Olé - Chugiak Eagle River Chamber of Commerce Wants Your Thoughts On Closing The UAA Campus There.

Today was the second Friday with my three Olé classes.  As I wrote last week, I'm taking a class on Brain Neurons, one on Photojournalism, and one on the Origins Of English. The Secret Life of Neurons These were the learning objectives in the Brain class.  If you click on the picture it will enlarge and focus better. An easy to share part of the class is this video from the "2 Minute Neuroscience" series on Youtube. This was one of two we saw today: The meaning of intelligence came up today after looked at a chart that showed the ratio of brain weight to body size of many different animals.  It seems one of the dolphins is higher in this than humans.  (Whales have heavier brains, but the ratio to body weight is lower.)  She mentioned that the brain of a certain moth has one part that is highly developed and researchers discovered this was the part of the brain that helped the moth evade bats.  That isn't what I would call 'intelligence' since the moth is not thinking about that, just some part of the brain automatically does it.  Prof. Hannah even said (after class) that the moth can get better at evading bats (at least the ones that don't get eaten first.)  My prior understanding of intelligence was going beyond what the body does automatically.  But as I thought about the different kinds of intelligence Gardiner discusses, some are more like the moth's ability.  Say someone with high interpersonal intelligence.  Perhaps someone's brain is really good at face recognition and interpreting body language, so the person can 'intuitively' know how another person is feeling.  But that person may not know they are better at this than others.  She may assume everyone has this ability.  And she can get better and better at this with more experience.  Is that different from the moth's ability to avoid being caught by a bat?  And  Gardner calls that one type of intelligence.    Perhaps it's the vocabulary that is lacking.  Or is this an ability and when one becomes conscious of it and consciously uses it we can call it intelligence.  I still have to think more about this. Professor Hannah also passed around models of six or seven different animal brains and we were supposed to figure out which was which.  We didn't do too well, but in our defense, we really needed to have them all in front of us at once.  I only ever saw two as they were passed around. Photojournalism The guest lecturer in the Photojournalism class was Scott Jensen, a 22 Emmy award winner who was born at Providence Hospital and eventually went outside and worked in television and has returned to Alaska working with the ADN and KTVA television in Anchorage. Erik Hill, who is the teacher, offered us some links to some of the photojournalism awards that have come out recently. World Press Photo Awards - The winning picture is at the top of the page.  "Crying Girl on the Border" by  Photographer John Moore.  It just eats at me.  Maybe because I've just been with my grandkids and saw the two year old, toward the end of the day start to cry for her mom (who was out of town for work which was why we were there.) Origin of English, On the surface this sounds incredibly dry but it keeps me riveted.  Trying to convey things we covered - like alphabets and  pronunciation of Old and Middle English, well I don't think I can do that.   But here's another video.  This one from the Open University.  But, unfortunately I can't figure out how to embed it here, so you have to go to the link.  It's History of English In Ten Minutes.  The link takes you to the first of ten tracks.  This one on Anglo-Saxon.  Well worth it and shorter than the Neuroscience video. But I can give you some of our homework, which is to find a video of someone reciting the beginning of Canterbury Tales.  Here's what I found with someone reading the old English words, but the modern English translation is there too. And tonight, when I got home, there was an email from Olé with a link to a survey that the Chugiak/Eagle River Chamber of Commerce has about the closing of UAA's Chugiak/Eagle River campus.  Olé offered classes there in the past. Here is my response to question 8. 8. Do you have any suggestions, ideas or options for continuing a UAA campus here in Chugiak Eagle River? Get rid of our governor. Then get Chugiak/Eagle River voters to elect people who strongly support the university and a budget that will keep it thriving (along with other important public services that Alaskans expect.) 157 characters left.

If anyone wants to fill out the survey,  here's the link.  After all, Eagle River and Chugiak went for Dunleavy last November and they regularly send very red reps and senators to Juneau.  Did they think they'd get spared?

Back Home. Olé! Brain Neurons, Photojournalism, And Beowulf

We  left San Francisco yesterday afternoon



and flew into Anchorage last night.

Today I went to three Olé classes at UAA.  Olé is the acronym for Opportunities for Lifelong Education and is set up for older folks.  You pay a fee for the year and can take all the classes you can fit in.  Well, if others don't fill it up before you sign up for the class.

There were two I was waitlisted for were:

• Brain Workings:The Secret Lives of Neurons 
• Photojournalism in the Modern Era

(Links take you to the Olé course descriptions)

Then one more I got in.  And I even volunteered to be the class manager, which I understood to mean minimal extra work - introducing the instructor and putting out the roster.  (I learned today I also need to write a thank you note to the instructor.)

• The Origin of the English Language

My head is spinning.  The brain class was in the planetarium and we saw 3D images of the brain which the instructor Rachel Hannah could manipulate so we could see it from different angles and at different levels of magnification.  She could also add and subtract parts.  She suggested going to brainfacts.org which has lots of interesting info, including a link to a 

3D brain like we saw in class.  You can get to the 3D Brain here.  Do it! Much better than an hour of Facebook or Twitter.  

The photojournalism class, taught by two retired ADN photographers - Erik Hill and  began with a history of the field starting with this picture:

Picture above and text below are from a Business Insider article:

"Boulevard du Temple", a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph of people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least ten minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible.

Then we saw the work of photojournalists over the years.  It seems like war is a photojournalist magnet, or perhaps the pictures are so memorable because they are so horrible.  I did begin to start feeling bad about all the photos I put up here, but then I realized the ones we saw were the best of the best and that all the photographers had taken thousands, probably tens of thousands that weren't  perfect.  

Finally, the English Language class.  The instructor has a very well known name - David Bowie - so as manager I decided to head off questions about the name by playing David Bowie's Space Oddity as people came in.   Since I had my computer with me, I took lots of notes.  I'm a language freak so I enjoyed this class a lot.  He was answering riddles I've never solved about English and its relationship to German and other languages.  It's getting late, so maybe next week I'll put up more.

But we have a homework assignment.  We've got a copy now of the Prelude to Beowulf in Old English and translated into modern English.  We're to find an oral rendition in the old English and listen as we read along until we start getting it.  

OK, I found one with the words on the screen as it's read.  I'll put it here so I know where to find it tomorrow.

It's good to be home.  The snapdragon seeds I planted before we left are starting to sprout.  

Playing With Bread (And Photoshop)

I started here.  Well that's not exactly true.  I started with the sourdough starter to make the bread.

But photographically, I started with this picture.  I took it to photoshop.

I went into filters.  I wasn't sure what I could do with this picture, but I thought I'd see where it would take me.


I went into filters and tried several and they weren't exciting me.  But Paint Daubs had possibilities.

But only if I got closer and played some more.  So first I got closer.

That's more interesting, but not really as compelling as I want.

So let's try curves.  That's a feature in Photoshop where you play with a curve to change colors and light.  It doesn't have precise settings like Filters.  You just have to play until you get what you want.


That eventually got me here.  Much better.




 It's got some Hundertwasser echoes.

The rest was pretty easy.  I just copied this image and went into edit/transform/distort until I got what looked like a flap.  Then I copied it and flipped it vertically so I had the two flaps. I put a gray edge on the flaps because the colors blended too much to see the edges.   And put in a background color and cropped it.  

The final product:  

I guess I could call it bread and nobody but you and me would know why.  The real benefit of this is to experiment and see what I can do.  And I confess, these are all techniques I've used before.  I should just look up Photoshop tricks online to figure out tools I don't know how to use yet.  And my brain needed something other than politics or even just words today.  

Joel Sartore's Photo Ark

 Here's a post I forgot to put up.  We stopped at the Annenberg Space For Photography when we were in Los Angeles.

These posters were on the street light poles on my bike ride to the beach, but I'd never been to the Annenberg.

This museum is in Century City and is free, but parking is $4.50.  But if you get there after 4:30pm, it's only $1.50.  Since it's a small space and it closes at 6:00pm, there's enough time.

Joel Sartore is the photographer.

The photos are magnificent.  I only had my little camera to take pictures of pictures.  This one is a close up of his photo.

Despite humans' greater abilities to think and communicate, those abilities too often are used to destroy the natural habitats of these animals.  Whether by turning natural spaces - forests, plains, jungles, shorelines, wetlands - into farmland, oil fields,  mines, housing, battlefields, or simply cutting the trees or taking all the fish, we have radically endangered a multitude of species.

And that's not to mention how climate change further threatens the animal world.

This exhibit is a reminder of the mass plundering humans have done and the diversity of amazing animals we're likely going to wipe off the face of the earth.   Sorry this is blurry, but it's all I have of this message.

Miscellaneous Bits And Pieces

I've been working on a post in reaction to the Covington High School buzz.  (I'm trying to think of a reasonable name for the many social media/mainstream media phenomena that cause a temporary ringing in our ears, then are gone as something else gets our attention.  This is clearly not a good way to get an understanding of what's happening in the world.  Well, this is my problem.  This parenthetical comment was not what I was writing about, but could become a whole post on its own.  And the Covington post is raising so many issues that I can't tie it all together.  But maybe that shouldn't be my goal, since the world itself is messy.  But the whole point I used to think, was that a blog post should make at least a small part of the universe a little less opaque.)

Also working on the lack of useful instructions for people who sit in the emergency rows in airplanes.

My daughter invited me to her Barrecor exercise class yesterday and it was much easier than the high intensity workout my son took me to three years ago in San Francisco.  After the one - in which I made it through the routines without embarrassing myself - I ached badly for three days.  But today, no new aches or pains.

Today I did a bike ride, which here on Bainbridge Island means lots of ups and downs through big trees.  And water.  There was a raft of water birds at my turnaround spot, and a view of Seattle.

And the sun came out and lit up downtown Seattle across the channel.  Here are two different pictures - one from my old Canon Powershot and the other from my new used iPhone 7.


I like the Canon result better, but maybe it's because I tried to enlarge the iPhone image too much.


Getting good granddaughter time while we're here.







And Murkowski voted to open the government without requiring $5 billion, or is it $7 billion now?

And Dunleavy's new commissioner of administration apparently lied to the a Senate committee about his background.  But, hey guys, he went to a Christian college, that's all Dunleavy had to read.




And finally, I recommend this video be shown at the School Board meeting when they discuss the minimum times kids should get to be at recess and lunch.  Right now it's being whittled down to nothing, which means teachers have kids with way too much unused energy who can't sit still in class.  (I couldn't figure out a way to embed the video itself, so you get the whole tweet.)

#MostWatched Principal gets students up and dancing pic.twitter.com/Yc7cDmtpAN

— CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) January 24, 2019

So, it's not that I don't have anything to write about, rather there's too much, and I'm trying to write the posts so you can read and get the bigger sense of things.  Not easy.  Remember that once each day ends, it's gone.  So don't complain about waiting in line - take those seconds or minutes and enjoy your life.  Try thinking about something important.  Text your members of congress what you're thinking they should do.  Send a note to someone you care about.

[UPDATE 10:14 pm:  And the ADN had an article today about how three major oil companies have carbon pricing already built into their long term plans, the House has reintroduce a carbon fee and dividend bill, and the Senate is working on one too.  There is good news.  But as Vox notes:

"But what’s gone largely unnoticed is that Exxon’s proposal comes with a massive catch: In exchange for a tax, the company wants immunity from all climate lawsuits in the future."]

Camera Fun With Lunar Eclipse

I found a great website that gave me exact instructions on how to use my camera to shoot a lunar eclipse in 2014. You can see the eclipse pictures I got then at this link.  (There were three posts that night and there are links to the other two there.)

But that link (to how to shoot an eclipse with a Canon rebel) doesn't work any more.  I learned a bit more tonight about my camera, but not enough.  And my little tripod just isn't steady enough.  But here are some shots.

Sometimes not being able to keep the camera completely still offers more surreal pictures.

Here's the blood red moon in complete shadow.

I did a much better job in 2014 and recommend looking back there.

A Break From Politics - Campbell Creek Impressions

These photos are of Campbell Creek yesterday late afternoon, modified a bit with photoshop.

From a bridge (near Lake Otis), modified using the posterize filter.

And the same picture using Curves.  (I still use Curves experimentally - I can't really plan the effects I'm going to get.  I probably should look for some lessons online.)

And for those of you who want to see the original.

What exactly do photographers do when they manipulate pictures in programs like Photoshop?  Is this artistry or enhancement or deception?  What you get from the camera - the third picture here - doesn't exactly portray what the original was like.  Aside from the obvious cropping out - in the sense - the rest of the picture, the camera doesn't capture  the light and colors the same way the human eye does.  And, of course, different eyes and different brains see the same scene differently.

This sort of playing around(experimenting may be too pretentious here, though not if people do this more systematically) can give us ways to see things in the scene we can't see with the naked eye.  It can also hide things we might originally see - and if someone does this to deceive, then, well it should be evaluated the way one would evaluate any deception.  How serious was the deception?  To what extent should the victim have been paying more attention?  How badly was the victim(s) hurt?  Those sorts of questions.

Here's another picture of Campbell Creek further down the bike path.  This one is looking south. (The first ones were looking west).

I used the posterize filter to get this one too.

I think many, if not most photographers do some fiddling with their pictures now just to get a nicer looking picture - playing with the saturation, contrast, exposure buttons are the most obvious ways.  Cropping is basic.  But even the earliest black and white photographers played with their images in the dark room to achieve similar improvements to what they had caught on the negative.

All the images are looking down from bridges, into the sun's reflection on the water.

Moose's Teeth and Denali Patterns

I read in my cloud  spotter's guide yesterday that Alfred Stieglitz was the first professional photographer to take pictures of clouds, not just as part of a landscape, but as abstract art.  I guess that encouraged me to follow my druthers as we drove through the park today.  Today's clouds, for the most part, were one mass of grayish haze that the sun tried to burn through now and then, but that also included intermittent rain and snow.   This first one is the mountain above Savage River.

Another snowy landscape.

Snow/Ice on the side of the road.

More formations in ice and snow and dirt as the plowed snow on the side of the road melts and sublimates.

Rocks below the ripples of Sanctuary River from the bridge.

OK, time to get more representational.

A view from the road.

Another view from the road, in an area that had less snow cover.

A magpie flies across Sanctuary River.  At this point a car stopped and a woman asked if anything was moving.  I said, "Just a magpie and the water."  She said, "I love the magpies."  I said, "I see them at home everyday so they aren't that special."  She said she was from North Carolina so she never sees them."  "You're right," I said.  "They are really beautiful birds."  And they are with their striking black and white patterns and their dark colors that turn green and blue in the right light.

But here are much better magpie pics from  my front steps and here in my back yard.  The magpie made it across the river.  A number of years ago my daughter and I watched, at this same spot, a mother moose with a very young calf cross the river.  But the calf couldn't make it up the snow bank on the other side.  The mom tried to push it up, but after a while it got tired and the current carried if off down the river.  It was real life nature.  The mom climbed the bank and wandered off.  No one to to comfort her and I know she had to have feelings about this.  But someone down the river was in for a tasty treat.  The natural world is harsh, which  is why civilization, in its best meaning, is important and worth striving to keep alive and improving.


And while I was hoping to see some caribou today, again we only saw moose, which we can see in our on front yard.   But again, they are still magnificent and fascinating to watch.  Here's last year's calf (I think).

And her mom.  I've labeled this picture "Moose's Teeth" which has a little more meaning for Anchorage visitors.  Moose's Tooth is the most popular place for pizza and beer in Anchorage and also the name of a  peak in the Alaska Range.  She was with the calf eating on the side of the road just a mile or two from the visitor's center.  The elevation is lower here and there isn't as much snow and the vegetation is a little closer to greening.

Bad Camera Day

Yesterday the sky was blue blue.  The water in the park was mirror still.  The pictures were all around me waiting to be captured.  And as I pulled out my camera it got caught on the open sound card door. Damn, I'd left the card in the computer when I downloaded pictures the night before.

But today, clouds bled the richest blues from the sky.  A breeze rippled over the reflections in the water.  The great pictures were hiding.  So here's one from when we were landing in Seattle Monday. I think this is the Bremerton ferry coming into Seattle.

Enjoying Rare Seattle Sun

To my great surprise, the rain ended Sunday morning and the sun came out.












So we walked to the playground.

And then to the museum.

From the Bainbridge Island Art Museum site:

"Serve is a 14-foot hand-fabricated stainless steel fork. This sculpture takes the ideas surrounding the spoons and brings them to the forefront of my consciousness. Serve represents the silent, but giant, role of women in households over generations - lovingly nurturing their families. Serve is about power, but the protective kind.

This large-scale fork also becomes other things – the nude figure, or a flamenco dancer. Gradually it leaves me, the artist – it becomes alive and starts to move on its own."

Move on its own it has.  The person at the desk told us the fork was to remind folks of the people around the world who are hungry.


Note:  The sun was washed out in the original of the tree picture, so I figured I could play around with photoshop's curves and filters to make it more interesting.  And I don't post pictures of my family, so I had to mess with the playground shot too.  And the image of the fork I'd gotten was just too busy, so back again to photoshop.  I like how manipulating the photos shows me things I didn't see with just my eyes, or even the camera.  There were other interesting exhibits but they need to be unaltered, so I may do another post.  Or not.

The New Thai Kitchen, Homegoing to Cleveland and to Ghana, Bending Toward Justice, And Tree Shadow

The Thai Kitchen, after 30 years, was closing briefly to move a few spaces down the mall, next to the Yogurt place that they also own.  That was going to happen after we left in December, and Saturday night we went to see the new place.  Here's Sommai at the stove and some of the flowers for the new opening.

The overall space is a little smaller, but it's new and fresh and it has a door directly to the Yogurt place so you can get dessert after your Thai meal.

And it has some new menu items.  Kow Soi is a great Chiengmai noodle curry that we enjoyed while we were in Chiengmai.  (Transliterations into English from Thai can vary.)  I  Also the new spicy cabbage was good.


Today I got my teeth cleaned and picked up a book at the UAA library.  Coming out I passed the small gallery next to the library entrance and was impressed with the pictures there by Michael Conti.  The sign said he grew up in near Cleveland and last summer went back for a couple of months fine arts residency funded by the Rasmuson Foundation at Zygote Press, ant art printshop.  I liked what he learned to do with his photos.  Here are a couple examples.

There also was this poster for a free lecture Thursday (Feb 1) at the Wendy Williamson auditorium that sounded interesting.  Marika Anthony-Shaw:  Collective Impact:  Bending Toward Justice.   7:30pm












And finally, walking the rest of the way home I had to wonder about whether trees check out their shadows to see how they look.

I'm sure the appreciate the warmth radiating back from the sunlit wall next to them in any case.





The book club is meeting here tonight so I have some cleaning up to do.  I made a Ghanian peanut soup last night - we read Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which follows the generations of two half-sisters - one who is taken as a slave to the new world and one who stays behind in Ghana from the late 1700s to the almost present.  Interesting book, lots of insights, but you have to keep on your toes as the characters change with each generation in two continents.