Camera Repairs

The door to the battery and sound card on my Canon Powershot is, well, shot.  First the part of the door that you latch closed so the camera will work, got cracked.  I managed to tape it so it stayed together.  But a short time ago, when I opened the door, it came off completely.  To be clear, there's an inside part of the latch too that's still attached. 


So I bit the bullet and took it to the Camera Repair Service shop.

I don't usually write plugs for businesses, but this is a place where I've been able to go over the years and get straight advice and help with my camera. It's a true "small business" that provides a service that the national franchise places just can't quite give. And it's easy to pass the little mall it's in on 15th, just east of C Street, and miss it completely.

(And I'm sure there's an interesting story behind the 'Norway Alaska' name of this building.)


So I asked Michael, the owner, if he wanted to say a few words about the shop.  There's a neat array of used cameras, including a Hasselblad for sale that you can see in the video.



 And here's his partner at the shop.

I'm keeping the camera until the part comes in.  I still manage to make it close enough that I can turn on the camera.  

What October's Supposed to Look Like

After abnormally rainy days, the sun slid out today, and the sky was blue.


Here's the edge of Goose Lake along the bike trail to UAA.  

 The sun made the birch trunks white, white.

Red crab apples, blue sky, and yellow leaves.  Primary colors.  Sort of.  Wikipedia refines this a bit, but I know from camera stuff that it's gotten way more complicated than this, but it's a start.

"RYB (red, yellow, and blue) is a historical set of subtractive primary colors. It is primarily used in art and art education, particularly painting.^[23] It predates modern scientific color theory.

RYB color wheel

RYB make up the primary colors in a painter's color wheel; the secondary colors VOG (violet, orange, and green) make up another triad. Triads are formed by 3 equidistant colors on a particular color wheel; neither RYB nor VOG is equidistant on a perceptually uniform color wheel, but rather have been defined to be equidistant in the RYB wheel.^[24]
Painters have long used more than three "primary" colors in their palettes—and at one point considered red, yellow, blue, and green to be the four primaries.^[25] Red, yellow, blue, and green are still widely considered the four psychological primary colors,^[26] though red, yellow, and blue are sometimes listed as the three psychological primaries,^[27] with black and white occasionally added as a fourth and fifth.^[28]
During the 18th century, as theorists became aware of Isaac Newton’s scientific experiments with light and prisms, red, yellow, and blue became the canonical primary colors—supposedly the fundamental sensory qualities that are blended in the perception of all physical colors and equally in the physical mixture of pigments or dyes. This theory became dogma, despite abundant evidence that red, yellow, and blue primaries cannot mix all other colors, and has survived in color theory to the present day.^[29]
Using red, yellow, and blue as primaries yields a relatively small gamut, in which, among other problems, colorful greens, cyans, and magentas are impossible to mix, because red, yellow, and blue are not well-spaced around a perceptually uniform color wheel. For this reason, modern three- or four-color printing processes, as well as color photography, use cyan, yellow, and magenta as primaries instead.^[30] Most painters include colors in their palettes which cannot be mixed from yellow, red, and blue paints, and thus do not fit within the RYB color model. Some who do use a three-color palette opt for the more evenly spaced cyan, yellow, and magenta used by printers, and others paint with 6 or more colors to widen their gamuts.^[31] The cyan, magenta, and yellow used in printing are sometimes known as "process blue," "process red," and "process yellow."^[32]

To really get into this from a camera perspective, check out Mark Meyers' Photo Journal post "Calculating Color Space Volumes."

 Yes, that white spot is trash at Goose Lake.  I decided not to photoshop it out. 

Do You See The Employment Glass 92.2% Full Or 7.8% Empty?

The media regularly publish the UNemployment percentage, but rarely the employment percentage.   For those among the 7.8% unemployed, the impact runs from liberating (a very few) to seriously problematic to disastrous.  And economists are quick to point out that another 20% may be underemployed.  But even 72.8% 'fully'  employed, means that a high percentage of people in the US have jobs that fit their qualifications and they receive what some would say is appropriate remuneration for their work.

My brain can't help but wonder, why those who are fully employed (or otherwise economically secure), can't be grateful for their luck in life (to be born into a family situation that led them to be suitable employee (or entrepreneurial) material, to be born at a time when getting a job was relatively easy, having an aptitude and being prepared for the kind of job that hasn't disappeared, etc.) and ready to share a reasonable portion of their economic rewards with those who have not been so lucky. 

Of course, many of the fortunate 72.8% are willing to share.  Even among the underemployed,  there are people sharing their more limited bounty.  They recognize and act on the charitable principles of most major religions to help those less fortunate.

On the other extreme (I'm assuming a continuum) are those who see such sharing of the bounty as foolish rewarding behaviors that lead to unemployment or underemployment - impracticality (ie majoring in art or history), lack of ambition (following their bliss), lack of hard work, lack of ambition.   People like Romney seem to acknowledge economic problems make getting a job hard when attacking Obama, but for the most part, their  seem to believe when people aren't working, it's somehow their fault.  

And I admit to thoughts about people I see around me whose lifestyles exceed their incomes and who then complain when disaster hits - a spouse loses a job, or they lose the spouse, or the housing or stock markets drop.  Relatively few Americans, it seems, given our levels of debt and savings - even before the economy tanked - are able to arrange their lives with the future in mind.  And there are those people who expect, when starting out, to live a lifestyle that took their parents 25 years to reach, without having to work too hard or at all.  It's tempting to ask, "Am I supposed to share from what I saved by living below my means while they spent freely?"  Yes, I identify with the ant more than the grasshopper. And I don't feel an obligation to help anyone maintain an above average lifestyle.  But I tend away from judging and lean to questions about what in their lives caused them to have these expectations and work habits and how do we create a society in which most kids are raised to be able to succeed?  (I'm leaving the definition of succeed wide open here.)

Nevertheless, if we are, as Romney proclaimed in his 47% speech, "the most prosperous nation in history," how is it that we can't take care of those who, for whatever reason, aren't able to make it in the US?  Why can't we provide minimal immediate emergency assistance now, and good schooling and childhood health care for the long run? 

I know, I know, it's complicated.  And Romney will tell us he is compassionate and his path to helping these people is by freeing the market to create jobs.  He sees the waste and inefficiency in government, but not the waste and inefficiency and inequity of the free market.  Neither is perfect.  Both can go terribly wrong.  But each needs the other as a complement, in the right balance.  And that is, perhaps, the crux of the difference between those who swing to the left and those who swing to the right - where they see the right balance.

But, I allowed this post to get hijacked.  Yes, my title focused on the the glass 92.2% full or 7.8% empty question.

But I did want to use this as an example of a recurring problem -   how we as individuals, and collectively as societies,  so often focus on the wrong thing and how that can  distort reality.  The media's constant use of the unemployment figure, instead of the employment figure is one example.

Another comes from Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature which argues that overall, violence is declining historically, but because the media focus on acts of individual and group violence, our perception is that we have become more violent.

I haven't read the book and there is criticism.  And from what I understand, he focuses on the number of people killed in relation to the total population.  That itself, may be a similar distortion.  I understand why it's important to frame things that way.  But even if killings/100,000 people is down, our increased population could mean that more people are killed than in history.  (I don't know that, I need to read more of what he writes.)

As Close As Most Americans Get to Ballet - Dan Bern on Bowling

Part of the charm of a Dan Bern concert is the chatter between songs and the rapport with the audience.  Out North is a perfect venue because it's so small - even with the extra rows in front it couldn't hold much more than 100.

From the Saturday night concert, here's Dan on bowling.

Questions or Answers? Which is More Important?

A day in the park is a story about a character who collects questions and one who collects answers.  They disagree on which is most important.  Brings up some interesting ideas.  There were lots of good panels, but I thought this one the best.

I think it speaks for itself.  The page is perhaps a bit too long, but there are lots of other gems in the debate between the question collector and the answer collector. 


Meanwhile Sunday was a heavy grey wetness. 

Dan Bern, My Favorite Songwriter/Singer, Packs Out North Friday Night

As I've said in previous posts this week, I first experienced Dan Bern performing in 1997 at Loussac library.  He blew me away. 

He carries on the tradition of Gutherie and Dylan's songs that commented on the state of the world.  Long narratives in a singing style that . . . well the first time I heard him, he came out and sang, then stopped, and said something like, "Some people say I sound like Dylan . . . but  you don't do you?" with a big grin on his face.

What struck me then was how his songs started with  unexpected premises and then wandered through a stream of conscious jumping from topic to topic, all the while telling the story.  Not unlike some of my blog posts.   "If Marilyn Monroe had married Henry Miller" for example.  These are sophisticated musical musings that are funny, thought provoking and musically seductive.  Sure, everyone knows who Marilyn Monroe is, but you also have to know who Henry Miller was and that Marilyn Monroe was married for a while to Arthur Miller (and who he was).

The Wasteland, one of my favorites from early on, wraps up the dilemmas of an age in evocative words and music that starkly express the darker side of American dream.  It starts:

Wasteland

Sound Clip

I saw the best of my generation playing pinball
Make-up on, all caked up 
Looking like some kind of china doll
With all of Adolf Hitler's moves down cold
As they stood up in front 
Of a rock and roll band
And always moving upward and ever upward
To this gentle golden promised land
With the smartest of them all 
Moonlighting as a word processor
And the strongest of them all 
Checking IDs outside a saloon
And the prettiest of all 
Taking off her clothes
In front of men 
Whose eyes look like they were in some little hick town 
Near Omaha 
Watching the police chief 
Run his car off the side of a bridge

 

He just tells the story and let's the audience work out what it means.

He also has a lot of baseball songs - including one about Pete Rose, the Hall of Fame, and betting, and another one I heard the first time Friday on Armando Gallarraga's perfect game stolen by umpire Jim Joyce's bad call on what should have been the last out.  Another on the golden voice of Vin Scully. 


 These photos were taken at Friday night's concert.  The purple shirt was before the break. 

Patrick McCormick stood in for his Dad Mike, the founder of Whistling Song productions which has been bringing up folkish musicians to Anchorage for a long time.  Mike's knowledge of music and hospitality has been the main reason we've had so many good musicians playing here.  Many, like Dan, have stayed at the McCormick's house when they were here.  Dan's talked about it being a wonderful change from most tour stops, being able to stay with a family.  And he's watched Patric grow up over the years he's been coming to Anchorage.   Patrick told a story about Dan coming to one of his basketball games when he was in the third grade. 

Having spent a good part of the week at the songwriting workshop and two concerts, I've got lots more to write and not enough time.  Rather than write one long, long post that won't get up til Wednesday or Thursday, let me stop here and I'll add more later.

What Would You Do If Your Daughter (Sister, Wife, Mother) Went Missing

I read about this in the ADN when Valerie first disappeared and was mildly disturbed.  I stopped at Granite Creek campground on my way back from Hope a month ago.

  It's a beautiful spot.  Lots of green and trees along the creek.  It's close enough to the Seward Highway that you can hear the traffic if the wind is going the right way.

But it's one of those places where you can escape from the everyday and surround yourself in nature.

I stopped there because I knew that Valerie disappeared there.  I walked around thinking about people disappearing.  About times when my kids weren't home when they were supposed to be.

Then I got a comment on a post yesterday.  I'm not usually sympathetic to people using comments to post something totally unrelated.

"Great post.
Sorry to hijack your comment section. Post and forward, if you don't mind. Missing person search on Sunday.
http://callanx.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/search-on-sunday/
Thanks."

It takes you to a website of Girdwood snowboarder Callan Chythlook-Sifsof who's aiming for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. 

There are too many women missing in the world.  Too many abused and beaten.  There are so many ills in the world that need our attention, yet we can't focus just on them.  We need to live and enjoy life as well.  Our lives are busy.  But we all need to put aside some time to help make the world a better place.  Like helping Valerie's family. 

We don't know what happened.  If someone else was involved, if she simply got lost and/or hurt.  But you know this family is still hurting badly.  It always seems so far away, until it happens to you.  What would you do?  It doesn't have to be this issue, but if you aren't giving time to others, in some small way, please do.  I'm guessing, most readers here are already giving back more than their fair share.  Thanks.

Fall's Hanging On, But Winter's Already Claimed the Upper Hillside

It's definitely fall in Anchorage, with winter having already made a preview appearance.

The geese are packing meals for their flights south. 

The cottonwood leaves cover our back yard, though, if you look closely, the amur maple leaves are still on the tree (on the right.)  The come out later in the spring too.

Up at Powerline Pass, the snow we had in town stuck.  This was Sunday evening. 

Live Fact Checking, Variations of Facts, Values, and Lies

The New York Times plans to blog live fact checking during tonight's presidential debate.

Here and Now had a segment on retired college professor ,Vicki Meyer, of Sarasota, Florida, who's collected 215,000 signatures with a SignOn.org petition, asking for live fact checking at the debate.

SignOn.org flew Meyer to Washington, D.C., to present her petitions to the Commission on Presidential Debates, but Meyer said they wouldn’t meet with her. She couldn’t even get them to accept the box of petitions.

The plan was to give the fact-checking results to the moderator during commercial breaks and let them do what with them what they chose and to have the results flash on the screen.

The online Oxford Dictionary offers this definition of fact:

"a thing that is known or proved to be true:"

But in more formal debate we have

• factual premises (that theoretically can be prove true or false, i.e. the cost of the U.S. military in Afghanistan for a year, whether Obama was born in Hawaii) and  
• value premises (beliefs about what is good or bad, such as "the death penalty should be abolished" or "the health benefits of no smoking laws outweigh the loss of personal freedom they cause").

Things go downhill from there.

I raise this because fact checkers will probably have some difficulty proving things on the fly.  So let's look at some of the intricacies:

1. Obvious facts that can be proven true or false easily.  This includes things like a candidate's birthplace, whether a candidate said his favorite food was enchiladas in New Mexico and cheese in Wisconsin.  But how fast can these things be found, and what triggers a fact checker to have a doubt that needs checking?
   
2. The hard to prove facts which rely on interpretation.  
1. How much did the US spend on the war in Afghanistan in 2011?  Which numbers do you count?  Just the military budget?  Just for that year?  What about costs of equipment that would have been purchased even if it wasn't used in Iraq?  Or soldiers who spent six months in Iraq and the rest of the time elsewhere?   Is this only about dollars or is it also about the impact on the mental health of soldiers and their families?  About health care to treat problems of Afghanistan vets for the rest of their lives?  Of damage done to Afghan infrastructure?  Or lives lost in Pakistani?  Or the environmental damage of bombing or all the fuel used in the war?  
2. Will the US better better or worse off because of Obama's health care legislation?
   
3. The hard to prove facts because the evidence is incomplete or inconsistent.
1. Did the defendant commit the crime?  
2. Is your boyfriend cheating?  (How do you each define cheating?)
3. Is this really organic?
4. Will a glass of red wine three times a weak decrease the likelihood of a heart attack?
   
4. Lies versus Errors  -  Here we get to intent.  
1. Did she believe what she was saying was true?  
2. Is it better to not know you are wrong than to know the truth but lie anyway?  Or said another way:  Is ignorance better than lying?
   
5. Kinds of Lies  -  Let's define a lie as something the speaker knows is not true, but intentionally says it.  There's a wide variety of kinds of lies, starting with "You look great."
1. There are the lies people told the authorities to protect Jews during WW II.
2. The lies undercover agents tell to gain the confidence of drug dealers.
3. There are lies people tell to get sex, to get jobs, to get better grades or to get elected.  

This is just a short list.  Another complication is that each of these categories can overlap with another.


But parsing things out into details like this also makes it easy for liars to find cover in all these clarifications.  Fact checkers, the good ones anyway, do know the difference between big, obvious lies, and those situations that are more ambiguous.


As a final thought, I found the etymology of 'fact' at the Oxford Dictionary online to be an interesting twist:

late 15th century: from Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere 'do'. The original sense was 'an act', later 'a crime', surviving in the phrase before (or after) the fact. The earliest of the current senses ( 'truth, reality') dates from the late 16th century

Dan Bern Songwriting Workshop Anchorage Evening 2

 I took Mariano's digital art class after seeing what he did digitally to photos.  I thought, I can take photos and then play with them.  What I didn't quite realize was that it was an art class and the other students were serious artists.  An early assignment was to use a couple of the photo shop tools to draw a picture.  I started with a very simple round flower with roundish petals and a simple stem.  But I noticed the screen next to me had a perfect cowboy boot with all the details.  The screen on the other side had a great human figure.  I realized I was out of my league.  But Mariano encouraged me saying these people have to adjust from their normal medium (oil, or water colors, or charcoal) to digital and I would be starting with digital.  In the end it worked out reasonably well.

Dan's standing on the left

But at least I believed I had a visual sense, even if I couldn't execute what I had in mind, at least I had something in mind.

Music is different.  I don't think aurally.  Tunes don't pop into my mind.  I'm just not musical.  But the song writing workshop is forcing me to confront one of my own stereotypes about myself.  Don't get me wrong, there are serious song writers and musicians in this class and compared to them, my musical talents are, politely, in the most formative stage.  But I didn't completely bomb in the workshop Monday or last night.

Monday Dan talked about how little children go around merging words and melodies that they spontaneously create.  It got me thinking.  He talked about speech and singing not being that far apart.  Certainly not opposites that some imagine.  He said I should just relax.

I thought about students I've had who told me they were 'just not good at math.'  I'd always ask them, "Which teacher did this to you?"  and 90% could give me a name and a grade without a pause.  I still remember one student holding out his hands for the ruler as he said, "Sister Margarita in 5th grade."

And the light went on that I've been going around saying I'm just not musical.  OK, I admit the oboe and I were not a good match, but I shouldn't have given up on dating music.

All this is preamble to my fortune cookie based song.  (See the previous post.)

This group's work sparkled

I ended up choosing the numbers in the fortune rather than the words.  The first three in the sequence were 03 14 29 which I immediately translated into March 14, 1929.  I googled it and came up with obituaries of people born on March 14, 1929.  The first was just birth and death dates with locations of each.  Toronto and Desert Hot Springs.  I imagined a song that filled in the gap.  I found a woman who was born and died in Lufkin, Texas.  There was a little more about her.  A guy born in England who died in Santa Maria, California with a whole career and family.  Who were these people, did their lives cross paths?  There were all sorts of possibilities.

Getting further into the google results brought the fact that Mickey Mouse's 4th cartoon was released on March 14, 1929 - The Barn Dance.  Clearly, Disney had no idea who Mickey would become and Minnie ditches him for Pete, when Mickey can't stay off her toes.

And then there was this post on a German Einstein website:

In 1920, after Einstein's achievements had been widely recognized, Ulm also wanted to honour him. Thus, for example, in 1922 the decision was made to name a yet to be constructed street after him. Even though in Nazi-Germany this street was renamed Fichtestrasse (after Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814, a German philosopher), it was named Einsteinstrasse again in 1945. On the occasion of his 50th birthday on March 14, 1929, Einstein was informed in a letter of congratulation by the then mayor that the city of Ulm had named a street in his honour. With respect to the Einsteinstrasse Einstein remarked in his reply: "I have already heard about the street named after me. My comforting thought was that I am not responsible for whatever is going to happen there." Between 1920 and 1929 a lively exchange of notes between Ulm and Albert Einstein developed which, interrupted by the political situation in Germany, was only resumed in 1949.

In 1949 Ulm wanted to grant Einstein the rights of a freeman of the city. Einstein however declined, pointing to the fate of the Jews in Nazi-Germany.

But how to put this all together?  I could focus on the day, but I also wanted to trace the paths, beyond the day, of those born on March 14, 1929.  And I had to try to sing it the next day in the workshop.

I ended up focusing on the Einstein story.  The line about taking comfort knowing he wouldn't be responsible for what happened on the street had a bittersweet sensibility.

Dan had told us Monday, in answer to a question about the problem of writing a song and finding out that someone had already written the melody.  The difference between a real songwriter and everyone else, is that the real songwriter will simply change some things here and there and call it his own.

And using the Mexican hat dance as the tune for our moose encounter songs Monday also showed me 1) how useful it was to have some structure, a skeleton,  like that to hold the words onto and 2) how hard it was to mesh - in my head -  the rhythm of the existing song to the rhythm of my newly created lyrics.

So, I decided to lift a Dan Bern song as my skeleton.  His songs are mostly stories put to music, but they do have melodies.  But I have to listen a few times to get them into my head. I picked Dan's Rome, from the "Dan Bern" album.  I tried to write lyrics, but the words from the Einstein website didn't flow with the music.  I had to start chopping back, finding words that were shorter, that had some rhyme.

I figured with my singing ability and the extra syllables here and there, no one would know where it came from.  Here's part of what I did compared to the lyrics of the original song.  I think I need another week to get this working.   But it's as far as I got before class.

March 14, 1929	Rome
Einstein got a letter from the Mayor of Ulm On the fourteenth of March Nineteen Twenty nine It wished him a happy Fiftieth  Birthday They gave him a street on which kids could play. Ulm was his birthplace Ulm was his past Ulm was the city That’d he’d return to last.	We pulled into Rome With blood in our eyes After days of travelin' Months of lies Taking our various Turns at the wheel Taking booze And pot and cigarettes. . . Rome was a bust Rome was a scream Rome was the final Rapid eye movement To this dream

HTML Tables

The Rome link gets you to the song so you can hear how it goes.

My last lines, which I left out here, just never could capture the Einstein quote.  Again, I need to find a totally different way to say it.

I also tried to throw my inhibitions to the draft and just sing.  Just as I'm doing here posting these lyrics on the blog.  This is a learning activity right?  The only lines that really work for me are the first two.  The rest need lots of massaging.  I stuck in the Ulm lines after listening to the Rome lines and I think musically, that worked best.  Clearly I have to toss the date altogether, it's just too clunky, and rely on it being the title.  But I guess that's part of the evolution of a song.

Dan asked if I played guitar, then pulled out his and gave me the perfect back up; that helped a lot.  Did he know what I was doing?

I did explain how I got to this point and read the class enough of the Einstein article to understand what I was trying to convey.

I asked Dan during the break if he had any idea what original song was my crutch.   He didn't and when I told him, he more or less congratulated me on a successful steal, "If I couldn't tell, no one else could."  I suspect that means I was so bad, there was no resemblance at all, but I'll humor myself. 

Musically,  mine was the shakiest.  The others in there are real musicians.  But they were kind, and I got credit for being the only one who found a way to use the numbers from the fortunes for the song.  Others were amazing, among them one who used a plastic cup and her hand for great backup percussion. 

Saturday, some of the members of the workshop (not me, I assure you) will present their songs at 2pm at Out North.  It's a pay what you like donation.  There are some gifted folks in the class and it should be fun.  I'm feeling a little like George Plimpton.

We had a series of interesting new exercises, including a group activity as you can see from the pictures.  I've got homework for tomorrow, plus my Chinese class meets again on Thursday.  So good night.