Music from science and civilization

whats better than your favorite contemporary composer?

2010-01-03T14:07:00.003-05:00

Your favorite contemporary composer played at 16rpm. Happy 2010!

Erik Satie. Part of the furniture music, Tenture de Cabinet Prefectoral. One of the unsung major influences on modern music.

Joep Straesser. Blossom Songs. I need to get hold of more of these recordings. He has the best titles such as "Sightseeing for string quartet" and "Splendid Isolation for Organ".

Lucas Foss. Fantasy and Fugue. Rhymes with Floss, which I just did for the first time in 2010.

John Cage. Conderto for prepared piano and orchestra. Should of done 4'33. Sneezing also sounds good at 16rmp.

mx multi-entry key. a self review from a recent web publication

2009-11-13T13:03:00.015-05:00

Recently we published an example of an MX generated multi-entry key as part of the publication and review Revision of the Oriental genera of Agathidinae (Hymenoptera, Braconidae) with an emphasis on Thailand and interactive keys to genera published in three different formats authored by Michael J. Sharkey, Dicky S. Yu, Simon van Noort, yours truly, and Lyubomir Penev. The revision was part of a series in ZooKeys reviewing multi-key creation practices, including some suggestions for publishers of open-access journals.

heres the key online.

The publication was good as a nice real world example. It highlighted some strong points in the system (multi-use matrices, auto linker to the Hymenoptera Anatomical Ontology, ability to import/export Nexus files, link to Morphbank images using Morphbank web services) and how we can expose these views as public (ie matrix view can be public [no-edit] or private [edit]). But more importantly it showed me a few things that could be done to improve it particularly in archiving the key version for future use:

1. We expose the nexus file for the key and a character list but need a format to contain all of the key annotations for export (including image and specimen data). We have character lists with image and specimen information attached for download---enough information to recreate the key. BUT best to do this how? SDD? or NeXML? or Other?

2. Also wouldn't it be grand to add a public comment section to the key itself? So while a user is working through the key they could add comments that would be archived for the key author.

3. Greater focus on images as primary language...continue to move further away from the words.

4. Encourage the use of tags. To show confidences and quality of characters.

Endnote Gem

2009-11-04T08:46:00.007-05:00

HOW from HAO

Working on an Endnote parser for MX as part of our interactions with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). We want to collect new terms parsed from Journal of Hymenoptera Research (JHR) articles OCRed on BHL.

But then we ran into the first issue: JHR literature citations are not available in a nice format we can import (based on article, BHL has them in Endnote based on volume). Ideally in the end it will be published (in part) as my first gem on Github (results of project #1). The logic for creating, or perhaps better termed the justification for creating, an Endnote parser primarily has to do with Google. We at the Hymenotpera Anatomy Project are adding lots of references and MX reference addition is form heavy (unavoidable)...that is if you type it all in. Google Scholar exports references in Endnote. Thus the proposed work flow is something like this:

I have a citation I want to enter
I Google it
Cut the Endnote file
Paste and verify in MX

May or may not be faster. But thats the next idea...run a short experiment on that. Amount of time it takes me to enter 25 references...each way (results of project #2).

It will be most useful if we can then export all references in Endnote as well (or perhaps some other library friendly formats?). That way we can return the nicely formatted references for those who need them (including JHR and maybe BHL).

What I would really like to see is BHL OCR returned to me based on pages. I know you can already get by asking BHL to email you the pages, and rumor has it that a wrapper is being written to hack just this, but it would be lovely to access it directly without the hack.

GIF Field Guide

2008-04-23T23:08:00.005-04:00

Blattaria

Lampyridae

Diptera

Culicidae

Muscidae

Pipunculidae ?

Hymenoptera

Apidae

Vespidae

Formicidae

Mantidae

Odonata

Isoptera

Orthoptera

Gryllidae

immature Oecanthinae ?

Acrididae

Hemiptera

Fulgoridae

Unknown

Coleoptera

Coccinellidae

some strange Staphylinidae?

Lucanidae

Chrysomelidae

Scarabaeidae

Carabidae

Dermaptera

Phasmatidae

Lepidoptera

Danaidae

Nymphalidae

Papilionidae

Pieridae

Radio station for the alligators

2008-02-18T19:05:00.005-05:00

The strip of highway 75 between Miami and Naples that runs through the everglades is lovingly called Alligator Alley. The highway has many wonderful overlooks, an educational rest stop and its very own radio station. Everglades Radio Network runs educational snippits and weather warnings and information. You can also listen to ERN 98.7 WFLP-LP and FM 107.9 WFLU-LP while in Alligator Alley or via their website.

View Larger Map

Not much here to spin tunes for but the alligators are rockin!

An entertaining snippit

2008-02-14T04:10:00.008-05:00

Some segments from a recent Scientifically Speaking with Irene Moon lecture that was presented at Florida Atlantic university as part of the southXeast exhibition.

Many thanks to the Prelinger Archives for placing such lovely old video online for non-commercial use. They supplied the film of the ootheca hatching in slow motion. Was from a film called "goodby mr. roach" created by the Clemson College Extension Agency in 1959.

Participation in a search cliché

2008-01-27T22:47:00.000-05:00

So boy this has been done many times. Found a search for racehorse names once for dirty words and lots of interest in pop culture. Registered racehorse names are easily searched from the Jocky Club International Web site. Really all started when it occurred to me that Fire Wall would be an excellent racehorse name than well it became something akin to looking for ones name printed on a coffee mug at Hallmarks.

Could this be Fire Wall?

Computer associated racehorse names:
Interlink (2000)
Internet (1995)
Interpretation (2003)
Apache (2006)
Fire Wall (ARG) (P)
Googleized (2004)
Google Me (2007)
Yahoo (2000)
Server (2005)
Perl Whirl (2004)
Web (2002)
World Wide Web (2005)
Code (2000)
Hacker (1994)

And some other good ones:
Phylogeny (1998)
Habitus (GB) (1974)
Morph (2001)
=Biologie (P)
Biologist (2007)

grass people that are not scarecrows

2008-01-04T20:24:00.001-05:00

Most human forms made of grass are termed or tagged as scarecrows on the web (some 20 pages in Google images) However, that does not cover all human forms made of grass. Some end up simply tagged as 'grass people' or ‘grass human’ instead.

image credit: Harnois' Happy Hens

image credit: amys robot

Greatest Collecting Locations I

2007-12-11T01:38:00.001-05:00

These amazing Salt Pillars are from the Dead Sea, Israel and seem to be an ideal collecting location for extremely halophilic Archaea.

Image from the research of Dr. Richard Shand at Northern Arizona University.

morphbank browse scraper

2007-12-03T20:41:00.000-05:00

Just in case you would want to add a little www.morphbank.net image scaper to your Web page. It returns the url to embed the image into a Web page and the link back to the morphbank record. Using nifty php client url library functions (curl). Any morphbank image browse query will work. Just find the browse you want and cut and replace the returned url in place of the one below.

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.morphbank.net/Browse/ByImage/?tsn=655371');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);$regex = "/Image \[(.+?)\]/";
preg_match_all ($regex,$data,$match);
foreach($match[1] as $id )
echo '<a href="http://morphbank.net/Show/?id='.$id.'"> <img src="http://morphbank.net/Show/?id='.$id.'&imgType=jpg" /></a>';
?>

Works ok for a small number of images, will really bog down a web page

Check that Acronym

2007-12-01T14:38:00.000-05:00

OTU

Acronym Definition
OTU Occupational Therapy Unit
OTU Office of Technology Utilization
OTU One-Time Use (disposable)
OTU Operating Time Update
OTU Operational Taxonomic Unit
OTU Operational Training Unit
OTU Optical Translator Unit (Lucent)
OTU Optical Transport Unit (IEEE)
OTU Outcome Tracking Unit
OTU Output Terminal Unit
OTU Over to You
OTU Oxygen Tolerance Unit

OTU OTU!

Oh those little white lies

2007-11-12T19:23:00.000-05:00

While browsing Google scolar this evening I found a few gems. One is a paper from 1992 by Jennifer Epstein, Bella DePaulo, Susan Kirkendol, Deborah Kashy and Melissa Wyer, whimsically titled “Lying in Everyday Life”

They found some interesting results of the daily lying of college students, generally they produce about 2 little lies a day.
Here is a brief review of some of the interesting results:

1. Participants told more lies about themselves than other people; except when you got a group of women together than they told as many lies about others as themselves.

2. Participants told more lies about themselves to men and lies about others to women.

3. Little lies are common but do not seem to relieve distress in social situations.

4. The most common lie is the removal of facts or absence of truth.

5. Lying serves the function of “impression management, emotional regulation and social support”. For impression management people fashion new and untrue selves.

6. Lying may have long-term emotional effects but ‘many people may prefer not to hear that their muffins are grainy or that they look like a blimp.”

the funny final statement

Are you a summer rain or a clean and clear?

2007-10-04T18:36:00.000-04:00

The feeling of being overwhelmed by too many choices is more common than I supposed. The toothpaste isle alone is a marketing train wreck. Interestingly in the article Iyengar and Lepper found that contray to what seems to be the trend, complexity in choice tends to drive people away from the product, either to another less choice-laden product or to not choose at all.

When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 995-1006. (2000

Your codex just got schooled

2007-09-10T21:28:00.000-04:00

A codex by definition is a book in the format of modern books, considered those with binding. But it seems that most codices come to us as epic works, historical documents and often marviously illuminated. Many codices are so magnificent they are named for the town or the library in which they have lived.

Nothing could be finer than the
codex seraphinianus, except well the Dresden Codex or the Book of Kells.

seudo-Seneca, and others
from the British Library Catalogue

Codex Seraphinianus

How to make the most of dying

2007-08-28T17:00:00.002-04:00

Just signed up to be an organ donor and then became nervous. As I see it might guarantee that I don’t remain in a coma on the table for a long period of time. The harvesters will surely come and take away whatever left is useful in some sort of last moment horror.

But as I poked around in the idea of being useful after death suddenly it became less straight forward. There is a lot of money in dead humans. One multi-million dollar industry that promotes itself as educational is the Bodies exhibition. Its not about science, art or education...its purely a means of making a lot of money. Here is a great article about some of the bodies in the exhibition 'leaking' because they were possibly a rush job. Some museum proprietors are protesting the exibits but I think the best protest is simply not to donate one self to become a rush job mock-up to line someone elses pockets.

This naturally led to the question of 'well why not if they pay me now.' Seems that it is hard to find groups that will pay for your body while you are alive. Who is the best in body donation? Well at least Life Quest will cremate you for free (estimated value $700 dollars). They are still making a ton of money. Found one estimated cost of a kidney to be £1,575, which includes transportation of the organ and a fee for organ donation programs. Your skin, tendons, bones, valves, organs, eyes, and just about everything else is very valuable. Thus one body=bankroll!

The ROYGBIV of Google

2007-08-11T22:05:00.001-04:00

IIts relaxing to Google concepts like serenity and see what the top image hits are for such a meaning-laden word. Googling emotions can show us the possible top 18 flash cards to show an alien species what we mean when we say humans are angry, sad, happy, etc. This is of course not a new thought and surely some articles have been written on the subject, which I am joyfully ignorant of. Today I found a nice google-goggle, the top hit images of our visible light spectrum. Good ole ROY G. BIV. They make nice compositions and will likely change as the general consensus of what these colors actually look like changes.

Red

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Indigo

Violet

of course all chaos breaks looks if you think of the color wheel, not ROY. Then we would have to worry about red-orange vs orange-red (one of many color worries).

Red-Orange

Orange-Red

Seems pretty obvious that we understand Orange-Red as a color much better than Red-Orange.

And then there is the color purple...always tricky. People prefer less 1980s names for the color like wine because you just cant escape the truth about the color. Look at our collective concept of the color purple!

Such a classic

2007-07-29T13:45:00.000-04:00

The Beckman Model JR-21 needs no introduction. Bit frightening sounding on the inside, sort of a demons from hell listen.

mp3

Another good shaker

2007-07-29T13:38:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately I do not remember the exact make and model of this old standby. He would easily boogie a 1000ml Erlenmeyer flask all night. Have a listen

Best lab sounds

2007-07-27T09:23:00.000-04:00

Attachment to inanimate objects is not uncommon, particularly if you work with 'it' every day. Computers commonly have names.

Its a bit less common for a vortex to find a special place in the hearts but to those who have grown to rely on him he is one of a kind.

Let me introduce Fred the Fisher Vortex Genie 2. Although only a shaker for single micro centrifuge tubes he really could boogie

mp3 of Fred in action

Tree octopus

2007-07-19T06:24:00.000-04:00

humm oh really?

Whats the temperature?

2007-07-06T19:30:00.000-04:00

oh and here is a link to the ever helpful Dolbear's Law formula on wikipedia. Makes me wonder why the snowy tree cricket (Oecanthus fultoni) is so very consistant for telling the temperature. Supposidly the average cricket is not consistant with variations in the amount they are chirping dependant on their age and mating success. Oecanthus sp. chrip a bit differently in the West as they sing a bit faster. Here is a nice Website with some sound samples and info
Its 98 degrees here. I think those snowy tree crickets would be a bit overworked.

dreamy live earth band of Antarctica researchers

2007-07-06T18:48:00.001-04:00

Well all musical interests aside nothing could possibley be cooler (probably a well worn joke by now) than a Live Earth Band consisting of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Rothera Research Station. Their name is Nunatak and they are a house band made up of scientists that already reside in Antarctica (well its not like they can actually get out this time of year, guess plenty of time to practice). Nunatak will be live via the Internet for Live Earth...Awesome!

look at band practice: you know you need lights when it is eternal night right now. Way goth.

Here is the prievew video:

oh yeah and band members ...Looking for publications right now. I mean they might be able to play the fiddle but im ready to check out the data.
Nunatak band members are:

Matt Balmer - Electronics Engineer - Singer, Guitar
Tris Thorne - Communications Engineer - Fiddle
Ali (Alison) Massey - Marine Biologist - Saxophone
Rob Webster - Meteorologist - Drums
Roger Stilwell - Field General Assistant (polar guide) - Bass

End of August at the Hotel Ozone

2007-06-24T11:47:00.000-04:00

Great movie and a excellent view if you are into the end of the world. Its a super bleak, 1967-Czechoslovakian film from directors Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt. Best human and least affected human extinction film I have ever seen. Supposedly all of the actors but one were recruited from the army without any prior acting experience. Only adds to the bleakness and flat profile of the actors.

Favorites from the lab

2007-06-17T14:54:00.000-04:00

A chemistry lab I believe is one of the loudest labs ever. Or at least the one Pax and I visited in Lexington a bit over a year ago. These recordings have made their way into Auk Theatre soundtracks but I think they sound really good stand alone! Nothing about the original sound is modified.
hash_chemistry.mp3
engine.mp3

Another odd one

2007-06-12T20:23:00.000-04:00

oh yeah I first posted this by accident. Another record with interest in the temple of understanding.

not invited to dinner

Except I probably wouldnt open the door if this guy came over. I am guessing he would be selling shoes, or toasters.