Compare and Contrast

We had some parties to celebrate my mother's 90th birthday over the Fourth of July weekend in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Between parties, I hauled my camera to the spot where the water tank used to be above the house I grew up in (and where three of my nieces are now growing up).

I love my new camera. It can do everything. And with the help of the few accessories I've gotten for it so far, it can do even more.

One of the accessories I've bought is a circular polarizing filter. One of the things that the filter can do is darken the sky without changing colors since the sky far from the sun is polarized a bit.

The first part of my picture project was to see the polarized filter in action.

First, here is a picture looking west at Burnt Mountain. This picture has the polarizing filter oriented so that it aligned with the sky's polarization. It doesn't darken the sky. 

Now I have rotated the filter 90˚. The sky has darkened and the clouds became more apparent. You can better see the quarter moon just to the left of the mountain (about half way up the mountain).

I didn't do any tweaking of the colors so the greenery has gotten lighter in the second picture since the automatic exposure has compensated for the darker part of the picture.

Another thing that the camera can do is take very long exposures. Here is the same shot (well, zoomed in a little...I didn't really mean to do that) later that day. This was about 10:30 that night and the exposure lasted 107 seconds, not quite two minutes.

If I had had the zoom set the same for the two pictures we should have been able to compare the lengths of the stars' trails to the diameter of the moon in the previous picture. It takes about two minutes for the moon (or the sun) to move its width across the sky. So the stars' trails should be about the same width as the moon. At least for the stars near the equator.

I repeated this exercise with the mountain to the north. First, with minimal darkening from the polarized filter.

And maximizing the sky's darkening.

And a 206-second exposure that night.

Though there is nothing to contrast this picture with, here is a 13-minute exposure of Polaris and its surrounding stars.

To the left of Polaris is a short track of a meteor or a satellite flare. Along the bottom of the picture you can see the dotted line of an airplane's navigation lights as it flew across the shot. And from around the middle of the bottom to the middle of the right side there is a solid line, either a satellite or a meteor (or maybe it's a flying saucer!).

Now I have to make myself a barn door tracker and try to shoot the sky without the stars leaving trails. But then, I don't make it to places with dark skies very often. When you live in the big city, you give up a lot of your stargazing.

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A-TEN-shun!

I usually don't pay attention to ads on web sites. I especially try to ignore the ones that have annoying animations going on. A year or so ago, there were some ads on the New York Times site for Design Within Reach. Their ads were simply their name on a red background. For some reason I checked them out. And spent hours looking through their products. I've gone back to drool over and over again.

I want a second house that we can decorate with contemporary furnishings.

One of the stops of our trip last month was Penzeys Spices in Santa Monica. Just across the street from Penzeys happened to be a DWR store. Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!

One of the things I wanted to see was a miniature of a molded plywood elephant designed by Charles and Ray Eames. The only one they had was in their display case. Jerry bought it for me!

I hadn't heard of Charles Eames and the Eames Chair until Charles Eames gave the commencement address at my college graduation.

I wish I could remember the address. I'm sure it was full of wonderful ideas to help us to do great things with our lives. The one thing I remember is that he showed us his film "The Powers of Ten." My friend Walter Kubilius was excited that we were going to see Mr. Eames and his movie. If it hadn't been for his excitement, I might have let the whole experience pass as just another inspirational speech. Sadly, Charles Eames died just three months after that address.

I'm glad I know a little about the Eameses. And I now have my own little Eames-designed piece. Now I'll have to go back and get a chair.

"The Powers of Ten" is a very interesting little movie. I hope you watch and enjoy it.

Happy Powers of Ten day!

It was Fate

There was a hobby that Jack introduced me to that I embraced completely.

For a long time I was fascinated by the paranormal.

Out of the blue, Jack got me an issue of Fate magazine. I guess I really enjoyed what I read. Jack got me a subscription to the magazine!

One of the first issues I got in the mail really got me hooked.

The article "Table Up! or How to Tilt a Table" got the ball rolling. This is a way to get answers to all of your questions.

It was easy. Three people sit at the east, south and west sides of a card table. You then rub your hands together until they are warm then place your hands on the table so that your thumbs are touching and your pinkies are touching the person's pinkies next to you. You then chant "Table Up! Table Up! Table Up!" After a short time the legs on the north side of the table rise off of the floor! The table then will answer your questions. You tell it to dip up and down to give the answers. For example, for a yes/no question, you could have it dip once for "yes" and twice for "no." I suppose you need to give it an option like three dips for "I'm not telling!"

It actually worked! Three of us got out the card table, sat around it, did the chanting, and, miracle of miracles!, the legs on the north side of the table rose from the floor! It did its dipping to answer our questions!

I can't remember what sort of questions we asked. I certainly don't remember if the answers were very accurate. But it was a miracle that the table ignored the laws of gravity and dipped out answers.

This led me to the 130s section of Mesa Public Library. I must have checked out every book of their paranormal collection.

I investigated dreams. I studied the Tarot. I got a Ouiji board. I read about UFOs. I thought about telepathy and psychokinesis.

A weird thing about the Ouiji board was that whenever Peggy was on the other side of the planchette, the board would give very rude or obscene answers. I guess Peggy was channelling unhappy spirits. I hope they have found their peace.

I never got good at reading the Tarot cards. I probably needed a teacher. Like most of the things I learned outside of school, I was self-taught. Book learning about mystical things isn't the best way to go. The knowledge probably has to be passed empathetically from master to student.

But mostly I learned about testing hypotheses.

I never saw that any of these mystical activities were shown to be real through reproducible tests.

Fate had features where readers would send in their proofs of survival (of this plane's life) and of mystic experiences. Most were rather silly. One woman told about waking up one night to see an otherworldly surgeon operating on her chronically sore hips. She woke up the next morning and the pain she had experienced for years was gone! She had scars on her hips that were proof that she had had the overnight surgery! Even though I was trying to be a believer and I was rather young, my eyes rolled and I thought, "Lady, you have stretch marks. Maybe you lost some weight and your hips aren't working as hard holding you up."

I couldn't be a believer. But I still have fond memories of my time trying to find more in this universe than can be experienced by our five traditional senses.

Red hot poker

Jack's choices of hobbies for me weren't always as successful as beekeeping.

Out of nowhere he gave me a book on how to play poker. I don't remember ever expressing an interest in the game.

The book was filled with the obvious information about the probabilities of filling your inside straights and how likely your two pairs will be beat at a table of four players.

The most interesting parts of the book were about the psychology of the game.

Much of the book was about how to play in a weekly game against a regular group.

We learned how to observe the mannerisms of our friends to understand when they're bluffing and when they have an exceptional hand. We learned how to encourage our friends to give away information through these signals. Of course it taught us how not to have such bad habits ourselves.

It taught us how to win but not win so much that our buddies stop playing. If one of the guys is looking like he's about to drop out of the Friday night game, we were told how to start losing some of our money to him so he'd be encouraged to stay in the game and lose much more money to us.

There were many problems with taking up poker for fun and profit (mostly for profit).

Among them:

1. I was a kid (in high school, but still a kid).
2. Without a lot of money.
3. Who didn't know anybody with money.

But mostly it seemed to be teaching me how to cultivate friendships in order to take as much of their money as I could. That didn't interest me.

There must have been tips on how to win against people we've never played against. But you probably have to get good at the game by first cleaning out your friends' bank accounts.

I never played poker for money.

I wonder why Jack thought I'd be interested in poker for a living at that time.

"Here, little number cruncher, you can make a living at what you're good at."

"Here's something I wish I could have done. Make me proud."

"This is your last best hope."

"Get rich quick."

I'll never know.

Eggs suck!

Yesterday, I made butter. I used Straus Family Creamery cream. They put their cream in an old-fashioned bottles. They want their bottles back so I had to pay a $1.25 deposit on each one.

(By the way, I said that Trader Joe's cream has carageenan in it. That's their cream in the plastic bottle. Their cream in the cardboard cartons is just cream. I've found a convenient source for future butter making!)

As long as I had a milk bottle that is a lot like the ones we all grew up with, just smaller, I thought I ought to use it to do an updated experiment from my childhood. You remember the project, putting a hard-boiled egg in a milk bottle.

I could have done it the way I did it back then but I'll save my pyromania stories for another day.

No, today I did it with the help of one of my modern kitchen appliances, my Tilia FoodSaver Vacuum Sealing System.

I made my second YouTube video in two days! (I've already gotten a comment on my butter-making video from one of my subscribers. He said essentially "meh." I'm crushed!)

Here is how you get a hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle. You just have to find a milk bottle.

If you want a better explanation of what's going on, you can watch this video.