Things Cooking Along…
As far as my recovery is going, things seem to be going well. I’m trying to remember to take an iron supplement daily to help boost my hemoglobin content in the blood. I’ve been getting in fairly regular walks. I still have stamina issues. That’s going to be something to work on for a long time into the future, apparently.
And Diane is back from her field research, which is a great thing. Six weeks apart is quite enough. There’s a picture taken with Gail’s digital camera of Diane, Gail, and the Ford Expedition vehicle at the loading bay of Storer Hall at UC Davis. I’ll post that when I get a copy.
Work at NCSE is keeping me busy. But in bits of spare time, I am working on some personal projects. On the evolution/creation issue, I’ve written a web application to help exhaustively catalogue antievolution arguments in sources. Mark Isaak has sent me some suggestions for additions to make the project include a little more information to accomplish a task he wants. I’m also working on a larger-scale web site to help establish a public activist community.
There’s a couple of papers in the pipeline, one on bioenergetics of dolphin biosonar, and another concerning a critique of “intelligent design”. There’s plenty more papers to be done. It’s a matter of making time for working on them.
I’m also looking at passive acoustic localization. This is a pretty cool technology that has been applied both for in-air and underwater bioacoustics. With multiple acoustic sensors (microphones or hydrophones), one can obtain estimates of bearing or locations. This is usually accomplished by noting time-of-arrival differences for the same sound at the different sensors (via cross-correlation) and doing some more math to simultaneously solve for a source location. It seems to me that machine learning may be applied to this problem, and I have some ideas for training that I haven’t found in the literature yet.
And, for the literal approach to the subject line, I’m making a salmon entree a weekly feature on the menu here. Essentially, I take about a half-pound of salmon fillet, a potato, a carrot, and a bit of butter, slice the carrots and potato, put everything in an aluminum foil packet, and bake at 425 degrees for 50 minutes. This is a pretty easy to prepare and very tasty dinner. I just add some lemon juice … I walk out to the lemon tree and get another lemon. Thanks to Marguerite and Sam Blackwood for passing on this bit of culinary knowledge.
This sounds a lot like a type of antenna (we called them doppler antennas) I used to drool over when I was involved in Amateur Radio transmitter hunts. The idea of these hunts is that someone hides a small transmitter somewhere in town, and then people have to find it using directionally-sensitive antennas (see more at http://members.aol.com/homingin/).
Doppler antennas work by having four (or more) antennas in a small area, and then comparing when the signal arrived at each antenna to determine a direction. I know a lot of people put a lot of time into building electronics for them; you might check with some local HAM enthusiasts to see if they have suggestions that could help with your acoustic applications.
Wow… that sounds like something I need to check out. Of course, there is the issue of the different scale of time-of-arrival differences. For the “Doppler antenna”, this would be best measured in nanoseconds. For the passive acoustic localization application I am thinking of, the maximum time-of-arrival difference would be about 300ms.
If some of the principles of the electronics could transfer, though, it would take a big burden off any computational system used to perform that function.