A beautiful photograph for California

Posted on by
Figure 2 - Jason-2 satellite thermographic image of the 2015 El Nino event. From NASA'a Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Jason-2 satellite thermographic image of the 2015 El Nino event. From NASA’a Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in the public domain.

California was made photographically famous by the f/64 group culminating, if I dare say so, in the glorious work of photographer Ansel Adams.  But in the present climate, I think that we need to admit that the photograph of Figure 1, a Jason-2 satellite thermographic image of the currently forming El Niño event for 2015, recently released by NASA’s Jet propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is even more glorious for Californians. Scientists now believe that El Niño is too big to fail! With that comes the prediction of a wetter than normal winter, something that drought-ravished California desperately needs.

 

Standard Post Format

Posted on by

Adventure_47The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Black walnut

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Black walnut, Fresh Pond Reservation by Lusitania Field. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – Black walnut, Fresh Pond Reservation by Lusitania Field, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Over the last few weeks at Fresh Pond the black walnut trees have been fruiting. These are wonderful green spheres, beautiful in their geometric simplicity, that make a major mess if you step on them. But they bring back memories of graduate school days in Ithaca. The Cornell Plantations, which is a university arboretum, has a grove of these trees and they harvest them every fall. But more significant is that they used to, I don’t know if they still do, serve the most tasty black walnut ice cream at the Cornell Dairy, made, of course, from university cows (Big Red Cows). Yummy! I want to race back and see if I can get some right now. This is the time of year hen the first flakes fly in Ithaca, NY.

The picture of Figure 1 I took of some yellowing leaves and some beautiful examples of the nut pods still clinging precariously to the tree. It turned out best in black and white and almost as a silhouette in reverse. That creates and abstract and dreamlike quality which fits my personal memories so well. Other readers, who were there, will have their own favorite flavors. Mine was black walnut.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 84 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/1000th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation

On phorgeting your child’s phone number

Posted on by

We have spoken often in this blog about the machine-to-human and human-to-machine aspects of the modern world as we approach the singularity. To me it is a matter of dealing with the inevitable. You’re not going to stop or reverse the trend. It is much like time and the tides, in that they wait for no man. And really, the issue seems to be not so much a resistance to change but a resistance to the speed of change, which prevents us from taking the usual time to process what is going on. Of course, that’s the whole point. Isn’t it?
This morning I read a fascinating piece by Sean Coughlin, Education Correspondnent on the BBC News entitled “Digital dependence ‘eroding human memory’” Now there’s a subject close to my heart and favorite theme.
According to a new study by Dr. Maria Wimber from the University of Birmingham  the trend of looking up information “prevents the build-up of long-term memories”. The study, examined the memory habits of 6,000 adults in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Not surprisingly, they found more than a third turn first to computers to recall information.

The big issue, of course, is what the long-term implications of such reliance are. And the problem that they identify is that push-button information can often be immediately forgotten. “Our brain appears to strengthen a memory each time we recall it, and at the same time forget irrelevant memories that are distracting us,” according to Dr Wimber.

A very marked observation is that among adults surveyed in the UK, 45% could recall their home phone number from the age of 10, while only 29% could remember their own children’s phone numbers and only 43% could remember their work number. This phenomenon has been dubbed “digital amnesia.” To modernize one of those Facebook postings people are so fond of, everyone has a photographic memory, some just don’t have RAM.

It has been argued that humans have evolved a new form of evolution, memetic evolution, where units of memory are created and passed on collectively. So the issue becomes whether the development by humans of digital memory – an extracorporeal form of memory is just a next logical step in this process of this super-evolution or whether we have mentally misstepped and lost our way. Losing your way in terms of evolution usually has catastrophic consequences. It has always struck me that there is a profound ignorance in the belief that we have somehow escaped the inevitable cycles of biological evolution.

Global warming is an example of this self-deception. Parts of the world are becoming precariously hot – precarious that is to support human life. Even a century’s view is myopic on a geological scale. If we predict doom and are a hundred years off in our predictions, the species is just as doomed, and along with it any arrogant view of having superseded biological evolution.

The magic on the pond

Posted on by
Figure 1 - The first color of fall 2015, Litlle Fresh Pond, Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – The first color of fall 2015, Litlle Fresh Pond, Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Well, it is time for nature to work its magic in New England. I went out for a walk along Fresh Pond today, to catch the early fall color. The key to autumn is the reds. The yellows and the recalcitrant greens are beautiful, but it is always as if they would be nothing without the brilliant reds. The first act in this chromatic parade is, believe it or not, the poison ivy, and that abounds with its brilliant crimson shades. But today I was attracted to this little tree along the shore of Little Fresh Pond. I intentionally captured just out-of-focus the surrounding reeds and the deeply out-of-focus pond itself in the background. And like I said, this is just the beginning.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 84 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/2000 th sec at f/7.1, with -1 exposure compensation.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Posted on by

[slideshow_deploy id=’3819’]

Well, there is no denying the fact that in New England summer has given way to fall. We have knocked on the door of October and entered. Here we are excited. This is our most beautiful month. The leaves are just beginning to show their color in a last dramatic performance before giving way to winter. It is time at Hati and Skoll to post our Halloween Gallery. I’ve put it here. But all month long you can also find it among the galleries. These are photographs of Halloween soft sculptures ready for hoards of trick or treaters,

As the Second Witch says in Macbeth:

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. [Knocking]
Open locks,
Whoever knocks!”

The lady, or the tiger?

Posted on by
Door in the shadows, Natick, Massachusetts, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – Door in the shadows, the lady or the tiger?  Natick, Massachusetts, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Last Sunday I posted about the unusual sunlight during my morning walk at the mall. I wanted to share Figure 1 another IPhone photograph that I took that morning. This shows slanting shafts of sunlight and a hidden doorway buried in the shadows. It is kind of a tribute to the IPhone that it was able to pull off the necessary dynamic range for this photograph without my having to activate HDR. The door is just barely visible, but the lines of shadow draw our eyes first to it and then away from it.

Doors are intrinsically mysterious. They relate both to the famous logic problem of which door leads to freedom and the Edward R. Stockton’s famous short story “The Lady, or the Tiger?”

The story takes place in a land ruled by a king who practices “trial by ordeal,” where guilt or innocence is determined by giving the accused the choice of two doors, Behind one is a tiger. Opening that door, well, does not have a very positive outcome. Behind the other door is a lady whom the king has chosen for the accused. The king learns that his daughter has a lover and he is brought to trial by ordeal. The clever point is that the king has solved his problem either way. One door leads to the man’s death the other to marriage with someone other than the princess. The princess learns which door is which. When the man is brought to the arena, he looks to the princess for a hint as to which door to choose. She gives him a discreet signal.

Now herein lies the problem. Will she send him to his death or to the arms of a rival. Stockton in a famous tease doesn’t give us the answer. But instead leaves his reader with the words:

“And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?”

Man the barricades 1848

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Daguerreotype showing the barricades during the June (1848) in Paris. Original in Musee d'Orsay. In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Figure 1 – Daguerreotype showing the barricades in the Rue Saint Maur-Popincourt during the June Days Uprising (1848) in Paris. Original in Musee d’Orsay. In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Following up on yesterday’s post about the first photograph of the sun taken by renowned French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault in 1845, I thought that it would be fun to continue the Parisian theme and consider the daguerreotype Figure 1.  It is a  very unusual daguerreotype in that it is not a portrait but a scene and, it is quite possibly the earliest that illustrates an historic event.  The photograph shows the Barricade in the Rue Saint Maur-Popincourt on June 26, 1848 during ill-fated the June Days Uprising.   Since some readers are sure to ask, the June Days Uprising or 1848 should not be confused with the June Rebellion of 1832, also ill-fated, and the theme of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.”

.”The uprising was staged by French workers from 23 June to 26 June 1848, in response to plans to close the National Workshops, created by the Second Republic in order to provide work and a source of income for the unemployed. The National Guard, under General Louis Eugène Cavaignac, was called out to quell the protests. Over 10,000 people were either killed or injured, and four thousand insurgents were ultimately deported to Algeria. The photograph was published in the Journées illustrées de la révolution de 1848 and is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

If we consider this image in our recurrent theme of captured and frozen moments of the past, moments that connect us across centuries, then it is significant to note that what this image really conveys is passion, political passion. In that regard this now fuzzy, clouded over image is truly remarkable. It speaks profoundly to the inner meaning of photographic and literary record.

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

Victor Hugo

from the Preface of Les Misérables

1862

 

 

Photographic first #18 – First photograph of the sun

Posted on by
Figure v1 - First photograph of the sun taken April 2, 1845. In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Figure v1 – First photograph of the sun taken April 2, 1845. In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

My discussion about Mars yesterday got me looking for the first photograph ever taken of Mars, meaning from an Earth-based telescope, and so far I have been unable to find it. I did however, find the first photograph extant of someone “flipping the bird.” I also found the first photograph ever taken of the sun, shown in Figure 1. In the Geek Zone this daguerreotype is likely to bring shivers because of who took the photograph. It was taken on Apron 2 1845 by legendary, French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault made the first successful photographs of the sun on April 2, 1845. The original image, taken with an exposure of 1/60th of a second, was about 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) in diameter. Not only does it capture several sunspots but you can see their structure and also the rice-like texture of the solar surface, when seen through a moderate sized telescope.