New T-Shirt

This just arrived from halfway around the world.  It'll be interesting to see by how much the "huh?" responses outnumber the "ooh, where can I get one of those?" responses.

Challenges for 2013

I'm going to make a few posts about challenges I face this year.  I welcome your input and suggestions on them, even anonymously.  I do have comment moderation turned on, so anything particularly illegal or indecent will either get deleted or replied to privately.

The Unboxing Experience : Evil Husband Edition

My wife is a fan of James Bond movies, in much the same way that Warren Buffett is getting by okay, Van Gogh liked to paint a bit, or Linus Torvalds is a geek.  Prefixes like "rabid" or "über-" come to mind.  This fall marked the 50th anniversary of the Bond franchise, and a "Bond 50" boxed set was released on Blu-ray.  There was a brief burst of media about this, coinciding with the theatrical release of Skyfall, and then it was pretty much forgotten... except, of course, by those of us who are married to hardcore Bond fans who had birthdays coming up.

Of course, it wasn't cheap, and when I found a local store that had it, the words "limited availability" featured prominently.  I bought the one they had on the shelf, a few weeks before Christmas, and hid it away.  Then I got to thinking... my wife is sneaky and likes to play tricks on me, but I grew up in a tricky family.  Obviously, the gift needed to be disguised somehow.  Fortunately, we had boxes of various sizes sitting around, waiting to be taken to the recycling center, as well as several days' newspapers.  I decided to give her an "unboxing experience" - but one not nearly as shiny and elegant as you find when you buy the latest iThingy.

Thus a fairly large, heavy package sat next to the Christmas tree for about four days, until shortly after midnight on my wife's birthday - she insisted on staying up late and opening her presents in the middle of the night.  She made it through the "normal" things - cards and money from family, some clothes from my parents, perfume and lotion from me - and then tackled the big, mysterious box... which unfortunately was neatly wrapped in a couple different layers of paper.  (Newspaper underneath keeps sneaky people like her from trying to read through the wrapping paper.)

It turned out to be a box from a sewing and embroidery machine - which she already had. I'd taped it securely shut (of course).  Upon opening it, she discovered a couple old phone books near the top (for weight, naturally) and beneath them, cushioned in crumpled newspapers, another box, also neatly double-wrapped.  At this point, she thought I'd had my fun... She was wrong.

This one turned out to be from a Crock Pot slow-cooker - which, again, we already had. It, in turn, contained another box - this one only wrapped once in newspaper, since I was running low on decorative paper.

This one was a box from baby wipes - which wouldn't be a good birthday present for my wife, even if we were close to running out, and we weren't. Fortunately, this box contained yet another gift-wrapped box, in a different style of paper.

 

Finally, she said - progress!  Better yet, it was a shoebox - she loves shoes. Unfortunately, it was a shoebox from my old shoes, definitely too large for her and of entirely the wrong style. And it was taped on every side, naturally.

It did, however, contain another neatly wrapped package - and by now, things were getting small enough that there couldn't be too many more layers to this Russian nesting doll of a present.  This was, at last, "Bond 50" - shown at right below for scale, next to the packaging she had to open to get to it.

The end result was, of course, worth it, since she got a surprise gift that she loves.

It was worth it for me as well - I got a lot of laughs, and photos of the whole process. ;)
But oh, yes, she has vowed to get revenge on me for this... I'd better watch my back!

Coloring Time 2

Monday, around 70-75 first-grade students became the first people to try out the new coloring pages I've been creating.  Some rather... interesting alternate color schemes for the observatory emerged.


Tuesday and Thursday, another 120 or so first, second and third-grade students will get their hands on the coloring pages.  I look forward to seeing what they do.


Here's another of the pages, scaled down.

Subaru Telescope and its Control Building

Coloring Time

As a child, I did my fair share of coloring, first with crayons and later with colored pencils and ink markers.  Unlike at least one friend (shout-out to Eva of Dawn and Dark Ivory fame), I didn't grow up to be an artist, so I haven't done that sort of thing in quite some time.


Instead, I wound up with careers in other fields, and in one of them, I've lately gotten to the point where I occasionally get to visit schools and talk to kids about what I do, how it relates to things they're studying, and all that.  And so, I've developed an interest once again in coloring pages - but this time, from the side of creating them!


Conveniently, I take a lot of photos of things that make interesting subjects for coloring pages.  Inconveniently, I don't have a light table and parchment paper, which I'd instinctively want to use to trace the outlines of things in a photo to create a coloring page.  I do, however, have Photoshop.  But knowing how to use Photoshop to process photos is one thing, and knowing how to use it to create a coloring page from a photo is quite another thing altogether.


I was well aware of the various filters available in Photoshop for this sort of thing.  I could "Find Edges."  Or, I could create "Glowing Edges."  Or I could "Trace Contours," or "Emboss."  So many choices!  A tutorial video online suggested instead creating a greyscale image, duplicating the layer, setting the top layer to "color dodge," doing a gaussian blur, and adjusting the blur ratio.  I tried it, but found it to be a rather complicated manual way of arriving, more or less, at "Find Edges."


Then I ran across a page suggesting the "Photocopy" filter, with its sliders for "Darkness" and "Detail."  Aha!  Photocopiers, I could handle.  (Fax machines, less so.)  I gave this a shot, then went in with a white "pen" to tidy up the image, followed by a black "pen" to strengthen some of the lines - steps which have to be done after using this filter - and in an acceptably short amount of time, actually had something I can give schoolchildren to color.  Hooray!  Here's a scaled-down version of the first coloring page I've ever created.

A coloring page of the Subaru Telescope and its laser beam.

I intend for this to be just the first of several, perhaps even "many," such pages, now that I've found a practical and reasonably quick way of creating them.

Aloha, cousin?

With apologies to Stitch, of course...


If you're on Geni.com, and have enough of a family tree entered, sooner or later someone in your family tree is going to turn out to be in other people's family trees as well.  This tends to start happening a few generations back, and occur more and more as you go further back.  Geni calls the interconnected tree-of-trees the "World Family Tree."


For example, actress Liv Tyler and I are both about 10 generations descended from Joseph Morse (1671-1745), which makes us 9th cousins.  One has to go back a couple generations earlier than Joseph, though, to find the ancestor we have in common with noted 19th-century "coder" Samuel Finley Breese Morse - he's descended from one of Joseph's cousins.


There are plenty of other more distant relations to be found out there.  Like many people, I'm distantly related to plenty of recent US presidents, and to various and sundry European royals in the old days.  None of this gets me anything, of course.


Anyway, I'm curious.  I already know who my cousins are, and at least most of my cousins once removed, cousins twice removed, and second cousins.  I'm sure they're far outnumbered by my third cousins, fourth cousins, and so on.


So here's my question: will anyone read this who turns out to be more distant than a second cousin, but less distant than Liv Tyler?  A third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth cousin?


Here's my Geni profile - well, there's a lot more to it than that, but it's not all visible to the public.


If you're on Geni and are a pro or plus member, I believe it will tell you whether it thinks we're related.  If you're a basic member, it won't tell you, but it will tell me (as a Pro member) if you give me the URL for your Geni profile so I can search.  Of course, it'll be more likely to work if you've entered a bunch of your ancestry!


If you aren't already on Geni, get yourself a basic account and enter a bunch of direct ancestors, then let me know and I'll see if I can find a connection.


Oh, and sorry, the "World Family Tree" is not the same concept as Yggdrasil the "World Tree," for those who might be wondering.

Join the worlds largest family tree

Rick Santorum wants healthy babies to die.

CBS News reported today that Rick Santorum criticized President Obama's health policies requiring medical insurance plans to provide free prenatal screening.


Santorum said, "...free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society... That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."


This position is not the least bit new to me.  Since I was a kid, I've been aware of the March of Dimes, which works to fight birth defects - and I've heard the mantra that people are likely to abort babies who they know have defects.  I also know that Santorum himself has a three-year-old daughter who suffers from Trisomy 18, which is usually fatal in much less than three years.

My wife any I are Christians of modest income, living in a small city, doing everything we can to get by.  (In my case, that means full-time work, plus part-time when I can get it.)  We're not the sorts who'd chose abortion ourselves.  In fact, Santorum would probably think we're the "target market" for his campaign messages.

I don't know whether the Santorums' faith led them to entirely opt out of prenatal screening for Trisomy 18, or just to have their daughter regardless of the results.  I do, however, know that Santorum is absolutely "full of it" on this point, because prenatal screening can also save the life of a mother or baby.  In fact, if it weren't for prenatal screening, my daughter wouldn't be alive today.