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Broken keys and ticking clocks
You may have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT a little this month. If you carefully craft a prompt it can give you some quite remarkable responses, I got it to write a new article based on my writing style, for instance. I also had it mess around with some of my lyrics. To be honest, I wouldn’t use anything that it’s come up with without massively editing, but it does trigger new thoughts and ideas when it bounces back a response. I thought it might be worth trying it for inspiration for the chord progression to help me develop the melody to go with those new lyrics. I’d originally had ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Music Source Type: blogs

Old song demos
It’s 21:12 on Friday the 13th… Regular readers know by now that I occasionally post stuff about my music, the music I write and record, the music I perform with my band C5 and the TyrannoChorus, and even occasionally about the am dram pit band with whom I play once a year for their Xmas show. I’ve got a lot of demos on BandCamp and SoundCloud and occasionally look at the very embarrassing stats they give on how many listens I get. Some of my older material is on a BandCamp account I called Sciencebass instead of Sciencebase, haha. Here’s the all-time top ten of my songs on that account that people a...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 13, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Music Source Type: blogs

Being a ray of sunshine even when it is dark and dull outside
A friend over on Mastodon was telling us how it’s been dull and gloomy in her hometown for 15 days on the trot. That’s miserable, it’s not easy jumping out of bed with any kind of enthusiasm when the day ahead looks dull and grey. She wanted some advice on how to break through the gloom. I don’t like it when it’s dark either, only thing I could suggest is to set an alarm and have some specific small task to do each morning. Switch on the lights, throw the curtains wide, jump to your feet, make a start on the task, get it done and dusted quickly and then get on with the rest of the day! Tasks c...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 13, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Psychology Source Type: blogs

Setting the tone artificially
If you feed ChatGPT, the AI language model, an appropriate prompt followed by a sample of writing, it does something that could be rather useful. The bot analyses the writing style. The prompt needs to be something like this: “Analyze the text below for style, voice, and tone. Then, using natural language processing (NLP) create a prompt to write a new article in the same style, voice, and tone.” and you paste in a sample of your own writing. I gave the bot this prompt and pasted the text from a recent blog post of mine about migratory blackcaps in our garden. It came back with this summary: Style: Informal, ob...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 11, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Source Type: blogs

Ticking Clocks – She ’ s coming home
I had a little chord progression that got me thinking…nothing complicated just some interesting inversions on BM7, FM7 Gm7 and C7 that came up on a social media site. Sounded nice, but I ditched the BM7 and the C7 and just oscillated between the other two to sing an ad lib lyric…and then to break away into a chorus based on Dm7 Am, and Gm7. Thing is, I thought I came up with something neat lyrically, a kind of riposte to The Beatles’ song She’s Leaving Home, whereby we find the protagonist returning to her childhood home after her parents have died, there always was the implication of a less than ha...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Music Source Type: blogs

Bot writes artificial clickbait
I asked the language model ChatGPT, to give me an answer to the question: “Is it unethical to use ChatGPT to write a blog post?” The following “chat” ensued: It is generally considered ethical to use language models like chatbot to generate text as long as you disclose that you used a language model and do not present the generated text as your own original work. However, it is important to use your own judgement and consider the specific context in which you are using the language model. If you are using the language model to generate content for a blog post, it would be a good idea to clearly disc...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 7, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Source Type: blogs

Fowl play: old gravelpits as birdwatching hotspots
There are lots of old gravelworks in our area some of which are earmarked as nature reserves as I’ve mentioned before, a couple of times, and some are used as fisheries. Where there’s water and reeds and trees there will most likely be birds regardless of the anglers or visitors. Great White Egret perched on a half-submerged tree stump On this almost sunny Friday morning, I headed to the fishery lakes adjacent to Meadow Lane, St Ives – known to some as Meadow Lane Pits. I was hoping to see and perhaps get photos of the five Smew, a type of diving duck, that had turned up there earlier in the week. Birders...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 6, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

My photographic setup for birds
I get asked a lot about what camera (and lens) I use to take my bird photos. It comes with a simple answer. Most of the time, I use a Canon 7D Mark ii (a model first launched in 2014). I bought the 7Dii during the first COVID-19 lockdown (March 2020). It was cutting edge when it was launched and was a leader for the top-end pro-sumer wildlife photographer for many years because of its focusing abilities and burst mode rates. It’s very susceptible to noise, more so than the Canon 6D I used for a few years before buying that camera. I have various lenses, but the one I use while birding (or strictly speaking togging) ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 6, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Photography Source Type: blogs

Will AI help us be more creative?
If you read the previous two Sciencebase articles, you will note that the first one about our New Year trip to Norfolk was a conventional article in my usual style, descriptive, with a few puns and pops, and a load of bird photos. The next article was a reboot of that same article where I fed each paragraph from the former to an AI tool known as ChatGPT and provided its responses. They were almost insightful, the AI responded in a positive way to my paragraphs basically rewriting them as a response in a way a chatshow host might reiterate and re-emphasise the points made by a guest on the show. It also seemed to extrapolat...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 4, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Source Type: blogs

Artificial conversation
I fed the paragraphs from my recent blog post about our new year trip to the Norfolk coast sequentially to the ChatGPT, artificial intelligence system to see what sort of things it would say in response to my words…its responses put a positive spin on everything, even my complaint about the number of dogs! It’s also interesting, that it recognises that I said “for starters” and so asked if I saw any other interesting birds. For the most part, it looks like the bot repeats back to you what you’ve said like a vaguely interested and patronising friend might! Be interesting to know from where it g...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 4, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Source Type: blogs

New Year in Norfolk 2023
As has been our habit for the last few years, we have eschewed the midnight festivities of New Year and escaped to the coast. This time, we straddled the New Year with three nights in a cosy cottage in Wells-next-the-Sea. We enjoyed the local hostelries in the evenings during our trip, but the main focus was to walk as far as we could manage each day (usually 7 or 8 miles) and to take in the birding and other sites of nature en route. Record shot: Pallid Harrier in flight Wells, Warham, Titchwell, and Holkham Gap were the main areas, beach, woodland, marsh, and nature reserve. A couple of Muntjac (one deceased), two or thr...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 4, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

It ’ s not only rock and roll
We were quite content with vinyl. Indeed, aside from the occasional warped record and friends who didn’t hold them properly by the edges, we loved our US import 45s, our double gatefold sleeve live rock albums and our picture discs. We put up with the crackles and pops and built our bedroom collections. We lent our vinyl to friends, despite their not understanding about sleeve liner orientation and they lent us theirs. We recorded them on to cassette when we couldn’t the latest and greatest and we made mixtapes, the playlisting of a Generation X. They even tried to stop us by telling us that “Home taping ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - December 31, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Music Source Type: blogs

Just another notch
An intriguing thought experiment explains how one might encode the whole of literature in a single fraction, a/b, and how that ratio might be made physical as a notch in a metal rod, whereby the length on the left of the notch is a and that on the right is b. How might that be done? Well, if we assume we’re using just the English alphabet, we could assign each letter a code, 001 for the letter a, 002 for the letter b, 003 for c, and so on. 000 could represent a space. Numbers beyond 026 would be the punctuation marks. So, all of literature could be written out as a continuous sequence of those three-digit codes. The...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - December 23, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science Source Type: blogs

A Blackcap in Winter
It’s no wonder this little fellow looks so grumpy perched next to the mistletoe growing on our rowan tree…most other Blackcaps will be enjoying a much balmier winter on the Iberian Peninsula or even in Africa. We have had Blackcaps in our garden in winter for several years now. Never see them in the garden in summer though. We had a male and a female last winter. So far this winter, just this solitary male. Blackcap overwintering in the UK In recent years, a lot of migrating Blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) have headed west from eastern Europe for the winter instead of turning south. Their compasses seem to have ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - December 23, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

Whatever happened to that birding book you were writing Dave?
Back in August 2017, I was all hyped about putting together a new book. It come up with a title, Chasing Wild Geese, and the plan was to write a short piece about the hundred birds a novice birder might “tick” first in the UK. Each item would be illustrated with one of my photos of said bird. Chasing Wild Geese, the gosling feather book cover I put together a taster, with the first ten written and formatted and even did a spoof bio page in the same style about yours truly. I gave the cover a silly acronym: FEATHER. This stood for “Food Environment Aural Type Habitat Etymology Resemblance” and was a summary of the c...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - December 21, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Photography Source Type: blogs