whats better than your favorite contemporary composer?

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

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

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:

1. I have a citation I want to enter
2. I Google it
3. Cut the Endnote file
4. 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.

Radio station for the alligators

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.


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

An entertaining snippit

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

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

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