It looks like my talk to the Minnesota Atheists (you know, the one Egnor viewed by remote sensing or something) is available on the Atheist Talk Podcast. I haven’t seen it — I am constitutionally incapable of watching myself without curling up into a quivering ball and mewing piteously — so don’t tell me if it’s hideous or not. I really don’t want to know.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
O.K. I won’t tell you that you look hideous.
(Perhaps shaving the beard would help.)
I can’t watch recordings of myself without cringing. I wonder if it’s about self-acceptance or something.
Poor ‘itty cat! (I assume cephalopods doesn’t mew – or is it myew?)
Other stuff as well, I think. You and your “agent simulator” are adjusted to work with your reflection at times, so videos looks funny at first. Sounds funny too, since your ears are used to bone conduction, sinuses and what not.
But yes, if you can’t uncurl and stop cringing and mewing after a few minutes, I guess you aren’t giving yourself a fair shot. Who knows, you might even become friends!
Poor ‘itty cat! (I assume cephalopods doesn’t mew – or is it myew?)
Other stuff as well, I think. You and your “agent simulator” are adjusted to work with your reflection at times, so videos looks funny at first. Sounds funny too, since your ears are used to bone conduction, sinuses and what not.
But yes, if you can’t uncurl and stop cringing and mewing after a few minutes, I guess you aren’t giving yourself a fair shot. Who knows, you might even become friends!
I’m sorry to say you did a great job, and the recent lactose evolution is a great example (but a selected big mutation would be even cooler).
However, I think you are correct to avoid watching it yourself, you just can’t see it the way we do. I understand recent research shows we actually use different parts of our brain for the judgement of self versus other.
I’ll have to take the time to check this out. I was in Minneapolis working for the summer and fully intended to make it over to your talk, PZ, but I had to hang out with my aunt, uncle, and cousin that day. (Who live in Roseville, oddly enough.) But we did go to the science museum in St. Paul, so I suppose that makes up for it!
For those of you who prefer to watch someone else, Prof.
YaffleDawkins’s latest programme is available from Bad Science.Bob
I can’t watch recordings of myself without cringing. I wonder if it’s about self-acceptance or something.
Well, saying what some of you might already know, you can’t assume you’ve got some weird self-hatred thing going on just from the discomfiture a lot of people experience seeing recordings of themselves. I think you almost always get the shock of the unfamiliar, at least… especially those who don’t regularly see as much, aren’t actual working talent in broadcast or film. Even if you’re pretty used to your reflection in a mirror, you only see really one specific perspective, doing that–no three quarters views, even, eyes always directed right back at you of necessity. So you get used to that. All the other views you can get in video and film are unfamiliar. And just when you thought you really knew that guy…
Likewise for the audio: you hear your voice partially through bone and sinew, when you hear it live; it takes on a different timbre, on a recording, even with an excellent mic (which, note, a lot of amateur equipment won’t have). So it’s not just ‘I don’t like that guy’, viewing recordings… It’s also ‘But I don’t look and sound like that, do I?’
And, incidentally, you probably don’t–or not generally. Probably, you only look that way to someone holding a halogen spotlight pointed directly at your face…. Since in amateur video especially–in which the all important lighting often isn’t done terribly well–often no backlight/no hairlight, no sidelight, and the keylight, such as it is, frequently right on the camera–is generally very unflattering, and likely to be far less kind even than the lights around your bathroom mirror or in your living room.
Wow. On video, PZ looks and sounds mild-mannered. Hardly a single breath of fire in sight!
OK, it’s hideous. [Now I suppose I’ll have to actually watch it…]
Oh, and can I request that videos like these go up on Google Video? It’s much easier to blog about and discuss videos which can be embedded (Google offers an option to start playing the video at a particular time, too).
If you haven’t noticed it already, check out SciTalks.
How the heck do you access the podcast? I see instructions but no listing of Myers’ podcast.
Cheers
Why was I expecting Miss Piggy?
In related news, the first episode of Enemies of Reason is up here.
Enjoy.
Whoops, Bob O’H beat me to it.
My bad.
I’m going to have to get used to thinking of you as Pee-Zee and not Pee-Zed!
Nice talk. Shame the recording wasn’t better, but is was at least adequate. It would have been better to have made it available on YouTube or GoogleVideo.
It is available on Google Video… Part 1 and Part 2.
The link to the podcast page is instructions for how to subscribe to the podcast feed(using iTunes or something similar) for all Minnesota Atheists videos and the audio.
Cat’s Staff
Thanks for the links. I eventually figured it out and there was a plethora of talks available in iTunes. However, the youtube links also gives easy access to a number of those same talks.
Cheers
Eventually I will put together an index to all of them. It’s in beta version now, and I haven’t had a chance to do much with it in a month or so.
I edited out the parts of the video were PZ was breathing fire, and put the slides over the parts where the smoke was clearing.
For those of you who are allergic to iTunes, you can see a list of all the recent mnatheist videos here:
http://www.mnatheists.org/atheist_talk/video.xml
Works in Firefox and IE7, older browsers may see something weird there. It’s an RSS feed, more or less, so anything that speaks RSS should be able to deal with it.
Very much enjoyed the lecture, although throughout I kept expecting Cabaret Voltaire’s “Neuron Factory” to start playing. I’m guessing that’s just me, though.
Jolly Good podcasts, sir.
I do enjoy the conversational tone of your talk and really did enjoy listening to the topic of the podcast itself.
Particularly I liked your allegory of Exaptation.
Nicely Done.
Are the slides online somewhere?
A lot of the discussion in the second half is particularly good…
After sampling much of both segments, all I can say is, PZ, you are unkind to yourself. You fuzzball. How dare you be such a soft-spoken intellectual, such a contraire to your blog-persona?
:)
In all seriousness, you must be an excellent teacher, for all your students, theists and non theists.
> QuickTime 7 is required to view the video
> (available for free from Apple for both Mac > and Windows).
Ah, BOTH Mac, and Windows. Both Christians AND Muslims. The only two OSes that matter. What if the apostate runs that apostate OS called linux? Fuck out of luck, I guess. A .ogg of the audio is out of the question, I suppose.
SteveC… I, the guy who edited and encoded the video and audio, use both Mac and the apostate OS linux. You should be able to listen to the MP3. That format was chosen so that all the people with MP3 players (not iPods) could easily play it or burn it to a CD and listen to it in their car, portable player, etc… The MP3 was encoded with LAME if that helps. Ogg isn’t that much better at the low end anyway(the audio is mono and low quality to reduce the file size). There are ways of doing .h264 on linux as well…but I figured anyone doing linux wouldn’t need instructions. I sympathize with you on the general difficulty of getting things to work on linux though.
Boohoo.
Why hasn’t the “genius” linux community created a quicktime player anyway?
Pick the cheap ugly step son and you get what you paid for.
PZ . .
I enjoyed the podcast. By the way, since you were discussing milk, and the subject of mare’s milk came up, and you said you’d like to try it. . . . .
About ten years ago I was working in Mongolia, and learned to enjoy their national drink of fermented mare’s milk. It has about the same alcohol content as beer. To me, it tastes like buttermilk with a little kick.
Very good talk, thank you!