What enemy will we marry next?

kw: national events, memorials, sociology

In early 1941, realizing that war between Japan and the United States was getting ever more likely, a Japan-born naturalized American citizen, who had lived in California for twenty years, took his wife and two daughters to Japan. Were there a war, he expected Japan to win. A few years later his wife died of TB and, during the last year of the war, he remarried. Early in 1946 their daughter was born, who grew into the woman I married in 1975. But before that, when the little girl was barely three, the man divorced his wife and returned to America, with his two other daughters, to marry again, but he had no more children.

Another Japanese man, a soldier in the war of the Pacific, lost his wife soon after the war. He had two young boys. He met the divorcée and married her; they blended the families. He it was who actually raised my future wife.

A key element here is that the girl's natural father had returned to the U.S. When she was a young working girl, she saved enough money to visit him in California. A second visit a few years later led her to decide to remain, and a year after that she and I met. I find it strange that, nearly thirty years before we married, her stepfather and my father were in the same region, fighting on opposite sides in the war. I did not get to know him well, as he spoke no English, but we had a cordial relationship for the very few weeks we spent together. He died more than ten years ago.

Today, the seventieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack (and a coincident attack near Manila), carries great significance to my father and his generation. It is before my time, and my wife's time, so the event of greatest significance to the two of us has been her decision to reside in America, which has led, so far, to 36 years together.

Just five years after we married, Mount Saint Helens in Washington state erupted, devastating many square miles of landscape. It took just a few years for new life to take root in and through the ash and lava, and begin to reclaim the landscape. I liken the thriving relationship of my wife and myself, and our son, now in his mid-twenties, to new life that arose from the devastation the volcano. We were born in the aftermath of war, though in truth, her country was much more devastated than mine, and our fathers suffered their own traumas. Life is tough and tenacious. I wonder what we will find, a generation from now, in the aftermath of two current wars and another one or two that are on the horizon.

Kill a cop, get famous

kw: national events, observances, crime

Twenty-nine years ago today, Wesley Cook killed Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner. He bragged about it at the hospital. He was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury of ten whites and two blacks, and sentenced to die. He hasn't.

What has dies is the American justice system. Wesley Cook, who has taken the name Mumia Abu-Jamal, has become the symbol of getting ahead by doing evil. He is more famous than Al Capone, has had a street in France named for him, is staunchly defended by thousands of ignorant, misguided public figures, and has been invited to speak at college and high school commencement exercises, as he continues to thumb his nose at the right of a civilized society to make totally certain he will not commit murder again, by killing him. If ever someone "needed killing", it is him.

You can get more information from the official Daniel Faulkner web site. Be patient, the site is getting huge numbers of visitors, plus a huger number of "denial of service" accesses by immoral opponents.

Earth Day #41

kw: national events, environmentalism

I was 22 on the first Earth Day. Now I am 62. My wife and I have done something from time to time to improve our energy efficiency: plant trees, install more efficient windows, replace most bulbs with CFL's, be more diligent about shutting things off, recycling… I thought of one thing I've done with my computers at home and at work that many people don't think of. While I tend to either turn off a laptop or hibernate it when I am about to step away from it, when I am using a desktop I leave it on all day. Here is how to reduce power use by taking advantage of the computer's power management features:

First, open the Display Properties dialog box. There are two ways to do this:

1. Open the Control Panel from the Start menu, then double-click the Display icon.
2. Right click out in the middle of the display, and select Properties.
   

Then open the Screen Saver tab as shown, and click the Power… button near the bottom of the dialog box. The Power Options dialog box will open:


A desktop computer will not have the "Running on batteries" column. Note that by default this computer will darken the monitor after 25 minutes. Set this to 15 minutes or less. On most laptops the monitor consumes 20-25 watts. Some stand-alone monitors consume 50-75 watts, though the best ones are 40w or less. But that is like having a small light bulb running all the time. Although shutting off the hard disk(s) doesn't save much power, it helps the disk drives last longer.

So tune your computer's power settings to save a little power, and perhaps also make the computer last longer.

Rose Parade 2010

kw: national events, photographs, photography

Every year I watch at least part of the Rose Parade broadcast. When I lived in or near Pasadena, I went to the parade several times. Once I stayed up all night to secure a curbside spot. I remember the night better than the parade next day!
This shows a float from this morning's Tournament of Roses Parade broadcast, taken right off the TV screen with a 6Mpx camera. The moiré pattern, caused by the near-alignment of the camera's pixels with the TV's pixels, is rather objectionable, even though I used a heavy blurring step before reducing resolution.

I've worked in printing, and I recall that when printers must overlay several halftone screens, such as for a color photograph, they rotate the successive screens by about 25° to minimize moiré fringes. So I decided to rotate my camera.
I tilted the tripod mount somewhat less than 30° and shot pictures throughout the parade. This shows what one of them looks like. Once I'd loaded them to the computer, I could measure right off the picture in the image processing software: 23.4°.

This is the image above, rotated back and cropped. I did a blur step and reduced resolution.
This image of the two floats has only a trace of remaining moiré. You have to look for it (try clicking to get a bigger image, and search there).

Here is one more, without the blur step. The blurring inherent in reducing resolution has done a good enough job.
I just had to have one pic of the PCC color guard (I wasn't quick enough to get a shot of the band). Not only did I attend PCC for a while in the 1960s, but my mother was valedictorian of her class when she graduated from PJC (It used to be called Pasadena Junior College) in 1942.