In LAX Travel Chaos Hoping to Get On This Flight -Updated

Our original flight to Seattle was delayed and the checkin person didn't think we'd make our connection to Anchorage, so she put us on the earlier 11:45 am flight which is overbooked, but she thought we might be able to get on when they upgrade people to First Class.

This one is also delayed.  Passengers are just getting off the plane now.  It's 12 noon.

We've been lucky to avoid this sort of mess most of the time.  I do have an appointment in Anchorage at 1pm tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.


UPDATE  12:12 pm -  we now have boarding passes with seats.   On to Seattle with plenty of time to connect to the Anchorage flight.

UPDATE:  4:40pm the follow up to this post is here.  We made it to Seattle.

Diamonds And Volcanoes, Oceans And Space

I wasn't sure what to do with this piece on diamonds.  It was interesting - both because of what it said and because it exposed a gap in my knowledge that probably most people know already.  (Did you?)   I tend to think diamonds and their high prices are due to monopoly and marketing.  Young men are cowed into buying sparkling rings by all the hype about diamonds being forever and the made up tradition of diamond wedding rings.  I'm not making this all up, people have studied this.  The article mentions that diamonds weren't associated with weddings until the 1930s.

But I acknowledge that industrial diamonds probably play an important role in society.  From the USGS:

"Because it is the hardest substance known, diamond has been used for centuries as an abrasive in grinding, drilling, cutting, and polishing, and industrial-grade diamond continues to be used as an abrasive for many applications.  .  . Diamond also has chemical, electrical, optical, and thermal characteristics that make it the best material available to industry for wear- and corrosion-resistant coatings, special lenses, heat sinks in electrical circuits, wire drawing, and advanced technologies."

I actually started yesterday's post with the quote below on diamonds.  That's why yesterday's title was  misleading.  The post was going to be bits and pieces of different things that weren't related and not enough to be a post on their own.  But the post evolved and the photos about the Silverlake walk were enough.  So I cut the diamond reference, but forgot to update the title.

So here's what I edited out yesterday:

"Most diamonds come from depths of 90 to 120 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, Smith said. The only reason they are accessible to us today is because they traveled up through the crust millions of years ago, carried along by rare and powerful volcanic eruptions.
But chemical clues culled from the Cullinan diamond and others like it suggest they were forged at even greater depths than most diamonds — about 224 to 446 miles beneath our feet."

- From an LA Times article on what scientists are learning from diamonds about deep in the earth .

I resurrected the post because last night before going to sleep I picked up my next book club volume - Anthony Doeer's All the Light We Cannot See - and read this:

"A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons and driven to the surface in a volcanic pipe.  Someone facets it, someone polishes it."

I got the same lesson about diamonds and volcanoes from two different sources on the same day.  Did I ever learn that diamonds were spewed out of the bowels of the earth by volcanoes?  Maybe, but if I did, it didn't stick in my conscious knowledge.  But I was getting a message from someone to pay more attention now.

The original LA Times article is about a scientist studying large diamonds for what they tell us about so deep in the earth - a place, the article tells us, scientists can't reach, so these travelers from this distant region of our own planet offer up clues to what else is there.  And the article says there's a lot more minerals than had been previously thought.

This also got me to thinking.  Voyager has travelled about 12 billion miles from our sun,  about how we can send missions to to explore our solar system, but we on earth,  according to the Smithsonian:

"as of January 22, drilling had only reached a depth of 2,330 feet beneath the seafloor."

That's less than half a mile.  The earth's core is 6,371 kilometers (3,958 mi) according to this extreme tech article.    This site has a lot of clickbait, so checked further.  National Geographic says "about 4000 miles" so it's ok.  [There's an interesting graphic representation of traveling to the center of the earth at this BBC page.]

Is it really harder to drill into the earth than to go out into space?  Or is space just more romantic and better sold - like the diamonds - than earth core exploration?  Perhaps it is simply more difficult.  I found lots of articles comparing exploring space to exploring the oceans (where getting to the earth's core seems to begin).  This article from American Progress suggests it IS 'marketing' or at least what has stirred our exploratory imaginations:

"Yet space travel excites Americans’ imaginations in a way ocean exploration never has. To put this in terms [James] Cameron may be familiar with, just think of how stories are told on screens both big and small: Space dominates, with “Star Trek,” “Star Wars,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” and “2001 A Space Odyssey.” Then there are B-movies such as “Plan Nine From Outer Space” and everything ever mocked on “Mystery Science Theater 2000.” There are even parodies: “Spaceballs,” “Galaxy Quest,” and “Mars Attacks!” And let’s not forget Cameron’s own contributions: “Aliens” and “Avatar.”
When it comes to the ocean, we have “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and Cameron’s somewhat lesser-known film “The Abyss.” And that’s about it."

And since this quote mentions 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I should mention that a key character in All The Light We Cannot See is reading Jules Verne's classic story in braille.

Bits And Pieces January 9, 2017

It rained hard before it got light Monday morning.  We had a walking tour through Silverlake planned with friends.  J and my old neighborhood.  Back in the 1970s.  J was working downtown and I was going to school at USC so it seemed like a reasonable location.

It wasn't cool back then.  Just a funky neighborhood.

As I was preparing breakfast, I noticed a car out front of my mom's house.  I went out to take in the garbage can and saw that it wasn't a car.  It was traffic.  This quiet, out of the way street has become a way to beat traffic.  It's insane.  But it's only for a short time in the morning.  Maybe 20 minutes.  But it's sick that there is so much traffic that cars are backed up the block on this out of the way residential street.

There was a fair amount of nostalgia as we walked up and down the hills of streets roamed in our 20s, newly married, and discovering interesting people and places every time we went out.

In a lot of ways, the neighborhood looks remarkably the same.  While in my mom's neighborhood contractors buy old little houses, tear them down, then build lot squeezing villas, there was very little of that on the streets we wandered.  Places had new paint, maybe even a new facade, but most looked like the original buildings we'd wandered past over 40 years ago.

And this neighborhood is as likely to have lost parrot posters as lost dog posters.

The biggest difference I noticed was security.  Rambling hillside apartment buildings that had interesting steps used to be open to the world.  Now, many of them have security gates and locks.  Our building's old inviting opening onto a courtyard with a view, now had a glassed in wall with a door.  Fortunately a tenant came in and let us in so we could look around.  But here's an examples of what I'm talking about.

So many places now have iron gates.


But the neighborhood's funkiness is alive and well.  Here's a fence with little arm chairs and signs on it.  Since this is a nostalgia trip, I've taken the liberty to play around with a few of the photos below in photoshop.  In this case it was to get some closer views of the chairs along with the larger picture of the fence.  But then I played with the color of the sky and the saturation.

And we walked down the Micheltorena stairs.

We stopped at Night Market Song - a Thai place that left my mouth with a satisfying, if low watt,  glow - and wandered on Sunset past this motorcycle shop where our friend fell in love with an old used Vespa.

Much to my amazement, the Free Clinic was still there.  As part of a graduate class, I volunteered as an intake worker there several nights a week for a semester.

It looked a bit tired, so I took some liberties again in photoshop to perk it up a bit.






After a couple of hours of exploring the old stomping grounds, we got back to the car and made one last stop at Barnsdale Park where I took this view of Hollywood from outside the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Hollyhock House.

I've got lots more thoughts, but no more time.  It was good to just go out and have fun for the day after lots of paper shredding, sorting of boxes, and looking through old documents and memorabilia that give a little back story of my family that I never quite understood.  If I have time . . .

AIFF2016: GayLa Night Filmmakers Bennett Wallace (Real Boy) and Alex Myung (Arrival) Q&A

Back in December I got some video of the Q&A at the Anchorage International Film Festival's GayLa night.  Alex Myung's animated film Arrival opened.  It's a visually beautiful story of a young, Asian-American gay man leaving for the big city and later coming out to his mom.  It got the first runner up award for animation at the festival.

The second film, a feature documentary called Real Boy, follows Bennett Wallace's transition to a boy.  

[You can see the trailers for both films here.]

After the showing, they went on stage together to answer questions.  I've paraphrased the question below.  I got most of the Q&A but I think there were a few more questions I missed.
The first went to Alex.  The Bennett got some, and then it went back to Alex for the last one.

For Alex:

Q1:  Was this how you came out or someone you know?
Q2:  Was it always going to be a film without dialog?

For Bennett:

Q3:  How has the relationships with your parents evolved since the film?
Q4:  Given that the film portrays your cutting yourself, what would you tell kids today who are cutting?
Q5:  Would it have helped you to see a film like this?  [Spoiler:  "It would have changed my life."
Q6:  How did the film come about?
Q7:  How did it feel living your life with the camera on you all the time?  [Spoiler:  "At first I felt I always had to say something really profound.  That didn't last long."  "It was difficult when we filmed in public."
Q8:  How is Joe doing now?

For Alex:

Q9:  I seemed to see a Miyazaki influence, was he a model for you?

Painting Beauty On A Wall

We went to the UCLA hazardous waste drop-off this morning and saw these guys actually painting this Beauty and the Beast billboard onto the side of the building.

If you enlarge the one below (click on it) you can barely see the lines on the wall where they are supposed to paint.

Glad to see that these painters haven't been replaced by a giant ink-jet printer.

John Berger - "Tenderness is a Refusal to Judge"

John Berger died January 2, 2016 at age 90.

I didn't know him or even of him until this afternoon when I heard this interview on PRI with Teju Cole, who did know him.  This is a man I would have liked to have known. And I'm hoping to start an acquaintanceship through his books, and through the videos that have been left behind. The PRI interview begins like this:

"You may never have heard of John Berger.
But the English writer and artist, who died this week at 90, changed how countless art students thought about art and maybe even the world.

His 1972 television series and book ''Ways of Seeing" was designed to upend traditional, and what he termed elitist, ways of evaluating art work.
But Berger wasn’t just an art critic. He was also a novelist.
His book, “G,”, a non-linear account of a man travelling around Europe before World War One, won the Booker Prize."

[I tried to embed the audio here, but I couldn't make it work.]

It's a beautiful interview worth listening to.  It got me to look the man up and try to find out more about him.  He took on the conventional reverence for art as culture.  He also moved to rural France where he lived for 40 years or so.  Most important to me is that he saw the world and how we see the world differently from the way most people do.  Here's the first episode of that 1972 television show mentioned above.




Below is from a much later interview (I'm not sure exactly when - the posting date on Youtube isn't necessarily the date of the interview). The whole interview is available too. In it he talks about tenderness, defining it in different ways - "a refusal to judge"


In the PRI interview about Cole relates Berger's characterization of the dead as really being merely in hiding who are around us.

“Part of the storytelling is about memory,” Cole explains, “but part of it is about how the dead have not gone away. … [They] are always with us, actually supporting us.”

Jane Wyman's 100th Birthday, Rain, Clouds, And Fences

Jane Wyman was an Oscar winning actress and she married a B movie actor in 1940 named Ronald Reagan until they split in 1949.   Here's the New York Times obituary.  She'd be 100 today.  Here is the first birthday from my list of people born in 1917.

It's been mostly cloudy, with breaks of sun and breaks of rain.  Southern California can use every drop of rain it can get, so I'm not complaining. When we came home after seeing Fences Thursday evening, it was raining, which I tried to catch, not too successfully, in the lights at this soccer field.  But the fence is a good lead into talking about the film.

Fences was powerful.  The language was magnificent, but then it was written by August Wilson, a playwright who has written some of the best American plays of the 20th Century.  I couldn't help thinking about Death of a Salesman - another play about a father who was doing all he could to cope in his role as the family provider.  But while we can see that Willie Loman is a victim of the social expectations of his times, he's essentially a weak man who could have made different choices in his life.

But in Fences the father, Troy, - played by Denzel Washington in the film - was a much stronger and competent man, restricted by much harsher limits.  But flawed as well.  His anger at the injustices he experienced and perhaps some he just perceived prevents him from enjoying the comparatively decent life he has built.   He was a great baseball player, he hit home runs against Satchel Paige he claims, but it was before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.  Now he's fighting the system to break out of the restrictions of the Pittsburgh sanitation department.  He's tired of throwing the garbage into the truck.  He wants a promotion to the job reserved for white men - driver.

As the play progresses, we learn why he's such a hard ass father, and why he can't tell his son, Corey (Courtney B. Vance  in the 1987 version and Chris Chalk in the 2010 version)  he likes him, let alone loves him.   Here's that scene I found online from the play - first the 1987 version with James Earl Jones as Troy and then in the 2010 version with Denzel Washington in the role he plays in the movie.  (Washington also directs the film.)




Troy's father had abandoned him and we can see throughout the play* how stretched he is trying to provide for his family - which includes his mentally unhinged brother, a son from an earlier wife, and a son from his present wife of 18 years or so, played by Viola Davis. And you can see the pressure he feels to raise his son to be responsible and tough in a world that shortchanges black men.

And Davis is fantastic. Here's a later scene, after Washington had told Davis he's going to be a father again, and how he just needed a place where he could let go of all those pressures, where he didn't have responsibilities to pay the rent and feed the family, where he could escape and laugh and be himself. She doesn't take kindly to that at all.



No one should be saying that while men have it easy in today's world. Few people have it easy.  The system isn't kind to human beings.  But all things considered, there have been fewer barriers to success for white men than for black men. (I'm avoiding women because that's a whole other issue.) 

But I wonder how many white men who hate the slogan 'black lives matter' can watch this film and get its humanity. The issues are universal, but will the racist wing of the Trump team  be able to see past the skin color and the language? One would hope so, but how many will ever see it? And if they do, and if they felt Troy's pain, could they tell their friends?  I don't know, I'm just asking.

* I say play deliberately as I'm vaguely aware of some critics finding the movie not cinematic enough.  As I was looking for cast names I saw a link to a New Yorker article on that topic, but haven't looked because I wanted to finish this first.  I'll look now.

Before I found it, I found an article by Kareem Abdul Jabbar and I can't think of a smarter or more suited man to talk about this film.  The link also includes a video interview he had with the two lead characters of the film.  Jabbar writes as part of the intro:

"The Maxson family's unhappiness results from a toxic mixture of the patriarch's unapologetic hubris and the pressures of being raised black in a white society that marginalizes, degrades and oppresses anyone not in the mainstream. Troy Maxson (Washington) isn't aware that while he battles for equality from the white society, he's imposing the same tyrannical restrictions he's struggling against on his own family. He has become the very enemy he's fighting."

Most of it is the transcript of the video and the video itself.  They are exactly the same.  There are a few things in the written interview that aren't in the video and vice versa.  Also, in the video Davis correctly says 'baseball league,' not the 'football league' that's written.

Thursday was a break from the rain.  When I did a quick bike ride down to the beach just to move my legs a bit, the clouds were out over the ocean, but it wasn't the solid gray we'd had.

We had dinner with a friend of my mom's, a woman who came by weekly and always brought some food for my mom.  They'd been good friends for a long time.  She told us stories about after WWII when she met her husband in London.  They were both young refugees in England during the war.  They'd both gotten out of Germany before the war started.  His sister had lived through the war in Berlin with fake papers.  They had both applied for jobs as translators for the American military in Europe.  Her father took her down to the station and started talking to a young man while she was away a moment.  So, it turned out he introduced her to her future husband.  She was 20 and they first were sent to Paris for a week of training and then to Germany where their fluency in German and English were helpful.  Despite the hardships of those immediate postwar days in Germany, love and adventure are what she remembered most.

For those of you who are wondering about the New Yorker article, I did find it after I finished this.  I think the reviewer got so hung up on the idea that this should have been done more cinematically that he missed the fundamental power of the story.  He's focused on technique, even when he has praise, which he has.

Amazon's Proposed 30 Minute Delivery From Airborne Warehouse

The ADN had an article touting Amazon's patent application for a floating warehouse that could reduce delivery to 30 minutes or less.

I can imagine that there are some items that one must have in 30 minutes.  I'm not talking about an onion you forgot to buy with dinner guests due in an hour.  There could be some life-saving items that are occasionally needed quickly.

But, generally, what's the point?

I remember when my son got impatient waiting for something to appear online in 20 seconds because he was used to a faster connection.  But this instantaneous gratification comes at a cost.  Actually, a lot of different costs.

1.  Opportunity costs of creativity and money spent on this rather than on  projects that make a greater contribution to humanity's well being.

2.  Continued reduction of people's long term thinking and planning skills as businesses work compete over speed of gratification.

3.  Loss of patience as a human quality, and thus, the devaluing of things that take time to grow - trees, babies, friendship, love - and inability to deal with any delays.  It seems we already have enough road rage.

4.  Loss of attention span, necessary to evaluate ideas, test theories, make good decisions.

5.  And whose airspace will these warehouses be in?  Whose sunlight will they block?  Where will their pollution pollute?  Will they be silent or add to the noise we all suffer daily?

The article talks about using such flying warehouses at events where lots of people gather - such as a baseball game.

"Imagine you're at a baseball game and wanted to buy a meal or a jersey without ever leaving your seat. The system Amazon describes would allow you to place an order and receive the item within minutes."

Well, I'm imagining 30 drones zooming down to three rows trying to figure out which person to deliver the hot dog to and how to avoid crashing into the other 29 drones.  I'm imagining people snatching someone else's lunch, that was paid for already electronically when the order was placed.  I'm imagining drones picking up bottles of urine for a fee so the patron doesn't have to leave his seat.




Doesn't this all sound a little like the people in Wall-E?


But maybe virtual reality will make going to the stadium totally unnecessary.

But I take hope from other trends.  Here's another Alaska Dispatch News article that goes in the opposite direction:

"Folk schools offer lessons for battling ‘convenience culture’"

"Raising urban chickens, making a leather belt or building a traditional kayak aren't among the offerings you'll usually find at mainstream educational institutions. But they are skills you can learn at two of Alaska's newest schools. 

They're known as folk schools, and they focus on teaching and sharing traditional, hands-on knowledge and homesteading skills typically nonexistent in the educational system."

And the Los Angeles Times had an article about the growth of the vinyl record business.

But it shouldn't be an either/or, thus versus them issue here.  There are some great benefits from new technology.  We just need to consider the environmental, cultural, and human costs of the technology against the benefits.  People can argue that if consumers don't buy, businesses won't make the products.  But since business spends so much money tapping into people's primal brains to get them to 'need' every new product, I think that's a specious argument.  But it is true, if people don't buy, those things will no longer be on the market.

But I think that humans should always be ready for the day, or the year, when the power goes out, the satellites fail, and that infrastructure that supports the life so many are totally dependent on crashes.  Humans need to be able take care of themselves when all the conveniences collapse.

Venice Beach Sunset - But Which Picture Would You Prefer?

I didn't get on the bike until late this afternoon.  The downside is I have to ride back at dusk when, even with blinking bike lights, I'm not as visible to the cars.  The upside is a great sunset.

So, this picture looked pretty good right off the disk.

Directly from the camera

There's the bright pink clouds, a bit of ocean at the bottom, framed by the palm trees.

But could I make it better with a little tweaking?  Nothing fancy.  No photoshop.  Just playing with the contrast.

Contrast bumped a little

Which would you prefer to see?
Does it matter if it's digitally enhanced?
Would you know it was enhanced if I didn't say so and the other picture wasn't there?
Would you know the other one wasn't enhanced?

And, does it even mean anything, since the camera doesn't capture a true image anyway?

Do you even care?
Would you like enhanced images to be marked somehow so that you know?
Does cropping count as enhancing?
Does increasing the contrast matter?
Where is the line?  Adding in the palm trees?  (I didn't, they were there)  Changing the color radically?

For pictures like these, my questions are more aesthetic.  But when wrinkles are removed (or added) to people's faces larger ethical issues arise.  And what people are doing is manipulated (a gun is put in someone's hand, or removed) there are more questions. (I removed a cigarette once from someone's hand because he wanted to share the post with family, but they thought he'd stopped smoking.)

Will people just become sheep and accept what they see if it supports their world view?  Or will they not believe anything?  Both situations become debilitating for a civil society.  

These aren't new issues.  Jerry Lodriguss goes into more detail on this issue in The Ethics of Digital Manipulation.  He even says there are times when it would be unethical to NOT manipulate the picture.  I couldn't find the date of the post.

Another post, on what sounds like a promising website - Ethics in Photo Editing - offers some examples starting with an Abraham Lincoln photo.  The problem is that the posts I could find were all 2009, so either this blogger moved stuff elsewhere, or just gave up.

Another problem is that the post is dated April 1, 2009.  I always have to wonder about things posted on April 1.  But whether the examples are real or not . . .

[Writing that caused me to google one of the pictures (Oprah Winfrey's head on Ann Margaret's body on TV Guide, with neither of their permission) which got me to a 2012 Atlantic article with some of the same examples, which linked to Izitru (say that out loud) which has a large collection of such doctored photos.  It also has a service where you can send your jpg pictures and they will officially verify that it's not been manipulated.

There are some pretty egregious ethics lapses - there's one where anti-John Kerry folks added him to a picture of Jane Fonda talking to a crowd making it look like they had appeared together.]

I guess, since I posted about The Cloudspotter's Guide, I should be saying something about the clouds.  I still haven't read that much more of the book so I'm not too sure.  My guess would be cumulus medics radiatus but that's because it's one of the few I've read about.  And cloud experts out there can you confirm or correct?

Famous People Born 1917 - Some Biggies - JFK, Thelonious Monk, Indira Gandhi, Lena Horne - 2 Still Alive

It's a reflection of how the human brain and heart combine to decide who is important.  How else can one explain why I've got people whose influence on the world is as varied as Buffalo Bob Smith and Ferdinand Marcos?   There are three assassinated heads of state (Kennedy, Gandhi, and Park) and seven Nobel Prize winners (marked in the table below.)

Two are still alive - architect I.M. Pei and voice of Rocky Squirrel June Foray.

There's one Alaskan on the list - Judge Robert Boochever.  He's probably not a household name, but he was a fine judge and he was also the father-in-law of my doctor (until he retired.)

I hope to do more with this list, but I wanted to get it up on this first day of 2017 - one hundred years after these people were born.  While we know about people who gain public attention, we rarely (at least I rarely), think about people who are in the same cohort, or in this case the same birth year.  It fascinates me to think about these people all going to the same schools from Kindergarten through high school.  In that context, this chart below makes sense.  The famous folks are listed in birth order - something that would have meaning to kids.

These are all folks who would have grown up at the same time and been impacted by the same historical events - though from different parts of the world in a number of cases.  Ray Massey had a popular video tape many years ago that argued that people's world views are shaped by the times they lived and that explained differences between those who grew up during the depression and those who grew up after WW II.  We see the same sort of thing today in discussions about Millennials and other generations.  That certainly plays a factor in our world views.  So seeing this group of people who were all born in the same year gives one lots to think about.  In addition to the time they grew up, one has to consider their economic situation, race, geographic location, family influences, etc.

When I first made a list like this - 2008 - it was much harder to track people down.  That year I was googling "born 1908" to find people until I found a website that listed historical events by day in a year.  That's how I picked up many of the names.    Nowadays there are lots of sites that list people by birth year.  This year I used  NNDB  which has a long list of people born in 1917 and links to bios about each.   I'll try to do some bios about a few people on the list - particularly those not so well known, but who made significant contributions to the world.  You can see similar posts for other years by clicking on the "Famous People Born label".

If you find substantive errors or typos you can email me (see just above 'blog archive') or leave a comment.  Thanks.

Famous, Important, or Otherwise Noteworthy People Born in 1917 in Birth Order by Steve on Scribd