Went to see Into Great Silence last night. It's a film about a bunch of monks who don't talk much; so the entire film is meant to engender a feeling for the contemplative life. The filmmaker has gone to lots of effort to make it peaceful and relaxing, while not too dull. He uses lots of wacky angles, film, video, even super 8 by the look of things. On the whole, it worked well; only a few people left, although someone just behind snored through half an hour of it. I thought it was overlong at over 2 hours.

I was rather moved by the serenity of the monks, by their enormous sense of peace; they were also deeply worrying. There are only a few pieces of dialogue: one was a reading which was rather rambling gibberish about the trinity; the other was a interview (although the film claims to have no interviews) with an old monk. He was a deeply serene individual. However, he claimed not to be scared of death as he would be closer to God and that, moreover, there seemed no purpose to living for those without God. It's just a hop, skip and a jump from here to think that if death brings you closer to God getting there faster is a good thing, and that if people without God have no purpose in life, then they might as well not be alive. Even within this most gentle part of Christianity, we can see the ghost of the crusades.

Well, my rant of a few days ago did give rise to a useful discovery which is Nature Proceedings. Lodge your PDF, get back a DOI. Nature are doing great guns on this at the moment, although I think it's a pity that we tie ourselves to the mast of a publishing house.

I will definately consider going this route for next year. Maybe would just ask all authors to just submit here, and send us a DOI.

Went to the Cafe de Vie for lunch today. It's quite nice inside, although would be better without the music. The menu was okay, rather than inspired: it's basically posh sarnies, italian style, served by the French. The food looked okay on the counter.

Their service was interesting: the heated food (toasted sandwiches, sorry panini's) was very slow to come. When it did come, the waitress described it in French, and seemed genuinely surprised to be answered in English. Everyone else got their food, but mine never appeared. I went and asked; they had forgotten.

So, no idea at all what the food is like, but I can say that it did offer a genuine and authentic French experience.

I've been looking at options for storing papers from bio-ontologies. All I want is a place to lodge PDFs, with some standardised Dublic Core metadata, and get a DOI out. It's turning out to be surprisingly hard.

In the process, I have found that JISC has been funding a repositories programme. If you look at their architecture you see a depressing thing. They have actually got terrible idea that "institutional" and "subject" repositories should be built into their architecture. The point is that institution and subject should be just a part of the data model that are used to store papers; by making it explicit in the architecture, it becomes fixed, unchangable.

Why do I care? Well, first as a cross-disciplinary scientist, I am also scared of anything organised by subject — I always tend to fall between the cracks. As for institution, why would anyone thing that 100 year old, bureaucratic, administrative orgaisation of the employers of the paper authors are a good basis for organising modern science?

The best I could find is Depot, but this describes itself as a stop-gap till the authors get a proper institutional repository. Also no one is using it. It's got one biological paper, and that's under the subject heading of "Biology not elsewhere classified" — a sin against good classification if ever I saw one.

The subject classification comes from JACS. From their documentation,

C190 Biology not elsewhere classified Miscellaneous grouping which do not fit into the other Biology categories. To be used sparingly.

Entertainingly, this has a subclass (!!)

C191 Biometry Concerned with the quantitative techniques and measurement in the biological Sciences.

Which as well as being a contradiction, is a definition that is wrong.

Perhaps I should just give up and go home.

I first went to see Paco Pena years ago at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. I've managed to miss him ever since, mostly because there was something else on at the same time; this time it was Bo Diddley who was playing. He has sadly had a stroke and the concert was called off. It's an ill wind, as it mean that I got to see Paco instead.

The last time I saw him solo. Now he has three guitarists, two vocalists, a percussionist and three dancers. Flamenco is arrogant, brash and melodramatic; Paco Pena's show lived up to this. The music was wonderful though, and the dance astounding.

I have to be honest and say that I prefer the music: the stage lights were quite bright (I was sitting at the edge of the stage, directly in the path of from lights from the other side). After a while, my eyes got sore. And I missed the intricate and flamboyant playing of 15 years ago; we only got a single solo piece.

Still, this is to be a curmudgeon. The night was wonderful; the music compelling and exciting; the adrenalin made my knees go weak. I hope that it's not another 15 years before I get to see him again.

My pension document arrived today. On the 28/02 I have been in paying a pension for 7 years and 43 days. That's a lot of cash, especially given the chances that it's worth more than a packet of smarties when I am 70 are small.

Went to the Green Festival in Leazes Park at the weekend. The weather was great — cloudy on day two, but still nice and warm.

I like the Green Festival. It's easy to be cynical — 100s of Geordies saving the environment by swilling beer out of plastic glasses. But it's got a great feeling to it, relaxed and comfortable. And this year, the music was better than last year.

Amusingly, at one point a drunk guy decided to go swimming in the boating lake. Got an enormous crowd. Slightly depressing for the musicians; you spend years learning to play, getting songs and rehearsing and then get upstaged by someone drinking too much beer and cavorting in algae ridden lake.

As described previously, Google Calendars was broken for me. But, magically and randomly, it appears to have fixed itself today. Thanks heavens for that.