I have done a lot of work with audio capture and compression in a professional capacity, but very little in the way of video. I have often heard that video is significantly more difficult to deal with. Recently, my wife bought a digital camcorder and we have been planning on installing a firewire card into our PC and doing some digital video editing. This process is made fairly easy by the software and by the fact that the video is already in a digital format. But, what do you do if you have video in an analog format and you want to bring it into the digital domain? Today, I found a nice little introductory article on the topic of analog video capture [ArsTechnica]. It's the first in a three part series that will deal with video capture, clean-up and compression. A very good read for anyone who wants to put their old home videos on their PC, CD or DVD. 11:58:48 AM    comment []  

As I was reading some comments about creationism [Corpse Divine] made by my friend, Chris, on his weblog, I had a few thoughts to add:

Charles Darwin at no time made any claims regarding the origins of life. His theory assumes that life exists without trying to explain why. His theory then attempts to define the driving forces behind the "origin of species". The origins of life fall outside the theory of evolution as formulated by Darwin.

Of course, few people actually understand evolution and many people will invoke evolution to support or disprove claims that they make regarding the origins of life. Others will make assertions trying to disprove evolution by demonstrating how evolution does not adequately explain the origins of life. In either case, the false assumption is that evolution even tries to explain the origins of life; it does not.

I personally believe that some formal theory will eventually be developed that will tie together such seemingly disparate concepts as species formation, cognition, development of social organization and the origins of life. All of these phenomena, and others, share certain common themes relating to the emergence of higher levels of order within systems comprised of discrete entities. Darwin’s theory of evolution contains some of the building blocks for such a universal theory of organizational genesis, but is probably too specialized to properly deal with such diverse systems.

I think it is because of these similarities that people tend to incorrectly view Darwin’s theory of evolution as an attempt to explain the origins of life. People intuitively perceive the similarity between the origins of higher levels of organization whether that process is operating upon individuals within a species or individual molecules in the primordial soup. This perception is not without merit, but any conclusions made based on such analogies must be treated very carefully. 10:46:41 AM    comment []