audio, video, and diversity

A while ago I posted a recording of a poem I wrote, Punctuated Equilibrium. I knew that the volume on it was too low, but at the time I didn't want to think about how to fix it and I figured whoever listened to it could just crank up their speakers. Last night I was playing around with sox a bit and realized it's fairly trivial to adjust the sound level, so I updated the version that the link points to, and in the process I added an echo. I think the echo adds a great bit of improvement to the recording, as it kinds of goes with the whole theme of the poem. I think it also kind of goes along with the way in which I think. A lot of time when I hear myself speak (or type) I hear and echo in my head... everything sounds kind of delayed. There was something that sounded kind of off about the pace originally, and I think the echo fixes it... perhaps it fills in the implied echo I was imagining that was left out.

Jeff.L.Jones-Punctuated Equilibrium.mp3

I look forward to possibly playing around with more voice posts in the future. Not sure if they will be poetic or something else, but I enjoyed making this one and I like listening to it. Also on the topic of audio, and actually the reason I started playing around with sox in the first place, I set up a myspace account a month or two ago, but I'm very slowly filling in the details and finding people. (If you are on myspace, and on my lj friendslist, you're encouraged to add me.) Last night I finally got around to adding music to my profile... but I didn't want it to take forever loading, so I took a copy of my favorite NIN song, Just Like You've Imagined, and did a fade out right after the initial build. Came out pretty good:

http://www.myspace.com/holographicduality

I'm still looking for ways to recompress an MPEG (video) down to further compression. I would be very greatful if anyone with knowledge of the best way to do this under Linux would give me suggestions. I used Kino originally to import several videos over firewire, and then to do the editting, and then the compression. However, even though I tried several different combinations of options on the compression (done by mpeg2enc), no matter what I tried, it gave me ridiculously large files. So large that even the shortest clip I made, which is about 9 minutes long, is still 250MB and thus too large for YouTube, googlevideo, or myspace to accept as an upload. Ultimately, I want to put a 2 hour video online, which takes up about 4GB at the level of compression it's at now. One of the videos I have is of the James Hughes lecture from May, and the other is the physics lecture Sean and I gave at Burning Man.

Oh, and congratulations to moonaysl for a well-written and thoughtful guest post on CosmicVariance, a blog that is read and respected by a wide array of physicists around the world, including my advisor (if the fact that it was up on his browser one time as I walked in is any indication!). I'm kind of curious about who is right, in regards to steuard's comment about the statistics on where women get lost in the pipeline. But regardless of where the problem is, I value the opportunity to hear about how different things can seem for a person trying to get through the system who doesn't have the "white male" gold pass.

Our Future Salon tonight went pretty well. Two professors showed up, and one of them brought two students who actually took notes as the speaker was talking! I asked them if they had been offered extra credit to come, and they just said the professor had suggested it and they were interested on their own. Everyone appeared to have a good time... although one guy did point out that only 2 females were there. After hearing that and then coming home to read moonaysl's post, this has me wondering about gender diversity and how it relates to my own life. Mainly, I keep wondering why it seems like--with a few exceptions like cuddling and perhaps drama--the clubs and activities I've been involved in, have always been heavily dominated by men. (Actually scratch drama, because as I recall now, my longest involvement with that was with the Let's Try This improv troupe at Georgia Tech, which was still around 90% male dominated!) Whether it's computer science or engineering, BBSing, electrical engineering, HAM radio club, objectivist clubs or other philosophy clubs, skydiving boogies, physics lectures, internet startup companies, technology discussion forums, Linux conventions, transhumanist gatherings, libertarian conventions, or AI conferences, I've always seemed to wind up in places where there are very few women. This is much to my dismay, as I would almost always prefer the company of women, given the choice and given equal intelligence/personalities. And actually, now that I think of it, it's a downright miracle I can even interact with the opposite sex at all, given how little time I've spent around them in my life. It's not fair! :( Well... at least I'm not a big sports, cars, or guns fanatic. :-) Come to think of it, do women just join clubs less frequently? Or are they all hiding out at the same one where none of us guys think to look?