Skywatch Friday – Fisheye

I love cold, sunny, windy, winter days. Another experiment with the Lomography Fisheye2 film camera.

My New Boat, HMS Laconia, Citizen Science, and Global Warming

What do you think of my new boat? You have to admit it is pretty nice. It is the HMS Laconia a former passenger liner turned armed merchantmen built in the early 1900’s.

Photo fromOldWeather.Org

It’s a little big to launch a lake for bass fishing and it probably doesn’t have a live well for the fish we’d catch anyway. HMS Laconia is a little pretentious for a fishing boat anyway.

http://www.gjenvick.com/HistoricalBrochures/Steamships-OceanLiners/CunardLine/1912-RMS-FranconiaAndLaconia.html

It does have a Dining Saloon however. I don’t know if chicken fried steak is on the menu or not.

It doesn’t matter because it was sunk by the German submarine, U 50, pictured below six miles off Fastnet, which I think is an island just of the southern Irish coast on 25 February 1917.

(subsim.com) (I am not actually sure this is the right U50. There were three U50’s in World War I and one more in World War II).

Oh well, it would have been fun.

Why am I calling this boat mine? I found the coolest thing on the internet, second only to geocaching. It is called OldWeather.Org. It is a citizen science project to transcribe the old log books from all sorts of British Ships from the early part of the century and you can browse this site to know more about it. The books were written by hand in handwriting that is almost as bad as mine so they cannot just scan them into the computer. They need people to transcribe them.

It’s easy and fun and doesn’t cost anything. They give you templates and instructions on where to enter the date and the location of the ship as wells as water, air, and dew point temperatures, wind speed, and direction, and sea state. Plus you can read the log pages as your ship goes into and out of ports and loads and unloads stuff. It really is fascinating. When they started the project they had a total of 750,000 log pages they need transcribed. They also have other links involving citizen science if you want to do something else.

What is this data used for? It is for climate research to help calibrate and validate the weather models being developed today to help scientists determine just what affects are climate and how much. They didn’t have the network of weather stations back then with weather satellites. Plus Al Gore hadn’t been born yet and so they didn’t have the internet, that he built, to link all the data together. (Yeah I know, he never claimed that he built the internet.)
Go to OldWeather.Org to see how to get started.

Below is a video from their tutorial section to show how to get started.

Old Weather – Getting Started from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.

So what do you think? Give it a go. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time. You wouldn’t be reading this if you were busy.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending won the Mann Booker Prize for 2011. I’m old enough to where I don’t read books just because they are good for me, a book has to be a “good read” for me to be interested in it. The book is about memory and how memory can fool us as the years go by. That has always intrigued me because sometimes when I get together with family and talk about far ago events we each sometimes have completely different versions what exactly happened. Also, if you have ever been involved in a lawsuit you often have a two step process. First you recount to your attorney’s just what you think happened. This is often completely refuted when you go back through the documentation. Memories are a powerful thing, they are hard to change.

Anyway, I didn’t know the book was about memory until after I had read it and peeked at real book reviews by people who can read critically and know how to write reviews. Unfortunately you get me. While I was reading the book it was about an older baby boomer, Tony Webster, in his 60’s who is pestering an old girlfriend from his teenage years. She had dumped him way back when to date one of his best friends, Adrian. Adrian died in an accident while still a teenager. Over the years Tony got on with his life and forgot about both Adrian and his girlfriend until one day he got a letter and found out that the girlfriend’s mother had bequeathed Adrian’s personal diary to Tony. Problem is, the old flame still has it and isn’t giving it up. So Tony decides he wants the diary and proceeds to make a fool out of himself.

So to me the book is about how guys just a little older than me are still capable of making asses out of themselves and it is also a book about how guys “just don’t get it.” I didn’t get the basic riddle of the book until literally the last page. I bet most women could solve the riddle by about 20 pages into the book.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is a good read. Barnes has a way of writing that draws you into the story. That is what I’m looking for in a book. A book that makes time stand still as you are completely engrossed.

I give the book three stars out of five.

Watery Wednesday – Fisheye View of the Arkansas River

The Arkansas River through my Lomography Fisheye2 Camera.

Watery Wednesday

Our World – Tulsa’s Race Massacre of 1921 and Reconciliation Park

One of Tulsa’s best kept secrets is the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park just north of downtown next to ONEOK Field.

It commemorates Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre, according to some, the worst in our nation’s history. It’s centerpiece is the tower above which tells the story of African Americans in Oklahoma.

From when their ancestors were sold into slavery and shipped over to the New World.

To be slaves working in the fields.

It also tells the little known story that many of their ancestors were property of members of the Five Civilized Tribes and came to Oklahoma during the brutal forced march of the Tribes by the US Government known as the Trail of Tears.

There are other statues at the park. The one above is based on the photograph below.

(Above on display at the Tulsa Historical Society, and yes I had permission to take a photograph of the photograph.)

The above sculpture is based on the photograph below. A security guard at the park told us that the man pictured below was killed by a gunshot almost immediately after the photograph was taken. I have not been able to find any documentation of that, but it does make a good story.

The riot left officially 39 people dead, and an estimated 10,000 people homeless. It was obliterated from Tulsa history until 1997 when a state appointed commission convened. They issued their report, “Final Report of the Oklahoma Commission to study the 1921 Race Riot” several years later.

Image via Wikipedia

I have other posts about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Tulsa Hanging Tree
Reconciliation Park Dedication
Brady Theater

Our World Tuesday

Borrowing my Favorite Cross

My favorite cross in Tulsa is this one at the Church of Saint Mary near Henthorne Park. SuperPizzaBoy attends an improv workshop at the park so while he is doing that I wander around the park and the nearby neighborhood with my camera.

The cross is constructed of concrete (an engineered material) and I just love its presence and strength. The black and white seems to accentuate it’s solidity.

The church is a Catholic Church and I’m not but that’s okay because we both love God and I hope they don’t mind me borrowing their cross from time to time.

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which[a the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

Galatians 6:14 (NIV)

Check out my friend Baloney’s Perfect Pairings.

Do you think Catholic’s and Protestants can share a cross? What about Democrats and Republicans?

Weekend in Black and White – First Roll

My Mother-in-Law recently gave me one of my late Father-in-Law’s cameras. A Kodak Brownie Hawkeye.

I took it, cleaned it up and put a roll of film in it, and much to my delight it works.

So these are old school black and white photographs. I took these photographs at a local Harley Davidson dealership here in Tulsa.

I found a local lab that sells and processes the 120 film that the camera uses. Now that I have the first roll behind me I’m going to go take some more. Got any ideas for me for subjects?

The Weekend in Black and White