That's right. I dueled with the mighty LPC spectrum for two days before finally vanquishing the beast! The end result was that I figured out how to create an LPC spectrum from a speech waveform. I feel like a DSP expert now! :-D Well, sort of. I've also been playing around with some pitch estimators and have had only moderate success. But it's good enough and the end product is a piece of MATLAB software that will step through a number of files (about 850) and estimate some parameters which I can then tweak and accept, or reject as the case may be. The measurements will be saved and I will have a lot more new data to play with and to put into my Oroqen paper. And I feel a lot better about this paper when I think about being able to include these new data.
On the downside, it's now after 3am. I seem to be oblivious to time and food and sleep when I'm in the middle of a programming project. Fortunately that's not my chief occupation. :-}
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
New Reading Torrent Coming My Way
I think a friend of mine is going to bring me Dawkin's book The God Delusion tomorrow to read. I will want to read it rather carefully but quickly (rather than stretching it out over a long time). It should inaugurate a reading program that will likely include Breaking the Spell and God: The Failed Hypothesis, and perhaps also Moral Minds, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and Letter to a Christian Nation. Lots of reading - it never ends. :-} In the meantime, I spent my free time today enjoying a couple more chapters in a biography about Mercater. :-)
Now a few thoughts which I'm not sure if I've written down somewhere sometime before, and I find that sometimes writing down underdeveloped thoughts helps stimulate their development. So...
People want to find evidence of God's existence, usually by means of scientific investigation. If God could be described mathematically (which is really what people mean when they say they want to find evidence of His existence and presence, I think), then why wouldn't He be just another "law of nature"? And if He isn't another law of nature then why do we expect that He should be objectivizable to scientific study? People claim that if He exists there should be certain evidences that we can find, that we should be able to test empirical claims about His presence and that those tests should be replicable (the modern scientific method - I am not going to say anything in this entry about my opinion about the woeful state of working philosophy of science these days (that sentence had way too many prepositions - my apologies to the reader)). But is this kind of evidence available for people who lived 500 years ago in downtown London? Do we therefore reject the notion that so many of them existed?
Then there's the question about the problem of evil. The usual argument goes like this:
Premise 1) God is all-powerful.
Premise 2) God is all-loving.
Observation 1) Evil exists.
Conclusion 1) Since God does not stop evil from existing, He is either not all-powerful or not all-loving or both. Therefore the God of the Bible does not exist.
But what if evil did not exist? What if every time a person thought or did something evil, he was struck down? Well, again I see no reason why we scientists wouldn't chalk it up to a natural law - we could still reject God's existence on the basis of the predictability of His response to evil. Then we might complain that if God exists and is behind this predictable response to evil, He should prove it by witholding His response to evil - and then if He did we would all either accuse Him of being not all-powerful and/or not all-loving, or we would posit something like dark matter to account for the single exception to the otherwise perfectly good natural law. If more exceptions were made in order to get it out of our heads that there was a law of nature, then we would not be able to posit something like dark matter but instead we would have to posit much more indirect theories such as religion memes or primeval Oedipus complexes, or we would say that God is not all-powerful and/or not all-loving. And this is exactly what we have today. So in any event you just can't be satisfied: If evil did not exist, we would still have to deal with the problem of evil, but the question would be "why doesn't it exist". Perhaps it is actually useful to suppose that evil exists so that God could destroy it (which is one of the ideas I've heard about a lot in the last several years), so that in the future when it is completely taken away we will be able to answer the question "why doesn't evil exist?" The answer will be "because God destroyed it".
At any rate, I think the notion that we can rely on science to answer any and all question objectively once and for all is way overrated. Science can do a lot of cool things, but it also has limitations - some of them are only historical (i.e. we can't do something now, but in 100 years we will be able to), and I am not interested at this point in discussing what limitations are absolute. But something that seems to be very much overlooked (but this is changing) is history, and besides this the whole class of investigations into events that occur exactly once, and are therefore not replicable and not controlled. It seems that the whole world has "physics envy".
Ok, that's enough for now. Maybe I'll discuss "the scientific method" sometime. I think it would be interesting.
Now a few thoughts which I'm not sure if I've written down somewhere sometime before, and I find that sometimes writing down underdeveloped thoughts helps stimulate their development. So...
People want to find evidence of God's existence, usually by means of scientific investigation. If God could be described mathematically (which is really what people mean when they say they want to find evidence of His existence and presence, I think), then why wouldn't He be just another "law of nature"? And if He isn't another law of nature then why do we expect that He should be objectivizable to scientific study? People claim that if He exists there should be certain evidences that we can find, that we should be able to test empirical claims about His presence and that those tests should be replicable (the modern scientific method - I am not going to say anything in this entry about my opinion about the woeful state of working philosophy of science these days (that sentence had way too many prepositions - my apologies to the reader)). But is this kind of evidence available for people who lived 500 years ago in downtown London? Do we therefore reject the notion that so many of them existed?
Then there's the question about the problem of evil. The usual argument goes like this:
Premise 1) God is all-powerful.
Premise 2) God is all-loving.
Observation 1) Evil exists.
Conclusion 1) Since God does not stop evil from existing, He is either not all-powerful or not all-loving or both. Therefore the God of the Bible does not exist.
But what if evil did not exist? What if every time a person thought or did something evil, he was struck down? Well, again I see no reason why we scientists wouldn't chalk it up to a natural law - we could still reject God's existence on the basis of the predictability of His response to evil. Then we might complain that if God exists and is behind this predictable response to evil, He should prove it by witholding His response to evil - and then if He did we would all either accuse Him of being not all-powerful and/or not all-loving, or we would posit something like dark matter to account for the single exception to the otherwise perfectly good natural law. If more exceptions were made in order to get it out of our heads that there was a law of nature, then we would not be able to posit something like dark matter but instead we would have to posit much more indirect theories such as religion memes or primeval Oedipus complexes, or we would say that God is not all-powerful and/or not all-loving. And this is exactly what we have today. So in any event you just can't be satisfied: If evil did not exist, we would still have to deal with the problem of evil, but the question would be "why doesn't it exist". Perhaps it is actually useful to suppose that evil exists so that God could destroy it (which is one of the ideas I've heard about a lot in the last several years), so that in the future when it is completely taken away we will be able to answer the question "why doesn't evil exist?" The answer will be "because God destroyed it".
At any rate, I think the notion that we can rely on science to answer any and all question objectively once and for all is way overrated. Science can do a lot of cool things, but it also has limitations - some of them are only historical (i.e. we can't do something now, but in 100 years we will be able to), and I am not interested at this point in discussing what limitations are absolute. But something that seems to be very much overlooked (but this is changing) is history, and besides this the whole class of investigations into events that occur exactly once, and are therefore not replicable and not controlled. It seems that the whole world has "physics envy".
Ok, that's enough for now. Maybe I'll discuss "the scientific method" sometime. I think it would be interesting.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Nothing to blog about...
It's been a while so I figure I should write something. I just finished reading C. S. Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost. It is quite good! Makes me want to read PL again. And it makes me want to read Dante, too. I keep running into comments about Dante or quotes from Dante, and with each new comment or quote I wish I had time to just sit down and read Dante! Well, I'm sure I will soon enough. In the meantime, I'm reading a book about evolution, and reading papers about pulmonary fibrosis. And I got a little book the other day by N. T. Wright called For All The Saints? which I started reading today after finishing Lewis' book. I should probably turn back to this book about the flu that I started reading (and enjoying very much) a while ago but haven't touched for quite a while... That's the book that is currently feeling a little like the bottleneck in my reading program. Well, we'll see. In other news, I'm making good progress in my analysis of Oroqen vowels. I went up to Dartmouth last weekend, rented a car for it and drove up in the middle of the big NE snowstorm/blizzard. A little nerve-wracking but all in all not terrible driving conditions. I was impressed at how everyone on the road seemed to know exactly how to handle the situation, unlike in Central Oregon. I guess the difference might be that in Central Oregon we get a lot of people not from Central Oregon and therefore not used to driving in Winter conditions, whereas in New England it doesn't matter what part of the state or region you're from, you all know how to drive safely in blizzards. As as long as you drove in the tracks of the cars in front of you, the pavement stayed relatively bare and not very slippery. Still, it took about 6 hours, which was a long haul. I'm going back this weekend and it looks like it will be sunny and 50+ degrees! The goal for the next two days is to finish making acoustic measurements so that the goal for the weekend can be accomplished: To get some serious writing done.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Good Times in Biology-Land
In the last week I feel like I have taken some pretty big steps toward becoming something of a biologist.
Finally!!!! It's only taken six months, you know....
Actually, the steps themselves haven't been too big, but my mindset/attitude toward how biological research is done has undergone some pretty neat developments. Here is a list of "firsts" in the past 5 days:
1) First time getting frozen cells out of a liquid nitrogen case.
2) First time transporting them across town in dry ice.
3) First time thawing them out, culturing them, and refreezing some.
4) First time having fresh cow/pig larygnes delivered to me.
6) First time dissecting cow vocal folds.
7) First time cutting sections of cow vocal folds in a cryostat (well, actually I just watched).
8) First time staining cell nuclei.
I think there are a few more, but that's what comes to mind right away.
Did a pretty big experiment today (10 hours) and got some data. Haven't analyzed it yet, but at least now I know that certain parts of the experiment work and certain parts could be improved. I think what I need to do next is figure out how to do 1) flourescence microscopy and 2) Western blotting. I might also need to learn how to make gels of different stiffnesses. Then there will be a LOAD of very interesting and very easy experiments to run. This is getting exciting!
Finally!!!! It's only taken six months, you know....
Actually, the steps themselves haven't been too big, but my mindset/attitude toward how biological research is done has undergone some pretty neat developments. Here is a list of "firsts" in the past 5 days:
1) First time getting frozen cells out of a liquid nitrogen case.
2) First time transporting them across town in dry ice.
3) First time thawing them out, culturing them, and refreezing some.
4) First time having fresh cow/pig larygnes delivered to me.
6) First time dissecting cow vocal folds.
7) First time cutting sections of cow vocal folds in a cryostat (well, actually I just watched).
8) First time staining cell nuclei.
I think there are a few more, but that's what comes to mind right away.
Did a pretty big experiment today (10 hours) and got some data. Haven't analyzed it yet, but at least now I know that certain parts of the experiment work and certain parts could be improved. I think what I need to do next is figure out how to do 1) flourescence microscopy and 2) Western blotting. I might also need to learn how to make gels of different stiffnesses. Then there will be a LOAD of very interesting and very easy experiments to run. This is getting exciting!
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