This post, originally published on January 16, 2005, was modified from one of my written prelims questions from early 2000.

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There are a bunch of bloggers here at Lindau, wearing Press badges, going to Press meetings and generally behaving like Press. Apart from PZ and myself, most of them are German sciencebloggers who are posting their interviews and dispatches on the Lindaunobel blog on Scienceblogs.de (you can filter only English-language posts here) as well as on Page 3.14. Last night we went out for dinner together and had great fun. Most of my pictures turned out, well, pretty bad, except perhaps this one:

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As BC’s Carbon Tax enters the terrible twos, and is the subject of stupid headlines in the CBC trumpeting a 1.5c/L increase in gasoline price (smaller than the price difference between a pump in the Saanich Peninsula and outside), it is worthwhile to see what the rest of the province’s carbon strategy is, or isn’t [...]

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The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.

Today, I asked Betul Kacar Arslan of the Counter Minds blog, to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?

I am Betul (Kacar) Arslan, originally from Istanbul, Turkey, living in the USA. I actually came here to get a PhD but now that I am graduating, I am starting to feel that I am here only to steal an American's job. My doctoral studies structured around biochemical work on a teleost enzyme (MAO). Now I am getting ready for an exciting project for my post-doctoral work: "resurrecting and evolving 4-billion year old proteins". Interested? More can be found here.

What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?

I don't want to be a grown-up when I grow up. That said, I don't want to lose my ambition and passion for scientific research and I think that is possible if one has the curiosity and courage of a child.

But if you insist, I want to see the Earth from a space shuttle that is headed to Mars.

What is your Real Life job?

Well.. I spend my day time in the lab doing research but I guess people no longer consider academia as real life. Therefore, in my -other- life I dance & teach tango. I am also a volunteer for the IRC (International Refugee Committee). Many refugees come to the US and they need help in many ways, if you'd like to help see this .

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I am learning. Nothing excites me more than new ideas and thoughts. Therefore through blogging I think I found the right place for me. Not that I get hundreds of hits everyday, but it is just nice to feel a part of the club, plus, all the interesting people (like you) I got to meet. Some people from Turkey reached me through my blog, and now I am writing articles for a popular science magazine called NTV-Bilim in Turkey. So yes, blogging does open you new doors and raises opportunities. One shall not underestimate the power of the Web.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?

I have friends who read my blog.. well at least they tell me they do so. My graduate advisor wanted me to keep my work limited to publications therefore I have not been able to write on my project details on the blog. I try to write some real-time campus happenings, that way when people see me around, they share their comments and thoughts. Mostly fun. These days I can not blog as often due to my dissertation writing but I promise to strike back starting August. -- I don't use Twitter.

When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?

My dear friend and collegue, Karen Ventii PhD (science to life), introduced me to the blogging world. I am very glad she did. I like to communicate and I like doing experiments, however laboratories are not the perfect place to be talkative (learned the hard way). Blogging helped me to release my words, my thoughts and everything else that I could no longer keep to myself.

This year was my first time at a SciBlogs Conference, and I had limited time, so I tried to read as many name tags as I could and go talk to sciblings. Therefore I had a lot of "oh so, this is him/her" moments, some disappointing, some surprising but always fun. I got to meet Stephanie Zvan for instance, after reading and following her blog for so long, her blog name has become like a brand in my mind. I called her "almost diamonds" for a while then switched to her first name eventually (I hope this doesn't make me sound like a weirdo)

Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I have never thought of the copyright issues or the problems that I might encounter with my employee based on the things I put on my blog. Conference made me realize that my blog is not my secret diary, it is out there and people actually read it. I was more careful on what I put or say in my blog afterwards, though I am still working on it. Like, one way to control myself is not to write when feeling too emotional or frusturated so to not regret later - and for a Mediterranean, that is a challenge.

Eh, I know! Mediterranean myself. Was there an event that marked your first year at blogging?

Definitely, blogging helped me to make a voice on Turkey's censorship of evolution. I even made it to the news in Turkey. So instead of sitting at home and being frusturated on my own, it was a good feeling to be actually doing something. It was also amazing to see how evolution can gather so much attention on one's blog! Some creationist was threatening me and he even told me to behave (or else). A lot of action and drama for a small blog, right?

After all I feel happy with the crowd I gathered. I always feel happy when a new reader stops by. I have no big ambitions on blogging (like being a blogging super star), as I said earlier, having fun and learning new things: priceless.

What is your favorite ice-cream flavor?

Vanilla

It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

My pleasure Coturnix, thanks for all the fish (and baklava).

==========================

See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

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PZ was sleepy this morning, but he was a diligent blogger - he sat through each and every talk this morning and wrote about them all in two posts. Knowing myself (and my ADHD) I did some cherry-picking. I skipped the heavy-duty chemistry lectures that I was bound not to understand, and went to only two talks I really wanted to see.

The first one was by my yesterday's co-panelist Prof. Sir Harold Walter Kroto (homepage, Wikipedia, Lindau biography). Just this moment, I am sitting in the press room discussing with other bloggers who are at this very moment writing blog-posts about Kroto's talk, how impossible it is to describe it. He touched on many topics - numbers, chemistry, science, environment, education, Web (or as he puts it: GYWW - Google/YouTube/Wikipedia World), religion, scientific method and much more. But it is impossible to describe it, really. What was it about? It is one of those talks where you need to be there, sit back, and let the speaker grab you. Laugh. Enjoy. So, you should just watch it yourself. See what strings it pulls for you. How it makes you think. What moral you get out of the story.

The second talk was by Prof. Dr. Peter Agre (Wikipedia, Lindau biography). This was definitely something different (watch his talk here). After all these talks about chemistry, and several on the science of climate change, Agre decided to do something different - remind us what this is all about. His talk was essentially a vacation slide-show of his four camping/canoeing trips in the Arctic areas of Canada and Alaska. But every shot was breathtakingly beautiful. And every now and then, a picture would remind us how fragile those seemingly harsh environments are and how strongly susceptible they are to climate change. Others used numbers and graphs to issue warnings about the necessity for quick response to the climate issue. Agre used powerful imagery to appeal to our emotions instead - not just how it all works, but what is it that we are trying to preserve and protect.

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This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here.

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Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:

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Just because I am galivanting in Lindau does not mean I could not take a look at the brand new papers published in PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases last night. A few titles caught my eye - take a look. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:

Racial Differences in the Human Endogenous Circadian Period:

The length of the endogenous period of the human circadian clock (tau) is slightly greater than 24 hours. There are individual differences in tau, which influence the phase angle of entrainment to the light/dark (LD) cycle, and in doing so contribute to morningness-eveningness. We have recently reported that tau measured in subjects living on an ultradian LD cycle averaged 24.2 hours, and is similar to tau measured using different experimental methods. Here we report racial differences in tau. Subjects lived on an ultradian LD cycle (1.5 hours sleep, 2.5 hours wake) for 3 days. Circadian phase assessments were conducted before and after the ultradian days to determine the change in circadian phase, which was attributed to tau. African American subjects had a significantly shorter tau than subjects of other races. We also tested for racial differences in our previous circadian phase advancing and phase delaying studies. In the phase advancing study, subjects underwent 4 days of a gradually advancing sleep schedule combined with a bright light pulse upon awakening each morning. In the phase delaying study, subjects underwent 4 days of a gradually delaying sleep schedule combined with evening light pulses before bedtime. African American subjects had larger phase advances and smaller phase delays, relative to Caucasian subjects. The racial differences in tau and circadian phase shifting have important implications for understanding normal phase differences between individuals, for developing solutions to the problems of jet lag and shift work, and for the diagnosis and treatment of circadian rhythm based sleep disorders such as advanced and delayed sleep phase disorder.

Seasonal Hunger: A Neglected Problem with Proven Solutions:

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Most of the world's acute hunger and undernutrition occurs not in conflicts and natural disasters but in the annual "hunger season," the time of year when the previous year's harvest stocks have dwindled, food prices are high, and jobs are scarce.
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We know what works in fighting seasonal hunger and undernutrition: there are identifiable policy and program successes in contexts around the world, but they often operate on a small scale and in isolation.
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Community-based interventions to treat acute undernutrition and promote growth of preschool children are examples of successful interventions that should be scaled up.
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Global scale-up of a basic "minimum essential" intervention package against seasonal hunger would cost around 0.1% of global GDP and save millions of lives, while protecting millions more from severe illness.
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Focusing on seasonal hunger would be an effective way to leverage resources for the attainment of the hunger-related Millennium Development Goal.

Bad Taste Protects Fruit Flies from Eating a Toxic Amino Acid in Plants:

Besides enhancing the pleasure of eating, our sense of taste can steer us away from poisonous foods. Many plants, for example, produce bitter-tasting toxins, such as caffeine and quinine, to deter predation by herbivores from cows to insects. But it remains a mystery how animals developed their capacity to detect--and so avoid--the tens of thousands of plant toxins, which include alkaloids, phenolics, and nonprotein amino acids. The best-known toxic nonprotein amino acid is L-canavanine, which accumulates in the seeds of alfalfa (Medicago sativa) and many other leguminosae. L-canavanine is so similar to the amino acid L-arginine that it gets incorporated into proteins, rendering them dysfunctional. A few insects have developed strategies for counteracting this toxin, including larvae of the beetle Caryedes brasiliensis, which depend entirely on seeds of the legume Dioclea megacarpa and catabolize L-canavanine into harmless compounds. However, the vast majority of insects are susceptible to L-canavanine, and little is known about their ability to detect it in plants.

Clean Water Should Be Recognized as a Human Right:

At the March 2009 United Nations (UN) meetings coinciding with the World Water Forum, Canada, Russia, and the United States refused to support a declaration that would recognize water as a basic human right. The special resolution proposed by Germany and Spain, and endorsed by the President of the UN General Assembly, was instead rejected in favor of further examination of issues of access to safe drinking water and sanitation [1].

Opposition to this declaration runs counter to considerable evidence that access to clean water, which is essential for health, is under threat. According to the World Health Organization, 1.2 billion people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking water, and a further 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation services. These numbers are expected to rise. The UN has estimated that 2.8 billion people in 48 countries will be living in conditions of water stress or scarcity by 2025 [2].

Parks and Tourism:

Why should it matter how many people visit national parks? In a word: politics. Protected areas are not only physical places, reservoirs of biodiversity, and sources of ecosystem services, such as breathable air and drinkable water. They are also human political constructs, and they are under ever-increasing pressures from growing human populations and resource demands. Visitors may bring them the political capital to survive.

Biologists have pointed out for decades that protected areas are not playgrounds, but life-support systems for the planet's population of humans, as well as its other species. Economists estimate that ecosystem services worldwide contribute twice as much to the human economy each year as all forms of human industry combined--many trillions of dollars [1],[2]. At regional scale, ecosystem services from National Wildlife Refuges in the contiguous 48 states of the Unites States have been valued at US$27 billion annually [3]. The human economic value of conserving biodiversity is many orders of magnitude higher than the funds invested in it [2],[4]-[9]. The cost of buying all of the world's biodiversity hotspots outright has been estimated at around US$100 billion--less than five-years' expenditure on soft drinks in the US [10]. But the actual funds allocated worldwide each year, a few billion dollars in total, are <5% of minimum requirements for effective conservation [11]. This compares with the trillions of dollars spent in 2009 to prop up financial systems in the US, European Union, and China [12].

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A brief interview with one of the young researchers attending the Lindau Nobel conference - Corinna Reisinger from Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung

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Wojciech Supronowicz

A brief interview with one of the young researchers attending the Lindau Nobel conference - Wojciech Supronowicz from Poland:

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Because a fellow has failed once or twice, or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage - and that's the same thing.

- George Lorimer

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I have arrived. The trip was OK. Terminal 2 at RDU rocks - I was there far too early (due to trip-excites) and spent 3 hours online on my iPhone. At Heathrow, wifi is pay-only, and I could not detect any at the Zurich airport. There is no AT&T signal to be picked up at Heathrow, Zurich or Lindau, so I am not using the iPhone at all. The wifi at the hotel is decent (a little slower than at home) and they say that it is much better at the conference center.

For some reason, AA switched airplane types. I was looking forward to sleeping 7 hours on the B777 (it is never completely full so I can usually find a line of 3, 4 or even 6 seats to spread my length and sleep. But this time they used a B767-300 so I sat cramped and got only a few quick bursts of sleep that was not very restfull. A big group of exchange student from Meredith college on their way to a summer in London, as sweet as they were, did not help my sleeping by chatting all night.

The rest of the trip was uneventful - as Heathrow is so large, by the time we landed, docked at the gate, walked miles of corridors, passed passport check and security, I only had about 10 minutes waiting at the gate for the Zurich flight (which was more comfortable). I then quickly got on a train to Lindau and a bus driver, not speaking English but understanding I am "with the Nobelists" and "did not get yet to get any Euros" took me to the hotel for free.

So, I should not complain, especially comparing to PZ's trip which lasted twice as long and did not go as smoothly.

PZ and I arrived at around the same time and made plans to meet via Twitter. We were accompanied by Ashutosh Jogalekar for a nice hour-long walk around Lindau - both the old part on the island on Lake Constance and the newer, bigger town on the coast. Got some cash, bought some essentials, and went to the Social event at the Inselhalle on the island, where I met the rest of the blogging/press team and saw some 600 people including 20+ Nobelists. It was the Indian night, with their food, dances, music and customs, which all together got everyone off their seats and socializing.

Now, exhausted and jet-lagged, I need to go to try to sleep as tomorrow is the work-day for me here: liveblogging, interviewing participants, and myself being on an Open Access session in the afternoon.

You can follow other bloggers on Lindaunobel blog and Page 3.14 as well as on Twitter and FriendFeed.

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The Town of Chapel Hill's new website appears to have gone live today.  It sure is a snazzy new look, but I haven't found much yet in the way of new features.  The menu navigation seems to be more intuitive than the old website, and it seems to be much easier to use from a casual visitor's perspective.  But I'm still not having an easy time finding archived material without a help from my dear friend Google.  Have you had a chance to check it out?  What do you think?

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The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.

Today, I asked Glendon Mellow of the The Flying Trilobite, to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?

I'm yet another Canadian atheist artist-illustrator recovering goth-punk who blogs about incorrectly drawn fossil arthropods. We should have a lobby group. I grew up and live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and attended York University for Fine Arts. I'll actually be returning to complete that degree this fall after many years away. Evolution was always an interest, but after reading River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins, I was far more inspired by that book than post-modern painting. It's been pretty much a straight line from there to where I am now, blogging at The Flying Trilobite: art in awe of science. I'm also a contributor at the group paleo-art blog, Art Evolved: Life's Time Capsule.

What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?

Making a full time career out of illustrating and art-making is my eventual goal. It's getting closer all the time, and I desperately would love to illustrate a book with surreal scientific images. Perhaps for children. I'd like to work on another degree, and I'm torn between a biology undergrad and post-undergrad concept art courses. I could see myself using my management background to become an art director for a scientific group or institution.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Massive online amateur research programs like BioBlitz I think have a potential to somehow become fused with a game like World of Warcraft or maybe Facebook groups. People join WoW and Facebook groups for a sense of accomplishment and belonging -they make a statement about you- so I could see amateur research projects fusing with those in some way. That's been on my mind since hearing GrrlScientist at ScienceOnline09 and Joel Sachs at SciBarCamp Toronto.

Relating to art, I think the quality of scientific illustration and indeed all illustration is rapidly going up. You're competing with everyone. Artists are better at younger ages because there is a higher bar. And with something like Art Evolved, even though it's only a few months old, we have enthusiastic, largely unpublished (thought that's changing) artists engaging in a debate about pterosaur wings with paleontologists. That's not something I would expect to see outside the blogosphere.

You are an artist - why is your art science-related? What motivates you and what are your goals?

People enjoy the feeling of the sublime, like you're in the presence of something greater than yourself, and art has often dealt with that through myth and metaphor. I like exploring what new, awe-inspiring visual metaphors can be created with this wealth of real information and imagery that science gives us. Why use an image of a halo to enhance beauty in a portrait when you can use diatoms?

Your most famous picture is the Darwin Took Steps, features already in many places including the cover of Open Lab 2008. What gave you the idea for this work? What does it mean?

That Open Lab 2008 cover came out lookin' sweet, thanks to David Ng.

The painting is about the pattern of thought the starts building a memetic structure, taking those first steps up into the idea of evolution by natural selection and through Charles Darwin's thoughts, elevating the rest of us into that place so we can build on the idea with evidence. I could have used any amount of stairs, but I chose 5 to represent Darwin's main lines of evidence: biogeography, morphology, embryology, and paleontology, with the last step open to represent natural selection, or the elevation of reason over dogma. That's the type of symbolism I don't think a viewer could get from the painting itself, but it is important to me to make sure I have a reason in mind.

The concept actually came from a much older painting I did for a never-saw-print cd cover, with "random old wise man" with a staircase head. Marrying the idea to Darwin produces a strong reaction of familiarity in people who understand his theory. I didn't set out to create this painting to be popular, or to resonate more than my others. I just thought it was a neat drawing, Darwin Day was coming up and I wanted to try speed painting. I painted it in three hours. It's since appeared on numerous websites, a magazine and a couple of book covers. It caused a ruckus on DeviantArt as a featured painting this year and led to a full-on argument between the science crowd and creationists.

If I can throw in a plug, I'm donating portions of the sales bearing this image to The Beagle Project, and I have cards, prints and shirts available in my Reproduction Shop. Let's build a ship.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?

The various options online can be daunting for a new artist. It's so easy for people to rip off artwork and claim it as their own, but on the other hand, it's an unparalleled medium for sharing images. There's never been anything close to this in history. After Science Online I was waiting with other participants at the airport, and Henry Gee asked me if blogging had changed my life. It absolutely has. It yanked me out of a deep, lightless artistic depression. I'd been sitting on paintings for years, occasionally making something new, frustrated with work that few people I knew liked. Using the blogging platform, I can display my, um, let's say niche artwork and still have a decent audience.

I tried liveblogging a painting for Darwin Day shortly after the conference. I burned out on it. Painting for two hours, then 20 minutes of uploading and colour-correcting the image, then painting 2 more hours...I spiralled into a strange place with that image. It felt as though I let people following down. It's sitting in my studio glaring me.

I participate on DeviantArt, LinkedIn and RedBubble which has an excellent online print shop. Twitter has actually gotten me back into Facebook. People who've never commented on my blog were becoming fans on Facebook: are they lurkers, quietly enjoying the paintings? I don't know. You start thinking about all of the eyes on you. It becomes a responsibility to become a better artist. I began posting new art every Monday as a way to discipline myself toward my blogpeeps.

When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?

Being a Richard Dawkins fan, I really discovered blogs through links on his website, maybe 5 years ago.

Arriving at the hotel, Kevin Zelnio, Southern Fried Scientist, and Miriam Goldstein yanked me into conversation, and I let some of my imposter syndrome fade away. Karen James exudes cool. Talking with Stephanie Zvan between sessions helped me remember this was real somehow. I follow a ton of the blogs from the conference attendees. Anything in my sidebar.

You led two sessions at the conference - what did you learn from that experience?

The unconference format took the edge off, easier to be yourself. In the first session, the audience wanted to overwhelmingly move past the "two cultures" discussion about art and science - a huge contrast to the group at SciBarCamp here in Toronto in May. It hit me during the talk that maybe the distance of art and science is something you only see when standing in your own present - looking back across the decades of art past, it's easy to see art inspired by science standing tall above its history.

I brought up what I had largely been thinking about at the time - that much of art based on scientific inspiration is somewhat parasitic, not giving much back. The group was vocal, emotional about the contribution of art to inspiring scientists. I'm still trying to absorb that.

The second session artist/scientist/force of nature Tanja Sova and I tried to lend some tips on image making. The unconference format was good, but if we do a follow-up next year, I think blogging some step-by-steps in advance, a call for potential volunteers for a step-by-step would be helpful. I also learned that the best way to close a conference with laughs is to have your volunteer tech-person accidentally pull up nudity onscreen due to a mis-typed url.

Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

Roger Harris's session and comments from Greg Laden made me re-think my whole blog look. I changed it immediately. Follow-up email exchanges after the conference have my mind ticking about visualization.

Bora, there was so much - ! If blogging changed my life, then Science Online 09 did just as much. I have been massively discontented since leaving the unconference. Casting about for a new direction. There was a heady optimism in the attendees. The feeling of being around that many people doing what they love to do left me frustrated and hopeful that I can do the same with illustrating some day soon.

It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Great to meet you too!

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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

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The ability to relate and to connect, sometimes in odd and yet striking fashion, lies at the very heart of any creative use of the mind, no matter in what field or discipline.

- George J. Seidel

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A mass email is circulating claiming Obama's Justice Department, for political reasons, dropped charges of voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, Fox News and the Washington Times are spreading this meme, continuing in their sure-to-fail quest to equate Obama with black radicals. Joel Mathis of the Philadelphia Weekly had a good analysis of the case.

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I fear Americans have unrealistic expectations for what health care reform can accomplish. We seem to expect that we can quickly achieve universal coverage, for almost no additional cost to the taxpayers, with no limits on care, no limits on the choice of physicians, no limits on patients' ability to sue doctors or institutions that make medical mistakes, no limits on care and no rationing -- that 80-year-olds will be able to receive kidney dialysis or open-heart surgery, and there will be no waiting times for any procedures. We are setting ourselves up to be disappointed. I can already anticipate...

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Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 180 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):

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A couple of months ago, my SciBling David Dobbs and I recorded about an hour of discussion for Bloggingheads.tv. We talked mainly about science journalism, but also about journalism in general, about the future of the book, etc.

Unfortunately, Dave's half of the file got broken beyond repair, so the show never aired. I kept my half of the file and did not really know what to do with it. So, recently I downloaded Audacity and tried my hand at editing the audio part of the file, trying to cut out the silences (during which Dave was talking) and dialogues that would be intelligible without Dave's part of the file.

Here is the very first part, just a brief (1 minute and 38 seconds) introduction to myself and my job. Thus, my very first podcast, which (after popular vote on FriendFeed decided) will be called ClockCast. I will try to find some time (as I am learning to tackle Audacity!) to edit and post the rest of the file in the near future (I am not, for now, promising any kind of regularity for posting these, until I feel comfortable with the medium and the technology):

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