Archive for January, 2013
Random Images……Sausalito morning commute
Show on mapA quick snapshot through the window of Golden Gate Transit’s #2 bus at approximately 7:20am.
It looks like something from Hitchcock’s The Birds – which incidentally was filmed locally in nearby Bodega Bay.
On the Road……Above Bonita Cove: Views of the Bridge and Sutro Tower
I’m not exactly sure what this graffiti artist is trying to communicate. Perhaps, it’s that war = destruction? (since the opposite of creation is destruction).
But speaking of language, the December 24th issue of The New Yorker magazine had a curious article by Joshua Foer about an amateur linguist named John Quijada. When he wasn’t working at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Quijada spent his spare time (extending over 25 years) engineering a new language and grammar system combining what he believed were the best aspects of all the world’s languages.
Here’s a quote from the beginning of the article:
In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-m?öi hhâsma?p?uktôx.”
This is really quite odd.
Ithkuil seems to be a language devoid of nuance, implication, metaphor, and for that matter: poetry!
Random Image……Cargo Bike at Dunphy Park, addendum
As a follow-up to the previous post, here’s one final traditional B&W darkroom variation called a duotone (For an in-depth, but slightly outdated photoshop tutorial and explanation of dutones see this article on the Luminous Landscape website.)
The highlights (i.e. the brightest areas of the tonal range) receive the sepia tint and the shadows (the darkest areas) receive the blue tint.
Actually, this may be my favorite version so far.
Random Images……Cargo Bike at Dunphy Park
Happy MLK day!
Since today was a day off from work, I spent a leisurely morning luxuriating over breakfast and a cup of PJ Tips tea.
Here’s the idyllic view — from this morning — from my apartment’s dining nook.
I thought I’d use the image to demonstrate different types of traditional black and white tinting techniques — techniques that are now regularly applied digitally, but which photographers originated in old fashioned, physical darkrooms.
For example, here it is as a neutral, black and white image:
Here it is as a warm sepia-toned image:
Here it is as a cool blue-toned image:
Click this link to view the original image in color.
-Nathan
On the Road……Marin Headlands Gun Battery on MLK Holiday
The coastal fortifications (as seen in the image above) from a time when nation-states confronted each other with crude, 20th century explosives and projectiles are hard to miss as you bicycle through the Marin Headlands.
These gun batteries are now quiet, but our world still does not embrace Martin Luther King’s practice of non-violent resistance or Mahatma Gandhi’s ethos of satyagraha.
King was influenced by Gandhi, who, according to the author Thomas Weber (Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor, Cambridge University Press, 2004), would quote the poet Shelley at his mass rallies in India.
So in honor of Martin Luther King Day, here are a few stanzas from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Stand ye calm and resolute, Like a forest close and mute, With folded arms and looks which are Weapons of unvanquished war. And if then the tyrants dare, Let them ride among you there, Slash, and stab, and maim and hew, What they like, that let them do. With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise Look upon them as they slay Till their rage has died away Then they will return with shame To the place from which they came, And the blood thus shed will speak In hot blushes on their cheek. Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you- Ye are many — they are few
–Percy Bysshe Shelley (from The Masque of Anarchy)
Random Images……Muhammad Ali and Grandson
I first saw this image on the back cover of The New Yorker magazine. I find it to be a beautiful and tender portrait.
Forget that it is a Louis Vuitton ad. Forget that the world’s highest paid and most famous portrait photographer, Annie Leibovitz, created it. Just appreciate it.
And this reminds me to add Muhammad Ali to my personal list of heroes, which was published in a previous post.
On the Road……Entrance to Battery Wallace
From the days, when gunpowder was king.
These batteries housed guns 12″ in diameter with 36 foot long barrels that fired thousand pound shells 268 football fields out into the Pacific Ocean.
That’s my bike in the sunshine on the other end of the tunnel.
On the Road……Old Tree at Battery Wallace, Marin Headlands
I think this was once a Monterey Cyprus (Cupressus macrocarpa). It’s located near Battery Wallace, a former armed outpost (from 1918 to 1948) meant to defend SF bay from marauding seafaring types.
On the Road……Descending Conzelman Road
After riding uphill steadily for 4 miles (from the town of Sausalito), bicyclists will dive sharply toward the sea, before the road flattens out and heads toward the spit of land seen off in the distance where the Pt. Bonita lighthouse sits.
The section of road seen below is most certainly the steepest stretch of pavement I’ve ridden. Although the steepness may not be readily apparent from the image, looking at the elevation graph on the route map page, one can see that the road drops away precipitously right after the summit.
On the Road……Fighting shadenfreude pedaling toward Pt. Bonita
What a beautiful, clear winter day! The image below is a popular picture taking spot just where the road reaches a plateau (below Hawk Hill) and before it plummets back down to the sea.
The Park Service made some major infrastructure “improvements” along Conzelman Rd., expanding parking and creating new scenic vistas and pullouts. Now, more people driving up here in cars can enjoy the scenery, but my sense is there’s more traffic and delays. On this day, cars were lining up and I was sometimes overtaking vehicles on the uphill!
I have to admit, it was a rich, satisfying feeling passing snarled cars while pedaling uphill on my bicycle. The Germans, I believe, have a word for this sense of delight in the misfortune of others: they call it Schadenfreude. Studies have shown the human brain’s reward centers are activated in these schedenfreude-like situations, which confirms my own experience.
For the record, I’m not proud of this at all — humility after all is one of my velosophic tenets — but noticing unconscious negative habits, and then slowly perfecting oneself is what life is all about.
Route Map……Sausalito to Pt. Bonita Loop
Overall, this is an incredible 15-mile ride. The loop has views that tourists come from a world away to take-in; roads in very good condition with a bike shoulder for much of the way; and, interesting and varied terrain.
If this ride were a restaurant, it would earn a 3-star on the Michelin scale!
Beginning at sea level in downtown Sausalito and cresting at the top of the Marin Headlands near Hawk Hill, I was surprised the elevation gain was only 800 feet. It felt like much more. That’s barely a third of the way up Mt. Tam (elevation 2,571′)!
Here’s a map and elevation chart extracted from the gpx file created by the gps logging device I sometimes carry with me.
Off Topic Post……A Tragic Story
[This announcement will remain at the top of the blog for the next week. New posts will show up below]
Some tragic news to report close to home: The same beaches I’ve been photographing and enjoying recently have claimed three lives in the last week. Read the rest of this entry »
Random Images……First (Bay Area) Sunset of 2013 over Pacific Ocean
January 1, 2013
6:05pm to 6:07pm
The little nub of land (barely visible) on the right side of the horizon are the Farallones (also known as California’s Galapagos), a set of small islands which help form a highly productive ecological web of sea birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles including the Black-footed Albatross, Chinook Salmon, and Great White Shark.
-Nathan
