Filed under: Augmented Reality, Connections, Faith healing, Science Fiction, Survival, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, blogging, Darnell Sidwell, excerpt, jim downey, miracles, Roman, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Wales, writing, Y Gaer
An excerpt I thought I would share. I had been planning on the current chapter being titled “Maen-Du Well”, but have decided instead on going with “Y Gaer”, which is just the Welsh name for “The Fort” — this fort, actually. The following happens there in the ruins:
A path led around past the buildings, then into a fair-sized rectangular terrace, the remnants of the Roman walls still clear and exposed in places. And the western and southern gate foundations were still surprisingly intact, from what he could see even at a distance of a hundred meters or so. He decided to cross the grounds of the old fort, go directly to the south gate.
As he approached the south boundary, he saw a man sitting on the gatehouse foundation, looking across the river. An old man, his aged leather rucksack on the wall ruins next to him. Eleazar didn’t look back, didn’t say anything as Darnell entered the small fenced-in area which protected the ruins from grazing sheep. He just looked out across the valley, until Darnell sat down beside him on the sun-warmed stone. “I thought I might find you here.”
Eleazar smiled. He pointed down the slope. “It was a good posting. The old road used to run just there, between us and the river.”
“You make it sound as though you were actually here,” said Darnell.
Eleazar shrugged. “For a while. It was good to get back to Britannia, and my passage was with a cavalry unit, part of which wound up here.”
Darnell studied the man. For a while, Eleazar just continued to look out over the small river valley. Then he turned, and considered Darnell in return. “You’re looking for miracles. Are you so surprised to see evidence of one?”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Book Conservation, Connections, Failure, Health, Marketing, Publishing, Survival, U of Iowa Ctr for the Book | Tags: appendectomy, appendicitis, art, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, bureaucracy, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, mortality, survival, teaching, training, University of Iowa Center for the Book
The summer before this past one I almost lost my wife to appendicitis.
All my adult life I have known that sudden, unexpected death can strike those we love. And I have tried to live my life accordingly.
The flip side of that, of course, is that I know I could die suddenly, as well. And while I have done a number of crazy and stupid things, I’ve always tried to keep an eye on the real risks involved. It’s not smart to lose track of the fact that you’re mortal.
But being there in the hospital with my wife, as she recovered from an emergency appendectomy, reflection on my own mortality took a slightly different direction. Rather than just thinking about what I had accomplished, and whether it had been a full life, I got to thinking about what I had to offer. And one thing I started thinking about was that I had accumulated a lot of very specific experience which was fairly rare: my book conservation skills.
Now, there are some really good schools out there to train conservators. As well as professional organizations, and workshops and all the sorts of things you would expect. But not a lot. Certainly not enough to meet the need for trained conservators; a need which will only continue to grow as more and more books and articles are published only in electronic format, and the current inventory of printed material starts to age and grow fragile.
Since I have been in private practice as a conservator for 20+ years, I haven’t done a lot of just low-level routine repairs. Rather, I’ve worked on the more valuable items from both private and public collections — the sorts of things which individuals and institutions felt it was worth paying me for my expertise. In other words, I’ve been fortunate enough to work on the cream of the crop from multiple collections, as it were, which has given me the opportunity to further hone a wide range of techniques and demanded that I do my very best by the books and documents entrusted to my care. And with that experience came judgment about what techniques are appropriate in what cases, what will work and what won’t. Judgment which often isn’t even conscious, but lives in my fingertips and can only be shared by close example and repetition.
That’s what I have to offer. And that’s what would be lost were I to die suddenly.
That’s what I got to thinking.
As luck would have it, about the same time I started working with an old acquaintance who had developed an interest in medieval bookbinding. He doesn’t live close, so we had to discuss things online and over the phone, with his coming to visit for weekend training now and then. Because *nothing* compares to hands-on, face-to-face training.
And working with him reminded me of how much I enjoy sharing my skills and love for my craft. Oh, I’ve taught plenty of bookbinding classes over the years, and that has been enjoyable. But there is nothing like working with a student who shares my intense passion for caring for historical texts, rather than someone who just wants to make some blank books for Christmas gifts or needs to have another example for their arts portfolio.
So I got to thinking of how I could find another mechanism to share my skills with people who already share my passion. And I decided to sound out a local institution about perhaps training some of their staff (many large libraries and archives have one or a few preservation technicians, who do the valuable basic repair work on the collection). I knew that while the budget environment wasn’t good, there might be a way for us to work out an arrangement for long-term, careful training in depth of some of their staff, allowing me to transfer both specific skills but more importantly nuances in judgment through hands-on work of items in their collection.
The institution was certainly receptive, and for a while we worked hard to see how to bring my initial thoughts into reality within their system. Meetings were held, brain-storming sessions conducted. Lots and lots of meetings, involving lots of different people and departments, different budget lines and facilities. The prospects were very promising, and I was very excited about the possibilities to begin a new phase of my book conservation career, teaching others part-time. But ultimately the bureaucracy proved too hard to overcome; rather than starting a long-term, fairly permanent training program, the bureaucracy could only accommodate a temporary ‘pilot’ program within its usual rules and guidelines for professional development.
And here is where the title of this post comes into play: knowing when to walk away.
Because when all was said and done, there was a chance … but only a chance … that the temporary pilot program teaching two or three people might find a home (and funding) within the institution. Maybe.
What should I do?
I considered and consulted with some close friends. After all the discussions, after all the meetings and brainstorming, I was deeply vested in seeing this work out.
But I had to take a step back and think about my initial goals, and rationally assess whether or not this would accomplish what I wanted. I decided that it didn’t — that I would be committing too much time and energy to trying to meet the needs of the bureaucracy rather than my own needs, and that I would have too little control over what I could teach.
I can’t blame the bureaucracy; it exists for a reason. Trying to change it, to get it to do something unique and risky, was probably a fools errand from the start.
So, failure.
Maybe.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, though. The bureaucracy at the institution in question, as well as the bureaucracy at many such institutions, is already set up to handle another version of training for their staff: specific workshops conducted by outside consultants, lasting from a few hours to a few days.
So that’s what I am going to do. In the next couple of months I will put together the initial offerings of training workshops for specific conservation techniques. All will have detailed descriptions of what the workshop will include. All will include plenty of hands-on practice under close supervision. All will be completely modular, so that any institution can select from the menu of offered workshops without being committed to other workshops.
I may not be able to do in-depth training of a small number of people, but I can share my skills and judgment with a much wider selection of institutions. It’ll be a lot more work on my part, but will hopefully also accomplish more.
We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted as to developments as things happen.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Architecture, Book Conservation, Connections, Humor, Weather | Tags: architecture, blogging, book conservation, historic building, home repair, horror, humor, jim downey, photography, roofing, technology, weather
Three weeks ago we started a “small” home repair project.
Well, we thought it was going to be small. And then we discovered the horror within. As I said in my first blog post about this:
When you start a project like this, you don’t really know what you’re getting into until you actually start getting into it.
Boy, howdy.
Well, it became much more of a project than originally envisioned. If you want to know why I haven’t done a lot of blogging recently, this is almost entirely the reason: we wound up replacing everything about the original porch except the two upright posts, and those we altered. We even wound up having to clean up and put aright some of the work which had originally been done to tie in the porch roof to the house roof, which was a real horror.
And when I say that “we” did it, I mean that literally: my wife and I. We actually did every single aspect of the work. My wife is an architect, and we’re both very used to working on smallish practical repairs — the sort of thing you always have pending on a house which is 130+ years old. Had we known that this job was going to turn out being so big, we might have opted to put it off until a contractor we trust was able to work it into his schedule. But once we got started, we were committed to doing the work all the way through, not according to someone else’s schedule. So, we did it.
What follows below is a step by step photo documentation of the work, just for grins. We finished the work this weekend (well, except for the painting, but that’s pretty minor and will get done in a week or so when we have a chance), and I’m really pleased with how well it all turned out. So, if you’re interested, take a look.
And with a little luck this week I’ll get back to a more normal posting schedule.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Faith healing, Humor, movies, Religion, Wales, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: blogging, faith healing, Ffynnon Gwyddfan, humor, jim downey, Monty Python, movies, religion, Science Fiction, St Teilo, St. Cybi's Well, video, Wales, writing, www youtube
Excerpt:
The priest spoke. “My friends, welcome. We’ll go inside the church and start services in a little bit. But I know many of you are not regular members. And while I would urge you to consider this moment to be the right time to become closer in fellowship with the Church, I think that what has happened transcends even the Church. God has spoken to us all, revealed His truth, to believer and non-believer alike.”
He reached into the box and carefully, respectfully, removed the goblet, and held it up. “So it is time to reveal something else which has long been hidden away: the cup of St Teilo, miraculously made from one of his skulls. The ancient legends say that drinking the water from Ffynnon Gwyddfan out of the cup will cure those who are stricken, and bless even the pagan.”
He moved off to the side, and down the slight hill, the crowd making way for him. He stepped up to the brick wall, and then reached down with the goblet to scoop up water from the well. Again he held it up for all to see. “Believer or not, all of us have been stricken with fear, unsettled in soul and mind by the darkness in this world. Drink of this cup, and let the water refresh you. Pass the cup from hand to hand, sharing the light of community. Be at peace, whatever comes.”
Jim Downey
*Sorry, couldn’t resist. Check the Wikipedia link about St Teilo above.
Filed under: Art, Connections, Humor, Music, National Geographic, Predictions, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: America the Beautiful, art, blogging, Elsie Kaplan, humor, jim downey, music, National Geographic, New Mexico, predictions, Science Fiction, Singing Road, St. Cybi's Well, Tijeras, video, Wales, writing
More than ten years ago I wrote the first version of what is now the opening page of St Cybi’s Well:
Darnell Sidwell had just crossed the Severn Bridge on the M4, heading west. He read the highway sign:
Sound Sculpture Ahead. Move to outer left lane, maintain speed of 70 kph.
He pulled the little GM rental hybrid into the left lane carefully, and thought about setting the cruise control, but was unsure where to find it on the unfamiliar vehicle. The car crossed the first warning rumble strips. Darnell turned his attention to the sound of the tires, and a few moments later was treated to a long, drawn-out rumble over a series of carefully spaced and specially shaped strips, which distinctly said: “WWWWW-ELLL-CCCCOOOOOMMME-TOOOOO-WWWWWAAAALLLESSSS”.
Playing with rumble strips is nothing new (and wasn’t when I first came up with the idea mentioned on my archive site above), but it’s fun to see that it is now being used more in the way I envisioned:
Sounds emanating from 1,300 feet of roadway just west of Tijeras have been listened to around the world, and it’s more than just tires on pavement catching international attention.
The Singing Road, installed last week, uses rumble strips to play “America the Beautiful” for drivers who obey the speed limit as they cruise down Route 66.
The National Geographic Channel approached the New Mexico Department of Transportation about the project last June, asking if they could construct the road for an upcoming series. The project was privately funded by National Geographic and NMDOT didn’t make – or spend – any money on it. Since the road was finished last week, Melissa Dosher, the public information officer for NMDOT, said she’s fielded questions from television stations as far away as Australia.
There’s a video (with sound) at the above site, so you can hear it. Fun stuff.
Jim Downey
HT to ML for the initial link last week.
Filed under: Architecture, Connections, Failure, General Musings, Humor, Preparedness, Rube Goldberg, University of Missouri, Weather | Tags: architecture, blogging, historic building, home repair, horror, humor, jim downey, roofing, University of Missouri, weather
We live in a “Notable Historic Structure“: the house built by the first dean of the University of Missouri Medical School back in 1883. As with almost any structure this old, it’s seen a lot of alterations and additions over the years, complicating the history and the condition of the house. It’s quite literally the case that there are layers and layers of changes you uncover when you do any work on the place. About a decade ago we had the house professionally painted by someone who specializes in doing work on historic buildings, and the painter estimated that he removed about 35 layers of paint — it was about a half inch thick.
So whenever we have to do any work on the place, you expect to find … surprises. For major projects we’ll call in a crew of professional. But for smaller jobs, my wife and I will tackle it on our own. Since she’s an architect with a lot of practical construction experience, and I’m good working with tools, this usually works pretty well. Usually.
Earlier this year, a spring storm peeled back some of the roofing material off of a small porch on the west side of the house. This porch was probably put on sometime around WWII, and was just a roof over a small concrete pad, open on the sides. In the sixties it was chosen as the site to install an air conditioning unit which serves to cool about half of the first floor. Anyway, while we knew the porch roof was in need of work, we didn’t realize how bad it was until the storm revealed this:
Seeing that, we planned on doing some substantial roof repairs the next time we could set aside a couple of days for it. Which turned out to be this week (hence the fall leaves in the pic above).
When you start a project like this, you don’t really know what you’re getting into until you actually start getting into it. So we got up there and stripped off the rest of the flat roofing materials, and expected to have to replace some of the original sheathing board. But after close examination, we decided that it made more sense to just replace the entire deck surface — it looked like the deck boards had probably been scavenged from some older building when they were originally put up, and all of them were in pretty poor condition.
So we got them off, and were down to the rafters:
Then closer examination of the rafters, and the support beams on the front and side of the roof indicated that they were likewise in need of replacement. Here’s a pick with the rafters removed:
In removing the rafters, we saw how the porch roof had been tied onto the roof of the house (seen above in shingles). This is looking down at the fascia and house roof:
Good lord.
What had been done was that they just added the 1″ wide fascia on top of the original fascia, with notches cut into the new fascia to help support the rafters. Oh, and some of the rafter ends were cut at an angle and then just nailed RIGHT ON TOP of the old house roof. Yeah, they didn’t clear it off, or anything. In fact, if you look closely, you can see that someone had just put down plywood sheathing over the old roof of cedar shakes and asphalt shingles.
So first we removed the 1″ fascia, so we could examine the original:
And finding that the original was in pretty poor condition, removed it. This is what we found behind that:
The horror, the horror … That’s more of the original roof material just covered over by plywood. Sheesh.
Here’s a detail showing the end where the last porch rafter was mounted on top/through the piled mass of old shingles and shakes, along with globs of pitch to help seal the whole mess:
Getting to this point was two days of work. We had allotted three days to do the entire porch repair, including time to assess the true nature of the work and get the needed materials for completion. That was because the weather forecast was for heavy storms to start late on the third day.
There was no way we were going to be able to get the whole thing finished.
So yesterday, on the third day, we got the additional materials and prepped the area for later. We also prepped it to close in securely, not with a permanent repair, but with a sufficiently solid repair to get through the bad weather of a few days time:
That temporary close-in consisted of a layer of new tar-paper tucked under the clean edge of the extant tar-paper on the house roof, then stapled down. After that, a layer of roof roll goods tucked up under the second rank of shingles shown above, and secured with roofing nails just as you would put down a new line of shingles. To make sure that the paper and roll goods were secure and would extend out sufficiently to cover & protect the exposed house rafters, we tacked down three lengths of wood to hold everything in place until the weather got better. Here’s a shot of that:
And I’m *very* happy to report that the temporary work has handled the storms so far just as intended. When we get good (enough) weather again, we’ll take off the side beams and replace everything with new lumber, properly constructed. With all the old crap roof stuff out of the way we’ll be able to attach the porch roof much more securely and have a better seal/transition of the roofs as well.
Blimey, what a job.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Connections, Mars, movies, NASA, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Survival, tech, YouTube | Tags: 2001, 2001: A Space Odyssey, blogging, Irene Klotz, jim downey, Mars, NASA, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, www youtube
NASA Eyes Crew Deep Sleep Option for Mars Mission
A NASA-backed study explores an innovative way to dramatically cut the cost of a human expedition to Mars — put the crew in stasis.
The deep sleep, called torpor, would reduce astronauts’ metabolic functions with existing medical procedures. Torpor also can occur naturally in cases of hypothermia.
* * *
Economically, the payoff looks impressive. Crews can live inside smaller ships with fewer amenities like galleys, exercise gear and of course water, food and clothing. One design includes a spinning habitat to provide a low-gravity environment to help offset bone and muscle loss.
Hmm … seems that I’ve heard of something like that before …
Jim Downey
*Obviously. Hat tip to ML for the link.
Filed under: Connections, Emergency, Failure, Flu, Government, Health, NPR, Pandemic, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Survival, Travel | Tags: blogging, CDC, Ebola, flu, health, Homeland Security, influenza, jim downey, NPR, pandemic, predictions, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, survival, The Atlantic, TSA, WHO, writing
… St Cybi’s Well, what with an incompetent theocratic government in place:
So imagine the scenario. A deadly flu pandemic is beginning in the northeast. TSA agents are asked to report for work in the germ incubators that are airports to keep the transportation system running. And while their bosses in Washington, D.C. can’t supply them with reliably functioning respirators to protect them from infection, they’re keeping thousands that may not work on hand, thinking they may hand them out for “employee comfort,” like security theater karma for those who make us remove our shoes and take our water.
But sadly, scarily, it isn’t. Rather, that passage is from the following news item:
The Department of Homeland Security Is Not Prepared for a Pandemic
As the Department of Homeland Security endeavors to prevent another 9/11, a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, it is worth remembering that there are far deadlier threats out there. I speak not of ISIS or Ebola, but the influenza virus. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed 675,000 Americans. That is to say, it killed about as many Americans in a couple years as the AIDS virus has in decades. Worldwide, that same flu pandemic killed an estimated 30 to 50 million people. It would take 16,000 attacks like 9/11 to equal that death toll. Those figures powerfully illustrate the case for redirecting some of what the United States spends on counterterrorism to protecting ourselves from public health threats.
Of course, money only helps if it isn’t squandered. Take the extra $47 million dollars that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security in 2006 to prepare for a pandemic. As a recent Inspector General report explains in depressing detail, a lot of that money was wasted. And one darkly hilarious passage in the audit reveals what may be the most galling example of security theater ever.
Oh, joy.
But it’s OK, because the rest of the world is ready to step up and fight against a viral threat which could explode into millions of cases in just a few weeks, right?
Um …
Dire Predictions On Ebola’s Spread From Top Health Organizations
Two of the world’s top health organizations released predictions Tuesday warning how bad the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could get.
Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization agree that the epidemic is speeding up. But the CDC’s worst-case scenario is a jaw-dropper: If interventions don’t start working soon, as many as 1.4 million people could be infected by Jan. 20, the agency reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
*sigh*
Sometimes it feels less like I’m writing a cautionary work of fiction and more like I am looking back and writing an historical account …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Bipolar, Connections, Depression, Health, Predictions, Science, Slate | Tags: apophenia, art, bipolar, blogging, creative process, depression, health, jim downey, Katy Waldman, Lancaster University, medicine, mental health, Northwestern University, predictions, Rick Nauert, science, writing
Since this blog has recently picked up a bunch of additional followers, I’m going to reiterate something I’ve said in the past: I’m mildly bipolar. Have been all my adult life. My ‘natural’ bipolar cycle is about 18 months, though that can be influenced by outside factors. It’s mild enough that I’m able to manage my bipolar swings without medication, but I keep a close eye on it. I’m thankful that I can manage it without medication, because I have always perceived a connection between this bipolar condition and creativity.
And increasingly, science agrees with me:
Professor Steven Jones, co-director of Lancaster University’s Spectrum Centre, said, “It appears that the types of inspiration most related to bipolar vulnerability are those which are self-generated and linked with strong drive for success.
“Understanding more about inspiration is important because it is a key aspect of creativity which is highly associated with mental health problems, in particular bipolar disorder.”
“People with bipolar disorder highly value creativity as a positive aspect of their condition. This is relevant to clinicians, as people with bipolar disorder may be unwilling to engage with treatments and therapies which compromise their creativity.”
Bingo.
And then there’s this, from an article on apophenia:
Another possible culprit in apophenia is dopamine. A 2002 experiment revealed that people with high levels of dopamine more often extract meaning from coincidences than those with lower dopamine levels. And when self-described skeptics (team “UFOs are fake”) were given the drug L-dopa, which ups the brain’s dopamine supply, they began to perform more like self-described believers (team “I can speak to spirits”) on the same pattern-finding tasks. Likewise, when Brugger and his colleagues administered dopamine to a group of healthy adult men, that group proved more likely than a control group to notice visual similarities between random pairs of shapes.
Personal accounts from manic patients fizz with an almost compulsive meaning-making, but the research on connections between apophenia and bipolar disorder is thin. One clue: Just like people with schizotypal tendencies, people at risk for bipolar disorder often ace creativity tests. They seem to excel especially at the type of “intuitive, open-minded thinking” that results in surprising associations. (Though he hasn’t studied apophenia and bipolar disorder, Brugger says he would “assume that you see connections everywhere in a manic state.”) A symptom of mania known as clanging, in which ideas are strung together not in a logical order but because of how the words sound, has an apophenic aura.
Related, this news about another scientific discovery concerning depression:
The first blood test to diagnose major depression in adults has been developed by Northwestern Medicine scientists, a breakthrough approach that provides the first objective, scientific diagnosis for depression. The test identifies depression by measuring the levels of nine RNA blood markers. RNA molecules are the messengers that interpret the DNA genetic code and carry out its instructions.
* * *
“This clearly indicates that you can have a blood-based laboratory test for depression, providing a scientific diagnosis in the same way someone is diagnosed with high blood pressure or high cholesterol,” said Eva Redei, who developed the test and is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This test brings mental health diagnosis into the 21st century and offers the first personalized medicine approach to people suffering from depression.”
I suspect that it won’t be long until some similar test is developed for markers indicating bipolar condition.
Oops, there I go, drawing connections again …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Expert systems, Mars, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: AIA, architecture, augmented reality, Blaine Brownell, blogging, Communion of Dreams, Harvard, jim downey, Mars, microbots, predictions, robotics, science, Science Fiction, swarm, technology, writing, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
Another interesting item about developing the technology to create a useful swarm of small robots:
Harvard Researchers Create a Nature-Inspired Robotic Swarm
Some scientists believe that the way to solve the flocking enigma is to replicate it. Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) recently developed a micro-scaled robotic technology that enables a controlled, flash mob–like assembly. In August, the team led by Harvard computer-science professors Radhika Nagpal and Fred Kavli demonstrated the ability of 1,000 robots to self-organize into user-selected shapes, such as a five-pointed starfish and the letter K.
* * *
“Increasingly, we’re going to see large numbers of robots working together, whether it’s hundreds of robots cooperating to achieve environmental cleanup or a quick disaster response, or millions of self-driving cars on our highways,” Nagpal said in the press release. “Understanding how to design ‘good’ systems at that scale will be critical.”
One provocative concept is the possibility of building and infrastructure construction that is carried out by thousands of self-organizing modules. Although many technical hurdles remain, this notion is especially intriguing in the case of hazardous and other challenging settings. In the near term, we will likely witness simple, one-story pavilions built from a collection of mobile robotic bricks to create emergency relief shelters following natural disasters.
Hmm … seems I’ve heard about that idea before someplace. Oh, yeah, from Communion of Dreams:
They were, in essence, enclosing the entire planet in a greenhouse of glass fabric and golden plasteel. It was going to take generations to finish, even using mass microbots and fabricating the construction materials from the Martian sands. Tens of thousands of the specially programmed microbots, a few centimeters long and a couple wide, would swarm an area, a carpet of shifting, building insects. As each cell was finished, it was sealed, joined to the adjacent cells, and then the microbots would move on.
But it is pretty cool to see the work being done to bring that about.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 