The XSD validation document contains the following annotation around the use of the xml:lang attribute.
VRA Core metadata attributes which can be applied to virtually any element. Note that xml:lang should contain ISO 639 language codes, not the English names of languages. Although the XML Schema defines xml:lang as allowing ISO 639-2 (three-letter) codes, some validators will only accept ISO 639-1 (two-letter) codes.
This annotation is misleading. First, the VRA Core authors are trying to alert catalogers and technologists that they need to not use the full text name value as might be done in other "library oriented standards", but rather they need to use language codes. In general this is a good thing. However, the VRA authors fail to understand the XML specification. Specifically, they indicate the need to use ISO 639 language codes. This is not true. XML needs to use BCP-47 language codes. This can be found in the specification for XML 1.0 fifth edition §2.12 https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-lang-tag. It is true that BCP-47 currently calls for the use of ISO 639 codes, but this might not always be true.
A second issue with the annotation is how the annotation distinguishes use between ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-1. If there are VRA Core data consumers or producers who are not consuming or producing valid XML then this is a transmission machinery issue not a protocol issue. BCP-47 does not call for the use of ISO 639-2/3 tas when there is an equivalent ISO 639-1 tag. If data ingest processes have only implemented ingest of ISO 639-1 then they haven't implemented VRA because VRA stands on XML which stands on BCP-47. BCP-47 is an algorithm which calls upon different standards at different times. Understanding the fall back nature of the algorithm would have clarified this point for VRA authors.
The following resources are useful for a better understanding of Language Tags in XML:
Food containers
I have noticed the proliferation of plastic food containers recently. Sometimes there are even multiple layers of plastic encasing food goods. The whole situation is endemic to the international commercial practices around food sales. I seem to remember more glass containers when I was a kid… but that may just be me.
The recent discussion about PFAS chemicals has me wondering how many of these chemicals are used in food packaging?what are our products shipped in?
Why did these olives need to be sold in a plastic bag rather than a glass jar?
Forever changed
This summer changed my kids forever. My son now asks for biscuits and tea. My daughter eats cheese and crackers with no end in sight.
Thanksgiving eve in Yachats
Growing Gray
Who would have known babe that we would grow gray together?
DCMIType PhysicalObject
Using DCMIType: how would I classifying a curated garden or Bacteria vs viruses.
Here is my outline for the paper on physical objects
