26 June 26
New Pen, New Ink
A new TWSBI Diamant fine nib arrived along with a bottle of Sepia DeAtramentis Document ink. I took it out yesterday for a spin.
25 June 26
Sister States
There is a story on the front page of yesterday’s Davis Enterprise with the headline “Catalonia, UC sign agreement on research”. The first sentence of the story reads “In 1986 the Spanish region of Catalonia and the state of California fostered the first agreement between the regions as sister states, recognizing the long relationships of culture, geography and climate that exist between the two regions”.
The story describes a memorandum of understanding between University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Catalan Institute of Water Research (Institut Català de Recerca de l’Aigua) to collaborate on research on sustainable water resource management. The president of the government of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, visited California in May and came to the UC ANR offices in Davis to sign the agreement, which incidentally is where Pica used to work.
I’ve known about the sister state relationship for a while now, and as a Californian this story makes me feel validated to be delving a bit into Catalan culture from afar. Coming in August we will be taking a trip to the region and I will learn much more in person.
It is not too widely known but many of the 18th century Spanish explorers and settlers of California were Catalan. Some of these people include Gaspar de Portolá (from Os de Balaguer — my junior high school was named after him) , Father Junipero Serra (from Mallorca), Juan Crespi (also from Mallorca), Pedro Fages (the first European to climb Mt. Diablo, born in Guissona in Lleida Province), and Pedro Font (drew one of the first maps of San Francisco Bay, born in Girona).
24 June 26
Oh My Aching Back
In the early 90s I visited a chiropractor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for some problems I was having in my hands and lower back. The impression I had was that it felt better at the time but the effect faded within hours and the whole experience really wasn’t great — it was more about getting people to come back twice a week until the end of time.
I was recently diagnosed with osteopenia, a precursor to osteoporosis, which I’d like to avoid… and I hurt my back about a month ago, moving an armchair from the sidewalk to the house. (Hey, it was for the cats.) Since it was taking so long to heal, I asked for and was given a recommendation to a chiropractor from my massage therapist — if nothing else, I’d love help with my hip.
The guy I saw this morning used to be a respiratory therapist and retrained as a chiropractor in his 50s — it’s a different experience seeing someone who worked for years within the medical system and has moved to a nearby field. Because he’s trained recently, he’s been exposed to more modern thinking on the subject… it was a much better experience, the adjustments were gentle, and I certainly felt better afterwards.
I will report on the long-term success of this adventure but for now I’m hopeful.
23 June 26
Forty-Three Still At The Ball
In the World Cup we have made it through two of the three sets of group matches — already five of the forty-eight teams have been eliminated from advancing to the knockout stages of the tournament. I will reevaluate whether the expansion to forty-eight teams has been a positive change after it all concludes. The success of the wee island nation-state of Cape Verde (two draws against much stronger teams) has been a delight for all; on the other side of the coin today we got to witness Portugal thrashing Uzbekistan who, like Cape Verde, is also a World Cup debutante. Meanwhile England reverted to form and played to a 0-0 draw today. They are the record holder in 0-0 draws in World Cup matches, with 13.
I would really like to see a team win the World Cup who is not one of the eight who have won it previously. Of the strong candidates under this criterion I am pulling for Japan or Norway. Because the knockout phase starts this time with a round of 32, whoever wins the final will have to win five matches in a row. Chance may play a large factor, especially with the deviltry of penalty shootouts.
22 June 26
Graphite
There was a massive thunderstorm in Philadelphia today, which delayed the start of the second half of the France-Iraq match. We decided to walk downtown to the local art store and buy some graphite pencils.
I haven’t spent too much time with graphite, being a damn-the-torpedoes-and-just-draw-it-in-ink kind of gal, but I’ve signed up for a graphite hatching workshop next Saturday. I looked through my supply of pencils and it was pretty paltry: plenty of colored pencils and even watercolor graphite pencils, but few pencils in the graphite ranges on the materials list.
Testing out these Faber-Castells with a quick drawing of my left hand, I realize I have learned something from my colored pencil work — you have to build an image up with layers. Start soft (or hard, in terms of lead) and darken as needed.
This drawing is nowhere near done but I would do shading all over the hand to indicate the contours and light source. I’m looking forward to this workshop.
21 June 26
The Day In Its Color
While browsing in the public library several days ago I ran across a photography book from 2012 entitled The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America by Eric Sandweiss, a historian at Indiana University. This book describes a remarkable collection of photographs taken between 1938 and 1969 by an amateur photographer named Charles Cushman. The title of the book comes from a line in a poem by Wallace Stevens; the collection consists of 14,500 Kodachrome slides of Cushman’s travels across the United States and a bit abroad. Cushman was a businessman with a lot of opportunity to travel, and he meticulously documented his journeys with his Contax II A rangefinder camera loaded with Kodachrome. This was a time period when most professional and much amateur photography was done in black and white, and color documentary photography was pretty rare then. As such, the collection provides an unusual glimpse in full color of the vernacular landscape of the United States at mid-century. Cushman showed little or no interest in fine art photography, but he had a good eye for composition.
Charles Cushman was an alum of Indiana University, and several years before he died in 1972 he arranged to have his photography collection together with his thorough notes (he recorded the subject and exposure details for every slide he took) donated to the archives at the university. There they sat until 1999 when an archivist unearthed them and realized their value to documentary history. The library got funding to digitize the collection, and all 14,500 slides are available to browse online. Cushman moved to San Francisco in 1953, and I have found it fun to search in the collection for slides of places I know in California.
20 June 26
Volunteers
I somehow have encouraged potatoes to grow in two separate plots, and they keep coming. These were pulled today from a bed I thought was now empty except for the tomatoes. Sigh. It’s likely there are some lurkers that will turn into more plants. Don’t get me wrong, I like potatoes (and we steamed a few to put in a salad yesterday); it’s just that I’d like to observe a bit of rotation so we don’t have nightshades in every bed (I have chiles growing in the other bed where several potato plants are now putting in an appearance).
19 June 26
Out of Gamut
Today Ryan Moulton posted a good article about the colors your screen cannot show you and where to find them in the real world. Computer screens mix colors from red, green, and blue primaries but there are many colors the eye can discern on the color chromaticity diagram that fall outside the triangle defined by the three primaries. Mostly these are greens and cyans.
Moulton provides a guide to where to find these colors in the outdoors. Looking up at the leaves in a deciduous forest glowing in sunlight is one place. The light passing repeatedly through the leaves has the red and blue wavelengths filtered out leaving a pure spectral green at a wavelength of around 550 nm.
Another place is sunlight through depths of pure water. Water rapidly absorbs reds, and if sunlight passes through a few meters of water the color shifts outside of any screen gamut. These colors can be seen from shore when the light reflects off of light sand on the bottom, or from underwater.
Birds and butterflies famously can have intense iridescent colors thanks to the structure of their feathers and wing scales which can have elements that have the same length scale as wavelengths of visible light. Examples of these include peacock tail feathers and butterflies in the genus Morpho.
One needn’t visit nature to find colors that cannot be displayed on a screen. Green traffic lights have a color that falls mostly outside of displayable gamuts. This color has been chosen so as to provide the biggest discernment from red for viewers who are red-green colorblind. Traffic lights nowadays use LEDs which can have quite pure spectral colors.
(Thanks to MetaFilter for the link to the article.)
18 June 26
Shadow Learning
For over three years now I’ve been volunteering to coach an Iranian woman with her English through International House Davis. We have established a deep connection in our weekly sessions. (I have a deep love and respect for Iranian culture and was saddened to hear of Marjane Satrapi’s recent death not to mention the horrific violence inflicted on the country by the U.S.)
I have no ESL training and mostly my Iranian friend and I chat about whatever is going on, which sadly includes politics. But I recently learned about a technique for helping students improve their pronunciation called Shadowing. It goes like this: I read a paragraph in English, then I read the first sentence of the paragraph, which the student then repeats. When we get to the end of the paragraph, she re-reads the whole paragraph.
We are working our way through Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, a children’s novella about the immigrant experience in a depressed midwest inner-city area where people of different cultures are brought together to transform a vacant lot into a garden. Each chapter is written from a different point of view, and they are short enough that we can cover the chapter in the hour or so.
What is especially useful for language learners is that consistent trip-ups become very obvious with this method. English pronunciation of “th”, voiced and unvoiced(/θ/ and /ð/); /w/; and initial s+consonant are all difficult for speakers of Farsi (and Spanish, of course). More subtle are the vowels. I never actually thought about it but I pronounce the “e” in “the” differently whether it precedes a vowel or a consonant, and have been able to detect these minor hiccups and convey them to my friend. Of course my own pronunciation is different from that of native English speakers who have spent all their lives in the United States, so my “little” pronounces the “t’s” as “t’s,” not “d’s.” I hope my friend can live with that. She is delighted with this method, nonetheless, and we are making good progress.
17 June 26
Seeing in Black and White
Every now and then I get inspired to take photos in monochrome with my everyday carry camera. This makes me view the world in a different way, looking for strong contrasts in value and interesting patterns. Black and white photography can point on one hand towards the visually more abstract and on the other hand towards capturing the essence of interactions.
This image from my recent spell of monochrome photography shows the wall of a nearby church building. It is an example of a black and white photograph that does not work at all if it was in color. What one would see in color is a literal wall of red, overwhelming the image’s patterns.