User:U10ajf
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Hello!
Here's a cagy customer, you may all think. I'm not telling you my name! It's not that I'm ashamed of my beliefs, it's just they might offend some of my family who are very dear and, should they ever search for my name, I should not wish them to discover my identity also! I am, however, very happy to correspond to people on a name basis via email. My address is u10ajf@yahoo.co.uk
u10ajf was my university email code which I kept up having graduated from Aberdeen University, Scotland with an honours degree in Ecology. I have worked as a proffessional field naturalist in Caithness in the North of Scotland in the region of Lairg. There I primarily monitored the bird life and used GPS to record their movements for an environmental impact assessment (that's the UK equivalent of the US term environmental impact statement)could be made regarding a possible development. As it happened the place heaved with lovely wildlife and that partly informed the developer's decision to withdraw the services of myself and my boss! There, I'm a victim of my own success!
Asides from my passionate interest in nature I play guitar (often brutal and very fast metal leads but some of what I play is mellower and/or acoustic), am interested in the musical theory of scales (and established the concept of "scale affinity" as a unifying concept) and am fascinated by sociobiology and psychology and their implications for human morality.
I have recently worked out how to use MS Excel to produce spreadsheets that are potentially useful learning aids (various tasks including the learning of the periodic table) and hope one day to have developed the expertise required to produce more sophisticated mnemonic software akin to "2 know" and "Supermemo" which are found as freeware on the internet. An advanced Excel application used macros and 1s and 0s to catalogue the scale affinities and prevalance of various kinds of arpeggios in some 46 different parent scales. That was a headbattering job and I'm not happy with Excel's stability but regrettably don't have the programming expertise yet to debug procedures. It may or may not be so that Excel is not as stable as I would wish it to be and it is hard to collate the data. One day I hope to publish my work but have no formal musical qualifications and don't hold much hope of being able to publish. Should my work be published I shall introduce the term scale affinity to this site, I strongly believe that it has great use as a learning aid and as a unifying concept in musical theory. My ultimate ambition for the project would be to have a web-based analyser which allows users to input their own scales, check to see if they are synonmyous with modes of a previously entered scale and, if they are not, to analyse their chordal constitutions. I would be very happy to collaborate with the producers of any fretboard mapping software such as on the wonderful GAFF website http://www.power-chord.com/gaff/mapper/ and to catalogue the names and help agree a standard nomenclature. I see no great need to name more than one mode of a particular scale form, hence I would describe the Natural Minor scale (Aeolian) mode as simply the 6th mode of a Major scale.
Natural history is my main interest and I think it is a great pity that many people regard themselves as separated by such a wide gulf from the rest of nature. Language is often seen as the diving line between us and other species but many others indulge in reciprocal relationships, mourning behaviour, altruism, tribalism etc and may even have the understandings of causality and the trappings of guilt to qualify them as genuine moral (or immoral) agents. This naive duality between humanity and "nature" is partly responsible for the contempt that some people hold for both animal rights and for sustainable development. Increasingly pollution and habitat destruction are destroying the tiny window that scientists have upon the enormity of the past that shaped these processes and we are in danger of losing knowledge of ourselves as well as of the myriad of fantastically adaptated organisms around us. Whilst I am no athlete I am a keen cyclist and wish that more people rode bicycles instead of driving cars. I am offended by the amount of packaging used in modern market places. I hate nightclubs, nobody can hear anybody else talk so only the shallowest means of company selection can be employed. It's time the volume went down.
My websites are at:
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/bohazard (largely about my life, creative writing, guitar and toilet humour!) http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/oddentity (largely about my philosophy)
