The second part of this week's Poetry Thursday was to share an audio file. I had never made an audio file before but it so happened I had just bought a microphone/headset to participate in an online chat. So after much fumbling around here is what I hit on.
First you need a program to do your recording. The program that comes with Windows is useless. I found a very good freeware program called Audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net. This is an open source program and is available for Linux and MacOS as well. If you are down loading the Windows version you will need to also download the LAME MP3 encoder and the audacity site provides a link for doing that. Do not use the raw project files that audacity creates. You can create a .wav file but they are not compressed. For instance the .wav file for "The Melting" is about 9.79mB and but the .mp3 file is "only" 1.7mB.
The next consideration is where to host your file. There are sites analogous to flickr for hosting audio files or you can host them on your own server. Be aware that band width gets to be a consideration. The several commercial hosting sites I have found are not free for that reason. Also your service provider may have limits on bandwidth so check that out.
I have put a link to "The Melting" and its audio file on my personal poetry site.
This week's poetry Thursday link.
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poetry
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Thursday, July 06, 2006
The Melting
This week's Poetry Thursday assignment was to focus on poetry related to some intense personal experience. Well it just so happens that I had just this type of poem sitting around waiting to be visited again. I don't want to say a whole lot about the poem except that is was triggered by my father's death but that is not really what the poem is about; nor is it really about some sort of reconciliation but more about an unexpected penetration to a secret.
The Melting
Going over Niagara and looking down
I think there should be snow
Not mud as Kansas at this time of year.
Then come the long lakes splayed out
Their marshes waiting for red wings,
Lakes still deep, mammoth cold.
Going over Niagara comes to mind
My first trip home the other week
With my sister to the hospital to see you.
You frown at us through the mask,
Point to me and whisper to her.
Who is this; is this Christine?
And I spin around this unrecognition,
Wrap reassurances around each other:
He has been through a lot,
Rough day just off the ventilator;
Confused by the medicines.
Our eyes stray to the vitals and the doctor
Is confident, no brain damage.
But maybe he is really going right
To the point of what I am,
For so long hidden by a certainty
That I could see all of myself like a model landscape
Of frozen solder scented plastic
Where I could rearrange the wire branched trees
And reorder the trusses and flip trains
From one to another track.
All that gone now, the land
Rebuilding itself from underneath
Only the slightest hint on the surface.
Going home to you for the last time
I feel my landscape opening up,
Filling with red wings in my breast.
And I look out; snow is falling.
Your snow, my marshes and I think
To the music I will sing at your Mass,
My ears filling with screes and chirrups
From the bird's golden throats.
Copyright 2006 © Paul Decelles
This week's poetry Thursday link.
Update! A discussion of audio files and a link to the audio version of "The Melting" is here.
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poetry
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Wow!
Never go to Best Buy to get something simple such as a scanner. We ended up getting my wife a couple of pieces of equipment that she wanted and a little something that I wanted as well, namely a Canon Rebel digital SLR. Hey, I am an entomologist and want to be able to take better insect pictures.
Not a great image, but consider this. It was taken with the standard 18-55mm lens on close up mode with auto focus. No close up lenses or extender rings and no attempt to adjust any other parameters. The image is also was not digitally magnified but only cropped out of the original jpeg. The actual size of the nymph was maybe 5mm at the outside.
Sure beats our little Kodak used for all my photos in my flickr stream up to this point.
Oh this is for Tara at the Lawrence Best Buy.
Technorati Tags:
insects
grasshopper
Not a great image, but consider this. It was taken with the standard 18-55mm lens on close up mode with auto focus. No close up lenses or extender rings and no attempt to adjust any other parameters. The image is also was not digitally magnified but only cropped out of the original jpeg. The actual size of the nymph was maybe 5mm at the outside.
Sure beats our little Kodak used for all my photos in my flickr stream up to this point.
Oh this is for Tara at the Lawrence Best Buy.
Technorati Tags:
insects
grasshopper
Monday, July 03, 2006
Bee Swarm!
...over at Karl Mogel's blog Inoculated mind. Great pictures and an audio recording of the swarm. Sent shivers down my spine since I am allergic to them. Check it out!
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insects
bees
Technorati Tags:
insects
bees
Sunday, July 02, 2006
The Robots are Coming.
Now for something very different:
You have probably been hearing about some of the new robots for doing house work being produced by iRobot. They now inhabit the noosphere thanks to Thorn Stevens at Robot Stock News . I have been following iROBOT for awhile and recently heard an interview on NPR with Helen Greiner, one of the founders of iROBOT.
The interview focused on what her company was doing and I found her to be very level headed about what robots can and cannot do and the directions her company is taking in the area of search and rescue type robots as well as the more familiar household robots. So check out Thorn's blog. Thorn covers other robotics companies as well. For instance here is his coverage of a South Korean effort to produce inexpensive household robots by farming out a lot of the processing to a cheap central server. So if you are a capitalist geek (that's geek not pig) his blog is definitely worth a look.
By the way if iRobot or any other company wants to test household robots under real battle conditions, just contact me.
In the interest of full disclosure I was impressed enough to by a small stake in iROBOT. Mind you a small stake...the stock like lots of other small caps is pretty volatile right now, so don't take what I did as being a hot stock tip.
Do I have ethical issues using robots in warfare?You bet. Do I worry about unintended consequences of robotics? You bet. But the technology is coming and one should not bury one's head in the sand over what bad things a technology could be used for.
Technorati Tags:
technology
iRobot
geek
stocks
You have probably been hearing about some of the new robots for doing house work being produced by iRobot. They now inhabit the noosphere thanks to Thorn Stevens at Robot Stock News . I have been following iROBOT for awhile and recently heard an interview on NPR with Helen Greiner, one of the founders of iROBOT.
The interview focused on what her company was doing and I found her to be very level headed about what robots can and cannot do and the directions her company is taking in the area of search and rescue type robots as well as the more familiar household robots. So check out Thorn's blog. Thorn covers other robotics companies as well. For instance here is his coverage of a South Korean effort to produce inexpensive household robots by farming out a lot of the processing to a cheap central server. So if you are a capitalist geek (that's geek not pig) his blog is definitely worth a look.
By the way if iRobot or any other company wants to test household robots under real battle conditions, just contact me.
In the interest of full disclosure I was impressed enough to by a small stake in iROBOT. Mind you a small stake...the stock like lots of other small caps is pretty volatile right now, so don't take what I did as being a hot stock tip.
Do I have ethical issues using robots in warfare?You bet. Do I worry about unintended consequences of robotics? You bet. But the technology is coming and one should not bury one's head in the sand over what bad things a technology could be used for.
Technorati Tags:
technology
iRobot
geek
stocks
Could You Pass?
| You Passed the US Citizenship Test |
 Congratulations - you got 10 out of 10 correct! |
Could You Pass the US Citizenship Test?
Thanks to fellow Lawrencian Blogger Joel Mathis at Cup o' Joel for the link.
Thanks to fellow Lawrencian Blogger Joel Mathis at Cup o' Joel for the link.
Mendel's Garden #2 is out!
Mendel's Garden #2 is out at Genetics and Health! Hsien has a great roster of submissions. So whether you are a genetics geek or just want to learn a little bit about genetics hop on over to the Garden.
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Carnival
Biology
Genetics
Science
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Blogging and a Country Divided
There is a great interview with Razib from Gene Expressions over at Genetics and Health. Razib in case you don't know his blog, is a wonderful geneticist and one with a refreshing independent viewpoint. He has lots of wonderful comments about politics and science, blogging and also genetics of course.
I think his comments fit very nicely with the 20/20 program last night, A Country Divided on ABC. This program documents how the United States is becoming more divided and people on each side of the divide are no longer able to talk to each other. The program looked at the forces that are pushing us apart including the rise of blogs and other politically diverse media that enable people to look just at the news (used loosely here) from their point of view. The program also talks about how our politics also affects where we live.
I had not really thought about this but it is true. Certainly in my case, and I have said this to people, that I choose to live in Lawrence in part because of its liberal atmosphere as opposed to where I work in the next County. To be fair to Johnson County, it's not all that conservative and is represented by a Democrat because the moderate and conservative Republicans are seriously split. But Douglas County having a blue streak in a red state was a consideration in my decision to stay here. Access to KU was a bigger factor.
Bloggers are in an interesting position, because the nature of the medium is such that our personal viewpoints show through. That is after implicit in the term blog (from web log) and there are some fine non political science blogs such as Genetics and Health. But often science bloggers let their political and religious view points show through maybe a bit too much. For instance PZ Myers over another one of my favorite blogs pharyngula
advertises his blog as:
"Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal"
and that is OK. But I wonder how many people might get turned off by that message and ignore the science. Clearly he is comfortable with his conscious choice to mix his science with politics.
In a way that is not too dissimilar to what I try to do here. Only in my case I blog heavily about lots of other things because science is only part of what I am and I quite frankly felt that being a science blog was too restrictive for me even though science informs everything that I do. In the 50's and 60's there was a lot of discussion about the two cultures - the humanities versus the sciences and I think we have gone a long way to breaking that false dichotomy, down at least in the academic world, but the society at large has become a psychic Gerrymander of political and cultural groups whose members slide past each other at work and drive past each other on the interstates and yet never really talk to each other.
Razib makes a good point in the Genetics and Health interview:
"One must separate norms, the overarching goals, and the day to day method. I don't think politics, aside from ubiquitous social politics, matters in science on the everyday level, but in terms of emphasis and orientation what your goals and values are seem entirely relevant. If scientists accepted that a zygote was a human being, and that human life is inviolable, then that has public policy implications in terms of stem cell research (one example among many in regards to fetal tissue research)."
But if we are so Gerrymandered that we as a society cannot come to some dare I say compromise on these value issues, get away from the absolutism of our little group, how are we going to deal with these large issues of public policy. We have to realize we are never going to have a perfect society from our individual points of view, so what we need to do is let go a little bit for the sake of having a working society. I know, easier said then done. But if we want a functioning civil society we have to try, liberals and conservatives, authoritarians and libertarians, gay and straight, deists and theists and atheists.
How do we do this? I think a big part of the solution is honest critical thinking. Often times, bloggers will come up with a question, leave it unanswered as a rhetorical device to undercut an opposing point of view. I see this all the time. For instance Big Simon in his really cool blog recently took on Al Gore's documentary on Global Warming and in a post that he files under lies says:
"Al Gore'’s new movie, The Inconvenient Truth, is in the theaters now, and liberals, treehuggers, and disciples of The Way of Clinton are absolutely eating it up. But the truth behind this "Truth"” is that it'’s all based on a lie - the lie of global warming and the destructive effects we, human beings, have on our world.
Here are some links to the science:
NAS study
Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming
The upshot is that one cannot extrapolate from what happens in one part of the world, say Greenland, to global temperatures and while global temperatures were warm around 1000AD, they were not probably warmer than now; though there is still uncertainty about that. Big Simon and other global warming skeptics might do well to at least examine these graphs about global temperatures discussed in the NAS study. Note that the recent spike in inferred global temperatures is well above the earler warming that affected Greenland. Then read the NAS conclusions concerning about the temperature data. The conclusions are couched with standard scientific cautions about the uncertainty of the data, but independent temperature estimates detailed in the NAS study point to the reality of the spike in glbal temperatures since the mid 19th century.
The message is clear. Don't leave questions hanging..OK? Asking a question is part of critical thinking, but leaving a question hanging without attempting to deal with it is not. Rather that is merely a rhetorical trick, one that unfortunately bloggers of all stripes use. And it is a technique among many others that serves only to further divide us and prevent us to having the important converstaions we must have if we are to survive long term as a civilization.
Update Razib provides a thoughful response to me.
Technorati Tags:
blogging
20/20
politics
global warming
Kansas
I think his comments fit very nicely with the 20/20 program last night, A Country Divided on ABC. This program documents how the United States is becoming more divided and people on each side of the divide are no longer able to talk to each other. The program looked at the forces that are pushing us apart including the rise of blogs and other politically diverse media that enable people to look just at the news (used loosely here) from their point of view. The program also talks about how our politics also affects where we live.
I had not really thought about this but it is true. Certainly in my case, and I have said this to people, that I choose to live in Lawrence in part because of its liberal atmosphere as opposed to where I work in the next County. To be fair to Johnson County, it's not all that conservative and is represented by a Democrat because the moderate and conservative Republicans are seriously split. But Douglas County having a blue streak in a red state was a consideration in my decision to stay here. Access to KU was a bigger factor.
Bloggers are in an interesting position, because the nature of the medium is such that our personal viewpoints show through. That is after implicit in the term blog (from web log) and there are some fine non political science blogs such as Genetics and Health. But often science bloggers let their political and religious view points show through maybe a bit too much. For instance PZ Myers over another one of my favorite blogs pharyngula
advertises his blog as:
"Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal"
and that is OK. But I wonder how many people might get turned off by that message and ignore the science. Clearly he is comfortable with his conscious choice to mix his science with politics.
In a way that is not too dissimilar to what I try to do here. Only in my case I blog heavily about lots of other things because science is only part of what I am and I quite frankly felt that being a science blog was too restrictive for me even though science informs everything that I do. In the 50's and 60's there was a lot of discussion about the two cultures - the humanities versus the sciences and I think we have gone a long way to breaking that false dichotomy, down at least in the academic world, but the society at large has become a psychic Gerrymander of political and cultural groups whose members slide past each other at work and drive past each other on the interstates and yet never really talk to each other.
Razib makes a good point in the Genetics and Health interview:
"One must separate norms, the overarching goals, and the day to day method. I don't think politics, aside from ubiquitous social politics, matters in science on the everyday level, but in terms of emphasis and orientation what your goals and values are seem entirely relevant. If scientists accepted that a zygote was a human being, and that human life is inviolable, then that has public policy implications in terms of stem cell research (one example among many in regards to fetal tissue research)."
But if we are so Gerrymandered that we as a society cannot come to some dare I say compromise on these value issues, get away from the absolutism of our little group, how are we going to deal with these large issues of public policy. We have to realize we are never going to have a perfect society from our individual points of view, so what we need to do is let go a little bit for the sake of having a working society. I know, easier said then done. But if we want a functioning civil society we have to try, liberals and conservatives, authoritarians and libertarians, gay and straight, deists and theists and atheists.
How do we do this? I think a big part of the solution is honest critical thinking. Often times, bloggers will come up with a question, leave it unanswered as a rhetorical device to undercut an opposing point of view. I see this all the time. For instance Big Simon in his really cool blog recently took on Al Gore's documentary on Global Warming and in a post that he files under lies says:
"Al Gore'’s new movie, The Inconvenient Truth, is in the theaters now, and liberals, treehuggers, and disciples of The Way of Clinton are absolutely eating it up. But the truth behind this "Truth"” is that it'’s all based on a lie - the lie of global warming and the destructive effects we, human beings, have on our world.
Don'’t get me wrong: We pollute, and sure, we should stop that. I am convinced it is having some negative effects on the biosphere. But to believe we are the cause of some great phenomenon like Global Warming, well, that'’s giving us a bit much credit.
Why do I say that? Well, Greenland, of course.
A thousand years ago, Norsemen were harvesting grapes in the fields of Greenland. In more recent times, however, explorers have unearthed several World War II-era planes that crashed in 1942. They were found under 268 feet of snow.
How'’d that happen in Greenland got warmer?"
Good question, but notice the rhetoric. He leaves the question as open ended without even bothering to think abut what might be going or even looking to see what is happening with the Earth's climate. Now to be fair, Big Simon is not a scientist, and a blogger's time is limited, but with the wealth of recent information about climate it seems he could have made a stab at answering his own question. Calling Al Gore a liar on the basis of an unanswered question is disingenuous at best.Here are some links to the science:
NAS study
Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming
The upshot is that one cannot extrapolate from what happens in one part of the world, say Greenland, to global temperatures and while global temperatures were warm around 1000AD, they were not probably warmer than now; though there is still uncertainty about that. Big Simon and other global warming skeptics might do well to at least examine these graphs about global temperatures discussed in the NAS study. Note that the recent spike in inferred global temperatures is well above the earler warming that affected Greenland. Then read the NAS conclusions concerning about the temperature data. The conclusions are couched with standard scientific cautions about the uncertainty of the data, but independent temperature estimates detailed in the NAS study point to the reality of the spike in glbal temperatures since the mid 19th century.
The message is clear. Don't leave questions hanging..OK? Asking a question is part of critical thinking, but leaving a question hanging without attempting to deal with it is not. Rather that is merely a rhetorical trick, one that unfortunately bloggers of all stripes use. And it is a technique among many others that serves only to further divide us and prevent us to having the important converstaions we must have if we are to survive long term as a civilization.
Update Razib provides a thoughful response to me.
Technorati Tags:
blogging
20/20
politics
global warming
Kansas
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