Temperatures soared into the mid-fifties on Thursday, so even though it was damp and dreary Anne and I knew that this was the day. If Anne was going to make her annual cycling mileage goal of one-thousand miles, it was going to be that day. We launched from the house and headed to the Park. We did a turn around the bike path, including the new section, which is now open. The dual-path system may be finished, but it is not done yet. Men were still working on landscaping, plus the old pathway has not yet been reopened, so much for a November completion date. After once around, we exited stage east on Clayton Avenue and headed over to Tower Grove Park. On the way back home, we stopped off at the Gardens and had a late lunch at the restaurant there. Afterwards, we visited the Christmas exhibit, Gardenland Express, picture trains, lots of poinsettias, small children and grandparents too. I didn’t last long there. We sailed home with a strong tailwind and got 23 miles.
Wednesday night we met friends from my work for dinner at Pi. Pi is that pizzeria that Mr. Obama liked so much that he chose this Saint Louis rendition of Chicago style pizza for his inaugural ball. I can still hear the echoing wails from that little town in northern Illinois. Two colleagues and their spouses, Don & Erin and Dan & Mary joined Anne and I there. So what do three engineers discuss at a place called Pi? What else but quiz each other on how many digits of the number Pi can be recited from memory? I topped out at seven, which only gives me about a 32-bit precision. Later, I saw a waitress with 20+ digits on the front of her t-shirt. Baby, where were you when I needed you!
My brother Chris was trained as a professional photographer. He went to Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. This training shows up in the beauty of his photography. We here at RegenAxe have been privileged in the past to feature some of his photos on this blog.
Included with this post are two portraits that Chris sent us this week. The first picture shows two of Chris’ friends, Gemma and Palo, on the beach at Carmel-by-the-Sea. The second one shows Frank, our other brother and Kathy, our sister-in-law, at Nepenthe in Big Sur. I’m surprised that with all of the rainstorms that they have been having, they were able to drive down the coast highway. I had heard that it was washed out.
Training and the learned attention to detail are important elements to good photography, but so is having a “good eye”. A good eye means being able to look at a scene and see the perfect shot. It is commonly said that a person is born with a “good eye”, it cannot be learned. I don’t disagree with this thought, but I also believe that anyone with an interest in photography must have some form of this “good eye” or why else the interest in the first place?
The third leg of the tripod that supports a photographer’s craft is his equipment. Chris has always had the best of camera equipment. When I visited California last month, I put the bug in Chris’ ear that it was time for him to upgrade his digital camera. I didn’t expect that this suggestion would bear fruit as quickly as it did. The week after I returned home, Chris made me an offer that I could not refuse. Pictured above is Chris’ old camera, my new camera, a Canon EOS 5D. Not pictured, but also included with the camera is a flash unit and an extra battery grip.
Chris upgraded to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Since all of his lenses were transferable, he did not want to part with any of them. So my new camera languished lens-less in its box, for about a month. On Tuesday, Anne and I went to Schiller’s Camera and purchase a lens for the camera. I dragged Anne along to act as the responsible adult and was glad that I did. Otherwise, I would have been defenseless to tender mercies of the all too savvy sales clerks there. I saw another customer there who but for Anne could have been me. His attending sales clerk seemed to be just toying with him as he wrestled with his purchasing decision and his own private demons.
So now that I have this marvelous piece of technology, I have to learn how to use it. I should start with the manual, but I think instead that I will just start taking pictures with it. I already know how to use the camera in automatic mode, so I can start there. Only time will tell if my leap from point-and-shoot to SLR will be successful, but it should be fun finding out.
A domestique is a bicycle racer who works for the benefit of his team and not themselves. So, what do domestiques do? For the most part, they ride in front of the team leaders and cut the leader’s wind resistance. Experts say that “drafting” like this can save a third of the leader’s strength. In addition to drafting duties, a domestique will also fetch food and water for the team. The French word, domestique translates as “servant”.
Anne and I rode in the Park on Tuesday and got 15 miles. Anne only needs another 23 miles to meet her annual cycling mileage goal of a thousand miles. I’ll be her domestique and work to keep those cold December winds off of her, so that she can make her goal.
In other domestic news, Anne knitted the above pictured cap for our house gnome, on Christmas Day. Under the rubric of making lemonade out of lemons, Anne took Dave’s news that he cannot find the beautiful argyle cap that she made for him surprisingly well, maybe too well. She later remarked, “Well, at least this creates another knitting opportunity.”
Speaking of Christmas Day, we had a double disaster in the kitchen that day. Our two oldest and most venerated cutting boards fell to the floor and then split in two. Anne and Dan went to the hardware store the next day and purchased two clamps and wood glue that specifically says that it is for glueing cutting boards. The picture above shows the first board drying in the clamps, while the second one patiently waits its turn.
Dave returned to Washington, DC on Monday. We were concerned, because seemingly the entire eastern seaboard had been pelted with a foot or more of snow on Sunday. Washington was spared though. On the NOAA snowfall map it is neatly nestled in a dry little donut-hole around which there was only blizzard. The District got only a half-inch of snow, but even so, his flight was still delayed a half-hour. Oh well, it could have worse. Right?
I copped the title for this post from some pundit at the Washington Post. A No-Pocalypse is sort of the antonym for last year’s way too cool snowstorm related buzzword, Snow-Pocalypse. A No-Pocalypse has all the hype and buildup of the apocalyptic Snow-Pocalypse, but without the snow.
While he was visiting us, Dave tried to explain what it is that he actually does as an intern at the National Institute of Health. This is my understanding of what he said. (Dave, feel free to correct me.) Previously, Dave has described his work as, “performing brain surgery on live-ish mice.” This is true, as far as it goes, but doesn’t really explain his work and is a bit flippant to boot.
These so-called, live-ish mice, are picked up at the vivarium, where they are raised. What makes them “live-ish” is that through a birth defect, they have no upper brain, just the brain stem. Effectively, they are born brain-dead. The benefit of using these mice is that you can perform surgery on them without an anesthetic. Dave cuts open their skulls and with microscopic electrodes, actually very small pipits that are hooked to an oscilloscope, he can measure individual nerve cell’s electrical responses to auditory stimuli. Using an anesthetic, as would be required with any normal mouse, would only mess-up the nerve cell’s electrical responses.
So that sort of answers the mail on what Dave does at NIH, but doesn’t explain why he does it. This is where I get a little fuzzy on the subject, so bear with me. (Dave, feel free to chime in anytime.) From the microscopic point of view, scientists have begun to categorize different kinds of nerve cells, but they don’t know yet what they do. Conversely, other scientists have shown that different nerve cells perform different auditory functions. In a nutshell, the goal of Dave’s research is to connect-the-dots, between what has been observed at the macroscopic level and what can be measured on the microscopic level. It is hoped that by correlating these two viewpoints a deeper understanding of how we hear can be gleamed and eventually with that knowledge, ways to reverse hearing loss learned.
This may sound all rather science fictional to you, I know that it does to me. But science fiction has always been a great harbinger of things to come. Yesterday’s science fiction becomes today’s science fact. While writing this post, I recalled an old Star Trek episode, called ‘Spock’s Brain’. While generally considered to be the worst episode of that sixties series, it still seemed somehow apropos. Here is the back-story for that show:
A beautiful woman beams aboard the Enterprise, incapacitates the crew and then steals away with Spock’s brain. Captain Kirk and his enterprising crew trail her to her planet only to find Spock’s brain installed as the planet’s central computer. Dr. McCoy using this alien civilization’s advanced technology reconnects Spock’s brain to his animatronicly controlled body, which the good doctor just happened to bring along with him.
The YouTube clip is from the show’s finale, so is a bit jocular in tone. Star Trek always believed that science and technology would pave the way to a brighter future. I too shared that belief; even when it wasn’t always warranted, but I never thought that I would live to see the day that so much that was once only fiction, become fact or at least began to become true.
Dave, Anne and I went to go see the fool’s-ball game at the Jones Dome on Sunday. Dan is no fool, so he eschewed the whole thing. We took the Metro downtown, so there were no hassles with parking and also no danger of towing. Besides we met some nice people along the way. There was the man with the little boy. The boy wasn’t his son, but the man was friends with the mom and was taking the little boy to the game. The boy was cold, waiting for the train. An elderly woman overheard this and showed us how to turn on the overhead heat lamps. That seemed to help, anyway the train was warm.
We arrived on time, but had to wait at the will call window and missed the Rams’ first touchdown. The seats were decent, so we settled into watch the game, I with my camera, Anne with her knitting and Dave with his Rams’ jersey on. I’ll cut to the chase, the Rams won, 25-17. This win keeps the Rams in the running for a payoff birth, while the San Francisco 49ers’ loss eliminates them from contention. The opportunity to trash-talk my two Californian brothers about this victory, will be savored.
Next week the Rams face the Seattle Seahawks. The possibility to further extend my intra-family fool’s-ball rivalries to the in-laws has not escaped my attention. The winner of that game will represent the NFC West in the playoffs. If the Rams win next week they will finish the regular season with a .500 record, an even number of wins and losses, but if the Seahawks win then they will be the first un-asterisked NFL team with a losing record to go to the playoffs. The playoffs are not for losers! That makes the Rams the last line of defense and the final protector of the NFL’s sacred honor.
Gene Soucy – Mister Air Show + Wing Walker + Aeroshell Team
Blue Sunset
Many Visitors Have Been Gored By Buffalo
I pray that your Christmas holiday was a nice one? Ours was filled with friends and family members, presents, cooking and then eating [repeat]. This post is another one of those year-end retrospective blogs. I did one on just birds last week, so there will be no bird pictures in this list. Some of these photographs were chosen because I thought that they were pretty, some because they were funny, some were just neat and two because they were famous.
The Beaver, The Riverlands, Saint Louis, 3/19 – Jane visited us in March and we toured her around town. She hails from the Great Lakes State, so we thought to show her our Great Rivers. We were touring Mel Price Lock and Dam, when she spied this beaver and it was just sitting there. Maybe as a fellow dam builder he was just checking out what the Corps had built.
Pagoda at Sunrise, Forest Park, Saint Louis, 4/16 – I snapped this photo during a morning bike ride in the Park. The morning light was gorgeous that day. At least that is what Joy must have thought. Joy is the self-described blog czar who daily plucks twelve lucky WordPress posts out of obscurity and “promotes” them. The 16-th being a Friday and as czars don’t work weekends, her promotion lasted all weekend. It made for a wild ride.
Elephant Seal Close-Up, Ano Nuevo State Park, CA, 6/22 – Cousin Liz clued me into this state park. So on the second of what was three trips to California this year; I visited the park and got this close-up of a seal.
Gene Soucy – Mister Air Show +Wing Walker + Aeroshell Team, The Arch, Saint Louis, 7/3 – This is the first of three pictures that I’ve picked that all fall within a week of each other. It must have been a hell of a week. This picture is from the Saint Louis 4-th of July air show. Another Purple Cone Flower, Forest Park, Saint Louis, 7/5 – Cone flowers abound across the landscape of Saint Louis. They are easy to find and also easy to photograph. I guess that is why I love them.
Blue Sunset, The Cabin, MI, 7/7 – The final entry in this most productive week was taken by Anne. I love the rich deep blue clouds in this sunset.
Many Visitors Have Been Gored By Buffalo, Yellowstone, WY, 7/27 – July continues to shine, first with a fourth of this year’s pictures, but also with our second WordPress promotion of the year. Czar Joy, (Shouldn’t it be Czarina?) blessed this little blog and the hits began to flood in again. I know that getting more hits in a day than I normally get in a month is just ephemeral fame, but it is still a fun ride while it lasts.
Red Sky At Night, The Cabin, MI, 8/16 – Another Cabin sunset, another lake boat, another great picture; there is no great artistry in shooting this shot, but it still makes for a great picture.
Sizzing Hot, Botanical Gardens, Saint Louis, 8/28 – Fun with PhotoShop, with this picture I’ve combined the Garden’s Dale Chihuly artwork with Anne’s fevered brow. It is cartoonish, but Anne accepts it and I like it.
Like Notes On A Scale, Benton Park, Saint Louis, 9/6 – Every Labor Day weekend there are bicycle races here in Saint Louis. The thrust of these races are for the semi-professionals, but each venue also includes a kid’s race. The tree’s long shadows look like lines on a musical score and the kids racing to the finish line look like musical notes, up and down the scale.
Water Lily Pads From Another Planet, Tower Grove Park, Saint Louis, 10/10 – Switching between Apple and Windows photographic tools can lead to inverted pictures. Usually this is an annoyance, but occasionally this is also an opportunity too. It gives us a different point of view.
African Daisy, Monterey, CA, 11/5 – I love this flower and have photographed it before in the Garden’s Mediterranean House. This picture was shot in a neighbor’s front yard, down the street from my parent’s house in Monterey. Apparently, Monterey also enjoys a Mediterranean climate.
