ADDenda & Incorrigenda

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It's a _good_ laser --
Hi again.

I was not able to optimize the gas pressure in the head, because the battery in my camera was running low, but the laser was nonetheless able to do something I don’t think any of my previous ones has done:

That’s the unfocused output of the nitrogen laser, driving the dye to superfluorescence (lasing without any mirrors; note the vertical purple stripe on the paper, at the right side of the photo). It takes a fairly powerful nitrogen laser to do this, which I guess this one has now shown itself to be.

(I have tried to do this on various occasions in the past, with other nitrogen lasers I’ve built, but as far as I can recall I’ve never gotten it to work before. Needless to say, I’m chuffed.)

[Note, added later: I have replaced the picture with a slightly better one in which the gas pressure is slightly better optimized. Not that it makes a whole lot of difference.]

Cheers —
jon

It's a laser --
The new nitrogen laser head that I’ve been building is now operational. It is not optimized yet, but it certainly works. We’ll see how far I get with the projects I built it for; initial results on the first are not encouraging, but that one is a longshot, so I’m not surprised.

Working on it...

Cheers —
jon

It is Ursula K. Le Guin's Birthday.
Happy birthday, Ursula!

(Also a happy 40th anniversary to The Left Hand of Darkness.)

Cheers —
jon

"Eat Flaming Photons and Die, Terran Scum!"
Night before last,

chakaal and her sweetie and I ended up at Mandalay for dinner. I arrived a bit early, and went in to say hello. After a bit, Aung Myint gave me One Of Those Significant Looks and said, “Jon. I have something.” This could mean anything from a new dish (he has come up with some really fine ones) to a new printer, so I asked him what it was.

“Ghost pepper,” he said.

I thought about that. “Sounds vaguely familiar, but I’m not quite placing it,” I said.

“Bhut jolokia,” he said.

That placed it.

[Note: “Ghost pepper” is apparently a direct translation of Bhut jolokia; it is reputed to be the hottest pepper in the world. (There are also Naga jolokia and Saba jolokia, which are closely related or possibly identical to it — I haven’t really bothered to research this.) My best current info, btw, if it’s of any interest, is that these things are not Habaneros; they are reported to be Capsicum frutescens. I presume that the lack of a Habanero- or Bonnet-type fragrance tends to support this.]

I made various excited noises, and then I asked him if I could try it.

“Sure,” he said.

Almost as soon as we were seated, he brought a small plastic container to the table...

You may notice that the bottom has been cut off this pepper; it is my belief that someone was nuts enough to eat it. They have my sympathies, ...but I am not that crazy, not with something like this.

Aung asked

chakaal’s sweetie, who is known to be a fan of hot food, if he wanted a taste, and he said, “No way. It’s Nasty.” He then proceeded to tell me that he knows someone in New Mexico who assures him that she will never ever grow that thing again. Hmmm.

I asked Aung if he had a nice sharp knife I could use, and he brought one. If you look very closely at the photo (it may help to click the little image, which will get you a bigger one) you will see, about ¼ of the way from the left, a very thin line. That’s where I pushed the knife about 4 or 5 millimeters into the flesh. After I did that, I rubbed the juice off one side of the knife (the side away from the cap, as it happens) with my pinky. Then I chewed on my pinky. Within about 3 seconds it started to become clear that this is one of the hottest peppers I have ever encountered; the heat filled my mouth and went to the back of my throat. Although I had ingested much less than a drop of material, it was quite pronounced.

So far, so good; but it certainly wasn’t what I would expect from The Hottest Pepper in the World.

I waited a few minutes for the heat to subside a little, and then I rubbed the juice (again, much less than a drop, though perhaps a bit more than my first sample) off the other side of the knife with my other pinky...

“Holy %$#@^$%&$^*(&%^*$%@^!!!!!”

Within about 15 seconds I had to ask them to bring me a bowl of rice, and I was having trouble speaking. I damn near had tunnel vision; the heat was just astonishing. I believe I can assure you that if this is not The Hottest etc., it is certainly a contender. (Not that I’m an expert, mind you; but by the same token I am not just a newbie. I have tasted Habaneros and a certain number of other sprightly little critters, and this is Right Up There.)

So, you ask, of what earthly use is such a thing? As of this evening, I have two possible answers for you.

The first is that if you are making large pots of spicy-hot food and you are on a tight budget, particularly if you don’t want the food to taste and smell like Habas or Bonnets, this item is probably a good choice. One of them should be enough for 5 or 10 gallons of chili or soup or what-have-you, or maybe even more than that.

The second is that your name is Keith Kato, and you know exactly what you’re doing. (The Keith Kato I’m familiar with definitely knows exactly what he’s doing.)

(It is probably also interesting to breed with, and Aung was kind enough to let me keep it, so I will have seeds to plant in the spring.)

Dinner, btw, was expectably excellent.

I should have some laser stuff to post within a few days; we’ll see how it goes. (No, I am not making a chile laser; they don’t fluoresce much.)

Cheers —
jon

Progress with "Dirt"; Jackfruit Revisited (slightly image-intensive)

Dirt

A few postings back I included a photo of a test tile of my first attempt to reproduce the “glaze earth” of northern China. Fired in the gas kiln, it looked like this:

The broad stripe is Rutile and Gerstley Borate, a wash that I like to apply over reduction-fired high-iron glazes. The narrow stripe is Iron Oxide; the glaze “ate” this, and it is only vaguely visible except where it got onto the unglazed porcelain surface.

Even by itself this mixture is a very sweet glaze, albeit almost certainly different from the original that it attempts to copy. (My suspicion is that plain Russet Ding ware was glazed with Glaze Earth, very likely with minimal additions, and possibly even just by itself.) I will probably be checking to see what this recipe does under various firing conditions, with various decorative accents, and with appropriate additives.

I recently did a series of tests with my third version (I skipped the second); they are quite different from the first, but may be of some interest. Here is the plain recipe, first in the gas kiln and then in the electric:

(The stripe in the lefthand image is Rutile and Gerstley Borate; there isn’t quite enough iron in this “glaze” to justify this wash as a decoration, but I frequently use it as a test, as I have done here. The corresponding stripe in the righthand image is Iron Oxide.)

This is quite different from version 0.1, but also interesting, particularly in oxidation (righthand photo). I like the tiny spots that formed where I double-dipped one corner, and I like the way it takes the oxide wash.

Here, left to right, are the results of adding some Wood Ash, then some Iron Oxide, and then more Iron Oxide. (All of these were fired in the electric kiln; I hope to have some gas-fired results in a week or two.)

This is a definite “teacup glaze” — as soon as I picked up the tile, I wanted to put my mouth on it. I will almost certainly be mixing up a larger batch and dipping a test cup into it to see whether it is reproducible. It should be, and I will be using it.

I don't know what caused the odd blip in the middle of the first tile, but I don’t think I’m going to worry about it too much, at least for now. Note some crawling in the second photo; this occurred as the glaze was drying, before I fired the tiles. Why the version with ash and oxide crawled but the version with ash alone did not, I am at a loss to explain, especially when the version with even more oxide did not. Go figure.

We’ll see how these do in reduction, when I get those tiles back. (They will be fired at Creative Clay Studios, in a much larger kiln than mine, with a proportionately longer cooldown.)

There are several factors accounting for the large difference in appearance between v0.1 and v0.3, one of which is the fact that they contain different brands of Yellow Ochre. I probably ought to re-mix them the opposite way, and make more tests. If/when I do that, and assuming that the results are interesting enough to bother reporting, I’ll post photos.

_..··-^vWv^-··.._..··-^vWv^-··.._..··-^vWv^-··.._..··-^vWv^-··.._..··-^vWv^-··.._

Fruits

The jackfruit [or jakfruit] is the largest tree fruit in the world. They are commonly about 15-20 kg, but I think specimens as large as 50 kg have been recorded. As it happens, things aren’t quite as simple as that; there is also a smaller variety.

Until the day before yesterday, I had seen the “little” ones (they are not exactly tiny) only in photos and videos; but we happened to stop at Song Que for lunch, and there they were, cut and plastic-wrapped, visibly different from the regular ones. The seeds turn out to be about as long, but they are much thinner; and the pouches that contain them are correspondingly narrower. Also mushier, at least at the end near the skin. The fragrance and flavor, however, seem to be approximately the same as those of the large variety.

Song Que: where routes 7 and 50 and 613 and at least one other come together, in Virginia, is 7 corners. At 7 corners is The Eden Center, which is generally referred to as “Little Saigon”. Four Sisters Restaurant moved out, some months ago, and Song Que Deli —

— has replaced it. They have various smoothies; they have Bánh Mì (Vietnamese sandwiches, which

lisajulie assures me are extremely pleasant); they have quite a few prepared dishes, some in single-serving packages and some behind the counter in tubs; and they have a fair number of Asian fruits, including (but not limited to) June-plum, Rambutan, Longan, Dragon Fruit, Jackfruit (most recently the smaller type), Sugar Apple, and even more common things like pineapple and guava.

June-plums (which seem to be the fruit of Spondias dulcis and/or S. cytherea) —

— are slightly elastic, the way a cucumber is, though considerably more firm. They are also refreshingly tart and only faintly sweet, vaguely resembling an extremely crisp cucumber sunomono. Song Que offers them on the stem, as in the photo; also peeled and plastic-wrapped, ready to eat, with a little packet of salt and hot chile powder that is a bit too puckery for me.

Song Que goes on my “definitely recommended” list.

Cheers —
jon

The World Science Fiction Convention
I have just attended the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, and I want to say a few things about it. This is, of course, going to be a very biased report. (What did you expect, chimes? I have only my own experiences and a bit of hearsay.)

Let me dispose of the complaints early, as there are few of them and they are small.

First: near as I can recall, I asked the convention to refrain from scheduling me opposite Neil Gaiman; but they did so at least twice anyway. Well, hey. Screwups are bound to happen. OTOH, part of it was the fact that Neil was overscheduled, and I suspect that he is now rather thoroughly exhausted.

Second: as is the way with huge numbers of programming tracks, there were often 4 or more items I wanted to attend, scheduled across from each other. Worse, even aside from the item I’ve already mentioned above, once or twice I was scheduled across from items I seriously wanted to attend. (I really loathe having a dozen programming tracks. Mind you, I’m not sure there was a whole lot they could do about it, given the constraints under which they were operating.)

Third: (I’m sure there was a third item, but I can’t remember what it is right now. I’ll put it here if and when I recall it.)

Umm, ...hmmm. I can't really think of any other problems that were actually the convention’s doing, and it is ridiculous to give them a hard time for problems that they had no control over. (The art show, for example, was small, and only 25 pieces went to auction; but that was mostly the current economic mess. Likewise, The Unpleasantness at the Delta Hotel was clearly not the convention’s doing.)

Kudos:

First of all, the opening ceremonies were almost certainly the most crisp and professional I have ever seen at a Science Fiction convention, and I have attended my share (though I will grant that I have not been going to as many in the past decade or two as I used to). Immediately after the opening ceremonies, Paul Krugman (Nobel-Prize-winning economist) and Charlie Stross sat on stage and had a conversation. This was just delicious all ’round, and the two of them appeared to enjoy it thoroughly.

There were a few minor technical glitches during the Awards ceremonies, but nothing that took very long to correct, and nothing truly horrendous. It was, otherwise, nearly as crisp as the opening ceremonies, and rather efficient: took less than two hours.

Second, programming: I was on two food panels, both of which were delightful romps. At the second one, we inflamed ourselves so thoroughly that one of the other panelists and I ran off immediately afterward to the Chinese noodle place around the corner and stuffed ourselves. I had beef chow fun and also the sticky-rice thing that usually comes wrapped in a lotus leaf but at this restaurant arrives unwrapped, and is much closer to the Hakka version (light & almost flowery) than to the usual Guangdong/Hong-Kong version (dark and rusty) that I grew up with.

Speaking of which, kudos also to Jo Walton’s restaurant guide, which was a huge amount of work (and, I sincerely hope, fun), and which was very helpful.

Third, Dave Howell, who did the Hugo bases this year: they are superb.

Fourth, even though it was requisite, programming in two languages. First time I’ve been to a WorldCon with more than one language built into the program.

Fifth, the Plokta folks, for the newsletter and the parody issue they did.

Notes:

I attended various other panels and presentations, including several of Neil’s talks; a kaffeeklatsch with Kyle Cassidy (a wonderful photographer); two splendid (albeit brief) interviews — Ellen Datlow & Delia Sherman, and Cat Valente & Greer Gilman; a nifty short film about Venetia Burney Phair, who named Pluto when she was 11 years old, and finally got to see it on the eve of her 89th birthday; an excellent panel about Consciousness, and another about The Singularity; a very wonderful panel at which people remembered Mike Ford...

On Monday morning I tried to attend a panel on the Drake Equation (an attempt to guess at the number of advanced civilizations one might expect to find in a galaxy, IIRC) and the Fermi Paradox (if they’re out there, why don’t we detect them?), but was prevented: the panelists obliged me to moderate it. Hurt me, beat me.

We had a standing-room-only crowd, not exactly what you expect on the last day of a convention, and we romped joyously for just about a solid hour. The various members of the audience who contributed (including Brad Templeton, who also got us moved to a larger room with actual microphones, and deserves a very warm thankyou for doing so) were beautifully in synch with the discussion, and extremely thoughtful and articulate. How good does it get?

I had a wonderful time seeing friends, meeting new people, and carrying on pieces of The Wonderful Extended Conversation, which is a big chunk of what I go to conventions for.

Regrets:

Several; the one that seems most prominent just now is that I missed Ada Palmer’s talk, dammit.

I also missed meeting several people I was hoping to run into. Argh.

I’m sure there’s more; but it is 1 am Monday night / Tuesday morning now, and I’m beat. I will add things later as they occur to me (or when I’m connected), if they seem to merit mention. In the meanwhile I must say that I am, on the whole, happy with the job[s] the committee did, at least in the areas where they affected me.

Cheers —
jon

Uhhh, surprise:
I fired the electric kiln last night. There were two oilspot bowls in it, and I would have expected them to have delicate little gray spots on a deep reddish-grayish-chocolate ground, as I have been seeing on test tiles of this type of glaze.

Hah.

This is one of them:

So much for expectations.

Not, mind you, that I am the least bit displeased; the photo, nice though it is, cannot do justice to the piece. [Note, btw, that this (grayish spots on a variegated brown ground, with my apologies for the fingerprint that I only just noticed, sigh...) is almost the precise inverse of what I get in the gas kiln.] I just wish I knew what had caused it to come out this way instead of gray-on-dark. The test tile of the new version did exactly that, so it seems likely that this is partly a compositional issue. I strongly suspect that it is also related to the rather long “soak” that I gave the kiln at peak temperature.

I also fired the gas kiln last night, with two bowls in it (same glaze, expectably pleasant results), and I now have some things I can take to Montréal. At this point I’m debating whether to try to mix up a batch of the Satin Matte, glaze a thing or two, and fire one more time, assuming that it will stop raining.

Cheers —
jon

If you reduce them, they don't spot...
That does not, however, mean that they aren’t nice. The four photos below show a bowl that is covered with the exact same glaze (from the same bucket) as the vase I posted on the 11th, and also a bowl I fired a few days ago:

...but this time the kiln was in light reduction when it should have been in oxidation. [We had a little weirdness with the burner, he said, through gritted teeth — a tiny piece of something got into the gas orifice, partially obstructing it. This is deprecated, and the offending matter has been removed.]

I am hoping to have this bowl evaluated by someone in my local Urasenke group. I doubt that it’s quite right for use as a chawan; but I would like them to tell me what needs to change, so I can make a better or more appropriate one. If they are willing, and if I can get to them soon enough and get it back quickly, I may be able to bring it to the World Science Fiction Convention; but I tend to doubt that this will happen.

Meanwhile, I am working on other pieces to take to the WorldCon. I am also doing a certain amount of glaze testing, and there is a reasonable chance that one or another item resulting from that effort will show up as well. We Shall See What We Shall See...

Cheers —
jon

Slavoj Žižek --
A friend recently turned me on to this guy.

Love; Voting; (etc.)

Just exquisite.

Cheers —
jon

A Joyous Musical Item
I was extremely pleased to find this on YouTube: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain with a rather special guest, doing something that isn’t humorous.

(My admittedly limited exposure to their work has, with this one exception, all been very funny. They are, for example, quite devastating on “Wuthering Heights”.)

Cheers —
jon

Pass. Fail. (See also, Hami-gua.)
So: I calculated an average of the two oilspot glazes, mixed a bucket of the stuff, and put too much water in it. (Sigh. I will let it settle for a while and then decant the excess.) I dipped a test tile and a small vase, and fired them last night, along with some other glaze tests that we can maybe get into later if they become interesting enough after I attempt to tweak them into submission.

Here is the vase, slightly overexposed (my apologies). Despite the fact that there is really enough glaze only near the top, it is entirely okay by me...

...Well, almost entirely. Here’s the bottom:

Grrrr. We hates it, we does. Still, the crack does not go all the way through, and the vase holds water. We Should Be Thankful For Small Favors. (...But We Are Not Very. Grrr.)

[Just by the bye, in case anybody actually cares: “H” stands for Helios Porcelain; “JS” with 3 dots is me (am I slightly dotty? I guess maybe I am); and the date is the year and month during which I trimmed the footring. I can’t date them by when I expect to fire them, because it can be a while before I figure out the right glaze for a particular piece. This one, frex, was trimmed in March, and didn’t get fired until July.]

In case you want a better look at the spots, here is a close-up. I really like the variegation in color.

The long and short of it is that my “average”, which is tweaked to use only one type of Kaolin (one of the original versions used this type, the other used a different type), then normalized so that none of the amounts would be tighter than 1/10%, and finally normalized again (a gram here, a gram there, pretty soon you’re talking real ...uhhh, sorry; wrong quotation) to make it easy to mix 3 kg, works in a firing that is more or less equivalent to the firing I put the original test tile through. To put that a different way, this glaze is very pleasantly noncritical.

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I have previously mentioned the Hami melon of western China, and the fact that travel along the Silk Road seems to have guaranteed that the Persians would become aware of it. I went back to the Persian market the other day, and found a large bin of the things. Oddly, there were two distinct types. These:

...were reported to have come in last week, and some that were netted about like a cantaloupe and were even larger (those tiles are 8&½" square!) came in this week. I acquired only this one, and cannot provide a photo of the larger size, but the shape was about the same. I suspect that these are hybrids of some sort, and that there is more than one strain.

Assuming that this one is like what I remember from my trip (I haven’t opened it yet) I will save seeds, and we’ll see what we get next year. If not, I will run back and buy one of the others. (Argh. Even at a reasonable per-pound price, they are not exactly cheap.)

Cheers —
jon

Oilspot Update --
As I mentioned in the previous posting, one of the things I would like to have is an oilspot glaze that makes bright, distinct silver spots. This is certainly possible, but it appears to be nontrivial to achieve if you don’t want to add a quantity of cobalt to your recipe. (Been there, done that, like it fairly well; but I want something different this time.)

I thought about some things I’ve seen, including a photo of a teabowl that was reported to have been reduced accidentally. It is warped and slumped, and very silvery. This led me to conjecture that it might be useful to reduce the glaze late in the firing, after it has had a chance to form spots. (Early reduction tends to prevent the spots from forming.)

The tile in this photo (which is covered with a 50-50 mixture of the two glazes from the previous posting) was reduced for a while, starting when the temperature in the kiln reached 1225° Celsius; and again for a few minutes shortly before the end of the firing, with the temperature a little above 1290:

The stripe down the middle is a wash that I often use on high-iron glazes that I fire in reduction. I did not expect it to do anything exciting in a largely oxidizing firing, but I wanted to be entirely certain. The spots, while not silver in color, are significantly more distinct and a lot more reflective than the spots I got in the electric kiln, and they are sweetly variegated in color. In addition, the glaze smoothed out much better in this firing.

This one is decidedly a keeper, and I will be making up a bucket of it.

Cheers —
jon

Glazes, mostly...
I continue to mess with glazes (in the broad sense), and I am currently pursuing at least 5 tracks:

Low-melting glass (more about this in a later posting).
Lead-free china paint.
Two paths toward the Black Ding glaze, improving on my earlier copy.
Aventurine.
Oilspots.

China Paint

I have a couple friends who are china painters. Seems that china paint (which is essentially the lowest-melting ceramic glaze) was classically made with lots of lead oxide, which melts nicely at low temperatures. Also seems that lead has to go away, because everybody is kinda crazy on the subject. There are now some supposedly leadless china paints, but according to Paul Lewing, some lead shows up when those paints are tested. I could wonder about this; perhaps the tests are showing Bi as Pb? They shouldn’t, but that may not prevent them from doing so.

I am working up some recipes that are seriously unlikely to contain any lead, and we’ll see how far I get. I am not a china painter, btw, and my test objects are very different from real china painting. Here is a recent one, painted onto an ordinary wall-tile that has little speckles, so I can see whether the plain clear version really is transparent (it isn’t, and I will have to reformulate it to obtain more complete melting) —

Black Ding Ware

I am reformulating my version of the Black Ding glaze, bringing it more closely into line with the original, and having the expectable problem: the Song dynasty folks fired their wares for several days; I fire mine for a few hours. My recent versions melt in my kiln; but they don’t have enough time to smooth out properly, and they come out of the firing with dimpled surface texture. I am messing with the formulation in order to make the melt more fluid. There are several possible approaches to this, and I will post about progress from time to time if and as there is any.

The other side of this particular project is that I am also attempting to approximate or imitate the original ingredients. It appears likely that the Song potters made these glazes from dirt and ashes and maybe some rust. The dirt (which I think is described as “Glaze Earth” when it is used in ceramics) is decayed Loessic soil that seems to have blown in off the Taklamakan Desert a few millions of years ago, and blankets a huge area of northern China; in some places it is hundreds of meters deep. My first shot at imitating it is a fairly decent glaze all by itself, so I am feeling encouraged:

The broad stripe down the middle is a mixture of Rutile and Gerstley Borate, which tells me that this tile was fired to cone 10 in reduction, in my little gas kiln. The narrow stripe is iron oxide. I think my next step is to try adding small amounts of wood ash, to see what happens.

It is, I will admit, peevish-making that it takes me at least 10 ingredients to make a mediocre imitation of something the Chinese potters could (and still can) just dig up out of the ground, make into a slurry, and use. Sigh.

Aventurine

Aventurines (see the Lancastrian vase on this page if it is still there, or this piece by Lasse Östman) are crystal glazes, and they want the kind of firing cycle that gives the crystals a chance to grow. This involves (among other things) stalling the kiln for a while during cooling, at some appropriate temperature. Sometimes there are several such “holds”. For certain crystal types it gets even more complicated, but let’s not go there just now.

A crystal firing is very different from my usual cycle, which involves a fairly long hold at peak temperature and no pause at all during cooldown. It is no surprise that I do not obtain great results from aventurine tests. I can, though, get some sense of the character of an aventurine test, and eventually I will get something that looks really promising, at which point I may ask a friend to put a test tile through a proper crystal firing.

I fired two test aventurines last night. One of them did approximately what I expected it to, and would probably be fairly decent if I put it through the right kind of firing, but does not appear to be in any way exceptional.

The other is quite possibly the most astonishing failure I have experienced in 13 years of glaze development.

I was originally going to call this “DragonPox”, but have been gently guided in a different and more temperate direction; it currently stands as “Chocolate Toad”. (I suppose I can use whichever name is appropriate for a particular piece.) Either way it is definitely a keeper, and will probably end up on a few delicately distressing sculptural items.

Oilspots

Oilspot glazes have been around for quite a long time; they are high-iron formulations, generally fired in oxidation, so they are nicely adapted to electric kilns. The process by which the spots form is reasonably well understood, but the description is sufficiently geeky-tweaky and protracted that I would prefer not to go into it here; if you are interested, please send email.

There seems, nowadays, to be a fashion for large spots, which are associated with very thick applications of glaze. I don’t really like that look, so I am working on glazes that are applied in ordinary thickness and develop small-to-medium-size spots, similar to the ones I’ve seen on occasional Song dynasty pieces (for example, this one). My first test glaze fired out the wrong color but was otherwise pleasant, and went from version 0.1 to version 1.0 immediately when I took this test bowl out of the kiln and got a good look at it:

(I only mixed up 100 grams of the test glaze, so I had to paint it onto the bowl with a brush. The thickness, needless to say, was somewhat uneven.)

Because it is not what I was going for, the mere fact that it is a keeper did not stop me from continuing development. Version 0.2 did not fully melt, and I reformulated it; last night I fired tests of versions 0.3 (right side) and 0.4 (left side):

What I think I want is probably about 90% v0.4 and 10% v0.3, applied fairly thinly. I think I will go ahead and mix up a large enough batch to dip things in, as there is a good chance I can make minor corrections on the fly if it becomes necessary.

Once I get this type under control, the next step is to get spots that are more pronounced and are either silvery, like these, or perhaps iridescent if I can engineer that. Thinking about it...

The one orchid I own, which I think is Neofinetia falcata ‘Tama Kongo’, is once again putting out flower buds. (The flowers are fragrant, mostly in the evening.) It does this every year now, despite the fact that I have no clue how to take care of it and no idea if/when it should be repotted or divided or whatever you do with these things. This plant has survived multiple frosts, and is either remarkably hardy or astonishingly stubborn. Maybe both.

I took that with the camera in my phone; apologies for the image quality.

Cheers —
jon

Digital Cameras: I think Sony screwed up.
The reason why I was looking at digital camera reviews (see previous posting) is that my “car camera” is trashed. It was trashed before it went into the car (it’s the Canon G3 that was mashed by EMP from the big nitrogen laser I built a couple years back), and in fact that is why it went into the car; but I would like to have something half-decent, in case I happen to encounter something interesting or important and I don’t have time to take 3 or 4 shots of it in order to be sure of getting one good one. I have become rather tired of “Bad camera, no donut!” images, even though they can occasionally be amusing:

.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-._/M\_.-°\W/°-.

(Dunno what famous abstract artist to attribute this to, but I suspect that there is one.)

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So, I went looking for possible cameras on eBay, and I went looking at reviews to find out whether the things I saw were any good. When I got to the Sample Photos pages, I kept seeing obvious noise and JPEG compression artifacts even when the review said that the photos were great, so I finally went back into the archives and dragged out the review of my good camera, a Sony DSC-R1. This machine was issued around 2005, and had already been discontinued by the time I bought it (used, on eBay). There were several reasons why I chose it, despite the fact that one of the comparable Canon SLRs had slightly better dynamic range and the fact that it doesn’t perform well at high ISO speeds (which, in any case, I refrain from using); one of them was reviewers’ comments on the order of “the lens alone is worth the entire price of the camera.”

Sure enough, when I compare test photos from the DSC-R1 against test photos from recent cameras, what I find is that really great glass and a honking big sensor will get you through hard times better than an okay lens and a tiny sensor with zillions of tiny pixels, even if the lens has insane zoom capability. The DSC-R1, mind you, is a 10.3-Mp camera; but the sensor in it is 21.5 x 14.4 mm, gigantic compared with the sensors in non-SLR digital cameras. (In fact, it is larger than the sensor in the Olympus E-30 SLR.) The zoom, however, is only 5X, nothing like what you can get today. Part of the reason for this is the size of the sensor: you need a very good lens to get a decent image over that large an area, and it is difficult to achieve extreme zoom while maintaining the image quality.

The pricepoint of the DSC-R1 was high ($1000 or so), and must have contributed to its demise. The poor thing got squashed between SLRs with decreasing prices and P&S cameras with improving performance. Unfortunately, the performance of the Point-&-Shoot devices didn’t improve enough, and decent SLRs are still fairly pricy, especially as you begin to add lenses to your collection. I wish Sony had brought out a DSC-R2, with image stabilization and one or two other minor tweaks. Instead, they discontinued the DSC-R1. Too bad; the R2 would have been an outstanding machine. (If you actually want to read a comprehensive review, try this one.)

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Meanwhile, I continue my search for a reasonably decent car camera. I’ve about given up on the idea of a machine with RAW mode, which is sad, but they generally seem to be going for more money than I can spare for this. If I’m lucky, perhaps I’ll find something that has image stabilization.

Cheers —
jon

Great Typos of Our Time, #537
From a review on Steve’s Digicams, a site I consult from time to time:

“Playing the staring role on the FZ50 is an amazing Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 12x optical zoom lens....”

I guess they got that one right... after a fashion.

Cheers —
jon

Bliss
Courtesy my friend Josh, who handed me a ticket yesterday, I was privileged to attend a fortepiano concert at the Library of Congress this evening. The concert was introduced by Dr. Frank Bär, who gave a brief but very informative lecture, largely concerning pianofortes and their evolution. The performer, Ludwig Sémerjian, also spoke: before playing each piece he related the piece, the instruments that were available to its composer at the time it was written, and how those instruments shaped the music. (I wish I could detail this here, but I don’t have time, and I probably don’t remember it clearly enough to do it justice. Just as a brief gloss, if I’m remembering this correctly, the first concerto he played was written when Mozart had access to an instrument that was about 5 octaves wide, with sharp attack, a fairly metallic sound, and very little sustain; these instruments did not have triple strings in the treble, and it was easy for the bass to overpower the higher notes, so composers tended to write in a slightly restricted range. By the time Mozart wrote the second piece in the concert, about 2 years later, he had an instrument that I think was perhaps as wide as 6 octaves, with triple strings on its upper notes, a less-metallic sound, and longer sustain.) Please don’t take that as gospel, though, as my recollection of the words is still somewhat eclipsed by the music...

I don’t really have the words to say how astonishing this performance was. Hearing Ludwig Sémerjian’s profound connection to and understanding of the music, while watching his hands, from less than twenty feet away, was nothing short of amazing. I’m not even a Mozart fan, and I am quite a bit more likely to be found listening to Handel than to Haydn, but it didn’t matter: this was just entrancing.

They didn’t allow recording or photography during the performance, and I was too blown away to think of asking whether I could take pictures of it with my phone afterward; but there is a photo of one very much like it at the Website of R. J. Regier, its maker. It has pairs of strings for the lowest 8 (or so) notes, triples for the rest. The page about it has more information.

I do not yet know whether audio-only recordings can capture a good fraction of what I heard and saw this evening, but I will assuredly be acquiring some CDs to try to find out. At the very least, I would guess that his recordings are likely to be superb.

Best —
j

Telephone EMF "data" (I use that term loosely) --

I just got a microwave leak detector for a project (more about that if and when I get anywhere with it; should be fun if it works), and because I’ve been hearing things about the emissions from telephones, I decided to use it to take a look at mine. The meter is rated to read from 0.01 to 9.99 mW/cm², warns you if the level exceeds 5.00 (which they say is the danger threshold; frankly, I find it difficult to believe that there is a hard shelf at some specific number), and is broadband enough that they specifically state that it can be used to check “cell phones”. [We use different technology now, and I’m not sure there is even a cellular network in the US at this time.]

A Mild Caution:

This report is not, let me assure you, the least bit scientific. For one thing, I have not attempted to calibrate the meter. (The vendor claims that it never needs calibration, though there is a button that zeros it out if you need to.) For another, I did not take measurements from large numbers of positions around the phone, and I specifically did not take measurements from the “Put Your Brain Here” position. For a third, I am only going to show you 3 of the measurements I did succeed in taking; I actually got 5 or 6 photos, and I saw lots more numbers that I didn’t manage to photograph because they went by very rapidly.

That said, here’s what I found.

Most of the time, particularly between calls, the reading was quite low — between 0 and 0.15 or so. This is typical:
When I made calls, however, it generally increased. Sometimes not by all that much, sometimes fairly considerably. It fluctuated quite a bit, so I can’t give you a firm sense of the levels, but I can say that readings like this were not particularly unusual:
On three occasions, however (I think these may have been times when it was having trouble trying to connect), the meter flashed its red light and made its little warning sound. I saw a reading of more than 6 at one point, and I also saw this, which I was lucky enough to capture:

Granted, it doesn’t do that very often; and it never does it for very long. Still, it’s not necessarily what I want to have right next to my head. I think I will be making somewhat more use of my hands-free. (2450 MHz is not likely to propagate any distance along a little wire.)

Cheers —
jon

Viable for Vigilant Vegans and Valiant Vegetarians...
...Maybe Mediocre for Militant Meat Maniacs. (They get theirs under “K”, below.)

[Various other items as well, including a New Frontier (for me, anyway) in Mud, which is at the end of this post.]

The other day I went to the store and got a nice big sheaf of Swiss chard, the kind with the really broad white rib down the middle of the leaf. (I like those types better than any of the others, but of course in the final analysis it’s up to you. I’m sure that Lacinato or regular kale would also work just fine, or turnip greens, or mustard greens, or tatsoi, or...) I chopped the chard fairly finely, sautéed it in EVOO, and when it was almost done I stirred in a quantity of babaghannouj (several Tbs), 2 or 3 Tbs of miso, and a cup or two of cooked rice. This did not require any other ingredients; the baba took care of things like lemon juice and garlic, and the miso took care of salt. (I might consider adding more lemon juice, maybe, if I were in that sort of mood.)

You can substitute any number of things for the baba if it isn’t something you like, or perhaps just leave it out entirely. As to the miso, I used some outstanding 3-year barley stuff from South River; I’ve been buying their 3-year miso with brown rice for some time, and that would work just as well. Both of these are deep and rich, and I am really happy with them.

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File under Laser Madness:

I am working on something that may eventually become interesting if I can actually get anywhere with it. This is not novel, but by the same token it isn’t particularly common:

What you are seeing is not frequency doubling. Rather, it is fluorescence by direct upconversion: two IR photons in from a laser that is below the bottom of the photo, focused by the lens that you can see part of; some lossage in the form of heat; one green photon out.

This transition has been lased in several hosts; but it usually doesn’t work at room temperature, and I expect to be obliged to cool my samples to liquid-nitrogen temperature, if they will consent to lase at all. (We Shall See What We Shall See. I’m currently waiting for samples that I can use to build a test rig.)

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Kurma Komix Kontinued

This time, I mixed some mango pulp (the bottled stuff, rather liquidy) into the unsweetened soy yogurt along with the spices, which included allspice this time in honor of the mango, and a bit of salt. Marinated three chicken thighs in it, cooked them as usual, and served the resulting kurma with sautéed kale. This works pretty well; the mango adds a slightly different tang.

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Brief NCECA Redux

I attended the annual conference of the National Center on Education for the Ceramic Arts last week, in Phoenix. It was, as usual, terrific. This year, the Glaze Doctors and the Clay Doctors were the same folks: John Neely, Janet deBoos, Bill Carty, and Pete Pinnell. They didn’t bother with speeches after the brief introductions from Pete, just threw it open and took questions for the full hour and a half, both days. The questions were rich and varied, the people on the panel are all highly expert and extremely articulate. It was both interesting and enlightening to watch and listen to them thinking things through.

I’m a member of a mailinglist called Clayart, which has a room at the conference every year, in which its members can hang out; this year there were two special things: AMOCA had a large exhibit, and Mel Jacobson (the “Mayor” of Clayart) organized some [extremely informal] tea ceremonies, which were performed by Reiko-san from the Urasenke school in Los Angeles, with two helpers from the Phoenix area. Even an informal tea ceremony is a very different headspace from what we typically encounter at a major professional conference, even a mud conference, and I was very happy to have the opportunity to participate. Besides, I like matcha.

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Mud

I have been asked to make a few confit pots. This is something of a challenge, as confit pots are far larger than anything I have previously thrown. (There are various images on the Web, if you are curious.)

Most people seem to think that it’s a lot harder to throw porcelain than stoneware. In fact, many studios won’t even permit newbies to use porcelain. IMHO, this is mostly horsepucky; modern throwing porcelains are nearly as easy to throw as ordinary stoneware, and they feel a lot nicer on your hands. They also take glazes really sweetly. (There may be some justification for a few studios that don’t want students to use porcelain: if you are recycling your clay, and you want the composition to be uniform so that people can have a reasonable idea of what the studio glazes should look like on their pots, it is probably a good idea to have only one clay body in use. OTOH, however, at least according the the folks I’ve asked about it, up to about 25% porcelain mixed into stoneware generally doesn’t seem to change it very much.)

But. So. Anyway: confit pots. I threw the parts of a first one today, using an entire bag of Helios porcelain. Here they are as thrown, and then as assembled, with the joint ribbed smooth on the outside and the top batt removed...

I’m pleased, but of course it remains to be seen whether I can finish shaping this without screwing it up. (Centering 12 or 13 lbs of clay is not easy, and I was maybe not as vigilant as I should have been when I made the upper section, so it is not as nicely centered as I’d like.)

My glazing plan, if anyone is curious and assuming I get that far, is to pour my regular clear on the inside (unless I change my mind and do something silly), and dip the outside into my regular Rutile Blue. It’s impossible to avoid a few drips, but they will just run down the side and make it look a bit more funky, the way the real ones do.

Cheers —
jon

...Into Which I Put Too Much Kimmel.
Far too much kimmel: must have been the better part of a Tablespoon in there, not that I mind. Besides, that’s just me. You could easily leave it out.

But I should maybe start at the beginning, or perhaps even before the beginning, some time in the late 19^th century: at one point or another when my father’s father was a little kid in Przemyśl, he got sick. One guesses that it was what we might now refer to as “gut ’flu”, or maybe he just ate too many unripe plums; I don’t know — I never did get the full story.

Kimmel soup being a sovereign remedy for a bad tummy in those parts, they seem to have fed him a quantity of it. This, uhh, didn’t help. In fact, he was so sick that for the rest of his life he hated the stuff with an absolute and unyielding passion. When we went to the deli to get rye bread, during my childhood, we had to get one loaf with seeds for us, and half a loaf without seeds for him. Later, probably some time around 1971, during a phonecall, I told my Grandma that I was making rye bread; she asked me if it was with seeds or not. (This was after she asked me why the hell I would do such a thing, but that’s a different story.) I asked her not to breathe a word of this to Grampa, and told her that I had used a rather large amount of kimmel because I really like it. She immediately turned from the phone and told him, whereupon I could hear him in the background making retching noises to indicate the depth of his feelings in the matter. He was in his early eighties at the time, assuming I have the year about right.

[Those of you who have never encountered a Jewish deli rye bread may not be aware that such breads are filled with and also liberally anointed with caraway, which is kümmel in German and kimmel (or maybe kiml — transliteration is nonlinear and nontrivial) in Yiddish.]

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At this point we come to the beginning, which was a frozen duck breast in my freezer. It sat there, stalwartly awaiting the call to action, for some time. Then, last Sunday, I found some unsweetened dried sour cherries at the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Co-op. Well, sez I, I b’lieve I know what to do with these.

This evening I chopped up several Tbs of the cherries and mixed the bits into a like amount of brewed black tea. I used decaf because it is the evening, and I do not care to stay up until 4 or 5 AM; and I used Bigelow’s Constant Comment^® because I had made a cup earlier and had not quite finished it. I probably would have used it anyway, though, as the flavor is highly compatible.

To this starting set I added a large sprinkle of Summer Savory (we’ve already been through that saga), a bit of regular cinnamon, a bit of Sri Lanka cinnamon, a moderate sprinkle of marjoram, and a little salt. When I heated this proto-marinade in the microwave oven the cherries proceeded to sop up all of the tea, so I added some chicken stock. (I am currently aware of one [1] brand of chicken broth that contains neither yeast nor onions, and one [1] brand of stock likewise.)

I sliced up the duck and put it in the marinade, ...and then I remembered the kimmel. I had replenished my stock at the Co-op, and there it was, in its new home, waiting for me to do something pleasant with it... so I put far too much of it through the burr mill, and mixed it into the marinade.

After it sat for a while I put the duck into the pan, got it fairly well along, and then added the marinade to form a sauce for it and finish cooking it.

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Please note: if I were not allergic to various things I would have sautéed garlic and shallots in the pan before I put the duck in, and I would have put some kind of pleasant red wine or a Tokaji Szamorodni Száraz [dry] into the sauce; but although I can eat little bits of garlic now and then without ill effect, and although my onion allergy appears to be at low ebb just now, I do not have those things here. As to wine, my yeast allergy is not at low ebb, and I do not need to spend the next day or two lying in bed moaning, thankew. OTOH, that shouldn’t prevent anyone else from putting those things in. I should think they’d be very welcome.

If you don’t have or don’t like unsweetened sour cherries you could use sweetened ones, Morello cherries if you can find them, dried apricots, or for that matter whatever strikes your fancy. If you don’t want it quite so tart and tangy you could maybe try fresh pears, or guava, or ripe jakfruit. (Even if the jakfruit is only available frozen, that should be very pleasant.)

Speaking of apricots, later in the year I will endeavor to make this dish with ripe fresh ume, assuming that my friend with the tree gets any: last year, the flowers were frozen. (I have said this before, and I will happily say it again: it is totally ridiculous to describe ume as a Japanese “plum”. Plums are not fuzzy, plums are not habitually bright yellow-orange, and plums do not taste like apricots. I have tasted ripe ume, and they ain’t plums, nohow. Just as Malus sylvestris is a crab-apple,Prunus mume is a crab-apricot.)

Ahem.

I will certainly be making this dish again, one way or the other, because my dinner vanished so quickly I thought somebody else was helping me eat it. Inasmuch as there is nobody else here, that seems unlikely; nonetheless, it was gone much too soon, and I want more.

Cheers —
jon

New nitrogen laser: a definite yes. Also an answer.
The nitrogen laser I’ve been building is now more or less complete. I say more or less because I am using a preliminary version of some of the high-voltage circuitry, including a switch that can handle only up to 20,000 Volts. Here is the discharge, which is quite clean:

Although you can see vague indications of streamers, there are no really bright ones; and there are no bright arcs or sparks except at the very ends of the electrodes. (The brightness at the right edge of the image is from such a spark. They don’t appear to be interfering with lasing, so for the moment, at least, I am ignoring them.) The obstructions are the small capacitors that power the discharge channel, and part of the sheet of brass shim stock that connects them to the switch and to one of the electrodes. There are 20 of the small capacitors in this laser. They are, in turn, fed by a considerably larger capacitor that is off to the left, outside the photo.

Here’s what happens when I focus the beam (which is ultraviolet, and thus invisible) onto the front of a crude homebrew cuvette into which I have put a solution of a dye that lases a deep indigo color:

The dye is lasing happily in that photo; here is what the output looks like when it reaches a piece of paper that is about a foot away:

There are definitely some issues with this laser. For one thing, I am seeing a certain amount of weirdness with the switch. Sometimes the laser runs, and sometimes it just makes a small “tik” sound; I am not entirely sure why, but I suspect that the switch I’m using, a commercial spark gap, is nearing the end of its usable lifetime. On the other hand, the performance is highly acceptable, especially considering the relatively low operating voltage. I designed this laser to run at 30-35 kV, though, and I am thinking about changing out the switch so I can bring it up to that level. Because the stored energy scales with the square of the applied voltage, charging the main storage capacitor up to 30 kV instead of 20 will give me more than twice as much stored energy. There is, however, only one real way to find out whether the output will increase similarly, and that’s to try it.

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Here is one of the items from last time:

Here is what it looks like when you cook it (which doesn’t change the color much) and cut it open:

Like most organic materials, it is modestly fluorescent:

(“Figure 37: We understood this organ to be the creature’s liver. The surface or rind is of a beige color similar to those of several other organs, and is slightly scarred. The cortex, however, shown in this Figure, is quite dark, and is moreover highly fibrous. A single great vessel enters at the anterior end, and numerous though much smaller vessels exit, primarily from the inferior aspect.”)

This is almost certainly the purple Okinawan sweet potato. I have eaten two of them so far, and I can tell you from personal experience that they taste very nice. I have not yet found the taxonomic name for it, which I would otherwise give. Do not mistake this item, btw, for ube or ubi, the purple Filipino yam. That’s a whole ’nother story, Dioscorea alata. (Spuds that are not members of Dioscorea are not, properly speaking, yams, though that word is used in common parlance to describe many of them.)

Cheers —
jon