UFO over Wartburg

For my morning walks, I've started taking my camera, especially at sunrise.  Below is a common view of Wartburg Seminary, sticking up like a Harry Potter castle above
the trees.

However, this morning, I was astounded to see a UFO hovering above it, lowering some sort of tube.  I assure you, I did not create the image below with digital manipulation.  It was a single exposure.  Is that some sort of tube hanging from it, perhaps for lowering aliens or abducting seminary students?  Let me know in the comments below what you think.

Nets and Masks

So far, I've avoided Covid-19. But I can't help comparing it to malaria, which I survived 40 years ago while teaching math in Kenya after college.

Malaria is a consistent killer. Hundreds of thousands die each year, three-fourths of which are younger than five years old. Little kids. Little African kids, mostly. And that, unfortunately, is one of the reasons insufficient research has been done on ways to combat it.

Research isn't cheap. Most work is collaborative, and the work requires facilities, salaries, and equipment. (The solitary genius is mostly a myth.)
Which research is supported depends upon the values of the people, organizations, and governments that control funding. Two-year-old African kids simply aren't valued much, not in terms of dollars spent on their well-being. No malaria vaccine is yet approved.

But there has been progress. According to Our World in Data, "from 2000 to 2015 the number of malaria deaths has almost halved, from 840,000 deaths per year to 440,000." That's without any vaccine. How did it happen?

The authors of a study published in the top science journal Nature, estimated that two-thirds of the reduction in cases of malaria were due to insecticide-treated bed nets. According to the CDC Foundation, such nets, with long-lasting insecticide and sized to protect three kids, cost $5. That we aren't handing them out like beads at Mardi Gras says a lot about what we value. Or don't.

A net to save a child or a mask to save grandma. Simple things. Cheap. And an immediate help while we wait on vaccines. While many conservatives speak out in support of the sanctity of life, many liberals speak out in support of protecting the poor and vulnerable. If both groups mean what they say, then perhaps nets and masks can offer areas of potential agreement.

Shrek says they are compensating for something

Sculpture abutting the newly erected Peter and Susan Smith Welcome Center at the University of Dubuque.  

Update:  New lights were installed recently, consistent with the theme:

Avoiding Despair

Despair is suffering without meaning. –Viktor Frankl

---

Dad was born in 1916, just starting high school when the Great Depression struck. That summer, he had raised a crop of tobacco to pay for clothes and school expenses, and when the market crashed that October, the sale of his summer's production brought one dollar. In today's dollars, that's about $15 for a summer's work at a hot, dirty job. He said that starting school with no money would have been a lot worse if everyone else weren't in the same shape.

After that, I don't think Dad ever worried too much about what he wore.

Dad's father was a bit of a gentleman farmer at the beginning of the Depression. He raised some tobacco with the help of sharecroppers on the farm, and he oversaw the work on some larger plantations in the area. His wife was quite proud of being from town and being descended from good people, including Betsy Ross. When the Depression hit, Grandpa lost the farm to the bank and started drinking, and grandma moved into a separate bedroom.

My father would never buy anything on credit. Ever.

During World War II, Dad learned to work on airplanes and, after the war, joined an airline starting up with surplus DC3 planes. Soon after, he met my mom and married, moving back to near where he grew up. They built their own home, a log cabin made of trees cut on his brother's farm. No electricity, no running water, no phone.

They paid for everything with cash.

Dad had little time to get to know his in-laws before marrying Mom—they got married six weeks after they met. Dad was 32 and Mom was 19. She grew up in the hills of North Carolina during the Depression, which may explain why she was willing to put up with, even embrace, Dad's ways.

They remained married 33 years until Dad died.

Dad was impressed with his father-in-law. Mom's dad may have been a hillbilly, but he loved to read, had traveled outside the hills when younger, and embraced a self-sufficiency that contrasted with Dad's own upbringing. Mom's family was poor in an income/cash sense, but they raised a big garden, grew an orchard, milked a cow, raised pigs, canned and preserved food, and never went hungry.

Dad and Mom always had a large garden, raised livestock, dug their own well for water, and kept multiple freezers and a block outbuilding stocked with food.

I grew up never knowing what it felt like to be hungry. And despite the economic turmoil of the pandemic, there are many more sources of aid in place now, largely because of programs dating to the 1930s—put in place by my Dad's generation.  During the Great Depression, we learned a lot about how to better take care of each other. 

My parents and neighbors always found time to help each other. 

I think those relationships are key to overcoming despair.  As Robert Waldinger says in one of my favorite TED talks, "Loneliness kills."  People with relationships they believe they can depend upon live longer, even healthier, lives. 

Weight-Loss Data

For the last 3+ years, I've been weighing nearly daily, trying to lose weight plus determine what behaviors helped or hurt. Take a look:

Look closely and some patterns appear:

• I lose weight best between the New Year and the end of the spring semester.
• Summers are flat or even a bit of gain.
• Weight creeps up in fall, and I'm lucky if I don't put on much over the Thanksgiving to Christmas holidays.

What's going on? A clue comes by looking at a couple of years of daily averages:

Daily averages for two years.

Something happens Thursday nights and over the weekend. It's really not a mystery.

• On Thursday nights, I go to Jubeck's, a microbrewery where I've been a member for over five years, since even before they opened. I typically drink two ales and snack on the free peanuts, Chex mix, and other goodies.
• Over the weekend, my wife and I often eat out, sometimes multiple times, and I don't walk to school.

In January to early May, it's typically poor weather for riding my scooter, so I walk more. I also shovel snow. And I keep myself on a regular routine. In summer and early fall, I ride my scooter, walk less, have no snow to shovel and the grass seldom needs mowing after July or so. I like to cookout, and I keep beer in stock. The extra calories add up.
Still, from when I started to the current date, I've lost about 35 pounds. My blood-test results have improved, and I feel a significant difference when I walk. Uphills are easier without the 35-pound pack I carried on my stomach and hips. So what have I learned about my body and weight loss?

• Walking helps everything---weight loss, blood work, and mental health.
• Cutting out everything white matters---no white sugar, white rice, white flour, white potatoes, white supremacy, white privilege---all of it has to go. (The latter is the hardest to get rid of.)
• I can eat as many salads and fresh vegetables as I want as long as I don't slather them or fry them in oils.
• The improved feeling that comes with weight loss is itself an incentive to continue losing.
• I need to watch the beer consumption, especially as it easily gets tied to increased snacking. That said, I'd rather die young than drink light beer. Even if I didn't live longer, it would seem that way.

Portrait Photos

In previous posts, I've explained the impact of aperture upon depth-of-field.  When taking portrait photos, a commonly desired featured is a blurred background, as shown in the following photo:

My daughter, Tess, before her senior prom.
1/125 sec, f5.7, ISO 125, focal length 155mm

There are still more features in the background than I prefer, but they are fairly blurred so that the focus is literally upon her.   Better yet is the following image in which the background is completely blurred:

My daughter, Tess, before a previous prom.
1/1600 sec, f5.7, ISO 1250, focal length 300mm

Notice that in both cases, the aperture was f5.7, not extreme.  Instead, the shallow depth-of-field and resulting blurring of the background was due to using a longer focal length, 155mm in the first and 300mm in the second.  In both cases, I was using a Canon T6 with a zoom lens.

This narrowing of the depth-of-field is a strong reason for using a longer lens for portrait images.  A second reason is that the photographer need not be very close to the model.  I was probably 20 feet or more from my daughter in both cases and could take multiple candid shots without her being painfully aware of my presence.  Depending on the comfort of your model with being photographed, this may be a tremendous advantage.

The weakness of using a long lens is the general need for better light or a more expensive lens.  Many photographers who specialize in portraits will spend the money on a fixed-link lens (prime lens) of 80 or 90 mm.

Another reason for using a long lens is simply to take photos at a distance, such as when my older daughter was on the field at a track meet:

Ananda (left) and her friend, Kat.
1/500 sec, f8, ISO 400, focal length 300mm

Notice the lack of detail in the grass behind them.  That said, if you depend on the camera to do the focusing, the shallow depth-of-field may result in something other than your intended subject being in focus.  We'll leave focus issues for another post.

Shutter-Priority Effects

In my previous post, I showed examples of how by changing aperture settings the photographer can alter the depth of field.  In this post, I'll show the effect of setting your camera to Shutter Priority (Tv on Canon cameras) and experimenting with fast and slow shutter speeds.

When you set your camera to Shutter Priority (instead of fully manual), your camera will automatically set aperture and iso.  So, as in the previous post, the depth of field will change.  But by setting the shutter speed very fast or very slow, you can stop or blur movement, respectively.

With a very fast shutter speed in the image in the left below, individual drops of water are visible.  With the very slow shutter speed on the right, the water falling is blurred, as are the resulting ripples. (Both images were shot while using a tripod and a 50mm lens.)

left: 1/2000 second exposure, f1.8, ISO 400                  right: 1 second exposure, f23, ISO 100 

Note also the difference in the shadow on the rock in the upper-right of each image and the difference in detail in the water upstream.

Sports and live-arts photographers may also wish to use fast shutter speeds to capture images without blurring.  Note, however, that the price of high shutter speeds is either small f-stop values or high ISO values.  Very small f-stop values (large aperture) generally mean expensive lenses.  Very high ISO values generally mean graininess in images.  Such are the tradeoffs.