Doc Skala's Old-Time Variety Hour, episode 2

Anonymous (sZGcRFFq) at Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:24:47 +0000:
Hey Matt,

Take a look at audacity, they have a noise pattern normalization script where you take the silent chunk of a recording and subtract that from the rest of the recording. It would help get rid of some of this white noise I'm hearing in the recording.

I suspect that some of the noise was the crunching of snow. The audio quality here is better than the previous, anyways you might want to look into it, and you might want to take a sweep with audacity to change levels quickly before you save out.

Be forewarned, audio is an infinite time sync. Choose a goal, achieve it and move on. Sadly there's always more you can do.

Anonymous (sZGcRFFq) at Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:32:50 +0000:
Hey Matt, TPL has a graphic novel called Skim, you should order it. It is CANCON and it deals with paganism on the side. It's about a young girl dealing with being a young girl and having this kind of faith.

Excuse the cliche of linking to the amazon page.

Matt (mskala) at Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:44:22 +0000:
The repetitive crunching noise is probably actually the rustling of my clothes, indirectly caused by my footsteps - I had the recorder in my breast pocket while I was walking. The mic is directional enough that I don't think it would have picked up much snow noise, especially considering that there were only a few millimetres of snow on the ground that day anyway.

As far as audio quality goes I'm much more interested in the stuff I record from home, which will in most episodes be a larger fraction of the episode. Field recordings are never going to sound like controlled studio recordings and I'm not sure they should.

Eric (metawidget) at Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:47:35 +0000:
Skim was a good read (and a quick read, which might be the only thing going against it when bought hardcover), and nicely drawn.

trythil (trythil) at Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:05:17 +0000:
A note as I stream through this latest audio-weblog-posting-thing; more may follow.

I'm curious why you label the Japanese writing system as non-phonetic. The kanji are, but the kana are (I thought) about as good an example of a phonetic alphabet as you can get. In ways they're more regular than the Latin letter system, e.g. meaning of the tenten and maru.

Maybe I misunderstood the phrasing?

Haven't finished up the rest of the audio yet; I don't think I have anything really intelligent to say on the subject of religion, but your bit about intrinisic vs. extrinsic may inspire something. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that the first things I think about on that subject are Rand and objectivism.

Matt (mskala) at Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:15:05 +0000:
Well, Japanese isn't written in kana... it's written in a mixture of kanji and kana with most of the information in the kanji. A nontrivial amount of information is even encoded in the choice of whether to use kanji or kana for any given syllable. You can't really write Japanese and have it be well understood in purely phonetic hiragana; there's too much ambiguity, too many words that would have the same kana but different meanings. Even though people sometimes *do* write Japanese in hiragana alone, when they do it's not the full language but simplified texts - for children, beginner-level students, or in the old days, women. I've certainly seen literate native speakers struggle to read pure-hiragana text that would give them no trouble if written with standard kanji usage.

Also, even though hiragana pretends to be purely phonetic, it isn't really. In order to write "wa" you need to know whether it's the topic particle は or the phonetic syllable わ; conversely in order to read は you need to know whether it's the topic particle "wa" or the phonetic syllable "ha." There's similar confusion with え/へ/"e"/"he"; and then the syllable "o" is written お or を depending on whether it's the object particle, though at least those two have only one reading each. Long お after the consonant "t" is usually written with an う as in とうきょう (Toukyou, the capital city) unless it's written with an お as in とおか (tooka, tenth day); there is a rule for which one to use, but most native speakers don't know it. And とう might also be pronounced "to-u" the way it's spelled instead of "t-long_o" the way it would usually be pronounced, for instance when it's the verb とう meaning "to inquire." So there're seven hiragana right there with exceptions to phoneticity, and は as topic particle is common enough that I suspect it's used more often for "wa" than for its supposed phonetic value of "ha." The bottom line is that you can't read or write hiragana purely phonetically; you need to parse the text at least part-way.

If you're going to allow Arabic numerals among your kana, as in "たった1つのおもい," then you need to also know *both* number systems, and recognize the counter words and know which number system goes with which counter, in order to read it correctly - though it can reasonably be claimed that Arabic numerals are basically a type of funny-looking kanji and we can't expect to read them phonetically. (The same issue exists in English - "2" might be "two" or "seco" depending on whether it's followed by "nd.")

Granted pure hiragana is closer to purely phonetic than are many other languages' writing systems. Pronunciation of individual letters in English is full of exceptions; pure hiragana is much more phonetic than English script. But Japanese script as it's actually used isn't pure hiragana. It's a mixture of hiragana, katakana, kanji, and English script; and English script alone is very much more phonetic than that.

Anyway, do note that the "phonetic alphabet is very special" claim is Marshall McLuhan's claim, not mine. I'm not sure he's right and I'm not even sure how meaningful the distinction between phonetic and non-phonetic scripts actually is.

Consider the much greater phoneticity of Korean script compared to Japanese script... do we see a dramatic cultural difference between Japan and Korea corresponding to that?

Daniel from 130.15.96.170 at Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:56:30 +0000:
Finally got around to checking this out. Wow! A real intellectual adventure, more amazing for being apparently off the cuff. Broadcasting might be your medium. I found the whole section about your spirituality and the labyrinth beautiful and inspiring - your quest is very compelling. "When did I last change my mind?" "There followed a pretty tough time because I didn't really have anything to pray to." With my lack of religious education and bland anglican background, the entities you pray to are very alien: the idea that you can bargain with them, and break up and move on if they don't keep up their end of the bargain. You demand results from your gods!

I was just talking to a friend training to be a life coach on saturday, and the whole inside/outside discussion came up, though I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're talking about. I do believe mental attitude makes a difference, especially when interacting with people, but a lot of these things, including some spiritual practices, sound more like changing your mind so you like the things you don't like, so you're happy no matter what, without taking any action or anything outside of you changing. That sounds like heroin to me. Changing your own mind to make your life better only makes sense to me in terms of how it changes your behaviour, to help you to get more of the things you want (even that you don't know you want) - I'm not so interested in changing my wants.

I hope you are still finding time for the labyrinth walks, I have this sense that that could be a very valuable part of life, and I want something like that myself.

Daniel from 130.15.96.170 at Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:25 +0000:
"My own conclusion is that 'yes, other people exist'" Phew!!