It’s not really a resolution as such (particularly since I started both projects before the new year began), but I have decided to spruce up (and expand on) my foreign language skills. To this end, I’m dinking around at Duolingo more and I’ve dug my old copy of Rosetta Stone Mandarin out and installed it on this computer. It took a few tries to get it to work on this computer, largely because I kept trying to install an update (note for Rosetta Stone users using Rosetta Stone on Windows 8. Don’t bother with the update. Just kick it down the road some and keep going).
My employer also gives me free access to Rosetta Stone, so since we have a lot of foreign customers, I decided to learn one of their languages and have settled on Vietnamese. Rosetta Stone is good for the initial introduction, but I’m nearing the end of Level 1 and suspect that I will hit the wall soon. So when that happens, I’m going to switch to Duolingo’s Vietnamese lessons and then repeat and redo the earlier Rosetta Stone lessons. Just as long as I do at least five hours per month I’ll be good. Eventually I’ll be able to tackle further lessons in Rosetta Stone. I hope to have all three levels done by the end of 2017.
I’ve also started doing the lessons at Codecademy. I just finished the first course, on HTML and CSS. I’m starting the JavaScript course now and will need to practice at some point. I started designing my first webpage in 1997 or so, so that course was easy. JavaScript is all new to me, so I’m going to need somewhere to practice. I wonder if WordPress will let me stick random JavaScript into the blog. . . .
I’m paying myself to do all these things, as well. With the language thing, I’m hoping that I’ll save up enough money to invest and with the Codecademy stuff I’m saving up to pay for the pro version which, they tell me, will give me opportunities to practice. If I never save up $20 for the first month, well, I’m clearly not dedicated enough to this idea to make it worth the expense.
I think I’ve been to the Adler Planetarium four times in my life. I remember going there once when I was quite young indeed and the planetarium show scared me. They were talking about the other planets and mentioned that the atmosphere of Jupiter was poisonous. I had uncorrected nearsightedness at that age* and the image that accompanied that statement looked frightening to me, like some kind of wall that was melting gruesomely. I sometimes wonder what that image actually was.
So, as a result, I wasn’t a fan until I got to be much older (and got glasses). I think we did one field trip there, but don’t quote me on that. The next time I am certain that we went was when I was in my teens or early twenties and the show was different. The one thing I came away with that time was that the Planetarium show was great, but that the building itself is very small, and the exhibits were not terribly exciting.
I returned again in August of 2016. There is a planetarium in Salt Lake City that Alex and I didn’t have a chance to visit, so I promised him a trip to the Adler during our Chicago trip. The building is much larger now. Well, they haven’t actually enlarged the building, because it’s a landmark, but they added a glassed-in portion that’s probably as large as the original building itself, plus it has several sublevels.
When we went, there were exhibits on telescopes, the nature of the universe, a model solar system that is beautiful but certainly didn’t look to scale to me. They also have a meteorite that you can touch. One can also see the oldest planetarium in the city, the Atwood Sphere, which dates from 1913 and has 692 holes drilled in it, each representing one of the brightest stars in the sky.
See what I mean about this not looking like it’s to scale? Jupiter and Saturn are almost touching and they look awfully close to Venus there.
The Adler Planetarium was named for Max Adler, an executive at Sears Roebuck & Co. (presumably Adler was the “Co.”), who donated the money to build it. Adler had seen some planetaria in Europe and felt that the United States needed one. The planetarium opened in 1930 (so the Atwood Sphere obviously was somewhere else prior to that point; where, I don’t know).
So I was much more impressed by the Planetarium this time than last time. Alex and I were trying to cover a lot of territory in a short time, so we went to a show that was held in one of the sublevels and had a flat screen rather than a dome, so I owe him a dome planetarium show. Looks like San Antonio College has a planetarium show on Friday nights. I might be taking a Friday night off sometimes soon and then we’ll have a brand-new South Texas Destination to share.
And I think I’ve found where the Atwood Sphere has been all its life. It was originally housed in the Chicago Academy of Sciences museum. The museum was in the Matthew Laflin building in Lincoln Park until 1994. The sphere was moved to the Adler in 1995, and then in 1999 the Academy of Sciences museum moved to a new building, still in Lincoln Park, and was renamed the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.
So it looks like my next trip to Chicago (tentatively scheduled for 2019) will include the Notebeart museum in addition to the Chicago History Museum, the Oriental Institute Museum, and the Museum of Science and Industry.
*So here’s how it was discovered that I was nearsighted. I’d been telling people that my perceptions weren’t the same as theirs for years. As an example, I didn’t believe that the candles in a Catholic church were candles. They looked like the blinking lights like on the control panel of the Enterprise on Star Trek. After the service (wedding?) my mom took me up to see that they were, in fact, candles.
I guess my parents chalked things like this up to imagination and it didn’t occur to my parents that this “imagination” that I had was nearsightedness until we went to the circus in 1973. We were waiting for it to start and I asked them what time it was and they both said, “You can’t see the clock?” I couldn’t. They indicated that it was on the wall and I looked way up and down the amphitheater (or was it the Coliseum? No, I’m pretty sure it was the Amphitheater.**). No clock. Finally my mom put her opera glasses in front of my face and adjusted until the clock came into focus. It had been right in font of me the whole time.
** I checked with my dad and, in a surprise come-from-behind victory, it was the Chicago Stadium.
Beyond Reasonable Doubt, by Veronique Greenwood, photographs by Max Aguilera-Hellweg
This article talks about the latest developments in forensic science. One of the techniques covered is what’s called genetic phenotyping, where they can now take a DNA sample and pull out hair, eye, and skin color and, often traits like whether the source of the sample had freckles. They can even sometimes get a general idea of the shape of the person’s face.
Of course, the hair thing might not be foolproof, as (totally aside from the existence of hair dyes), people do lose their hair sometimes and hair does eventually gray. In fact, I knew two young men in my youth who lost their hair at very young ages. It’s likely that there might be some kind of genetic component to the hair loss, but statistically speaking, in their teens or 20s the reconstructions would probably have shown them with full heads of hair.
We also talk about some of the mistakes made through older versions of forensic science, including Kirk Odom, whose hair was supposedly “microscopically indistinguishable” from a hair found at the crime scene. Turns out that the scientists never examined the hair under a microscope and that even if they had, <a href=https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/july2000/deedric1.htm>it looks to me like they can determine things like the species of the source of the hair and, if human, the race of the source of the hair, but it is not possible to narrow it down to an individual.</a>
The photograph of the photographer, by the way, was created by DNA phenotyping. There’s an interactive feature on the website where you can compare that image to actual photographs of actual photographers to see if you can figure out which was is Max.
The Battle for Virunga, by Robert Draper, photographs by Brent Stirton
Well, it’s been a while since we’ve had some unrest in Africa, so I guess we’re due. And since we’re talking about parks in the magazine this year, this article is a “twofer,” part of the Power of Parks series and about unrest in Africa.
Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the oldest national park in Africa. It is also part of some kind of turf war between at least two militias. The Battle for Virunga covers some of this recent history and discusses some of the things that the (at the moment) current director, Emmanuel de Merode, is doing to improve the park. One of these things is that they are building hydroelectric power plants in the park, hoping that the electricity being produced will (a) cover the park’s expenses into the future and (b) give potential entrepreneurs the chance to begin to develop businesses in the region that will give the children of the area something to aspire to besides joining a militia.
Generally I write my posts ahead of time and schedule them to launch at midnight of the day in question, but since I’m up at midnight, I figured I’d write one in real time for publishing immediately.
This was an exciting New Year’s Eve. I’m trying to build on my current foreign language skills and pick up Vietnamese, so I spent most of the day working on that. On New Year’s Eve, I did eight Duolingo lessons, three each of Vietnamese and Mandarin Rosetta Stone lessons and read two chapters in Kiêu Hãnh và Định Kiến (Pride & Prejudice in Vietnamese).
I also have started doing the lessons at Codecademy. I don’t know if I’ll learn enough coding there to become employable eventually, but it’s worth a shot.
I can hear the amateur fireworks of my neighbors going off in the distance and hear Ricky Martin singing “Livin’ La Vida Loca” on television as I write this and think about things we can do to make the world (and the United States) a better place in 2017.
Not my neighbors’ fireworks.
First, be kind. What’s that saying about how everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about? It looks like it was originally said by John Watson, under his pen name of Ian MacLaren, according to the Quote Investigator. So, yeah, do that.
Second, learn something this year. It doesn’t matter what. While I’ve loved my time in school, some of my favorite people are self-educated, and thanks to things like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, there is really no limit to the number of things you can learn for free, or at least for the cost of a textbook. I also love the mission of the University of the People. The University of the People is an accredited university with no tuition fees. Students pay a $60 fee to apply and $100 for every final exam they take. A bachelor’s degree takes around $4000, payable as students finish each class. Even spread out over a long period, $4,000 is a lot of money for some people, so there are also scholarship programs. And since it’s a distance learning school, they have students from all of the world taking classes together.
Third, support serious journalism. There’s so much emphasis on not taking sides in journalism today that people are getting the impression that nothing they do matters. And that’s just not true. There are serious journalists out there not taking sides. Support them. (If someone had told me ten years ago that I would someday subscribe to Vanity Fair magazine to support serious journalism, I would have asked what they were smoking).
Beyond that, be well. Exercise, and eat better than you did in 2016 and take some time off to have fun. Engage in your hobbies and pet the cats (or dogs or lizards or whatever).
I am kind of embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t really into history at this point in my life, so the thing that is causing me to stop and research rather than writing didn’t even register to me back then. Christ Church is the church that a number of prominent Philadelphians, including Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, George Washington (once he was president), John Adams (likewise), and William Penn all worshiped here.
One problem, though. Ross and Penn were Quakers.
So here I am, trying to figure out why a bunch of Quakers were worshiping in an Anglican church. So far, I’ve been able to determine that Betsy Ross’s husband, John, was Anglican, and so she got expelled from the Quakers for marrying a non-Quaker. During the American Revolution, the Quaker meeting in Philadelphia splintered into two groups, one that believed that sticking to their pacifism was important, and one that believed that the revolution was a just war and that they had a duty to support it. Betsy was able to join this second group of Quakers, who dubbed themselves the Free Quakers.
William Penn is the real poser, though. He founded Pennsylvania because he was a Quaker. Quakers were outlawed in England and so he found Pennsylvania to be a place where Quakers would be free to practice their religion. So then he moved here and promptly started attending an Anglican church? It just doesn’t add up. Maybe the Quakers met at Christ Church (the Arch Street Friends meetinghouse wasn’t built until 1804)? I have a coworker who’s from Pennsylvania. Maybe she knows. I’ll try to remember to ask her.
So I did ask my coworker and she didn’t know that William Penn had attended an Anglican church, so that’s a dead end. I guess we’ll just have to leave that as a head-scratcher. If I ever do find an answer, I’ll let y’all know.
After we left the church, we wandered around in the Burial Ground for a while. The website for the church says that there are currently 1,400 markers and that over 5,000 have disappeared. So this little burial ground, just two acres in area, contains over 6,000 graves.
Next up: Fairmount Park, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and the realization that I need to dig out that photo album and rescan the final five pictures.
I’m in a quandary. Remember how I said that I was probably going to start putting Amazon Associates links in my posts if they seemed appropriate?
Well, the next National Geographic post that I’m going to write (I’m three posts ahead right now (not counting what I hope will be another link dump thing for New Year’s Day) so this is my post for January 7 or so that I’m talking about) is going to be on an article about great white sharks. And I’ve got, like, four things that I can link to.
But I don’t want it to look spammy to Google, even though all four things are on-topic. Two are the book and movie versions of Jaws and the third is the second Young Wizards book, Deep Wizardry, but in order to make that book make sense, one would need to read the first Young Wizards book, So You Want to Be a Wizard. I really love the stuff about sharks in Deep Wizardry far more than the movie of Jaws, so I’m really leaning towards that.
Maybe National Geographic has done/will do some other articles on great white sharks in the past and I can link Jaws when I get there. That won’t look too spammy, will it?
A little later than I’d planned (I’d hoped to have this up 23.5 hours earlier than I actually ended up posting it), but I finally got out to take pictures of the lights here in the city. This year Alex and I went to the University of the Incarnate Word to take pictures, and I got a pretty good one of the Brackenridge Villa:
Brackenridge Villa, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas, 2016
Hopefully next year, we’ll have more energy and can take some Christmas pictures before the night of Christmas itself.
I’m still working on my next National Geographic post, but I need something for December 22, so here’s something short to use as a filler until I get the next post made (December 24, looks like).
So what do I take with me when I travel? I am only 5 feet 2 inches tall, and I generally book the cheap seats. This means that the overhead bins are generally filled by the time I get there and generally no one helps put my bag up. So I just check a bag. It costs a bit more, but compared to fighting over bin space (and having to drag the damn thing out of the bin when we land), a few dollars isn’t going to hurt.
This means that I need a smallish suitcase (since I may be willing to pay to check a bag, but I’m not willing to pay for an oversized bag) and a “personal item,” which is generally a backpack.
I used to travel with my laptop, and then with my tablet, but nowadays my phone is pretty much my only electronic item. Alex and I bought those lithium batteries that you can use to charge your phone when you’re away while we were in Idaho this year, so I take that as well.
Since I’m checking a bag, I bring whole containers of toiletries. My routine is pretty simple: shampoo, soap, the face cream with sunblock that I use instead of makeup, my leg razor, anti-perspirant and toothbrush, and toothpaste are pretty much it.
Then I bring enough shirts to change every day, plus one extra just in case. I bring two pairs of shoes (sandals and walking shoes) and a pair of socks for each day. I also bring two more pairs of underpants than the number of days I’ll be gone, in case of emergencies. I also have several of those broomstick skirts and generally bring at least one on each trip because they are very comfortable for traveling in. If I’m feeling particularly girly on one of my travel days, I may wear a skirt on that day as well. I prefer knit pants to jeans and have a couple of capri-length ones and some full-length ones, I’ll bring at least one pair of each and also a pair of shorts. If we’ll have access to a swimming pool, I’ll bring my bathing suit, but I haven’t used it since 2013. I wonder if it still fits. And, of course, a clean set of pajamas. I finally broke down and bought new pajama bottoms this year. Still using the same tops, though.
If I’m sure that I’m going to have access to a laundry room, I bring a few of those Tide Pods (I’m still working on the bag of them that I got in 2013 or so) and can cut down on the clothing that I bring with by a bit. I’ll bring only 2/3 as many shirts as I’ll need and maybe half as many pairs of socks and take out two pairs of underpants, so I’m down to one per day. That way if the washer is out of service and I end up doing laundry with shampoo in my hotel sink (and, yes, I have done that) I’ll still be able to make it through the trip.
Pretty much all that’s left is entertainment. If we’ll be gone a long time I’ll sometimes bring my portable DVD player with, but I’ve only done that once or twice. I do, however, always bring several books and at least one National Geographic issue. I generally have one hard copy book and put at least two books on my phone. That way my entertainment needs are covered whether I can use my phone or not.
The last time I looked at the official list of parks, I thought that O.P. Schnabel Park was listed under “O” and that I’d skipped it, but apparently it’s under “S” and so it’s up next.
Schnabel Park was founded in 1964 with the name “Bandera Road Park,” which is certainly descriptive, but not very exciting. In 1977, they renamed the park in honor of O.P. Schnabel, founder of the Beautify San Antonio Association. Do you know how hard I had to dig to find even that little bit on Schnabel? Honestly. I searched Google for his name and the first three pages or so were all articles on the park. I tried putting a “-park” in there and, apparently due to a bug, still listed the park. So frustrating. I even tried Find a Grave to no avail. Apparently, wherever his grave is hasn’t been indexed yet. Finally, I got the “-park” to work and you know what I found? Lots of listings on the OP Schnabel apartments. Picture me resting my elbows on my keyboard tray and putting my face in my hands here. So, then I tried again with “-park -apartment” and finally got, like two things on the man, both of which were writeups for the Beautify San Antonio Association archives. I’ll take what I can get at this point.
Deer at OP Schnabel Park, San Antonio, Texas
As you might expect from the prevalence of the park in the Google results, Schnabel Park is one of the best parks in the city. The park has two picnic pavilions, a kitchen, sports fields (baseball, basketball, soccer), at least two playgrounds, restrooms, a swimming pool and at least 4.5 miles of hiking trails. Schnabel Park also has a trail head for the Leon Creek Greenway and is home to the Braundera YMCA. I also know some people who go rock-climbing there as well, though I’m not sure if that’s an officially sanctioned activity.
Alex and I have seen a decent amount of wildlife in the park on our visits, including a buck who walked across the path right in front of us (see image). We have also seen several military aircraft fly overhead including, on one memorable occasion, a C-5 Galaxy. We also have attempted to access the Leon Creek Greenway from the park a few times, and the trailhead is quite a ways from the actual greenway, so we usually give up before getting to the greenway.
Stranded on the Roof of the World, by Michael Finkel, photographs by Matthieu Paley
In this article, we visit the Kyrgyz of the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan. The Wakhan Corridor runs from a low of about 10,000 feet to a height of about 16,000 feet. That puts the entirety of these people’s world above the tree line. Many of them have never even seen a tree. At the time this was written, there were no doctors and no roads. The closest road to their territory was a three-day hike away.
Their entire lifestyle revolves around their livestock. They live too high to grow crops, so they raise sheep and yaks and goats both to eat and to use as currency. They have been able to enter something like the 21st century by trade as well. They have solar-powered batteries and use them to charge cell phones, which they use to play music and take pictures. They cannot use them as phones, however. There’s no service that high up.
So far, however, it looks like that is as far as modernization has gone. They still lack basics like plumbing, roads, schools, and medical clinics.
Joy Is Round, photographs by Jessica Hilltout, text by Jeremy Berlin
Hilltout traveled to Africa and took photographs of African youths playing soccer (football to the rest of the world) and posing with their homemade soccer balls both to chronicle the development of the youth soccer leagues of these countries but also, from what I can tell, to convince people to donate money to a project that would buy real equipment for these leagues. As she traveled through Africa, she swapped the homemade balls for real balls that she carried in her car. Included in this article are the photographs she took of those balls.
While researching Hilltout’s project, I found Futbol Friends International’s website. They are raising money for soccer-related projects in Africa. I looked to see if they’re on the up-and-up and so far have found that Charity Navigator has a page for them, but hasn’t rated them because they are too small to have to file the form that Charity Navigator gets their information from. If you’d be interested in donating, however, their website is at Futbol Friends International.
The Sultans of Streams, by Adam Nicolson, photographs by Charlie Hamilton James
The Sultans of Streams, in addition to getting an old Dire Straits song stuck in my head, is about the decline and resurgence of otters in England (their numbers never declined much in Scotland). Industrialization and DDT caused the decline of otter habitat to only 6 percent of streams in the 1970s. Since then, however, they have been making a comeback. As of 2010, otters were present in 59 percent of streams and the numbers have probably increased even farther since then (I cannot find anything definitive).
