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Aaaghhhh!!
The night before last, my phone (a Kyocera QCP-6035 PalmPhone) broke. I can’t turn it off, because it crashes when I try. I can’t back it up, because it crashes when I try. It crashes at the end of every call; doesn’t matter whether the call is incoming or outgoing, doesn’t matter whether I end it or the other person does. In fact, it crashes after a few rings even if I don’t attempt to pick up the call.

After a crash, of course, it has no memory of the call. (Remember this; the relevance will soon become apparent.)

I looked into replacing this phone with another QCP-6035. (I had several of them here, but at the moment I can only find one, and it is clearly fried. Most of them were Verizon units in any case, though it turns out to be possible, at least in principle, to unlock those so they can be used on the Sprint network. OTOH, the procedure is tedious at best, and there is no real guarantee of success.) After finding this out, observing that there were no Sprint units on eBay at the moment, and thinking about it for a while, I decided to let it go. Went up to eBay, looked at what was available for Sprint, and won a used Sanyo 8200 at what seems like a very decent price. It only has to last until Apple releases a 3G version of the iPhone, at which point I will grit my teeth and make The Switch.

So:

This morning, at 9:51, someone called me. I answered, they said “Hello, Jon?”, I said, “Hi.” They said, “This is J--” ...and the call was interrupted, probably by my cheek hitting the Off button, which can happen easily when it isn’t in its little holster. I was mostly asleep, and I knew I had to reset the phone quickly in order for them to be able to call back, so I did...

...without reading the number off the screen.

They haven’t called back; I didn’t recognize the voice, so I don’t know who it was; and when I called Sprint technical service, for some unknown reason the call wasn’t showing up on their computer.

AAaaaagghhhhh!!!

(At least the techsupport person told me I’d gotten a fine deal on the Sanyo 8200, which he said was a very good phone.)

If the person who made that call reads this, PLEASE call again!! If you, reading this, happen to have some idea who the person was, Please (!) ask them to call again!!

Further update:

I called Sprint again, and they told me that “in order to protect my privacy,” they were not permitted to give me the information about who had called me without a subpoena from either a lawyer or a law-enforcement agency.

Got that? My own info, which should have been on my phone, and which they are going to send me at the end of the month in any case, and they can’t give it to me because they have to protect my privacy. From what, me??

(It actually turns out to be a bit more complex than their initial explanation indicated. When they pull up the call records from their database, even blocked/unpublished numbers show up. There are Federal regulations covering the release of that information, and I guess that rather than make things complicated by allowing the release of published but not unpublished numbers, they simplified matters by just declaring all of it off-limits except by legal intervention. Mind you, this is all horsepucky anyway, because at the end of the month they will send me all of the published numbers. If they can separate published from unpublished every billing cycle, surely they can do it now.)

I then figured out the most likely person to have called, based on the fact that I didn’t recognize the voice and the people I could think of who might be calling. Left that person voicemail and email, and heard back from him yesterday evening. He was, indeed, the one who called, so that part of the issue is now taken care of. Nice to know that I don’t have to either call a lawyer or grit my teeth for three weeks.

Now I just have to wait, first for the Sanyo device to arrive (the Kyocera is fine as a Palm Pilot, so long as I remember that I can’t back it up), and then for Apple to do its stuff with the new chipset. I fervently hope that the rumors of a June 9th release are accurate...

Cheers —
jon

PS: I should note that the first comment to this posting was written before I added a large amount of clarification and update information.

On the Importance of Baby Steps
On April 24th, 1996, I sat down at a potter’s wheel for the first time and made 5 crunky little objects, all of which I still have. (I know the date because I wrote it up in a journal that I started keeping late in 1995, around the time when it first became clear that I was going to fall into the mud.) The first was a wobbly bowl; by the end of the hour I was trying to make cups. All five objects got trimmed and bisque-fired, but I only glazed two or three of them. Here are #s 4 and 5. They are covered in Larry Bruning’s “Opal Blue” glaze, which became the earliest ancestor of my own Rutile Blue:

In just under two weeks I will have been at this for 12 years, and I wanted to take note of (and celebrate) that fact. I am taking the opportunity to do so now because I am thinking of it now. In two weeks I may be thinking of nitrogen lasers, stereophotography, tea, roses, or who-knows-what-all; such is life in the the AD[H]D lane. I have missed “Wheel Day” several times already, and wanted to be sure I don’t miss it again this time even if I don’t manage to catch the exact day.

I think we undervalue baby steps in this culture, and I think that’s a really stupid mistake. We are sometimes sentimental about them; but there is a whole lot more going on than that, and it seems to me that we could stand to be considerably more open to it. This appears to be locked into the whole “superstar” mentality, in which if you aren’t The Best, you’re worthless trash. Needless to say, baby steps are hardly the kind of thing people are likely to consider to be The Best. IMHO, most simple dichotomies of that sort are stupid mistakes, too. They seem to be designed to let you get away without bothering to think; unfortunately, some of the consequences of ‘operating without benefit of the thought process’, as Certain Persons describe it, are [...how can I put this delicately?] regrettable.

Anyway, no fancy dancing this time; just baby steps from a dozen years ago.

Cheers —
jon

Small ineffable joys --
I fired the kiln again today...

When Pete Pinnell was kind enough to share his “Pete’s Wollastonite Clear 2” recipe with me, it took me several months of testing and tweaking to come up with my own version, which I called “M9 Clear” because it was from my 9th series of modifications. It’s a nice glaze, and Pete likes it, which I take as a real compliment.

As a result of my recent work with noncrazing Copper Reds and Rutile Blues, however, and because Pete has recently mentioned that he likes Fusion’s low-thermal-expansion frit, I decided to have another shot at it. This time I wanted to go for slightly lower thermal expansion, while maintaining the pleasant characteristics of the glaze.

Although one learns more from failures than from successes, there is something joyous in writing a glaze recipe into a glaze-calculation program, mixing it up, firing it, and having it do exactly what you want, right out of the box. Granted, I wrote this one several times before I tested it (as you can see from the version number on the test tile), and it is not exactly a major modification; but the entire process took about a day and a half, and I only tested one version. That version now becomes Joss Research M10 Clear, v1.0.

There really isn’t any point in showing a photo of a clear glaze — you have to hold it in your hand and feel it, and probably look at it with a magnifying glass; but I am so chuffed that I’m going to put one here anyway, even though I ran out of test tiles and was obliged to try it on a broken piece of bisqueware.

________........--------/\--------........________

I should have developed a blue or turquoise celadon from this glaze; but I had already worked up a recipe, an offshoot of the Copper Red. It, too was a rousing success, though it is filled with little speckles because I didn’t take the time to mill it. When I mix up a batch, I will take care of that. Here’s the test tile:

(It’s actually a bit greener / less blue than it appears here; such are the vicissitudes of lighting and white-balance. I may take another photo in sunlight, to see whether that works any better.)

Both of these will be going onto various pieces, though the clear will probably mostly be used as a liner glaze when I want to use something that isn’t foodsafe on the outside of a piece. It will also be a good basis for fluorescent glazes, which I make from time to time.

Cheers —
jon

Bowl. Cup. Pink. Blue.
I fired the kiln again today.

[I had to decrease the saturation of one of the photos of the blue cup, and shift the color slightly; for some reason, it originally came out looking rather “day-glo”. It is now slightly grayish, but closer to the actual appearance of the cup.]

I’m not sure why the bowl is pink and not red, and I’m going to have to figure it out; that said, however, I can’t say I’m particularly displeased. The cup is one of two, both nice and neither particularly badly warped.

Not much more to say right now; have to go rip the front panel off my telephone and replace it — if I’m lucky the panel is the problem, and not the circuitry in the phone body...

Cheers —
jon

PS: It was the display panel. The one I swapped in has a bad flex connector; but at least when it works it works. I just can’t squeeze the phone, else the display goes blank. Soon enough, I hope, I will be able to get a more modern device to replace this one. (Read “iPhone with G3 data chipset”, or whatever the correct nomenclature is. I still can’t believe that the iPhone has 2000 times as much memory as my current device, but that’s another story.)

Joys [Gordon Bok] and Sorrows [fortunately minor] --
I went to hear Gordon Bok last night, in a special performance arranged by The Folklore Society of Greater Washington. It was a real treat to hear him, see him, and meet him; the man has a glorious voice, and what he did on guitar, especially with the 12-string, was rich and complex and lovely. Frankly, I am surprised that the concert wasn’t SRO.

FSGW, btw, got Charlie Pilzer to do the sound, which was definitely The Right Stuff: it doesn’t get any better than Charlie around here.

I have been making a lot of pottery this year, mostly in preparation for the upcoming NCECA conference. Here is a fair chunk of it, though not by any means all:

What you see in that photo is probably almost as much production as I manage in the average year, and it’s only March. We’ll see how much more I can do before I get shunted into other projects again. Not all of these are going to the conference, btw, and not all of them are actually fit to be given to anyone, though most of the flaws probably aren’t visible in the photo.

Speaking of flaws, here is something that didn’t make it into the picture above:

Looks nice from the side, no? Alas, ...

...it is not so great from the top. (Sigh. I love Rutile Blue. I do not love ridiculous warping.)

Fortunately, I was able to figure out what caused the problem, and I have partly figured out how to prevent it — the cup I fired yesterday is not warped too badly. (It’s the red one near the front, in the group photo.)

I will be at the conference for most of the week, and I may not be able to respond very quickly to comments. If that happens, you have my apologies.

Cheers —
jon

Tiny Triumphs from the Land of Hotness
I fired the electric kiln yesterday; here are two of the glaze tests that were in it.

The first is something I have been calling “Dusty Black Satin”. I have never put it on stoneware until yesterday, and now I’m trying to figure out why it took me so long.

The lighter-colored line is where I applied a wash consisting of equal parts Wood Ash (from a wood-fired pizza place that I’ve never been to), Whiting (= ground-up marble or limestone), and Silica (in this case, ground-up quartz). It is hard to tell from a single photo, but there are lots of tiny sparkly crystals in the washed area. (The darker line is Red Iron Oxide.)

Here, for reference, is the same glaze (but without any washes) on porcelain, a cup/bowl from yesterday’s firing:

(It shouldn’t be quite that pink, but I don’t have time to correct the white balance or reshoot the photo now.)

The second is something I knew wouldn’t work. I did it because “Og-the-cave-scientist” pushed me. (Og is my current way of thinking and talking about the occasional odd feeling I get, impelling me to do [or refrain from doing] something. In this case, I had a vague but persistent impression that I should mix this glaze and test it even though there is clearly too much clay in it, and it cannot possibly be a copy of the Black Ding glaze, which is what I originally designed it to be.)

Leaving aside my quaint notions about the more obscure parts of my head, there are various reasons for doing things that aren’t going to work, one of which is that occasionally it gets you a little message from Serendipity Central.

The dark red interlineations are visible only in bright light; the rest of the time, they just appear slightly shinier than the raised islands. Regardless of the light level the glaze is pleasantly textural, albeit less so on convex surfaces.

I also tested a plain satin matte, which is nice to feel but hard to photograph, and a glaze that almost certainly will, after a bit of adjustment, work as a copy of the Black Ding glaze. It isn’t quite dark enough yet, though, so I think I will wait on photos of it until I get it right. In the meanwhile, here is a photo of my existing copy of that glaze, on a small bowl that was also in yesterday’s firing:

Cheers —
jon

It's Time to Fling Another Neep on the Barbie
I got into a conversation about neeps a day or two back, with another potter, a chap named Matt Bailey. We didn’t start off about neeps, mind you; they came up in connection with translucent porcelain and haggis. [Perhaps I should insert a comma in that, haggis not being notably translucent.]

A Web page that I examined, in my effort to discern the true Inner Nature of the neep, said it was a turnip. This claim, I think, is somewhat lacking in the veracity department; it seems to me that a neep is, properly speaking, much more likely to be what We Here in the You Ess of Eh commonly refer to as a rutabaga.

I myself am from Noo Yawk, so I pronounce that “root-uh-bay-guh”, the “oo” resembling that in “food” or “fool” rather than that in “good” or “book”. Others may say it how they will; that and zigzag ants are no great concern of mine. (I spent many years wondering what the hell Mr. Gimme-the-ax and the zig-zag ants were doing in my head, before I finally found out how they got there. Actually, I only sort-of found out, because I don’t see any “Mr.” in front of Gimme the Ax; and I find a zigzag railroad, but at least early on it doesn’t appear to have any ants associated with it. Moreover, although I find a green splanch, which I do not recall, I find precious few hyphens. Go figure.)

Mr. Bailey avers that neeps are to be cubed, boiled, drained, mashed with butter, and sprinkled with pepper. They must then be permitted to lock themselves in intimate embrace with a haggis, and consumed in flagrante delicio. I can’t do that, as I am allergic to milk. (This is to say nothing of the relatively slight availability of haggises, which are not native to this continent and apparently fail to thrive on the local clay.)

But, so:

I acquired a rutabaga. Never mind how. I will say only that a bronze sickle keeps its edge better at the dark of the moon than a silver one; that blood is thicker than beet juice, though not by much; and that a macaroon is a terrible thing to waste, so I didn’t. (No grocery stores were harmed during the production of this blog posting, though one or two may have experienced some drowsiness, sneezing, or other side effects of short duration.)

Perhaps an hour or two ago I could finally stand it no longer, and found myself wandering amongst the pots and pans, so I sautéed some 3-color peppers in tea-seed oil with sage and thyme and oregano. While these were suffering I laved and scraped the hapless root, and placed it in durance vile (read: the microwave oven) for some 4 minutes and 44 seconds. It emerged slightly deflated, a bit dry on the outside, and at least partly cooked. I sliced it reasonably thinly, put it in a bowl, and poured the peppers on top of it.

[The next time I want to cook a rutabaga I will probably make a bowl with a lid (what, after all, is the point of being a potter if you can’t open your mouth, say the magic word “Tenmoku!”, and have a lidded bowl when you want one?), and put some water in it to keep things appropriately moist whilst the neep basks in the magic rays, which I will probably permit it to do for 5 minutes and 55 seconds in the interest of caring, tenderness, and ease of data entry.]

Having assembled the prototype, I put small amounts of rice vinegar and proper Tamari over it (no wheat; “Tamari” that contains wheat is an abomination before the faces of several deities), and fell upon it like the lion sleeps with the lamb. (If one is going to mix metaphors, one might as well do so in such a manner as to engender something interesting ...kibbeh, for example.)

While I will admit that neeps-and-peppers was fairly plain (for one thing, I forgot the black pepper) it was manifestly edible, and deserving of further development. A tiny sprinkling of tangerine peel and Grains of Paradise might be a happy thing, or perhaps ground caraway seeds. It is still possible, though, that when all is said and done I may end up deciding I like turnips a bit better than rutabagas. We Shall See.

.-+-v^v-+-.-+-v^v-+-.-+-v^v-+-.-+-v^v-+-.-+-v^v-+-.-+-v^v-+-.-+-v^v-+-.

Next time: who says Chard is too leathery to put in sandwiches? Nonsense! Ya wanna grow up with weak jaws?

Yo...
jon

Not entirely serendipitous / J. M. W. Turner
In a few days, the massive J. M. W. Turner retrospective at the National Gallery of Art will close. It reappears soon in Dallas, and then comes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, in the summer. The exhibit ranges from very early works to unfinished late ones, from little watercolor sketches to large oil paintings. There are pieces with detail that can be intense, crisp, and even almost photographic, one astonishing example of which he apparently painted between breakfast and lunch one day while visiting a friend and patron. There are also pieces where you would not have any idea what the subject was if you didn’t have the title. (One or two are so atmospheric that it is difficult to discern the subject even with the title.)

I was well and thoroughly dazzled, and can definitely recommend this exhibition to anyone who cares about painting in the first half of the 19th century, about the impressionists (a number of whom seem to have been influenced, some quite strongly, by Turner), or about art in general.

I have recently been looking into the translucency of porcelain again, with somewhat puzzling results. My regular mix is already about as translucent as fairly good English bone china —

— but I certainly wouldn’t mind if I could improve it. (It is also very difficult to fit a glaze to, but that’s a separate issue that I won’t go into here.)

Porcelain contains a lot of glass that is very much like a high-temperature pottery glaze, mixed into which are some crystals. In a typical porcelain, some of the crystals are leftover quartz that failed to go into solution during firing. It is clear that the quartz interferes with translucency; but my porcelain is of a type that doesn’t contain any leftover quartz, so I’m cheerfully ignoring that part of the issue. The majority of the crystals are something called mullite. They form a felted mass of tiny needles embedded in the glass, and they give the material a lot of strength.

If everything in the material had the same refractive index, it would be transparent; but wherever there is a discontinuity in the index you can get a reflection. Reflections prevent light from going straight through the material, giving it a larger chance of either going back out the way it came, or being absorbed. In porcelain there are such discontinuities at all of the interfaces between glass and crystal, because the glass has a lower index. (Bubbles are another culprit, and I am oversimplifying a bit here, so take it with a grain of salt.)

I decided that the most straightforward approach would be to increase the refractive index of the glass, to bring it closer to the refractive index of the mullite. All other things being equal, any significant increase should produce a noticeable enhancement. (The glass is easy to tweak and the mullite is [or at least should be] easy to avoid tweaking, so this seemed very reasonable.)

I fired a set of tests in my electric kiln, and two more sets in my little gas kiln; I have also arranged to have a set fired at Glen Echo Park, on a “just in case” basis — that kiln takes about 10 times as long to fire as mine, and that could possibly make a difference.

Alas, all other things do not appear to be equal. That, or my understanding of the issues is seriously deficient.

I do notice a few things, the first of which is that these formulations turn gray if they are reduced too heavily during the firing. (That’s why I fired the second set in my gas kiln.) This is annoying, but I can live with it; if I have something that requires heavier reduction, I just don’t get to put any translucentware in the kiln with it. The second is that there seems to be a slight decrease in the pale ivory color that porcelain has when it is fired in oxidation, which may be useful.

I continue to think about this, and I hope to try some other things, partly in an effort to refine my understanding of what gives here.

I also revised one of the glazes I’m working on, with pleasant results — no running or dripping; tolerable (though slightly dimpled) texture; and decent color, which actually has slightly more gray in it than is apparent from this photo:

(I am working on an article about this, and will say more about it when I can.)

I did make one mistake during the latest firing: it was about 55° F when I started, and I was adequately clothed for that. It then proceeded to slide fairly rapidly down to the lower 40s, and by the time I got into a nice steamy shower after I turned off the gas, some of my toes were actually blue. That’s a first — I have gotten cold before, and I have even had my hands get somewhat numb, but I don’t recall having seen blue extremities. Harrumpfh.

Cheers —
jon

Coffee Tofu: A Sidebar
Most people probably aren’t aware of the fact that you can make tofu from things other than soybeans; in Burma (as I think I’ve mentioned here when discussing the fresh tofu salad at Rangoon Restaurant), IIRC, it is sometimes made from sprouted chickpeas, and I seem to recall that the nice folks at Mandalay Café have told me that they occasionally make it from peanuts, or maybe it was yellow dhal.

There is also no law requiring it to be used as a main dish ingredient. In many dim-sum restaurants you will be offered a warm sweet tofu, extremely delicate, that to Western sensibilities is a dessert. (My admittedly loose understanding is that the Chinese are more likely to mix sweet dishes with savories during a dim-sum tea than most Westerners [other than children] are. That last probably says something about grownups being more hidebound than children, but let’s not worry about that now — we have other places to go.)

At this point we enter the 21st century Chemistry Chef era, in which the people with the aura of command and the precision digital thermometers who make their livings in the kitchens of extremely expensive restaurants do insane things to food. Mind you, I am disposed to view this trend with amusement and satisfaction rather than alarm; it is, as far as I’m concerned, entirely reasonable that some of the dishes we hear about today are closer to the “laboratory curiosity” end of the scale than to haute cuisine — this is a necessary early step. You have to crawl before you can put out your stubby little wings and fly. [I wish to establish a clear and crisp distinction, btw, between this new era and its 20th century predecessor, which produced and continues to produce a great deal of Packaged Peculiarity and a large number of Processed Food Products of Dubious Nutritional Value, though I’d bet that you could trace a more or less direct line of descent if you were sufficiently determined.]

That said, I must relate a happenstance: I have some “Manhattan Special” espresso soda here, and some “Silk Nog”. A few minutes ago I attempted to use the Nog in a variant coffee eggcream.

[Notes: A) The original eggcream apparently did have egg and cream in it, and probably sherry as well, according to at least one report I’ve read; but it got kinda debased relatively early on, and ended up as a chocolate soda with milk in it. B) Coffee almost certainly has to be a Noo Yawk or Philadelphia perversion. C) I am allergic to casein, so I don’t get to use the real stuff.]

The result was expectable, if you recall the fact that soda is distinctly acid: I got sweet spiced Coffee Nog tofu, floating in dark brown “whey”. I wasn’t in the mood for a pudding, so instead of getting out the Most Honourable Silken Sack and pressing it, I stirred it up and drank it; but it did occur to me that you could make an entire range of wacky desserts this way, using almost any soda flavor along with a range of [sweetened and] flavored nondairy products and perhaps the odd spice or flavoring. I would guess that in addition to soy liquids, most of the nutmilks and possibly even hempseed milk might work well, and you can always make an appropriate liquid yourself if you are so inclined.

Just thought I’d toss this item into the ring as encouragement for any experimentally-minded foodies who happen to read this posting.

Dengan meilleurs voeux para un wirklich verrückt holiday season...
jon

PS, to those who would contemplate doing this with Cel-Ray: I salute you ...from a safe and respectful distance.

A Mere 36 Years Later... (Gamelan Bali)
When I was starting graduate school I got involved with Bridget Dziedzic, who was an undergraduate at the same place (Wesleyan University). She appeared one day and said, “Come with me.” I followed her to a listening room in the Music department (she was taking some sort of Introduction to World Music), where she put headphones on me and let me listen to 3 Balinese Gamelan pieces that were part of the material for the class.

I ’bout lost it right there, and I cannot thank her enough for that introduction.

Bridget told me there was Gamelan at Wesleyan, but that it was Javanese, and rather different from what I had just heard. I figured I should find out what that was like, so she took me to a concert. At the end of the concert I helped put the instruments away, and promptly started learning Gamelan Jawa. I was in the group for about a year and a half, and loved it.

...............--------/^*^\--------...............

Let us take a moment to meditate upon the folly of picking up the rudiments of a particular type of music, and then failing to stay with it: after I left Wesleyan (which I did twice, but that’s a different story) there was a period of about 20 years during which I didn’t play. I missed it the entire time, I missed various chances to study with outstanding teachers, and I didn’t develop a number of skills, some of which extend into other fields of endeavor and are not limited to music in their applicability or importance.

That was a truly horrendous mistake; please, if you are in a position to study music and to make music, learn from my error instead of repeating it.

...............--------/^*^\--------...............

I started playing again in ’95, in Seattle, and when I moved to the east coast, a few years later, I immediately joined the central Javanese gamelan (the word can refer to the instruments, the players, or both) at the Indonesian Embassy. When people ask me how long I’ve been playing, I generally tell them that it has been about 13 years.

A while ago, I began to hear reports from people at the Embassy that some visiting artists would be coming to teach Balinese Gamelan and Dance for 3 months in the fall. This was delayed a bit, but is now happening, and I am finally learning some Gamelan Bali from I Made Kartawan, who is a member of a performing group called Çudamani. I recently had an opportunity to see these people in performance, and was dazzled. They are just superb.

In addition to the ongoing workshop at the Embassy, I am now a temporary member of Gamelan Mitra Kusuma, a local Balinese group, and I’m struggling to learn some of the music as fast as I can. It is great fun, but it’s also a huge stretch, and we have several performances coming up during the next few weeks. I believe that the one on December 14th is open to the public, but I am not yet certain of the venue.

You can’t really get the full feeling of a gamelan performance from a video, but you can get some sense of the music, and of the degree of precise coordination that is involved...

10 Minutes of Gamelan Çudamani

Next, a brief drumming example (about 40 seconds), from Wayne Vitale and I Putu Putrawan of Gamelan Sekar Jaya.

Interlocking Drum Madness

These next two are short (under 2 minutes each) examples of Kotekan, also from the Gamelan Sekar Jaya folks. The videos are true to their names...

Interlocking Madness #1

Interlocking Madness #2

Gamelan Jawa is seriously different from Gamelan Bali. Central Javanese gamelan music has two scales (one that is pentatonic [“Slendro”] and one that is heptatonic [“Pelog”]), and it is common for an ensemble to consist of two sets of instruments, with only modest overlap. Sometimes both sets are used in a given performance, sometimes only one or the other.

Here are some Javanese examples. The first two are of a form called Ladrang; both of these groups also have examples of other forms on YouTube.

Ldr. Asmarandana

Ldr. Tirta Kencana

Some of the classical Javanese court dances (and some other pieces as well) are in a style that I have heard referred to as “soft”; this style is slower and more stately than the “loud” style that shows up (see example, below) in the shadow-puppet play. Here is a “soft” example:

Srimpi (excerpt)

Here’s another court dance. I think this one may be in the loud style, but don’t quote me.

Sulung Dayung

There are some errors in the beginning of the next video (for example, the instruments are not invariably made of bronze, and the frames are often made of Jakfruit wood or possibly other woods, rather than teak; also, unless I am very much mistaken, Kyai Gunter Sari Madu [if I heard it correctly] is the name of the big gong — the set of instruments is Gamelan Gunter Sari Madu), and there are other shortcomings; but it is about a Gamelan that I have actually performed with, and in fact I show up it for a bit, just after Cindy mentions Pak Muryanto, who is my teacher at the Embassy. (He is sitting at the drum; I’m just beyond him.)

“Who’da Thunk It?” episode about the Charlottesville Gamelan

Here is a bit of Wayang Kulit (shadow-puppet play, using leather puppets). The dhalang (storyteller) is speaking in Javanese, and the subtitles are in Indonesian. (Javanese is so complex that I can’t begin to comprehend how it is even possible to be a dhalang, much less how they can keep going all night long, sometimes in a mixture of Javanese and Indonesian or even Javanese, Indonesian, and English. [A traditional wayang begins at dusk and ends at dawn.])

Wayang Kulit (excerpt from Dewa Ruci)

[The video is apparently one of 10 excerpts from this particular performance.]

Cheers —
jon

Wanted: broken "Blu-Ray" devices --
Hi.

I am looking to get my hands on one or more broken Blu-Ray devices — Sony Playstation 3, for example, or any Blu-Ray DVD player or writer. (These should all proudly proclaim their Blu-Ray status, so there is not likely to be much doubt about it.)

When I say “broken”, btw, I mean broken. I am not looking for working units. In fact, I might possibly be able to get what I need even if the unit has been run over by a car.

Anybody got any ideas about possible sources for such things?

Cheers —
jon

Eine Kleine Nacht-Musik, mit Sterne und Stellarium --
Having built a small (and slightly silly) telescope, I have actually been using the thing occasionally and making tiny improvements to it. Although the mount is still essentially nonviable (I think I need to build an equatorial mount), I can get a fair view of the moon or of a few stars.

I’ve been looking at a particular set of stars during the last few days, and because I am not very familiar with the sky (yeah, I know, I ruddy well should be; but there it is: I ain’t) I decided to figure out exactly what they were so I could be reasonably assured of finding them again in the future.

If you think about that, and especially if you try it with only that level of information, you will probably discover that it is a nontrivial task. I certainly did. I started by looking for virtual planetaria on the Web, not a bad beginning; but what I found was either literal planetaria that allow you to find bodies in the Solar System, or general planetaria that are pretty good (one of them has 9,000 stars in it) but can’t really zoom in on a specific region of the sky.

Then I found Stellarium. Stellarium is freeware; it is available for Linux (as source), MacOS X (recent versions), and Windows (also recent versions). As downloaded it has 600,000 stars in it, and there are four (4) more star catalogs that you can add to it.

Unfortunately, when I installed it on my MacBook, it initially failed to run. The general advice I found by Websearching was that one should, in such cases, delete the prefs file; unfortunately, there wasn’t any prefs file — there isn’t one in the initial install, and the app never got far enough to build one. I tried creating an empty one, but that didn’t change the behavior. In the process of bugging this on SourceForge, however, I had an inspiration: I tried deleting the empty file, whereupon the app started up very nicely, built itself a new set of preferences, and promptly impressed the crap out of me. True, it doesn’t quite match the Mac UI Guidelines; but one can forgive quite a bit when one gets quite a bit, and it looks like there is plenty to get here. Setup wasn’t particularly difficult, and the User Guide is very readable, so I had no trouble getting the program to do what I wanted it to.

I ended up taking out the Sony DSC-R1 and photographing the appropriate area of the sky so I’d have something to compare with what I saw in the program, and once I got the ducklings all lined up I think it took me about a minute and a half to find my stars. I’d been looking at an orange and green double star with very wide separation and a tighter uncolored double star, both close to a fairly bright star that was near the zenith around 7:30 last night. Not a whole lot to go on, but once I oriented myself by finding Jupiter and going up from there it turned out to be enough. The bright star I use as a pointer is Vega, the orange-and-green double is δ Lyrae, and the other double is the famous “Double Double”, ε Lyrae. Mind you, at a whopping 12 power I see it as 2 stars, not as 4; but that’s expectable. At some point I may try it with an eyepiece that has shorter focal length, to see whether I can resolve it further.

In the meanwhile:

I have been building a little (2' x 4') “stable-table” (actually a stack of shelves on the floor, with various kinds of padding distributed among them) with which I hope to do some diode-laser holography, and learning many things. (Frank de Freitas has a nice set of pages about using diodes, especially inexpensive laser pointers, for holography. I am going to try a 100-milliwatt diode, which may be another story entirely; we’ll see.)

Yesterday afternoon

lisajulie and I added another padding layer to the stack, and then verified my conjecture that even if the optics mounts appear to sit quite still, the least motion of the tabletop will result in unacceptable changes in position unless they are actually held in place. I applied little dabs of something called Museum Wax, which appears to be made by Trevco Products and is available at many art supply or arts-and-crafts supply houses, and promptly found that minor shifts of the table now have little or no effect on the fringes projected by the test interferometer. The fringes barely wiggle at all if I stomp on the floor within a few inches of the table, which is quite a change from what I was observing earlier. (I’m sure that various books on holography stress this point, but I had forgotten it.) I still have to complete the box that will surround the “table” — even the lightest breath is enough to cause the fringes to wobble, presumably from the change in air temperature around the components. Working on it.

If and when I get any holograms made, btw, I will endeavor to post stereo or pseudostereo photos of them. In the meanwhile, if you want to see some slightly wiggly fringes produced by an earlier version of the table & interferometer, there is a short AVI file on the Joss Research site. (Caution for those with slow Internet service: even a short AVI tends to be a fairly large chunk of data.)

Cheers —
jon

Updated version of previous item:
The previous posting showed the beginning of what was essentially Version 3 of the mirror mount. I completed that version, tested it, tweaked the design to “Rev 3A”, completed and tested the revision, ...and decided that it [still] wasn’t stiff enough. I also concluded that the adjusting screws should go through the stator, not the moving rider. ...So I tore 3A apart and reworked it, doubling up the steel plates and turning them into into box beams in the process. Here is the completed “Rev 3B” mount, as of a few minutes ago:

(Yes, that’s a faucet aerator.)

I have also, btw, built a 2-axis stage, so I can drop an iris diaphragm into the dye laser:

Cheers —
jon

Blogged! (Thank you, Gareth Branwyn!)
I am currently working on some DIY designs (specifically a mirror mount and a translation stage) built from parts and materials that are available at hardware stores and hobby shops (and a little bit of computer junk), with essentially no machining. This is a pair of really cute puzzles, and I am having a wonderful time with it. Here’s a photo showing the guts of the 3rd version of the mirror mount (it’s upside-down, if you were wondering; the smaller “L” bracket is the one that moves).

I did actually drill one hole, but it was avoidable.

Gareth Branwyn, of Make Magazine, was kind enough to put an entry about this on the Make blog. I am seriously chuffed.

Cheers —
jon

Janet Flanner, Paris, 1927:
Janet Flanner, an American, wrote for the New Yorker from Paris under the nom de plume Genêt.

lisajulie has lent me a volume of her work (which dates from 1925 to 1939). In reading it I come upon a number of little gems, of which I would like to share with you the following:

Honors

CoCo, clown from the Cirque de Paris, has just received the palmes academics from the grateful government and will in future be entitled to wear purple in his buttonhole. Also the late Marie Harel, eighteenth-century farmwife of the town of Camembert, has been glorified as the inventor of that cheese (from which her widower later cleared his fortune). Mme Harel’s monument, a stone shaft, unfortunately resembles a slice of Gruyère. There is no justice.

A Slightly Different View...
Thinking about LOLCats and being the creature that I am, I have come up with a new category: LOLGoo. This is what happens when you cross LOLCats with Nanotechnological Disaster, loosely known as “Gray Goo” probably from the notion that if you build self-replicating nanodevices that are not too picky about what they use as a source of materials, and they get loose, after a while all you have is nanodevices.

This is actually slightly more specific:

I suppose it could equally well apply to various forms of what one might call “natural nanotechnology”.

Ahem.
j

Summer Fuel Economy, now with All New DNA:

Easy Come, Easy Go

A few days ago I refueled after 350 miles, and found that I had gotten just over 59.9 miles per gallon. This was higher than the indicated economy, only the second time that has happened. It appears that summer has arrived. (The Prius tends to get better fuel economy in the summer, or so we are told.)

The next day the hot weather arrived, and I started using the air conditioner. This went on for a couple days, with the result that the following 334 miles were only at 49.9 mpg. I still can’t complain much.

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And So It Begins

Today I did my first actual work with DNA: I extracted some from a banana. This turns out to be only mildly tweaky, and it begins to appear that a fairly broad range of conditions will work if you have abundant starting material. When I start dealing with roses, in an attempt to do some DNA fingerprinting of them, I won’t have nearly as much material, so I will have to do a much more careful job of it. I figure I’ll be reading some papers about this in the next while.

The banana protocol is available from Cornell as a little PDF file, if you’re interested. The reagents, such as they are, are all readily available: distilled water, table salt, shampoo or clear dish liquid or SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate), isopropyl alcohol. (99% strength is best if you can get it, though 95% will work. 91% will do, but you may have to add extra salt to the aqueous liquid. [I did.] Don’t use rubbing alcohol, which is only 70% strength, unless you have a lot of salt on hand and a good deal of patience: no shaking, no fast stirring — either one tends to tear up the DNA strands.)

In case you were wondering, DNA looks about like this:

(Floating snotlike substance; also the snotlike substance kinda sitting near the bottom, just above the white layer of salt. If you are a person of delicate sensibilities, you may wish to think of it as cloudlike.)

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Eppur Si Muove, ...But Not Very Far, and Not Very Fast

One of the tweaks I recently made to the little room-pressure nitrogen laser worked rather nicely. I mention it here because it is immensely nifty and has fairly general applicability: it’s a fairly easy way to make a differential screw for fine motions. I explain it, with a photo or two, on this page or, if you just want a picture, try this. (That’s a crude compliant coupling in the middle.)

I just wish I had invented it, because it is too cool for words.

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Earlier today I discovered that if the air conditioner is slanted the wrong way, it pees on the carpet. (Argh.) It is now slanted correctly, and I have mostly succeeded in drying out the carpet with the aid of a largish squirrel-cage blower. Handy devices, squirrel-cage blowers...

Cheers —
jon

Peanut Butter and _What_?!
The other day, we found some pickled bitter melon at one of the Asian markets in Rockville. This being a generally pleasing notion, the little jar came home with me. Thinking about what to do with it, I decided to try it with peanut butter, as that seemed likely to be interesting. Alas, the pickle proved to be watery, mushy, and somewhat bland; the texture was vaguely boring, there was no bitterness to speak of, and it didn’t have quite enough pickle flavor either. Sigh.

The initial experiment having failed to produce a significant result, I was left in the Land of Insufficient Data, and I decided to up the ante a bit. I asked the wonderful folks at Mandalay Café to make me some bitter melon, medium hot, but plain — without any meat in it. (I also had them leave out the onion, but that was only because I’m allergic.)

In mere moments I will be giving this a whirl, and we shall see how it performs on sourdough rye toast (no yeast) with peanut butter of the customary unsweetened sort.

Having a backup is always a good idea, so I am cooking a turkey burger. I have no doubt whatsoever that it will go very nicely with the bitter melon if the PB fails to satisfy, though I actually expect it to be unnecessary: I tend to trust my gut on these things, and my gut says that PB&BM will be Just Fine, Thankew.

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In the meanwhile, I should report that the economy indicator in my car is not quite as far off as I had thought. I just did the numbers on 1459 miles; the car indicated 58.5 and the reality was 55.5, so the car is only about 5.4% high. That’s over the long haul, though. Something (most likely the fact that the fuel tank is a rubber bladder rather than a rigid structure) causes a certain amount of fill-to-fill variability. For one fillup, in fact, the car was at 56.3 and the pump was at 57.3.

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I am revising the little room-pressure nitrogen laser yet again, changing the configuration of the spark gap. (I am also probably going to build a new version using a different type of circuit and a capacitor filled with glycerol, but that’s another story.) I won’t blather here; if you give a hoot, go to my page about it (which I hope to update as I obtain results), or comment and inquire, or email me. My address is on most of my Web pages, and is also in my LJ userinfo.

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A Bitter Verdict

(Supertasters may feel free to shudder delicately and move on, if they haven’t already done so.)

There are several taste combinations that we have become accustomed to, and find appealing. Sweet and sour, for example. The Indonesians, the Vietnamese, and the Thai (also the Cambodians, if memory serves) do a certain amount of sweet and hot, which is also quite nice. When the House of Roy existed (in Boston), they served various Chinese-style curry dishes and various dishes with black bean sauce; these combined to make a superb black bean curry. I’m not sure how I would even go about describing it in terms of flavors, but it was wonderful.

But, so, anyway:

What I’ve done here is rich and hot and bitter, which I tend to think of as somehow more angular than, say, the magical orange/vanilla/milk mixture. (Can you say “kinesthetic”? I thought you could.)

Typical US versions of the Indonesian sauce for saté (or the sauce for Vietnamese summer rolls, which is not entirely dissimilar) involve peanut butter and chiles, so my little experiment is, frankly, only a mild departure from the commonplace. The combination, anyway, is guaranteed not to appeal to folks who, even if they are not supertasters, do not enjoy bitterness. It is, however, just ducky if you like that sort of thing, which I certainly do. If you find that you want it a bit more savory, you can always use a bitter melon dish with meat in it — I found that I liked it better with the turkey burger tossed on top than plain.

The bottom line: a definite yum.

...And now, children, let’s all sing the Momordica charantia song....

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Geekery Pokery

A while ago, someone described a nice flourless almond cookie to me (I think we were talking about cornbread at the time), and I got them to dig out the recipe.

It is now a few weeks later. In the interim I acquired some almond meal, which has been waiting in the freezer, and now I WANT MY COOKIE. Not only can’t I find the recipe, however, I can’t even remember who gave it to me, or where, or when. Let’s hear it for ADD and aging...

What to do? The usual response, of course, is RTFM; but in this case the manual is precisely what’s missing, so that’s right out. I suppose I could have chased down some references (I do own a copy of Fabulous and Flourless, after all), but I’m tired and cranky and having an allergy day, so instead I did what any geek on a rampage would do: made it up from first principles.

A little baking soda, a few Tbs of xylitol (sweet enough, and less likely to screw up my gut flora than sugar), roughly 2 eggs’ worth of Ener-G Egg Replacer, maybe a little more than half a cup of Bob’s Red Mill GF flour (that’s Gluten Free, if you weren’t already familiar with the abbreviation), about 1.5X as much almond meal as flour, a healthy blop of vanilla extract, a baking dish (oiled and dusted with almond meal), and an oven preheated to 350° (Fahrenheit), because the Impoverished Student always preheats the oven...

...And, perhaps 20 minutes later, I have 5 crumbly-fallapart almond sugar-cookies. I probably should have put some oil (and a pinch of salt, now that I think on it) into the batter, but in fact they aren’t bad at all (he said, having eaten 3 of them while finishing this write-up).

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Cheers —
jon

Artfulness and other things --
The redoubtable Don Simpson has some of his work on view at DeviantArt. I hope you will agree with me that it is well worth a look-see.

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My current room-pressure nitrogen laser is good enough that it can lase a cuvette of dye when its channel is filled with air. This is rather difficult, because air is a lousy laser. Usually, you have to fill the channel with nitrogen to get enough output to threshold a dye laser.

(This photo was taken from behind the cuvette of dye, which is on the right. The blue spot toward the left is the output of the dye as it lases. I didn’t use any external mirrors, so this was even more difficult than it might have been. I did focus the output of the laser, though; I’m not sure it’s even possible to build a room-pressure nitrogen laser that will lase dye with just air in its channel and no focusing lens.)

If you are curious, this photo shows a fairly recent incarnation of the laser, but without some weights that are usually on it, so you can see the electrodes. (Two of the weights ordinarily cover and obscure them.)

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Every year, the American Film Institute runs a 48 hour film competition here. (On Friday evening, you are assigned a genre, a prop that must appear, and a line that someone must say. You have 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, and turn in a movie.)

One of the groups that regularly takes part in this competition is connected with the greater extended “us”, and they have made some of their films at the building where I do most of my work. This year I was actually asked to be in the film, which is called FOURGE and will be screened this evening (Friday, May 11th, 2007) at AFI’s Silver Theatre, in Silver Spring.

I had a ton of fun watching and participating, and I hope they do well in the competition. (The spelling of the name, btw, is intentional.) They are planning to put up a site for the film at http://fourge.org , but I don’t think it’s there yet. In the meanwhile, you can check under “May” at http://www.cavegirl.com/news.html if you’re interested.

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Last fall, we found a tiny baby critter in the warehouse. We were afraid it wouldn’t live through the winter on its own, so we put it in an aquarium tank, gave it food and water, and ...it escaped. Argh.

Two nights ago I was working on the laser, and at one point I went to wash my hands. I didn’t get into the bathroom, though, because the very selfsame critter (or one astonishingly like it) was right there on the floor in front of the bathroom door. It was extremely sluggish, and I had no trouble picking it up, which caused me to be quite concerned about the state of its health.

I put it back in the tank and gave it some water, which it promptly drank a quantity of. Yesterday we fed it, and although it didn’t exhibit any particular gusto, at least it was willing to open its mouth and let me put food there. (If they refuse to eat, it is generally curtains, especially with babies, which are very difficult to force-feed if you are not an expert.) After it ate, it seemed to perk up considerably. They are apparently rather resilient.

Last night I went down to turn off the lights so the poor thing could sleep, and I decided (foolishly, as it turns out) that I should put a weight on the lid of the terrarium. This morning when I went to check, the lid was very slightly up at one edge, away from the weight, and the critter was gone. I felt like a complete idiot.

I set the water dish down on the floor so it would be able to get a drink, and resigned myself to the circumstances; but when I returned later with

lisajulie, there was the critter, in the middle of the hallway. I picked it up and put it back in the terrarium, but this time I straightened out the lid and we weighted it better.

(If you were wondering, we do not have any desire to keep Little Miss Poo-Bah as a pet; we just want her to be in vigorously healthy condition when we set her loose.)

Here she is, in a moderately alert sort of repose. (If you have any doubts or phobias about long reptiles with scalesome flailsome tails, but no legs or eyelids, DO NOT click this link!)

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Cheers —
jon

Bit of a Variorum
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The Gauge, Alas, Lies

I have been reporting what the mileage indicator in the car tells me about my fuel economy. Now that I’ve had a chance to put gas into the car a few times, it has become clear that the reading on the gauge is exaggerated by at least 8%. I’m peeved, because that takes a certain amount of the fun out of it for me. Not, mind you, that I can really complain too much about 54.5 mpg, which is how I did over 469 miles and two half-tank fillings. (I spent just under $23.50 for the fuel.) ...But the gauge readings indicated 59.3 mpg over that same distance. Grump.

It’s still about the weirdest thing I’ve ever driven, btw; but I have to say yet again that the more I drive it, the more I like it. (Side note: get behind the wheel of a “regular” car after driving one of these for two weeks or so, and you are in for something of a cognitive dissonance hit.)

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The Mystery Crapout Strikes Again

Around 4:30 this afternoon I was getting ready to go down to DC for Indonesian class, but instead I went to bed for about 2 hours. I still feel somewhat flattened, and although I managed to go back to the lab area for a little while during the evening, I did not manage to set things up or take the measurement I am currently chasing. Grump.

When I saw the doctor about this, the first time it happened, she said she had seen a number of her allergy patients with exactly the same sort of mysterious exhaustion. Even her PA [Physician’s Associate] had it. I hope this instance is a brief hit, because I really don't need another session of several days with no energy at all.

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Horchata, Chufa (Yeah, I know, “Gesundheit.”)

I thought horchata was a rice beverage, but it turns out that there are several ways to make it. People often use rice or morro seeds (or occasionally a combination) as the basis, but in parts of Spain (mostly Valencia, I think) they make it from chufas, which are rather less common around here. I mention this because I found a US source for them while cruising the Web looking for methods. (Yes, they have a recipe.)

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Mitochondrial Function

It is probably worthwhile to go to PubMed and type

carnitine lipoic

into their search field, though the results of such a search can be somewhat difficult to interpret. If you find the results interesting, it is also probably worthwhile to remember that Acetyl-L-Carnitine is not quite the same as L-Carnitine (an amino acid), though they are very closely related. (Most of the hits I’m seeing this evening refer to L-Carnitine; when I checked a few months ago, more of them seemed to refer to the acetylated form, which is largely but not completely converted into the plain amino acid in the body. Also, most of the initial results tonight refer to heart muscle, and you may have to look through more than the first page to find the stuff about brain function.)

Likewise, it is important to note that the effective doses appear to be rather high; I am taking 4 grams of ALCar and 600 mg of ALA a day. These are both somewhat acidic and a wee bit hard on the stomach, so it is probably a good idea to split the dosage between morning and evening, and to take them with food if possible.

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What?

I keep driving past the building that houses this credit union, and I kinda wish I could join it, but I live and work outside the Beltway. Such is life.

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I Believe the Current Term is “lolcats”

There are lots of silly animal photos on the Web. Most of them just leave me cold or are actually wretched, but there are a few that I find amusing or cute or whatever. If you care to have an index into how I run my head, and if you don’t mind pages that are somewhat cluttered (and take a while to load — please be patient), you can try these. They are not by any means an exhaustive sampling...

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/03/26/rotation-sequence/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/04/13/i-have-evolved-thumbs/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/03/25/i-is-gots-your-tail/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/03/20/oh-juliet/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/03/30/chomp-plech/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/03/15/monorail-hamster/

This one is actually from a different site, but it is definitely of a piece with the rest.

I should note that the ‘I can has cheezburger’ people have several running jokes. One of them involves things being invisible; there’s another about walruses and buckets...

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/04/12/invisble-everything/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/04/11/you-stoled-mah-bukket/

(Thanks to

chakaal for providing the initial impetus here, btw. I had no idea this stuff existed until I heard hysterical laughter coming from somewhere near her laptop, the evening after her belt test.)

Cheers —
jon