Interesting story from the Japan Times about an experimental maglev train reaching 581km/h (also reported on Slashdot), cool stuff, but maglev is rather blue sky stuff, did you know that a TGV reached over 515km/h back in 1990?

Sure TGV is a bit brute force and ignorance - lots of power, and special extra straight trackbeds - but if a little more tech wizardry was added to this formula, even better performance could be achieved, after all the much maligned APT ran at 155mph (249kp/h) on conventional tracks back in 1979 with what we would now think of as stone-age technology.

Update : Fixed the TGV speed (doh!), and found this interesting page from the BBC saying that the APT hit 162.2mph back in 1979.

Useful stuff time: SchemaWeb a site collecting RDF schemas, particularly useful schemas for FOAF, both serious stuff like Eric Vitiello's relationship schema that extends foaf:knows and fun stuff like the Beer and Pub ontologies.

No sign of LOAF there yet, looks like the LOAF project team are slackers... :-)