SherWords

Glass Friday

2008-07-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

Chihuly at the deYoung, July 18, 2008
(update, July 24: more photos are available by
clicking here.)

As an astronomer, I suppose that I am predisposed to be fascinated by unusual things that glow in the dark. As a former telescope-maker, I am certainly predisposed to appreciate masterful glasswork. As a human being, I am predisposed to appreciate beauty.

No wonder, then, that I was absolutely blown completely away (at least until lunch) by the display of Dale Chihuly's work at San Francisco's deYoung Museum last Friday.

(NOTE: I have uploaded larger than usual original images to Blogger for this post; my standard is 800 pixels on the larger side, but these are 1,000 pixels on the larger side, and they are very well worth viewing at that resolution. You can do so by clicking on any image in this post.)

An early display in the exhibit: autumn comes in large glass leaves.

Chihuly's work is deliciously slathered in controversy in artsy circles. He doesn't actually fabricate the pieces himself, he self-promotes agressively, he has legions of hired minions, he uses light (and marketing) in ways reminiscent of Kinkade... to all of which I say, "so what?" Diane's and my hour in the darkened tunnel of the deYoung's Chihuly exhibit was a jubilant one, a time of slack-jawed grinning that was every bit as energizing as a trip down Disneyland's Splash Mountain waterfall. If that ain't cerebral enough for true art appreciation, then so be it.

The exhibit is popular enough that even museum members need to call ahead for timed tickets, so the darkened trail that winds through the Chihuly exhibit is always pretty well crowded. That prohibited bringing my tripod, so I had to resort to various less-than-optimum hardware and software compromises in order to capture these images. I think they came out pretty well -- for what they are -- but, keep in mind, that they are very, very poor representations of how breathtaking the display really is.

Glass Baskets

Macchia Forest #1

Macchia Forest #2

The "candles" in this work are approximately five feet tall.

Boatloads of Fantasy

Chandelier Room

A Grand Chandelier (about ten feet tall).

Chandelier Detail

A Good Glass Ceiling

Glass Ceiling Detail

Climactic Display: Starting End

Climactic Display: Finishing End

Climactic Display: Detail

A photographer's adjustment I learned to make during the trip through the exhibit was to use my camera's polarizing filter to enhance, rather than minimize, reflections. (The polarizer is almost always used to supress glare and reflections.) It became clear as we went along that there were two major actors in the Chihuly exhibit: the glassworks and the lighting, and that the latter -- including reflections, highlights, etc. -- was absolutely the equal of the former in the overall performance and impact of the work.

At the end of the exhibit is, of course, a gift shop, which includes the opportunity to buy some original products from the Chihuly enterprise. Like this little blue basket. Its size is calibrated by the credit-card-sized price tag at left... for more than $6,000. Mrs. Fort and I opted for a book, instead.

The Chihuly exhibit at the deYoung runs through late September. I strongly urge any of my California readers who haven't been to it yet to hie themselves thereto. It is, to paraphrase Michael Jagger, a glass, glass, glass.

I'm Happy to Be OK, But...

2008-07-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

... I Feel Like an Idiot.

This is the Ft. Harrington workmobile: a 2005 Dodge Dakota. It weighs a little more than three tons, and has a pretty powerful V8 engine, full-time four-wheel drive, and power everything. That means that the engine has to be running in order for the steering and bakes to work easily for anyone who isn't monstrously strong. I'm not monstrously strong. Keep that in mind. (It also has automatic transmission, since Mrs. Fort's surgically-reconstructed knees and ankles prohibit clutch-pedal operation.)

My daily commute is beautiful, about 25 miles long, mostly through the great redwood forest of the Santa Cruz mountains along the twisty, two-lane track of California highway 9. Highway 9 is a popular excursion for folks with all kinds of transportation modes, all the way from hikers to sports-motorcyclists, a spectrum that includes, of course, bicyclists. Recently, over on RACS , I had occasion to vent some frustration over the small percentage of bicyclists who "lane hog" up here in the mountains: downhill coasters who clog up traffic by refusing to pull out of the center of the lane to let motorists pass.

I got caught up behind one of those today on my way to work. The below image from Google Earth (please click on it to see a better view) shows a roughly two-mile stretch of my commute; I was traveling right-to-left along the highlighted path. The yellow-highlighted portion is where I glumly trailed the guy on the bike who was going about 30 mph at maximum, and the comfortable, legal speed for motor vehicles along this stretch is 40. All along this part, he frequently looked back over his shoulder at me, so he knew I was there, but never pulled over to let me pass, and there was (clearly) no place safe for me to pull into the oncoming lane to pass him. The blue part of the path is where things got interesting.

I know this road well. I've driven it just about every workday for the past ten years, so I reckon that means that I've driven this stretch of mountain road more than 4,000 times (both ways.) It's a good thing that I know it well, as it turns out.

Above is a closer view of the blue stretch of the path; I was going from right to left. At the beginning of the blue part, I knew I could pass the cyclist, but there was oncoming traffic, so I waited until point "1" (please click on the image for a better view.) At that point I accellerated moderately until position "2", where I floored the accelerator in order to get past the still-lane-hogging bicycle before any traffic could heave into sight around the oncoming hairpin curve.

At position "3", I was past the cyclist -- and in deep shit.

The throttle was stuck full-open; the V8 was screaming at full rpm, not backing off a bit when I took my foot off the gas.

Between "3" and "4", I stomped on the accelerator several times, trying to unstick the throttle, meanwhile thinking that I could not turn off the ignition (brakes and steering are power-enabled, remember, and I knew that nasty hairpin was coming up fast), and I shouldn't throw the transmission into neutral, because that would probably blow the engine.

At "4" I gave up on the accelerator-banging, and just plain STOOD UP on the brake pedal. From there until position "5", the power brakes and the 230+ horsepower of the out-of-control engine battled each other, the tires screamed (and maybe me, too, but I ain't sayin' for sure), and that hairpin between "4" and "5" flashed past faster than it ever had before.

At "5", knowing the road and its upcoming very short, gentle-curved section, I disengaged the transmission, turned the ignition key off, kept standing of the brake pedal, and leaned heavily to the left with hands in a strangle grip on the steering wheel around the curve -- no power means no power steering, no power brakes, and four-wheel drive becomes 4-wheel lead-weight without power. The whole crippled thing came to a stop at position "6", anticlimactically safely off the road. No cliffhanger. That's okay, really, thanks, my adrenal gland had already had a pretty good workout in the previous ten seconds or so. Didn't need the cliffhanger business, much as it would make for a better read.

(By the way, the valley running down the left side of the above image is the San Andreas Fault.)

Here's where the "idiot" part kicks in:

So, there I was, safe and sound, but a bit rattled. I called in AAA's help via cell 'phone, and while waiting for the yellow truck mused about times gone by. Specifically, that if this had happened in the '60s, I would have just popped the hood and traced the accelerator linkage to find the problem. But I knew that modern automotive technology had progressed so far beyond what I was used to that it wasn't even worth the effort to pop the hood.

When the AAA guy arrived, he agreed with me. He appeared to be about my age, very well-experienced, and capable. And he didn't pop the hood.

When we got the truck to our mechanic, many miles away, and after the truck had been gently lowered from the AAA transport, our mechanic did pop the hood. Here's what he found:

... no, not a pillow, but this redwood twig (the standard pillow is there for scale.) Turns out that the cable from the accelerator pedal to wherever it goes travels up close to the bottom of the windshield. This redwood twig had worked its way from the hood seam at the bottom of the windshield into the engine compartment -- and had fallen into just the wrong place when I floored the accelerator to pass the cyclist, wedging the thick end between two metal parts of the engine and its midsection against a protrusion from the accelerator cable, jamming the throttle into wide-open mode.

If I had just opened the hood, I would have seen it. I didn't, so I wasted half a day of my own... and of the AAA driver.

Not a complete loss, though. It was a beautiful day, and a nice ride in a big ol' yellow truck.

Independence Day, 2008

2008-07-05T01:01:00.001-07:00

In Adrianne's garden.

Several of the regular readers of this irregular blog posted articles celebrating Independence Day on July 4th: Mike did, Ruth did, Dann did, and even ronnie posted a wish for us from north of the unstressed border.

Selfish lizard that I am, though, I didn't. Instead, I chose to indulge myself by enjoying some of the benefits that ultimately came tumbling out of the events of 232 years ago. I spent the day taking a long, leisurely drive around the beautiful area I live in, the land around San Francisco Bay, and enjoying a gathering of the extended clan at Adrianne and Grace's house for a great barbeque. Thanks, Declaration signatories (and all the others who, through the years, have furthered and defended their vision); I enjoyed on that day the stuff you started. The only downer was that Diane couldn't accompany me, since she was still not feeling completely up to snuff after a little accident she had a few weeks ago.

Here's a top-down map of my wanderings (click the map to see a version you can actually read):

The light blue trail is my path to Adrianne and Grace's place in Pleasant Hill, while the purple one traces my return. The numbered spots indicate locations from which the photos below were taken. I tried to avoid freeways as much as practicable, given time constraints. If I was going to pay almost fifty bucks in gasoline for the roughly 200-mile round trip, I sure as shootin' was going to enjoy the ride.

Fair warning: what follows, especially the long section at the barbeque, will be of interest only to family, if them. But others are, of course, welcome to join us in virtuality!

The Ride Up to Pleasant Hill

Here's a perspective view, courtesy of Google Earth, from the Boulder Creek end:

(The termini of the routes marked are the centers of the towns, not our actual home locations. I'm not that unconcerned about putting such personal details out here on the web-o-sphere.)

Photo position 1, from a vista point parking lot along California route 35, also known as "Skyline":

Looking eastward. My destination today, Pleasant Hill, is beyond -- but not a whole lot beyond -- the most distant band of clouds (whose slight brown tint is due to smoke from the Big Sur fire, far to the south on the coast.) The water is San Francisco Bay, and the white patches are salt evaporators.

Photo position 2, in an old section of the town of Fremont in the East Bay:

This photo was taken specifically for, and in homage to, the world-famous Canadian blogging cat, Mojo, who is somehow under the impression that he is the President of Cuba.

I have no idea where that idea came from. Really. I don't.

Photo position 3, on Palomares Road, just off its intersection with Niles Canyon Road:

Niles Canyon provides a narrow slot through which a single-track rail line and a two-lane highway find a shortcut from the Livermore area through the East Bay hills down to the heavily populated flatlands by the Bay.

Palomares Road is a scenic ten-mile byway through the heart of the hills that generally parallel two busy Interstate highways: 880 along the East Bay's flatlands and 680 on the east side of the East Bay hills. I discovered it in October, 1989, when I was living in Oakland. The Loma Prieta earthquake of that month devastated normal transportation routes around the Bay for months after, and I used this road as part of an inventive-by-necessity daily commute from Oakland to Cupertino and back.

View to the east from Palomares Road.

At the Barbeque

Adrianne shows off the first season of her raised-bed vegetable garden!

Grace has become quite the swimmer: she's great at diving down to the bottom of the pool and retrieving the weighted rings. It is so very hard to adapt to the fact that she'll be six years old next month. By the time I do, she'll probably be seven. And then 15.

Grace's cousin, Kiana, and her aunt (and Adam's sister), Reva.

Grace and Kiana in the pool.

We had very special visitors from England at this celebration of separation therefrom: Adam's uncle John, the younger (but not youngest) brother of Adam's late mother, and his wife, Ngoc Thu. John, recently retired from a long and successful career at Reuters, is a naturalized British citizen. I had only seen him once in the past 40 years, and that one time was more than 20 years ago. I was delighted at how the years fell away with grace and ease. John is the fellow in the blue shirt; the guy in red is Bill Lombardo, who was a great friend of Doug's. Bill is a musician from, yes, that Lombardo family: Guy was his uncle.

John and Ngoc Thu live in the south of London most of the time, but they have a new second home near Lyon, France. Ngoc Thu is in dark blue, above. Adrianne, in green at right, is famously petite, but notice that Ngoc Thu is standing on a step, and, even then, is only a little taller than Adrianne. Like Adrianne, though, she packs a very large personality in a very small package.

Grace's step-granddad, Adam's stepfather, Reva's father, Kiana's grandfather, Parris, was there with his wife, Dierdre. They live in Grass Valley, California, now, which is where Diane's parents lived after her dad retired. It strikes me that some sort of diagram of this family's relationships to one another might be interesting. Or maybe even form the basis for a doctoral dissertation in sociology.

Uncle Adam and Kiana.

Through his voiceover career connections, Adam hooked Kiana and Reva up with an agent who now has Kiana doing professional photo modeling. I am not kidding; that's real.

"Sometimes my uncle is just so silly that it's beyond words. Rully, it is."

Adam and Lynda.
If you can, zoom in on the right lens of Adam's sunglasses (the left one, of course, from our perspective here.) You'll see a very proud father in the act of taking a snapshot of two wonderful people.

Adrianne's mom's dog, Jack, and I hit it off very well. He knows a sucker for small dogs -- or just a sucker, period -- when he sees one.

The Trip Home

Gramps heads out (photo by Adam.)

Google Earth perspective view of the trip home (the purple trail, at left.)

Photo position 4:

The trip back involved a ride down the length of Niles Canyon, starting in the village of Sunol (and its old-timey but functioning train station) at the top.

Sunol had its Warhol-McCluhan quarter hour of fame in the early 1980's, when its citizens sagely elected a black labrador retriever, Bosco, to be their mayor. The Chinese were famously not amused. According to this 1990 article in the New York Times:

One of the more unusual attacks on the United States came in February in a sarcastic front-page article in People's Daily and other newspapers, asserting that the idiocy of American democracy could be seen in the election of a dog as mayor of a California town called Sunol.

''Western democracy has reached such a pinnacle that there is democracy not only among human beings, but also with dogs,'' the newspaper crowed. It added that the election ''is a wake-up tonic for those kindhearted people who blindly worship Western democracy out of ignorance and naivete.''

Bosco, they hardly knew ye.

Photo position 5 (you'll have to go back to the first map to see this location; it's very nearly all the way back home in Boulder Creek):

Fog drifting into the San Lorenzo Valley.

The Jeep rattled home, over the Saratoga Gap on Highway 9, past this vista point (which we elegantly call "pee point" because of its handy latrine) at nearly sundown, with the Pacific's natural air conditioner flowing into the valleys of the redwoods. It had been a very good day, with the notable exception of the absence of my girlfriend.

And the absence of my older son. You didn't think you'd get through this entire post without mention of him, did you? Not yet, no, not yet.

Thank you, gentlemen below. I couldn't have done it without you.

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

"The colour in those photos has held up remarkably well."

2008-06-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

The quoted sentence in this post's title is from a comment ronniecat made in the previous post, which included several images from slides more than 40 years old.

The "just taken yesterday" appearance of those slides is due primarily to two causes. First, my Dad's meticulous attention to detail, cataloging, and archiving. His slide collection is housed in a number of hand-made boxes, designed to keep the slides immobile, in order, and away from light and other contamination.

Dad's slide box #2

The other cause is this:

The Nikon Coolscan V.

... no, not the bear, but the gizmo the Alcatraz bear is sitting on: our slide scanner. The scanner and its associated software can do miraculous things for old slides. Through a combination of hardware, software, and a database of emulsions' aging characteristics, Dad's thousands of old slides are coming back to life. Here are two examples from the last post, the ones I called "Beach frolics" and "Mom and me in a roadside diner." Both photos were taken in April, 1961.

"Beach frolics" raw scan: this is pretty much what the slide would look like now if projected.

"Beach frolics" after the scanner removed most of the physical flaws in the slide: dust, scratches, etc.

Physical flaw removal seems to be accomplished by way of an infrared sensor that detects items above or below the surface of the emulsion (dust and scratches, respectively, for example) and proprietary software that "fills in" those areas according to the characteristics of the surrounding healthy emulsion.

Final stage: "Beach frolics" after software color reconstruction.

Since different emulsions' dyes "dark fade" in different ways, the emulsion type must be specified by the scanner operator. Looks like it worked pretty well for this Agfachrome shot.

Raw scan of "... roadside diner."

This slide had virtually no emulsion damage at all -- no scratches, fingerprints, etc. The reason for its pristine condition is pretty easy to figure out: it's a bad snapshot, one that's exposed well for the sunny parking lot outside the windows, but badly underexposed for the subject itself.

Restoration step 1: color correction and slight general brightening.

Restoration step 2: unveiling detail in the shadows.

This shadow detail restoration is different from simply brightening the image; note that the parking lot is still properly exposed, but the diner interior has been brightened and contrast-adjusted to bring it to life, too. I've elevated the shadow detail here and tweaked the color balance for dramatic effect; this is the more realistic way it appeared in the previous post:

Other examples of slide restoration in this years-long project can be seen here, and there are many, many more options, bells, and whistles in the hardware/software than I will ever learn how to use. But that's okay; the aim for me is to preserve Dad's pictures the way he wanted them to look, and I think we're doing that pretty well.

Side note: the computing resources this project takes up has given me an abiding appreciation for the staggering magnitude of a little 35mm slide's analog data storage. I store each slide's scan in a "raw" format, from which any number of graphics programs can operate on the image. To preserve as much information as possible, I have all of the quality preservation options maxed out, which yields a typical file size for a single slide of about 120 megabytes, and, even at that, I'd bet that I'm not within two orders of magnitude of capturing all of the information on each slide.

Look back at the second slide, the one showing the scanner. Next to the scanner, behind the dancing bears, is a DVD burner. Beside that, with the blue light, is a Seagate 500 gig external hard drive. Those are just a fraction of the data storage and backup that this project uses, but I worry about them. I wonder if the media they produce will even be readable as long from now as now is from when the slides were taken. Oh, well, maybe that will give Grace a hobby in 2056 or so.

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

A Trip South and Back. Way Back.

2008-06-20T23:22:00.000-07:00

Sherwood, evidently trying to run from the inevitable, Myrtle Beach, 1961.

Ruth recently posted this superb entry on her blog, which involved (among much else) reference to what things we hold so dear, outside of ourselves, that we would be irreparably lessened by their loss. Recently, two strikes of wildfire close to Ft. Harrington in the Santa Cruz Mountains have brought that issue into the forefront of our minds as well (as has the much vaster tragedy farther away, along the Mississippi.) The first local inferno was the “Summit Fire” in early June, which destroyed many homes in my friend Karl von Ahnen’s neighborhood, and the second was the fire on Ben Lomond Mountain, within sight of Ft. Harrington, that destroyed homes in the town of Bonny Doon, including this one:

John Steed sifting through rubble that a day ago was home. Photo by Lucjan Szewczyk, San Lorenzo Valley Press-Banner, permission pending.

Two wildfires within twenty miles of Ft. Harrington was enough to spur us to ready ourselves for evacuation. It is just June, and the high fire season hereabouts is generally three to four months from now, three or four months that generally provide no rain at all. This whole area is explosive now, and it’s only prudent to upgrade to “probable” what we used to think of as “unlikely.”

So we prepare to evacuate. And the first thing to do is to decide what we can’t do without, and what we couldn’t live with ourselves for leaving behind.

We can’t do without each other, so we’ve established all connection possibilities for any time of day. We couldn’t live with ourselves if we hadn’t arranged for evacuation of all of our mammals (sorry, chickens), so their portable cages and emergency supplies are right at the front of the shed by where the trucks are usually parked.

So, what else? Insurance papers? No, everything of importance is digitized. Birth certificates? Passports? No, all of that sort of thing can be replaced now without actual pieces of paper involved.

So that leaves photos and my Dad’s voluminous diaries and unpublished stories. And that’s what I’ve been spending just about all of my “free” time working on for the last month: backing up, duplicating, and distributing in various media to various places all of that stuff.

Along the way, just a few days ago, I ploughed my way through the scanning of Dad’s slides from our spring trip south in 1961. We lived in upstate New York, but my mother’s family was (and is) in Atlanta, so we periodically traveled the thousand miles from Norwich, NY, to Atlanta, Georgia, usually at Christmastime and Easter. By 1961, we had settled into a Spring auto trip routine that would continue annually until 1965: Norwich – Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – Daytona Beach, Florida – Atlanta, and back.

What struck me after a while was how modern all of those photos from 47 years ago looked, and, on further head-scratching, how unexceptional our experiences were compared to what they would have been if the trip had been taken in 2008 instead of 1961.

1961 was 47 years ago. 47 years before 1961 was 1914. I don’t know for sure, since I don’t have access to a collection of home snapshots from 1914, but I’d imagine that the differences between 1914 and 1961 would be vastly more than those from 1961 to now.

I’m not talking about “big-picture” things, like politics, or about faddish things, like zoot suits or hippie garb or parachute pants. I’m talking about day-to-day, grinding, boring, what-life’s-like things, such as how we go from one place to another, how we’re entertained, and whether or not our streets are paved.

For example, in 1914, the trip would have been made by rail, not road. Entertainment would have been by person, not by radio or recording. Roads, mostly would be unpaved, not paved. And so on, and so on, and so on. But the differences between 1961 and 2008, as far as their impact on a pre-adolescent int he back seat, would have been negligible.

So, why was there such a big difference between how we lived in 1914 and 1961, but not so much of a difference between 1961 and 2008?

The easy answer would be that we had a huge war between 1914 and 1961 (or two huge wars, depending on whether you treat 1918 – 1937 as an interstice or a breather – machts nichts) that force-fed technological change at an unprecedented rate. But I’m not sure.

I’m not sure that the difference is even real, frankly.

Maybe we always see things that happen within our own lifetimes as familiar, but those before it as quaint and strange. Maybe if I were writing this in 1961, looking back at photos from 1914, I’d be marveling at how different 1914 was from 1867. And maybe it was.

But would one of my ancestors in 1647 think that 1600 was pretty modern, but 1553 was odd?

Dunno. But here’s your challenge: can you identify things in the below photos from 1961 that mark them as from then, not from now? Have at it in comments, folks.

Brookgreen Gardens, 1961.

Shuffleboard with my Mom in Daytona Beach, 1961.

Beach frolics, 1961.

Now that I actually am over 60 and bearded, I don't find this quite so amusing.

Mom and me in a roadside diner, Florida, 1961.

Visiting relatives near Orlando, 1961.

Edith Johnson Murphy (my maternal grandmother), Mom, and Carolyn, Atlanta, 1961.

Dad and me at a motel swimming pool in Virginia on the way home, 1961. This is the precise way that I even now view his and my relationship to one another.

Like Flies, I Tell You [Updated anew]

2008-06-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

Another salute:

To Theriomorph.

First, Chris Clarke rips Creek Running North away from us like a bandit snatching a purse strap from our necks, breaking the fabric's cords without concern for the neck below them.

And now the Theriomorph backs away from the blogosphere, more slowly, more hesitantly, but gone none-the-damn-less.

I'm pouting now. I'll have to adjust the blogroll here, but not right away.

Update, June 7th: I couldn't throw them off, so I made them emeriti (see "Blogs Emeriti" on the sidebar.) And, as long as I was fussing with the blogroll, I added one that should have been there long ago: see "Vicki" at the end.

Update later on June 7th: Another blogroll entry that's long overdue is Mary Ellen Carew's. Check the third slot in the blogroll (which is alphabetical.)

The Weekend of MayToJune

2008-06-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

These are the times that we live for, really. Times like this, simple times but so keen that they chisel, not write, in our memories. Not big deals. Probably nothing special.

Just the reasons for our being.

Kelsey, Jax, Grace, Adam, Lynda, Scout, Emma -- Big Basin State Park, California, June 1, 2008

This past weekend, Adam and Lynda brought Grace and her friend, Scout, down to Boulder Creek for the weekend. (Grace is my granddaughter, Adam's niece, Doug's daughter, and Scout is that special friend we all wish we had when we were five. Lucky Grace: for her, Scout is real.)

Grace (in pink) and Scout

Scout loves animals -- so, of course, she loved Ft. Harrington. Emma loves little girls -- so, of course, she loved Scout.

Emma and Scout

Grace and Scout gathered eggs from our girls on Saturday evening:

Adam, Grace, Diane, Scout, and the spaniels. Note Scout's stylish footwear. And that all of her gathered eggs are in one basket.

Ever since this entry in SherWords, Adam had been itching to get at the Brown Box of Lost Photos. Here, he dives into it:

Adam, Diane, Lynda, Scout, and the spaniels

Treasures he found there include:

... himself in 1981, and...

... his brother (as an infant) with their Uncle Bob Kroeger, forty years ago. Bob is now, among many other things, the only professional croquet player I know. Note that baby Doug is swaddled upon a guitar case, a simple variation of Chekhov's gun.

Later that Saturday evening, after Lynda, Adam, and the girls had retreated to their rented cabin in Boulder Creek, the animals all seemed oddly agitated and happy simultaneously. Here, twitchy, nearly-feral Finn (the orange one), approaching his first anniversary here in the Fort, snuggles up with big, goofy, wonderful Cooper:

Finn and Cooper

The next day (today, June 1st), we all went for a little walk in Big Basin State Park, only a few minutes' drive from Ft. Harrington and Boulder Creek. This little outing proved well the fundamental nature of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels: they are bred to adore children.

Jax and Emma. They are both offspring of Sandy Drake's Kanga (officially, GardenGate Beach Rose), SierraView Kennels, Fresno, California.

Scout and Grace, Big Basin, June 1 2008.

When Diane and I take the dogs for their walks, Kelsey is, of course, all business. ("Of course" because old Kelsey is all whatever-he-thinks-business-is all the time, awake or asleep.) The little spaniels, though, are usually kind of put out about the whole dirt and exercise and trouble thing; they'd rather be at home resting on their pillows or eating bon-bons or whatever.

Except when children are involved. Then they spring into excitement, puppy-hood, and mega-sparkles. Really. It's like somebody flips a switch.

Jax and Emma were in spaniel heaven this afternoon, each having a five-year-old girl at the other end of the leash!

Scout and Jax.

Grace, Scout, and spaniels

Scout and Emma

Grace and Jax

An image branded in memory. (Needs to be viewed at higher resolution -- click on the image -- to be appreciated.)

While all this was going on, Adam was wielding a video camera. A five-minute video (and audio) amalgam of our time in Big Basin Park will appear here when I figure out how to make that sort of thing work here on Blogger now:

Coda: Brian, I haven't forgotten the astronomical posts I've promised you, and they will appear, I promise again. Life, as you know, just sometimes gets in the way, and sometimes joyously.

A Salute

2008-05-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

Creek Running North, Chris Clarke's magnificent blog, ends its five-year run today.

Thank you, Chris. Thank you so very much.

Hey!

2008-05-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

Ruth and Mrs. Peterson are excused from this admonition, but, for the rest of you:

HEY! Are you ever going to visit PicShers, or what? I've been busily posting a picture a day over there, and that due diligence deserves at least a daily snore from you guys, hey?

For Ruth: a picture of me in Myrtle Beach, 1958.

C'mon now. Especially anybody who might be, oh, I don't know, related to me.

Grumble.

Another Ordinary Day in May

2008-05-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

Last year’s ordinary day in May was followed by a significantly extraordinary one. I don’t anticipate that this one will be so eclipsed.

Chris with Emma and Kelsey

The most noteworthy thing about today in Ft. Harrington was that our longtime UPS delivery guy, Chris, delivered his last package to us. His “last package” as in his last delivery, period, to anybody. He is retiring, and saved his last package (a chaise frame, in the cardboard box) for Ft. Harrington. The dogs love him, and vice versa, clearly.

The second most noteworthy thing about today in Ft. Harrington is that our garden roses have started blooming:

But they were preceded by the wild ones – a strain of pink vine roses that permeates this valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They bloom only once a year, in May, but when they do, they festoon the whole valley in a lovely extravagance. Here’s one of those wild vines, one next to our largest shed :

After sunset, when yard work was no longer on my plate, I scanned a few photos from the brown box. I’m going at it in a brute-force order: from the top of the pile in the box on down toward the bottom. Adam wants to go through the box’s contents, and when he does, maybe we’ll come up with a more logical order. But, for the time being, it’s pretty much random:

Adam on the day of his 6^th grade graduation, 1982.

Sherwood and Doug applauding Adam’s high school graduation.

Sherwood and Mary Marsh, Australia, 1986.

Mary Marsh (nee Porter) was one of the clients on the ASP’s Australia astronomy tour for Halley’s Comet in 1986, and she and I hit it off pretty well. This photo is from the end of the tour, in Cairns. Mary’s stepfather was Rogers Hornsby, a Hall of Fame baseball player, and a notorious curmudgeon. Mary transcribed his last two books from his spoken words, and, after the Australia tour, sent me a couple of tokens from her collection:

Good luck, Chris! And bless you, Mary, wherever you are.

... Cloudy Dreams, but Real

2008-05-04T22:17:00.000-07:00

Highway to Kata Tjuta, April 1986

Two of you (and you know who you are) have been checking in on PicShers frequently since it started two months ago. Those two wonderful folks have, no doubt, noticed that the pictures’ dates are either before 1965 or after 1999. There are multiple reasons for that, none of which I’ll go into right now.

But that’s about to change.

In this entry of PicShers, I reproduced a photo of me taken by a now-famous professional photographer, Roger Ressmeyer. Problem was, the only copy I had was a damaged print that had been clamped in an oval frame since 1989. I went searching for another copy, and, in an attic here in the Fort, found it in a bonanza box:

An attic of my life

Hidden up in the rafters, unopened in at least ten years, was this plastic box. It contains hundreds of photos and negatives, ones I had lost track of. Since 1965 and until the digital age, my “serious” photography was all monochrome, hand-processed. Occasionally, though, I’d run a roll of color print or slide film through my old SRT-101 (yes, the same camera body served me for those decades), or I’d have a roll of Tri-X that I didn’t want to hassle with in the darkroom. Those rolls went to the drugstore, or werherever, and were then stashed away in this box. And then forgotten.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time scanning the box’s contents for a good long while now. Here are a few early returns:

Adam at a company picnic for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, circa 1984.

Adam and Doug at Black Diamond Mines Regional Park, 1981.

Violist and magazine production savant Janet Doughty, Oahu, mid-80’s.

Bush cracker plane, 1986 {click to read the logo.)

Roger’s picture of me.

The photo that triggered the search was the above snapshot. Roger Ressmeyer had been a paying participant in a two-week astronomical tour of Australia in 1986, timed for the closest approach of Halley’s Comet, for which I was one of two astronomical “experts.” (Roger, then, was just at the beginning of his career, having had some success as a San Francisco rock scene photographer, but anxious to branch out into other areas, especially space science.) By the time we reached Cairns at the end of the tour, we were all just completely worn out, and we had a few days of rest and relaxation programmed in before flying back to the US. Roger and I and many others took a ferry out to the Great Barrier Reef, and on the way he borrowed my camera. Once.

He pressed the shutter button once, and once only, and handed the old Minolta back to me.

Most readers of SherWords can’t know this (of course Adam can, though), but that one press of the button produced the best photo of me – in ways more important than whether or not it’s “flattering” – ever taken.

That’s what makes Roger and others of his ilk special, no matter what their medium happens to be. The rest of us can come up with a good, even special, product after great effort and iteration. The greats start iterating where we are satisfied.

Astronomical Moose & Murder

2008-04-23T00:44:00.000-07:00

Over on the Nellie Blog, Mike Peterson recently posted an article about the hazards Moose pose on Maine’s roads. My students are dealing with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion at this early point in the Spring quarter. I watched an episode of one of the “Law and Order” tv cops-n-robbers franchises last night in which the old “motive-means-opportunity” method of identifying murder suspects was invoked. These three items, weirdly, are not without connection.

Tycho Brahe had a moose.

Brahe (1546 – 1601) was the last and the greatest of the pre-telescope astronomical observers. A fabulously wealthy member of the Danish nobility, his island domain between Denmark and Sweden was home to astonishingly accurate celestial position-measuring equipment, which he designed and used from 1576 to 1597. The data he amassed there concerning the positions of the planets against the background of the stars were later used by Kepler to discover the underlying laws that govern the planets’ orbits and to demolish, once and for all, the notion that the Earth was the center of all Creation.

Brahe’s great wealth (at its height estimated to be fully one percent of all the economic power in Denmark) allowed him to indulge many odd whims – including the acquisition of a pet moose. He was proud of the moose, and happily agreed when a neighboring noble asked to show it off at a dinner party in the neighbor’s palace. The party guests happily shared their beer with the moose. Lots of beer.

Lots and lots of beer.

The moose staggered toward a stairway and, I’m sure to the mortification of the guests, disappeared down it. Luckily, no party guest was on the stairway that the creature careened down, or there would have been more fatalities than the poor moose on that evening. It died on the landing, so to speak. The lesson here is that you need to be careful about moose not only on the backroads of Maine, but also on stairs above you. Especially if the moose is drunk.

The moose wasn’t the only member of the Brahe household that was fond of ethanol. Tycho himself had an appetite that was legendary.

He had worn out his welcome in his native Denmark by 1597. I can find two versions of why he lost his estate and his income and his welcome, both of which may be true. One is that his mistreatment of his tenant laborers became too scandalous for the King and the Chancellor to tolerate. The other is that the Danish Chancellor had kicked Tycho’s dog “Lep the Oracle” during a tour of Brahe’s facilities, and Brahe had furiously evicted him from the premises. When the old king, Frederick II, died, the Chancellor, still smarting from the insult, convinced the new Danish king, Christian IV, to evict Brahe from his estate, cut off his income, and invite him to leave the country. In either case, Christian IV determined that something was rotten in his kingdom, and it was probably Tycho, so he was gone from Denmark in 1597 like Barry Bonds from San Francisco in 2007.

So, in 1597, Brahe was without income or country. He was, however, with considerable fame, and Rudolph II of the Holy Roman Empire snatched up the free-agent astronomical major-leaguer, offering him the position of Imperial Mathematician and a palace in Prague. Brahe accepted the offer, and set up shop – without astronomical instruments, but with entourage, family, and big-time street cred for partying -- in Prague in 1599.

Meanwhile, down in Graz (about 600 kilometers to the South of Prague in what is now Austria), a brilliant, strange high-school math teacher was trying to figure out the universe. Johannes Kepler had convinced himself not only that the Earth was a planet, and that the planets all orbited around the Sun, but that the planets were supported in their orbits by an invisible framework of Plato’s five perfect solids nested within one another. The problem was that he just couldn’t make his model fit the reality of recorded observations (Kepler didn’t make any observations himself, being the prototype of a modern theoretician.)

Luckily for Kepler, his school was closed, his books were burned, he was fined ten percent of all his assets, and he was kicked out of the country by an archduke who had switched religious allegiance from Protestant to Catholic. Yes, “luckily,” because that forced him to accept an invitation from Tycho Brahe to join Brahe’s new group of assistants at the Prague palace up North. There, Kepler thought, he would have access to Brahe’s famous but well-guarded data about the planets’ positions and would finally be able to prove his theory concerning the five solids.

But things weren’t quite that simple.

Brahe guarded his data trove from decades past jealously. Moreover, there were several assistants, and Kepler wasn’t the lead dog in that pack. Franz Tengnagel , a mathematician of little talent but a serviceable message-carrier, had grabbed the top assistant’s position by marrying one of Tycho’s daughters. Also, Kepler apparently had a priggish attitude concerning the nonstop party atmosphere in the palace and its petty intrigues. In Carl Sagan’s words, Kepler and Brahe “repeatedly quarreled” and the “synthesis of observation and theory, which is at the root of modern science, teetered on the precipice of their mutual distrust,” and Kepler just couldn’t get his hands on the data he so badly needed, the data for which he had abandoned his life and career in Graz.

But Kepler caught another break. Until then in robust health, Brahe took ill following a party (what else) in early October, 1601. He suffered severe pain and urinary distress until he died on October 24^th at age 54, and fate had opened the way for Kepler finally to obtain the data he coveted. Yep, fate did it, certainly. Sad for Tycho, though, but, hey, that's how things go sometimes, luck of the physiological draw.

Or maybe not.

Until the late 1900’s, Brahe’s death was attributed to his gluttony in one way or another. Sagan, in the above-quoted episode #3 of Cosmos, says in somber tones that Tycho died of “his habitual over-indulgence in food and wine.” Not so. In 1996, a nuclear analysis of one of Tycho’s preserved hairs showed that he died of mercury poisoning, and in a specific and troublesome way. The analysis showed that the fatal mercury had been ingested less than 24 hours before death. The following is from tychobrahe.com:

“In the summer of 1996, the University of Lund carried out a PIXE analysis of hair from Tycho Brahe (PIXE = Particle Induced X-ray Emission). With the PIXE method it has been possible to see not only what substances are present in the hair but also their precise location. If the mercury came from the embalming process, the mercury would be found on the outside of the hairs. If Tycho Brahe had been slowly poisoned by chemical experiments or the gold-plating process the mercury would be inside long sections of the hairs. What the analysis actually has shown is that only one of the hairs contained mercury. This hair was the only one with the hair follicle still attached, and the mercury was present close to the hair follicle. It was inside the hair, which means that it came through the body via the blood. It is calculated that the mercury concentration rose very quickly, in just 5-10 minutes, and that it sank just as fast. This and the mercury concentration's distance from the hair-root, show that Tycho Brahe must have ingested a large dose of mercury about 20 hours before his death. Unfortunately, the analysis is unable to explain the presence of mercury in Tycho Brahe's body. He might have taken it himself as a medicine for his illness. He might have been deliberately poisoned. It is impossible to know for sure. It can only be concluded that he mercury poisoning might have caused his death. The PIXE analysis have been questioned by other scientists.”

Despite that last disclaimer, Tycho was pretty clearly poisoned, either accidentally by taking large doses of mercury-laden medication to alleviate his bladder distress… or by someone who stood to gain from his death.

Four years ago, Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder published Heavenly Intrigue, a book in which they connect the tv-recipe of motive, means, and opportunity to point the finger of blame for Tycho’s death straight at Johannes Kepler. Motive: to obtain data necessary to fulfill his lifelong obsession with determining the underlying support of the planets. Means: Kepler lived in Tycho’s house, knew of Tycho’s dabbling in alchemy and pharmacy and undoubtedly knew where Tycho’s quicksilver (mercury) was. Opportunity: he was famously hovering around Tycho’s sickbed during his last, severe bladder infection, to the extent that he sent letters quoting Tycho’s delirious mumblings to others.

I think that it’s at least equally possible that Brahe self-medicated himself to death, but it’s fascinating to think that Kepler may have committed murder in order to gain his revolutionary insight into the way the universe works.

It’s indisputable, by the way, that Kepler committed another act that would be a felony in the modern world to gain the same end. After Brahe died, Kepler still couldn’t get the data he needed – it fell to the hands of Franz Tengnagel, the fellow who had married Tycho’s daughter.

So Kepler stole it. Flat-out burgled it. And later cut a deal with Tengnagel to avoid legal liability by giving Tengnagel equal credit in the first publication of results based on the stolen data.

You can look it up. Google stands ready to help.

Green Gorilla: A Proud Daddy Moment

2008-04-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

Gorilla in the Greenhouse is an action-packed animated web show that inspires kids to take real-world steps towards a healthier environment. The show is set in a magical greenhouse in San Francisco, featuring a visionary green gorilla and four kids who use their imagination, their network and their music to tackle the environmental challenges facing their generation.
- from the "Gorilla in the Greenhouse" website, launched on Earth Day, 2008

... and Adam is the voice of the gorilla!

Check out the pilot episode by clicking here.

'Scuse me. I have to go grin like a crazed idiot for a while.

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