The Therian Timeline

[wolfvanzandt]

I hope this is the right place for this.

My webpage, The Therian Timeline, is intended as a resource for the Were community. The name is rather an ironic misnomer, partially because the timeline is actually a very small part of it. It also has essays, my own artistic endeavors (verse and music), scientific recreations, food, and, hopefully, more and more practical information for the Were community.

Beginning tonight I've begun placing sound files on the site. Some of them are just readings from the website itself (for people like myself that would rather hear than read), but I want to also provide interviews, discussions, panels, etc. for the community. Although I'm a very opinionated person (some would say), I would like to respectfully cover other positions. In the future I would like to talk with experts in various fields - medicine, law, religion, psychology, etc. both in and outside the Were community - and provide the information to the community.

I welcome comments. The address is:
theriantimeline.com

[wolfvanzandt]

Woof!

Jobs like this really bring my weak relationship with language to the fore.

I've finished recording what I have in teh shamanism section of the Timeline. If anyone is interested in the technicalities, I'm using a Sony ICD-PX312 digital recorder. It's not to terribly expensive (about $60 at Wal-Mart) and has very good sound quality, which can be improved with external microphones and other equipment that isn't included. The recordings on the Timeline were made using the internal microphone that comes with the recorder. Since my website will not accept sound files over 10 megabytes, I had to split a couple of the recordings. The software that comes with the recorder does this very nicely. It also provides a full range of other mp3 editting and conversion functions.

As anti-technology as I am, I'm pretty happy with this thing.

[wolfvanzandt]

The Society of Weres is a little more daunting the The Mind of the Were, mostly because sociological information about the Were Community is so scattered out in tiny little pieces. So much substantive information is based on Were's accounts of how things work for them and not on their relationships with others. I'm hoping that the studies I'm waiting to come out will have some relevant materials, otherwise, I'm going to have to read back through my entire library and fish out bits and pieces as I come to them.

On other topics, I think I've found a format for my scientific recreations that works for me. I'm recording my scientific adventures in a series of tutorials I'm calling "LabBooks". I'm publishing them on my site in sections - they'll be long term projects. I'm starting with the stuff I wish they'd teach in K through 12 but don't much - Observation skills, critical thinking (philosophy), logic and problem solving, psychology, health, and mathematics (which they do teach, but not very well). I've got the first part of Observation and Recording (about general vision) and Philosophy (about critical thinking and how to evaluate your own beliefs) up. I'm working on the introductory part of Logic, Debate, and Problem Solving. I'm enjoying writing them and I hope that there are some folks out there that will enjoy reading and using them.

Since I learned to upload really big files (the built in uploader for the web builder I'm using will only transfer about 8 Meg at a time), I've started uploading much bigger file using Filezilla. I put a bunch of Robert Service's poetry to music back in the 70s and 80s and made a recording. Last year, I converted the tape to a loooooong (over 80 Meg) mp3, and now I've put a link in the Original Music section to the file (it's under "Other mp3s".)

All in all, I'm having fun with the site. I hope others do, also.

[wolfvanzandt]

Since I'm not cooking any more I've decided to let the incredible cooks of out Tribe take over the Stuff Files. If ya'll are ever stumped on what to have for a meal, I think you could do a lot worse than to check out these pages.

[wolfvanzandt]

I've just started a new page which is a commentary and tutorial on statistics. If there are any Weres out there interested in perusing research, you might want to look at it. I'm trying to take some of the pain out of statistics and research methods.....and, of course, let me know if you find any errors.

[wolfvanzandt]

I've added my LabBook on mathematics. It's about counting - abaci, finger counting and some technical how-researchers-record-counts information. Also Venn diagrams. Everybody can count, but do they really know how counting works?

[Hopper]

I'm actually quite interested in learning statistics. I find that not understanding it leaves a lot of holes in understanding when reading scientific articles. Hell, even watching the news it would be extremely useful. I have to agree with your article though, in that lots of students seem to not like it. When I finally take a class in it maybe I will find out why that is. XD

[wolfvanzandt]

Most statistics textbooks follow the general pattern of cramming so much information into short space with very little explanation of why things work the way they do, I don't wonder that many students don't like statistics. There are actually some fun books out on statistics such as Chatterjee, Handcock, and Simonoff's A Casebook for a First Course in Statistics and Data Analysis. It doesn't just throw formulas at you, it works through real cases like the Columbia Space Shuttle incident and (my favorite) predicting Old Faithful eruptions. Then there are websites like:

lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/

which approaches statistics like stories (which they actually are).

I was explaining to Coyote how standard deviations work the other night. I said that you want to know how much data values vary so you really want to know how much they differ from a set value - and you want one number, a measure of the variation. So you figure out the differences, but then you have a number for every data value - that's not good. And some of the differences are negative - that's not good either, so, to get rid of the negative value, you take the square of the differences. Squares are always positive (If you just went with the absolute values of the differences and added them to get a single number you would always zero and that wouldn't tell you much) so you end up with positive numbers and you can add them together to get a single number. Well, I'm not sure how you might interpret the big number that results, and you would want something that you can interpret so, you might think of taking the average of all the squared differences (dividing by the number of values)- that would at least tell you what the most likely squared difference is (that's what an average is - the most likely (expected) value in a data set). The problem with the result is that you end up with units that are pretty much nonsense. If your data, say, was tallness in feet, the result would be in units of feet squared. What does that mean? Area? You're not looking for area; you're looking for variations in tallness. Well, the easy solution is to take the square root of the result - the square root undoes the square so you end up with feet and that is exactly how the standard deviation works. Coyote said that he had never heard the standard deviation explained so clearly - fact is, neither have I. But most statistics are very understandable and intuitive /if/ someone takes the time to dissect it and really look at it's inner workings. I like opening things up for people.

I want to get into the universities around here and interact with the Weres there. If I didn't do anything else, the two things I want to do is convince them that community is valuable and give them a vision of Were community to carry back home with them; and, since they are in a good position to do research, convince them of the need of Weres to understand themselves and, for that, we need solid information. There reason I'm including all the science stuff in my website is actually aimed at Weres. I want them to have a solid understanding of how things work and give them tools to accomplish that. Anybody else who stumbles onto my website - great! - the world is better off if everyone has the means to explore things and understand how things work - regardless of all the politics and manipulations. But my primary focus is the Were community.