Computer Nerdity – Page 6 – The Big Room (and the little things in it)

I Hate You, Carl Zimmer!

Carl Zimmer wrote a book. Of course, that’s no reason to hate him, and I don’t hate him for that.

His book is all about Escherichia coli (“E.coli”). The friggin’ “Microsoft” of the biotech world. Accursed E. coli, hogging up all the print space and protocol development and sucking up electricity for -80�F freezers. I mean, come on people! You could be doing transformation of B. subtilis and related organisms instead, which form nice, sturdy endospores which you can dry out and keep in an any cool, dry place, no -80�F freezer needed! Or you could use something like Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and as a bonus be able to then transfer your nice transformed genes into plants, too! But NOOOOOooo….it’s always “E.coli, E.coli, E.coli.” DAMN YOU, E.COLI!

Of course, none of that is Carl Zimmer’s fault, either, so this is also no reason to hate him.

Now, if his book was lousy, that MIGHT be a reason to hate him, but as far as I can tell there’s no reason to think the book is lousy, so this is no reason to hate him either. In fact, that’s kind of the problem.

No, the reason I Hate Carl Zimmer is that he’s written a book about friggin’, stage-hogging E.coli…and I want it. (Well, a copy of it anyway.) It sounds like a very interesting book. I feel like a Republican who wants a copy of “The Audacity of Hope”. Or a Democrat who wants to plan a vacation to visit the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The cognitive dissonance torments me, and it’s all Carl Zimmer’s fault! CURSE YOU CARL ZIMMER!

Okay, got that out of my system. A review might follow eventually if I manage to get a copy of the book. Meanwhile, for a change of pace, anybody want to hear about my Asterisk setup? Or should I just get back to the fermentation stuff?

P.S. Here’s a bit of trivia for you: “Frig” is apparently an old-English word meaning “to wiggle”…

Fermentation: not just for alcohol

What does gluconic acid taste like, anyway?

Well, that was an interesting reminder. I’m tracking “fermentation” on Twitter, and caught a random reference to an interesting fermented beverage being made in Germany. The “reminder” I drew from this serendipitous reference was that “fermentation” doesn’t necessarily mean alcoholic fermentation.

“Fermentation” seems to be slightly tricky to define accurately. Most definitions seem to directly mention alcohol production from sugar, but this is only an example and not a definition. I’ve also seen the term used to mean simply “to grow a culture of microorganisms” (because the tank they are grown in can be referred to as a “fermentor”.)

Properly speaking, fermentation is what you get when you have microbes growing under conditions where the elelectrons that get sucked away from “food” molecules like sugars ends up on another, simpler carbon compound rather than something like oxygen, and therefore fermentation is implicitly anaerobic although that’s not the same as saying that fermentation cannot happen in the presence of oxygen (e.g. the Crabtree Effect, and of course fermentation of ethanol to vinegar requires oxygen). The end product is generally assumed to be organic acids (like acetic acid [vinegar]) or alcohols, and carbon dioxide. So, making beer and wine is fermentation. Making vinegar is fermentation. Making yogurt (lactic acid) is fermentation. Citric acid can be made by fermentation of glucose by Aspergillus molds, as can malic (apple) acid (see US Pat#3063910). You can make tartaric (grape) acid from glucose by fermentation as well (see US Pat#2314831).

I am familiar with the flavors of all of those products. One I’ve never directly tasted is gluconic acid, which is the main product of the fermentation process used to make “BIONADE�” (it seems to be written in all-caps everywhere).

According to their English-language page discussing their process – linked from the image at right, click to view – they are starting with malt, just as one would for beer, but instead of Saccharomyces yeasts, they are fermenting this wort-like liquid with “acid bacteria”. I’m going to hazard a guess that the bacterium in question is a strain of Gluconobacter oxydans or one of its close relatives. This group of bacteria is in the Acetobacteraceae family of bacteria which is involved in turning your wine into vinegar. It would appear that under the right conditions, the enzyme Glucose Oxidase (EC 1.1.3.4) produced by G.oxydans converts glucose to a compound which reacts with water to form gluconic acid. BIONADE� then adds flavor extracts and juices to the filtered fermentation product, carbonates it, and bottles it.

Not being familiar with the flavor of gluconic acid, I’m aching to get my hands on some of this stuff and try it.

For another example of a relatively non-alcoholic fermented beverage, see also Kombucha, which is essentially sweetened tea fermented by acetic-acid bacteria and non-Saccharomyces yeasts…which I also have yet to taste.

geostr:50.4600,10.2208:200804110105-06:geostr (at least if Google Maps interpretation of the address I could find at the moment is correct, and assuming the information I dug up and my interpretation of it is correct, this should be the approximate location of the brewery responsible for BIONADE� production.)

Well, a PHP example, anyway

Once I dove in and started messing around, I only had to fix two typos as the example I was working on seems to work correctly, at least to the extent that I’ve tested it. I now have what appears to be a working example of Geostring parsing in PHP. In this case, the example reads my feed from the Twitter website, sifts out any geostring tags it finds, then generates Google Maps links for each one found. As I write this, there are two geostring tags on that page, representing places (and times)
that I have actually been, and it seems to work.

You can take a look at the source code for the example here, or see it in action here.

Feel free to grab a copy to play with if you’d like (or write one yourself that isn’t so messy – hey, as someone who doesn’t consider himself a professional “coder”, I’m just happy that it did exactly what I wanted it to do on the first try…). You should only need to worry about two things – changing the $text_to_read, and whether or not your web server (or CLI) has fopen wrappers turned on so the script can read another web page if you use a web page as your text to parse rather than a local file.

Since generating a geostring tag is trivial, I didn’t bother trying to incorporate that into this example. If you want one, then here:

<?php
//generate a geostr tag with the most typical information only
//point not part of a track nor including heading or angle
$lat=44.027168;
$lon=-111.297892;
$elev=”1711.9m”; //could leave off the “m” and treat as float, since it defaults to “meters”
$timestamp=”20071125T123438-06″; //6 hours behind UTC

print(“geostr:$lat,$lon,$elev:$timestamp:geostr”);
//”full” version: print(“geostr:$lat,$lon,$elev:$timestamp,:,:geostr”);
//completely unnecessary, but legal
?>

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Off-Topic and Back Again: “Framing”, Cluetrain Manifesto, and Twitter

“Framing” came up briefly on one of the other small independent blogs I follow. I’d link
to the post but it’s gone now. I sincerely hope its disappearance wasn’t related to the
comment I posted there, unless it was just because of the “don’t feed the trolls” part
of it – (in which case excuse me for a moment while I tell myself what an amazing fountain of useful advice I am and feel self-important for about 15 seconds before I return to reality…). I’m guessing the poster just decided he didn’t want to keep the post, but I won’t let that spoil my brief ego-feeding fantasy.

For those lucky enough to have missed it so far, here’s my flippant and extremely brief explanation
of my understanding of how the “framing” thing goes. An assistant professor of communications popped up among the science blogs one day with what seemed to begin as a couple of reminders of the obvious (mainly because it occasionally seems that people have forgotten). Namely, that if you want someone to understand what you are trying to communicate (particularly scientific matters) and agree with you, you are more likely to succeed if you can connect what you are discussing to something that your audience already cares about, and you are less likely to succeed if you are, shall we say, unfriendly to them as you present your subject.

From there, “framing” seems to have grown into something resembling the brand-name of some kind of mass-market “self-help” product line. Its primary proponent, from the distant vantage point
whence I occasionally catch a glimpse of the fight, starts to seem like the angry Vice President
of Communications for Science, Incorporated, whose office issues angry memos denouncing the insubordinate “screechy monkeys” who insist on deviating from the approved language when discussing Science, inc.’s Mission Statement. The fact that science is a conversation among people rather than a corporation probably explains why so much of the response has been not “Oh, crap, we’d better behave ourselves or we’ll get in trouble” but “Who the heck are you, and why are you telling me what I can say and how I can say it?” And that, I think, is all that needs to be said. (Anyone who stumbles upon my little blog and disagrees is welcome to say so in the comments.)

Actually, it’s probably more than needs to be said, and I wouldn’t have even mentioned it except that the problem of trying to apply this sort of approved “Command and Control” approach towards information in the Internet age reminded me of something else. The Cluetrain Manifesto was published so long ago that AOL was still considered a successful and valuable operation at the time, but it still seems to be relevant. (It’s free to read online – follow the link if you want to do so). At its core, its central thesis seems to be that the “Command and Control” approach to information management favored by corporate and political entities is effectively broken now because of the two-way communication made possible by a ubiquitous internet. In essence, “the market” is no longer made of isolated individuals passively sitting on the couch “consuming” the approved messages coming through the television, but a “conversation” of people who can easily tell the difference between a corporate “message” and authentic human conversation. Here’s a relevant passage:

“Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura. They’re passive, yeah, but more than that: they’re isolated from each other.

Now imagine another magic wire strung from house to house, hooking all these poor bastards up. They’re still watching the same old crap. Then, during the touching love scene, some joker lobs an off-color aside � and everybody hears it. Whoa! What was that? People are rolling on the floor laughing. And it begins to happen so often, it gets abbreviated: ROTFL. The audience is suddenly connected to itself.

What was once The Show, the hypnotic focus and tee-vee advertising carrier wave, becomes in the context of the Internet a sort of reverse new-media McGuffin � an excuse to get together rather than an excuse not to. Think of Joel and the ‘bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The point is not to watch the film, but to outdo each other making fun of it.”

And now we take one more step towards on-topicness: One current set of the metaphorical wires described in that passage is Twitter. Twitter is kind of like a gigantic lobby at a convention center where some huge conference is going on. The lobby is filled with little groups of people, collectively discussing with each other all kinds of little thoughts, observations, and events that each person there has encountered. You can easily wander through the lobby for hours, listening for snippets of conversation that relate to your own interests. Sure, being a raw, natural, human group of discussions, Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of Everything is Crap”) is in full effect. Sometimes literally: On Twitter I’m tracking the term “brewing” which seems to pick up more metaphorical uses of the word than literal, and a recent “Tweet” that popped up was somebody commenting that someone didn’t flush the toilet (“someone’s been brewing up a 1.6 gallon pot of turd stew.”)

So why bother? Because I think the remaining 10% has enough potential value to make a little mental effort to sift through the stream of messages worthwhile. I’d say a majority of the messages that come through are related to events happening at that moment. Twitter seems to get a lot of use as a back-channel for commenting on things that are happening, and for organizing impromptu gatherings. In most of these cases I think location information would be a valuable addition…and now I’m finally back to “on-topic”.

I think it’d be exceedingly nifty to be able to map Twitter messages in real-time. If I can convince anyone else that my “geostrings” idea is worth using, and then if one were to track “geostr”, any “tweet” with parseable location information would automatically show up. A small tag containing precise location information would make it possible for your computer automatically alert you if a post was describing something anywhere near where you are. Imagine the case of posts like “I just saw a tornado touch down, I’m going down to the basement now”. Or, say, “Who wants to try the homebrew I’m about to bottle?”

Example code in Javascript and PHP for picking out and parsing geostrings to follow soon. I’ll get back to yeast again shortly thereafter, though.

New toy: “Twitter”

Wow – Celestron takes 8 business days to get me a terse one-sentence answer. BigC responds in one. Impressive. Apparently their technical people are all at trade-shows at the moment so my bigger question will have to wait until they get back, but they were at least able to answer my question about their “tabletop” digital microscopes magnification (answer: the “600x” really is optical magnification, not digital.)

Another digital microscopy WANT/DO NOT WANT post to follow when I get the followup reply. Meanwhile, after hearing about it on the This Week in Tech podcast for a while, I finally talked myself into signing up to play with the coincidentally named Twitter system.

It sounds like a really stupid idea – “Oh, goodie, now I can broadcast ‘text messages’ no more than 140 characters long about trivial events in my life to the whole world! Whoopee!” “Wow! I can find out when random strangers are drinking coffee AS IT HAPPENS!” Thrills! Excitement! Adventure!…

On the other hand, having the messaging system watch for particular words might be a handy way of monitoring current events. Plus, there seems to be a lot of potential for fun, off-the-wall uses, even if many of them are kind of silly.

It DOES seem like kind of an ideal context to play with that “geostrings” concept I’ve been toying with. A terse, easily-machine-parsed format for geotag data that can fit into a “twitter” post and still leave room for a sentence or two to go with the geographic information seems like it might be useful. If you’re so incredibly bored that you want to see some examples, you can check out my own Twitter posts, several of which I’ve embedded geostrings into.

All this week: A topic important to secular and religious people alike

It’s not midnight here yet, I’m still on time!

Hello, “Just Science 2008” subscribers and everyone else. My life is insane at the moment but dagnabbit I’m going to do my best to get at least one post up on a scientific topic every day from today (Monday, February 4th) until Friday…

Today’s post is in the form of a gedanken experiment.

First, imagine the following:

Some “entities” existing somewhere

It doesn’t matter what “entities” you are imagining, whether they are products in a market setting, or data structures in a computer program, or topics of discussion on a news broadcast. All that matters is that there can be more than one of them.

A mechanism by which these “entities” are copied (and, optionally, also sometimes removed)

Products are manufactured or recalled, data structures can be copied or deleted, additional news anchors can be added to comment on a topic or conversely may shut up about them…

At least one mechanism by which changes can occur between or during copies

Product designs can be changed, a computer program may consult a “random number” generator and use it to make small changes in the data structure, scriptwriters may alter the news anchor’s teleprompter messages…

Some aspect of the “entities” that affects the rate at which they are copied (and/or, optionally, removed).

Demand by buyers in the market results in ramping-up of production, a computer program may perform some test or comparison of a data structure and use the result to determine how many copies of it to make (or whether or not to delete it), news topics that result in more people watching are repeated more often while those that people tune out from are dropped from the schedule…

What happens to this group of “entities” over time should be obvious. Taking the example of products in a market, producers introduce a variety of products (the group of “entities” in this example) and buyers examine their characteristics and, based on which ones they like, buy some of them. The producers observe which kinds of products are selling more and make more of those, while reducing or outright eliminating the production of those that aren’t selling well. Over time, a few of the kinds of products in this group which best fit the preferences of the buyers and the ability of the producers to make them. These products will dominate the market until the preferences of the buyers or the ability of the producers to produce them change [example: a shortage in the price of a particular material needed for a popular product].

You have most likely observed this process in the “news topic” context yourself, where it tends to happen much faster as “cheap and easy” news stories are happily picked up by news agencies to broadcast until people get sick of them and tune out.

This can all, hopefully, be understood as a purely logical outcome – a conclusion that universally and necessarily follows from the premises given. There should be nothing supernatural or even surprising here, is there?

So, now that you understand why and how evolution works (if you didn’t before), I can move on. (Incidentally, the part of the example above that describes a computerized system is actually referred to as a “genetic algorithm”.)

My purpose in starting with this is because it really and truly is fundamental to the topic that I expect to spend most of this week posting about, and which has been of vital importance to human culture and intellectual development for thousands of years. This most important subject involves such notable figures as Charles Darwin,St. Thomas Aquinas, Noted American Science-guy Benjamin Franklin, New England Puritan Cotton Mather and Quaker William Penn ,Hardcore Catholics like Pope John Paul II, Hardcore Athiests like PZ Myers, even famous religious figures like Jesus.

I refer, of course, to wine (and beer and other examples of ethanol production).

Okay, here’s the background: I just graduated with my B.S. in Microbiology, and I’ve got this whole “Hillbilly Biotech”/”Do-it-yourself”/”Practical Science” kind of thing going on in my interests. That being the case, I wondered what it would take to isolate, culture, and maintain my own yeast (and bacteria – more on that later) stocks from the environment rather than buying “canned” cultures – or at least play with the “canned” yeasts to create my own stocks. As I was poking around, though, I kept running into the same attitudes – namely that it’s “too hard” to do this, and although there are a number of people who advocate re-culturing canned commercial yeasts for a short time to save money, none of them think it’s feasible to do this for more than a couple of generations, at which point we are assured that you have to go buy it again or else “mutations” will inevitably appear and scary and mysterious “off-flavors” will result and the brewing police will come and throw you in jail for deviating from the archetype of whatever pre-defined style of wine or beer you’re trying to make. Or something like that. In any case, it’s because of this fear of “mutations” that I am starting out with this “evolution”-related post: in biological evolution, various forms of alterations in the genetic material are the “changes before or during copying” in the gedanken experiment above.

I didn’t buy it when people were telling me that it was “too hard” to learn how my computer works so that I could run Linux and should instead leave deciding what my computer should do to the “professionals”, and I’m not buying the same argument about commercial yeasts, either. If I felt that way, I might as well leave the rest of the complex technology of brewing to the “professionals” too, and consign myself to “Lite Beer” and “Thunderbird” for the rest of my life.

I’ve been spending much of the last few weeks perusing books, online articles, and scientific papers on subjects related to brewing in general and brewing yeasts in particular, and this should form the bulk of this week’s post topics, of not well beyond this week. Tomorrow I intend to start in on the actual process of culturing yeasts. Meanwhile, feel free to correct my no doubt horribly over-simplified explanation of evolutionary processes in the comments.

I should be getting more done…

Im Name des Nudelmonster! It’s been over a week since my last post!

The 'happy dance' sequence from 'Relentless:Twinsen's Adventure' aka 'Little Big Adventure' “Someone” seems to have located a replacement original disk of a game I had many years ago (but lost when I loaned it to someone) and bought it for me. Now, in addition to a variety of issues I need to deal with related to moving over the next few months, I have this delightfully surreal old computer game beckoning at me. ARGH! MAKE IT STOP!

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to put together topics for next week’s “Just Science 2008”. We’ll find out who, besides me, is interested in fermentation once it starts. I think I’ll have to start off the series with a post on evolution, however, since it really does play a fundamental role when it comes to yeast culture. I also think I may be able to work JellO� into at least one of the posts, too…

Internet connection will be spotty the rest of this week as we travel towards the area that is to be our New Home, but I should have posts assembled in time for next week.

If I get a chance, there will hopefully be at least one more Geostrings post, possibly with a sample mp3 and/or Ogg/Vorbis audio file.

My “geostrings” project, and coming attractions.

I have set up a more permanent “page” for my little project to come up with a way to embed geotags in things like mp3, Ogg/Vorbis, video files, text documents, image formats besides jpeg and geotiff, and so forth. I’ve got a definition of the format and a basic description of the parsing algorithm for it up there. Embedding and decoding examples and so forth will follow soon, though I’m hoping for some comments before I get too deep into assuming I’ve got the format finalized.

Meanwhile, I’ve signed on for this year’s “Just Science” week, So I’ve got to get together at least five consecutive days worth of science posts to go up between February 4th and 8th. Fortunately, I think I can fill most if not all of it with the brewing science (and yeast culture in particular) stuff I’ve been researching. I’d still like to get my hands on at least one more paper which isn’t readily available to me (Gasent-Ram�rez JM, Castrej�n F, Querol A, Ram�n D, Ben�tez T.: “Genomic stability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae baker’s yeasts.”; Syst Appl Microbiol. 1999 Sep;22(3):329-40.) but I do have quite a few others that I’m going over.

Gather and harken unto my tale of woe!

Well, this roadtrip has been rather difficult so far. Not necessarily bad, but definitely difficult.

It was about a week before the weather would let up enough for us to even escape our home state. I came down with a cold as we were leaving. The campground we were originally going to be staying at on the second night was mysteriously closed for the season despite supposedly being open year-round. Panoramio appears to have forgotten that I exist and won’t let me login to upload more to my photos (and I’ve not yet heard back from the email contacts there about getting back in). And then on the third night, neither of the truckstops next to our campground had sour cream. And the following morning, after stopping briefly to pick up some food for breakfast, the truck sputtered and died on the way up the onramp to continue the trip. And then we had some stress and confusion getting things worked out initially with the RV’ers organization to get towed to a repair shop and a campground. And then my wife has apparently picked up the cold that I’m getting over now. And then someone took a doody in my sandbox…oh, wait. That was just a “song” on one of my CD’s. Never mind.

On the other hand, we did manage to finally escape our home state, we did find a replacement campground for the second night, we did get everything worked out okay, and our truck’s problem turned out to be a relatively minor issue with the distributor though it evidently took a fair amount of labor to extract, fix, reassemble, and reinstall it, and we should be able to get back on the road in the morning. So, enough whining from me for now.

Evidently some gas-station hotdogs are either not hot or are not food. I had to take a picture of this notice on the gas pump. Geostring included in the .jpeg comment. Meanwhile, I’ve thought about my “geotagging arbitrary files” issue a bit more. At this point I’m favoring the “geostrings” approach, split into what I’m calling “Where, When, and Whither” fields, which is to say, a field containing location (latitude, longitude, elevation), a field containing time-related information (timestamp, track-id), and a field containing direction (heading and angle) information. I’ve actually started putting geostrings in this form into some of the pictures I’ve been taking, just to get a feel for how easy or hard they are to work with. An example containing all information including the optinal stuff would look like this:

geostr:35.068531033,-106.5019369,1716.0905m:20080104T122418-06,track01:60,20:geostr

The “where” field is latitude, longitude, and elevation, separated by commas. The “when” is the ISO8601 standard simplified timestamp and a track ID, and the “whither” indicates a heading of 60� and an upward angle of 20�. The colon-separated fields and the comma-separated data within each field are in order from (as I perceive it) most important to least important. Aside from the latitude and longitude, and the “geostr” markers on either side, everything is optional.

Comments?

Linking this more-relevant latter portion of the post to the whining at the beginning is the fact that the cold I’m now getting over has messed up my voice. I did bring microphones and both my computer and some cheap portable recording gadgets, so at some point along the way I still want to do at least one short audio recording, geotagged and including an embedded image to go with it. I just need to wait for my voice to properly return (and to spot something about which I feel an urge to inflict people with my blabbering.)

Proposed format(s) for geotagging arbitrary types of media

Yet more thoughts on geotagging – here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

The format needs to handle only two fundamental data types – points and polygons. It also obviously needs to handle “lines” or tracks, but those are made of “points”. Polygon, for my purposes, might be unnecessary and I’m not sure if I should leave it in. I’m reluctant to leave it out – that way you could easily georeference media to a building or field’s outline, for example. On the other hand, I’m trying to keep this format terse and concise – I’m not trying to merely embed .gpx or .kml files in things.

A “point”, as I am thinking of defining it here, is made of up to seven attributes (more or less in order of importance): a latitude/longitude pair, elevation, timestamp, track-ID, heading, and angle. A polygon is the same, except that it contains a list of at least three lat/lon/optional-elevation sets. It still only has a single timestamp, though, just like a “point”. I suppose in some odd cases one could even define a track as a series of polygons – defining the field of view in a video taken from the bottom of an airplane that’s taking off, for example.

Leaving aside the question of polygons for now, I’m envisioning two possible formats which I will arbitrarily name “geotag” (XML-type) and “geostring”(simple text) for the moment.

I picture a geotag entry looking something like this:

<geotag:point lat="41.228063" lon="-115.058119" elev="1720.901m" datetime="20071115T143000-06" trackid="1" heading="340" angle="-5.0">Metropolis Hotel</geotag:point>

In this format, the optional description of the point is between the opening and closing tags there. “lat” and “lon” might be better as a single “latlon” or “coord” attribute, with the latitude and longitude separated by commas (i.e. <geotag:point coord="41.228063,-115.058119">:</geotag:point>)

A “geotring” point might look something like this instead:

geostring:point:41.228063:-115.058119:1720.901m:20071115T143000-06:1:340:-5.0:geostring

Not sure if the closing “geostring” is really necessary here, but it would make backwards-compatibility easier if fields were added to future revisions. As with the geotag, it might be better to treat the lat/lon pair (the only mandatory information for a minimal “point” definition) as a single field, so the minimal “geotag” example above done as a “geostring” would look something like: geostring:41.228063,-115.058119::::::geostring

Even as I write this, I find myself leaning towards combining the latitude and longitude into a single field, if for no other reason than it means each point only has one required field. Either way, I currently think the fields ought to be defined thus:

latitude and longitude are decimal degrees. Either may be prefixed by a + or – (lat: +=”Northern Hemisphere”, -=”Southern Hemisphere”, Lon: +=East, -=West) – if neither is there, + will be assumed. Latitude and longitude are required for every point.
Elevation may be suffixed by “m” or “f” (for “meters” or “feet”). If neither is specified, meters are assumed.
Timestamp is in the ISO 8601 “basic format”. If neither “Z” or an offset from UTC are specified, “the viewer’s local time” should be assumed (which is kind of silly, but it still would allow one to synchronize a track with, say, an audio recording or video.)
trackid is any arbitrary alphanumeric term with a maximum of, say, 16 characters (is that enough?) Any points with the same trackid are assumed to be part of the same track. If unspecified, the point is assumed to be unrelated to any other points (if any exist) that may be in the same file.
Heading is in decimal degrees from 0 to 360. This represents facing a particular (horizontal) direction from the point in question. “Which direction the camera was pointing” in the case of a photograph.
Angle is in decimal degrees from -90 to 90. This represents an angle above or below the current elevation at that point (for a picture, this would represent the upward or downward angle that the camera was pointing when the picture was taken.)

Hmmm, if I shorten “geostring” to “geostr” and either eliminate the “data type” field (“point”) or just reduce it to a single letter, that entire and complete “geostring” example would fit even into a single tiny 64-character comment field, if there are any file formats still floating around limited to that kind of small metadata size.

My main goal here is to make it easy to create files tagged with this information. So long as it’s easily read and not likely to get separated from the file it describes, using the data for anything ought to be easy, even if one has to do it “by hand”. As was mentioned on the “Into the Pudding” blog (found via the GeoRSS blog), having applications that can read metadata is useless if nobody’s putting the metadata in their files to begin with. If an acceptable format can be worked out, I intend to start making as much georeferenced information available as possible.

Who’s with me? Comments, suggestions, offers of patronage, anyone?