An American soldier greets his wife and son after returning home from a 14-month deployment to Iraq (Getty Images), BBC News
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Nineteen million veterans (2014 census) of war live among us in America, yet what do we do to help them transition from military life to civilian life? First, learn about their experience.
Here are two stories told by people who experienced war as active participants.
Wes Moore: How to talk to veterans about the war
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Sebastion Junger: Why veterans miss war
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Journalist Sebastian Junger wrote about veterans returning from war an opinion piece in the Washington Post:
Civilians tend to do things that make them, not the veterans, feel better. Yellow ribbons and parades do little to help with the emotional aftermath of combat. War has been part of human culture for tens of thousands of years, and most tribal societies were engaged in some form of warfare when encountered by Western explorers. It might be productive to study how some societies reintegrated their young fighters after the intimate carnage of Stone Age combat. It is striking, in fact, how rarely combat trauma is mentioned in ethnographic studies of cultures.
Typically, warriors were welcomed home by their entire community and underwent rituals to spiritually cleanse them of the effect of killing. Otherwise, they were considered too polluted to be around women and children. Often there was a celebration in which the fighters described the battle in great, bloody detail. Every man knew he was fighting for his community, and every person in the community knew that their lives depended on these young men. These gatherings must have been enormously cathartic for both the fighters and the people they were defending. A question like the one recently posed to me wouldn’t begin to make sense in a culture such as the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela or the Comanche.
As you probably know, Google is featuring Hedy Lamarr with its current doodle. Beauty and brains can be a toxic mixture. Take a look at this video to see what I mean.
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Despite her oft-repeated quote--"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid"--when her beauty faded, she did too.
TCM (Turner Classic Movies) has video clips of films with Ms. Lamarr. The overview page features a biography, her filmography, and other points of interest.
Uh-oh, looks like I've painted myself into a corner--again. There's not a lot of information on the web about using Notan in photography and what's there is very old. I could approach it as post-processing, but many photographers feel that that's cheating. To them a true photo is a capture of the moment. And I can't say I disagree.
Previously I talked about Notan--what it is and how it's used by artists. Here, in part 2, I planned to look at how it can be applied to photography. Granted, balancing light and dark values, as well as framing the picture, while capturing the image can be daunting, especially when you're starting out at photography.
So here's what information I did capture that photographers may find useful.
Available as a free ebook, Arthur Hammond's Pictorial Composition in Photography (American Photographic Publishing Company, 1920) is a small book with some big ideas. He prefaces his book by saying,
To tell a photographer how to compose his pictures is like telling a musician how to compose music, an author how to write a novel or an actor how to act a part. Such things can only grow out of the fulness and experience of life.
Another book relating Notan and photography, one that was elusive, is The Command to Look: A Formula for Picture Success (Camera Craft Publishing Company, 1937) by William Mortensen. This link is to a PDF file with photos of the book, somehow very fitting.
Ridley Scott is hands-down my favorite director. He has produced films as diverse as Alien, Gladiator, Robin Hood, The Martian, and Exodus. The one thing all of the films have in common is his talent for presenting gritty, hands-on characters in detailed, well-visualized worlds.
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That Scott produced a film like Exodus: Gods and Kings is surprising, considering that he is an atheist. It was not a particularly successful movie at the box office, but does have some interesting features. An excellent review of the movie from the standpoint of belief is one by Jack Jenkins at ThinkProgress. Another interesting review in the same vein is available at Time Magazine. In an interview with Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service Scott described himself and his approach to the elements of Exodus thus
I’m an absolutely very, very practical person. So I was immediately thinking that all science-based elements placed come from natural order or disorder–or could come from the hand of God, however you want to play that.
When trying to pin down when exactly it all happened and who the major players were from an historical viewpoint, one can't. We are, after all, talking about events that may have happened between the 15th and 5th centuries before the Christian Era (BCE, or Before Christ).
Despite being regarded in Judaism as the primary factual historical narrative of the origin of the religion, culture and ethnicity, Exodus is now accepted by scholars as having been compiled in the 8th–7th centuries BCE from stories dating possibly as far back as the 13th century BCE, with further polishing in the 6th–5th centuries BCE, as a theological and political manifesto to unite the Israelites in the then‐current battle for territory against Egypt.
There are a number of strong points that support the idea of no plagues and no exodus in the article. To me the strongest is that, despite the plagues and the death of all first-born sons, and the loss of the army, there is no evidence that Egypt suffered any noticeable setbacks during the period being recorded.
Ussher's 1491 BCE date corresponds with a time of ambitious Egyptian expansion. The reign of Hatshepsut was stable, peaceful and saw extensive construction projects and trading missions; this is known from actual material remains as well as Egyptian records. Her successor, Thutmose III, took Egypt to its greatest imperial extent, forging an empire from the Euphrates to the 4th and possibly the 5th cataract. These are not the signs of a nation that, just a few years before, had lost its entire harvest, its drinkable water, its army and its sons. There is no archaeological evidence at all of mass death and impoverishment in the early New Kingdom period (Rational Wiki).
Archaeologists now widely believe the plagues occurred at an ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279BC and 1213BC.
The city appears to have been abandoned around 3,000 years ago and scientists claim the plagues could offer an explanation.
Wikipedia's article on Pi-Ramesses describes the city as flourishing and outlasting Rameses II by 100 years. Although the city was eventually moved south because its branch of the Nile silted up and the city was left without water.
Pi-Ramesses was built on the banks of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile. With a population of over 300,000, it was one of the largest cities of ancient Egypt. Pi-Ramesses flourished for more than a century after Ramesses' death, and poems were written about its splendour (Wikipedia).
Halloween is the hot theme of the day with GOP antics superimposed, then there's the new Speaker of the House, Hilary, and processed meats.
If keeping up with the polls is a thing you like to do, check out RealClearPolitics. Have fun trying to keep up with the sea changes in the Republican race.
The Freedom Caucus, also known as the House Freedom Caucus, is a congressional caucus consisting of conservative Republican members of the United States House of Representatives. It was formed by a group of Congressmen as a "smaller, more cohesive, more agile and more active" group of conservatives.
Early last Friday there was dire news of a category 5 hurricane, named Patricia, that was expected to make landfall in Mexico later in the day. Patricia was reported as the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the western hemisphere. Luckily she struck land in a relatively uninhabited area and her winds had subsided to about 160 miles per hour, as reported by the Washington Post in How Patricia, the strongest hurricane on record, may have miraculously killed so few. Here's a video from GlobalLeak News showing what Patricia and her 160 mph winds looked like.
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Patricia vies with hurricane (aka tropical cyclone) Wilma in the statistics department. However, Wilma traveled further and caused a great deal more damage. This was Wilma's path.
What got me to wondering was "what exactly does a change of 100 millibars air pressure mean?" While I wasn't able to find a direct answer (guess you have to be there), I did find info on how high-low pressure works at WeatherWorks. Here are a couple of diagrams. Note that highs move clockwise and lows, counter-clockwise--at least north of the equator.
With high winds it seems to me the most destructive part is the constant barrage of force prying things apart in small steps. Here's an example of how Wilma worked, published by Tropmet.
Many of this week's cartoons are about Hillary and Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. And Jeb. One or two are about Star Wars: the Force Awakens, due out in December.
There were a couple of points made about our perception of cancer and the resistance to change rooted in medicine's standard of care that particularly struck me.
One,
Cancer has a language problem–not just in the way we speak about it, as a war that drafts soldiers who never signed up for it, who do battle and win, or do battle and lose. There’s also the problem of the word itself. A 57-year-old woman with low-grade DCIS that will almost certainly never become invasive hears the same word as the 34-year-old woman who has metastatic malignancies that will kill her. That’s confusing to patients conditioned to treat every cancer diagnosis as an emergency, in a world that still reacts to cancer as though it’s the beginning of the end and in a culture where we don’t talk about death until we have to.
And two,
“I hear people say that medicine is so important that we can’t be too quick to change, and I would say the opposite: Because it’s so important, we need to innovate,” says Dr. Laura Esserman, a surgeon and the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at UCSF. “If we were doing so well and no one was dying, I would agree we don’t need to change. But patients don’t like the treatment options, and physicians don’t like the outcomes.”
Esserman and Hwang, now chief of breast surgery at Duke University and Duke Cancer Institute in North Carolina, are leading a number of studies that they hope will fill in some of the knowledge gaps that make change such an uphill battle. DCIS now accounts for about 20% to 25% of breast cancers diagnosed through screening. Before routine screening, which went wide in the mid-1980s, it was 3%.
The treatment proposed is called "active surveillance," a term often used for prostate cancer.
Again, read the articles for a more complete picture.
Stamp, France, 1937, Rene Descartes, postbit
"Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)"
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It seems that posts over 3 years old deteriorate. Looking through posts published in 2012, I see that many have images and videos missing. What to do?
My solution is to back up the blog as it exists now by browsing to the dashboard and selecting settings/other/Blog Tools/Export blog. From there the usual download window appears (if you have 'ask' selected in your browser settings). Look through the downloaded .xml file to see if you got the information you wanted. Be aware: the code is dense and difficult to parse. Mainly you want to know that you can find the images posted, or at least the references to their source, and what you wrote. This information is material for future posts. Google has a page about export or import your blog.
Next, once more at the dashboard, I selected Posts/Published and set all posts published in 2012 to "revert to draft." Once they're reverted, you can find them under Posts/All.
The image at the top refers to a question I ask myself fairly often: why blog? In part the answer is I'm driven by an inquiring mind. Also I dislike wasting anything, including research, and like to entertain in a subdued way. Sometimes the posts serve as notes for something I'm working on.
Instructables is sponsoring a Halloween Costume Contest (the minion costumes above are an entry). There are 33 days left to submit an entry and the prizes are described thus:
Ready your sewing machines, fire up the glue guns, and charge your battery packs, it's Halloween again! Enter your DIY masterpieces in the Halloween Costume Contest for a chance to win some awesome prizes including an iPad Mini, a Petcube Camera, a Leatherman multitool, Samsung digital camera, and more, provided by HalloweenCostumes.com and Petcube!
I noticed the other day that some videos in previous posts don't work. Often they are reported as "private." So I'm beginning to review the older posts and replace the missing videos.
It may take a long time; there are 560 posts to check.
The first one fixed (published in June, 2012) is Spinning the Earth with your cursor... And the video replaced is about placing a building modeled in Sketchup into Google Earth and sharing it.
Planned Parenthood got yelled at. This from Slate Magazine:
Watching Republicans repeatedly interrupt and yell at Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards on Tuesday, one might get the impression that there's some kind of national uprising against the existence of affordable women's health care. Republicans repeatedly excoriated the organization for focusing on contraception and Pap smears instead of on mammograms, which are typically done at radiology centers. ... Viewers got a laundry list of things that Republicans felt should be funded instead of low-cost birth control and STI treatment at Planned Parenthood. Rep. Glenn Grothman even argued (bewilderingly) that since there's medical care he can get "as a guy," then Planned Parenthood—and by implication, its gynecological services (?!?)—is unnecessary. The message was clear: Taxpayer-funded gynecological care is an illegitimate use of government funding.
In the United States the average size of new single family homes grew from 1,780 square feet (165 m2) in 1978 to 2,479 square feet (230.3 m2) in 2007, and to 2,662 square feet (247.3 m2) in 2013, despite a decrease in the size of the average family. Reasons for this include increased material wealth and prestige.
The small house movement is a return to houses of less than 1,000 square feet (93 m2).
Sometimes there is a distinction made between small--less than 1000 sq.ft.--and tiny--less than 400 sq.ft. A resource for information on the tiny house is The Tiny Life, a site with a lot of information about living tiny. 11 Tiny Houses looks a number of different approaches to building a tiny house. Some of these builds remind me of living off the grid. Note that many tiny houses are built on wheels, making them sort of home-made RVs.
Stock house plans can be found at sites like America's Best and Jacobsen Homes. But the prices can range from several hundreds to thousands of dollars. It's best to do some research at a site like Home Style Choices first.
If you're wondering what living in a tiny house might feel like, check out this video.
