Travelling
Topic: Travel
Hey Droogies, just checking in to let you all know that the missus and I are alive and well. We've made it to the land of the Vikings (evidently they don't call it that here) and we are having a wonderful time. To all you who warned us that it would be cold, and wet, and expensive, and windy, and etc.... Well, you were all right. It is cold, and wet, and expensive, and windy ... Also, not so many people in pointy hats drinking grog. We're are having a blast however. I've gotten to spend the day hearing about some outstanding crystallography and becoming jealous of a structure lab that has a real focus. The wife and I also spent yesterday at Den Gamle By or "The Old Town" where we had a visit through Danish history seeing the architecture and culture past of the last 400 years. Of course, this had no Vikings either. It is funny that they don't focus on their history here. I mean, the Vikings were only 1000 years in the past. Not that long ago. I mean, we Americans still talk about bellbottoms...

In closing, if you want to learn about Vikings I'd advise going to the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, UK. Don't bother with Denmark. Cheers all and we'll keep you posted.

Our Scandinavian tour
Topic: Travel
So the trip is all set and we are nearly ready to walk out the door. Hopefully, as it is Memorial Day, the airport won't be too crazy. The current plans are as follows (to make life easier for Homeland Security):

We leave tonight and should arrive in Copenhagen tomorrow morning. We'll get on a train and should be in ?rhus by tomorrow afternoon. We'll stay with friends, I'll give one talk at the University, and then we'll head to Stockholm on Sunday. I'll give a talk there as well and then we should be on our way to Oslo by that Thursday. We'll stay at a friends place and will meet up with my wife's parents. Then, on Monday/Tuesday we'll be heading back to Copenhagen for 3 days (I get to give a talk at a Brewery) and then the wedding will be in Northern Jutland that Saturday. Finally, we'll be heading back after 3 weeks abroad. Should be interesting.

Preparing to travel
We are packing and packing. This is the least fun part of travelling. The preparation.... Well, it is getting close. Today I head over to a very perplexed Europe.

The French voted 'Non' on the EU constitution. This means that the unification of Europe as a singular unit will have to take a while. Good news for Dumbya of course. He and his cronies won't have to answer to Europe for a long time to come. Our first stop will be Denmark which has previously voted against the Euro so we should get a little bit of insight there. I'll keep you posted.

History lessons
Topic: History
So the wife and I had a discussion today about some lost tidbits of history. The first issue concerned the fact that one of France's greatest writer, Alexander Dumas, was African-American...sorry, black. This probably does come as a surprise to some people but I don't think the fact is lost on the French. Of course, he is most famous for "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers" but there is much more. There is a perfectly lovely site dedicated to this history so I won't recap it all here. Suffice it to say, he was born to a Haitian slave and, in his own words,'My father was a Creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.' This quote is obviously a clever insult but seems to imply that even his father was of mixed decent. History should just be set straight.


A probably more significant failing of how history is taught in america is the fact that many people seem to see the west as purely white. This is of course incorrect. Estimates seem to indicate that blacks (or people of mixed black heritage) made up from 1/6th to as much as 1/3rd of the early pioneering forefathers. There are a lot of different sites dedicated to this history, Black Cowboys and NCSU, so definitely take the time to check out some of the history. You all know about the Buffalo Soldiers, thanks to the legendary sounds of The Wailers, but many more people made significant impacts on history. Probably the most famous of these is pictured to the left, Bill Pickett. Ol' Bill invented the famous cowboy maneuver of bulldogging which involves riding alongside a steer and wrestling it to the ground. Blacks are being credited with a lot more of the innovations necessarily created by those treated as lower classes doing the back breaking work. This of course isn't to downplay the contribution of many other peoples contribution in the multicultural west including Latinos and Asians.

New glasses and Music Compression
Topic: Technology
So today I picked up my new glasses. They are a fashionable pair that cost a bit of money. Now I find that it is weird wearing them. I suppose I'm much more used to wearing contacts so the new perspective of the glasses is discomforting. Well, we'll see how the glasses work out. It is complicated when I trade quickly between the two I think.

On another note, I've taken to converting all of my music files to mp3 and 128 kb/sec. This seems to be a fair compromise for listening to music at reasonable quality while maximizing disk space. For your information, the compression of mp3, or any digital format, is a complicated process that can have a significant impact on the sound quality. Lots of formats for compression are out there (AAC from iTunes and Atrac3 from Sony) which claim to be the best; however, the standard has been for some time mp3 which means that almost all players will recognize them. The problem is that the conversion technology is getting pretty old so you would be losing info by converting your CDs to mp3 and then throwing out the discs. The other issue is the compression rate. The goal with compression is to be as lossless possible, which, in simple terms means to keep all the original information. For music this includes the high and low range frequencies. This is pretty exhaustively discussed elsewhere but worth thinking about when compressing your music. Just for your information, CD audio quality is 1400 kb/sec so anything less is giving up something. This is usually the ends of the frequency spectrum but that can be an issue when you have complicated music such as classical. The graph at the right gives you an idea what I mean. By using 128 there is no dramatic drop off but you can see that a lot of info is loss. Using 256 lowers the info loss but doubles the file size. Different compression formats can have a different effect and the example is for MP3. Anyway, worth doing your homework on. A great compression conversion program is dBpowerAMP and I endorse it enthusiastically.

Hope your music is lossless!

Star Wars
Topic: Movies
Is this sad? (Thanks KB) I suppose they liked the movie. All I can say is that I wish it could be like before, on Naboo...

Christianity
Topic: Religion
Well, I attended the closest thing that I'll get to in regards to a religious service (not including weddings) at my parents church. It was an interesting evening. This place, the church, is a crazy beast of a thing. They have a bookstore and coffee shop attached! I was impressed by their obvious growth in a relatively short time. I'm intrigued by religion and the ability to get people to give up their hard earned money in things that are so obviously supreficial. Very christlike. The best quote of the evening was a thanking of god for giving the talents to all the people who we saw performed and for, basically, everything good. He gets credit for everything good. Must be nice. I didn't do any of the good stuff just the bad stuff is my fault. Nice.

BTW, this guy is christlike.




Also today we visited Jerome, AZ. It was very nice. We climbed 6000 ft, by car, to get there. Mountains and desert, very nice day.

A New Movie
Topic: Movies
My brother has turned me onto a great movie called Rockers which is the greatest compilation of Roots Reggae musicians in a movie of all time. Really excellent. IMDB has a great plot outline:

"Harder They Come meets Hard Days Night. No real plot just lots of reggae."

The movie stars Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, possiblity the greatest Reggae drummer of all time.

Check it out!

On another note, I'm in Phoenix. It is over 100F in the shade. Yikes.

Star Wars and life sucks
So I saw the starwars movie, number III. I'd say that it is appropriate because it ranks number 3 in my starwars movies behind Empire and then New Hope. It beat out Return so it ain't all bad. I enjoyed it, just was disappointed by a few of the scenes. The acting sucked but what can you do. Go see it.

On a personal note. An important chapter in my life seems to be coming to an end. A close friend, so close that he is more like a brother, is leaving. My wife and I will miss him terribly. U2, we love you man, and you will always have a home with us.

STAR WARS
Well, I'm about 2 hours away from seeing the new Star Wars movie. How exciting! Actually, there are a few good spoofs made on Atom Films to wet the whistle. I'll check back tonight to let you know how it went!

On an unrelated note, I just wanted to give a science update similar to the Mad Scientist. Todays NY Times has an article about the female orgasm and it's evolutionary significance. The scientist quoted for the book, Dr. Elisabeth Lloyd claims that the female orgasm is an evolutionary remnant, as vestige of the differentiation of the male from the female. She equates it to the fact that males have nipples which serve no biological purpose. Her biggest support of this is that many sexual encounters do not involve a female orgasm (well, not in my house but - who da man!). This apparently is evidence that women do not need to orgasm to procreate. Kind of a simplistic argument, but one to be studied...I suppose. Some interesting issues related to this that I've thought up are the fact that women generally orgasm before the man (if they do) so there probably isn't a physical component. Women tend to become more orgasmic with age which to me seems counterintuitive to an evolutionary argument. Perhaps, as some scientists in the article suggest, is that the orgasm helps a woman pick a healthy male, which would be genetic selection!