Monday, June 1, 2015
If Google Were Only So Good
Today being June 1st, I noticed the cover of the June issue of the Magnificat, a monthly booklet that contains the Catholic Mass liturgy for the month. This month the cover depicts a painting of an angel offering the Eucharist host. I was curious about the painting and the Magnificat always has a page describing its selection for its cover picture. It tells that it is an 1848 painting by the artist Sébastien-Melchior Cornu originally for a chapel in the Elysée Palace. It is now hangs at the Louvre Museum.
What happened next was amazing, although I have experienced similar amazements before, and which leads me to entitle this blog, ”If Google were only so good.”
While thinking about the story of the painting, the thought popped into my head of experiences that sometimes occurred while I was in grade school. Occasionally, when there would be a funeral mass at church during the week, altar servers would be excused from class to assist at the services. (My school was a parochial school adjacent to the church.) Sometimes it would occur that one of the ladies of the parish would be making the hosts that would be used by the priest and distributed as communion to the people. She had a small room next to where the altar servers stored their cassocks. She would mix up the flour and bake the unleavened batter into a flat disc about the size of a dinner plate. She had a press that would stamp out the hosts, a big one for the priest at Mass and little ones to be distributed to the people. She would end up with a remnant of interconnected “lace.” If the timing were just right, servers suited up in their cassocks, waiting for the priest to appear before the funeral service, and the lady well into the host-making process. Seeing us curious boys (no girl servers then), she would offer us the lace left over after she had cut out all the hosts she could derive from her master piece.
And as seamlessly as you swipe an iPad to a new page, my thought jumped to a Polish custom in my family that would occur at Christmas time: the sharing of “opłatek”. Opłatki (the plural of opłatek) are sheets of unleavened bread often embossed with a religious scene such as the Holy Family at the manger. At our family Christmas dinner, usually with one or two families of my aunts also present, my Mom would present the opłatek, say a few words about deceased family members and offer best wishes to all present, and then she would break off a piece to each member present. In turn, each person would take their piece and share it with all the others at the table. It always struck me that we were doing a very “holy thing.”
What’s the theme? A picture of a host held by an angel, a childhood experience in the making of hosts, and the offering of hosts (unleavened bread) to relatives at Christmas time. Oh Google, if you were only so good! And all of this, flowing out of a water logged, spongy brain, carried around for over 80 years, and no batteries required!
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Rebirth of Nucleogenesis
Among the enormous amount of ‘stuff’ I came across in cleaning out the basement of about 15 file boxes that were shipped up from Huntsville when we moved to Jenkintown was a notice of a seminar that I presented as a graduate student at Purdue University. It was required that each doctoral candidate in the Chemistry Department present a seminar to the faculty and students on a topic not directly related to their research. The title of my talk was “Nucleogenesis.” For the benefit of my non-scientist readers, what this title implies is the question of how did it come about that we now have about 100 different chemical elements on earth. The “nucleo-” of nucleogenesis refers to the nucleus of an atom that determines the chemical nature of each element. The nucleus consists of varying number of protons and neutrons. It is the number of protons that determines the chemical nature of the element. For example, hydrogen has one proton, oxygen has eight. Hence, as there are different numbers of protons, we have the various chemical elements: carbon, sulfur, iron, lead, gold, etc. The “-genesis” part of nucleogenesis refers to the question of how the elements were created. (The term nucleosynthesis is also used to describe this process.) How did it come about that there are the different chemical elements? At the time of “creation” of the universe was each element created as such, or was there some process of creating each element by adding protons to existing elements thereby growing in size, each one representing a new chemical element?
Why this seminar notice now attracted my attention and didn’t just get tossed out with the ‘tons’ of other stuff was the fact I have been taking various MOOC courses (Massive Open Online Courses), one being Astronomy and another being From the Big Bang to Dark Energy. The first course, in addition to lectures on the description of the universe in terms of stars, planets, orbits, etc., included a major segment on the evolution of the universe, the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, etc., going back in time to the Big Bang. Very early on, even before the heavenly bodies were formed, it was necessary to create the fundamental particles of matter that make up these bodies and then the chemical elements that we now observe on our planet and distributed throughout the universe. This is nucleogenesis.
With a degree in physical chemistry and working in industry in the fields of rocketry, plastics, fibers, toxicology, and chemical regulation, I had not paid much attention to the growth in knowledge in the fields of nuclear chemistry and physics. I was able to do my work with the knowledge of the atom as was taught in the late 1950’s; there were just four fundamental particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, and the mysterious neutrino. Those particles along with photons (light rays), and a variety of electromagnetic waves, like x rays, gamma rays, radio waves, were all one needed to pursue chemical research for the rest of one’s career. Today there are 16 known fundamental particles (17 if you count the Higgs boson whose existence was confirmed in 2013); twice that number if you count anti-matter. In fact , two of the fundamental particles in my day, the proton and the neutron, are no longer considered fundamental because they are now known to be made up of two other more fundamental particles, the up and down quark.
The curious question that I had when I came across the seminar notice was: how was it that I was attracted to the topic of nucleogenesis in 1958 when I had no special interest in nucleo chemistry or physics. Surely at that time there must have been some event or trigger that sparked my interest. Through the marvels of the Internet, I located a paper entitled “Stellar Evolution, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Nucleogenesis” by A.G.W. Cameron. This paper contains the series of lectures given at the Purdue Physics Department in March and April 1957. I am quite sure that I did not attend these lectures, but it is quite likely that I saw some announcement of this series of lectures, and that the title of the talks triggered a curiosity in me that led to my personal pursuit of the topic and eventually the seminar that I presented.
What shocks me now, having taken the two MOOC courses and also knowing that an understanding the formation of the elements requires a knowledge of what was occurring in the very early moments of the universe, is what did I teach at the seminar? Nucleogenesis couldn’t be fully understood until the theory of the Big Bang was well developed and the processes that were occurring during the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang were appreciated. Although the Big Bang was first proposed in 1927, a deep understanding didn’t develop until the 1960’s and beyond. So what did I teach my fellow graduate students and professors how the chemical elements were formed without this understanding? Of course at this point some 56 years later, I have no memory of the details of the seminar. What I can glean from the summary on the seminar notice was that I proposed two approaches that would appeal to chemists: One is that the distribution of the abundance of the elements represents an equilibrium of the energy contained in each element (which is referred to as the grand canonical ensemble). The second is that the distribution of elements that we see now resulted from the kinetics of formation of each element. Today both these concepts are as naïve as Lord Kelvin’s calculation was in 1862 that the sun would burn out in a trivial number of years because he did not know of any process that could release the amount of energy required for what he knew was being released from the sun. Although Lord Kelvin died in 1907, we have no knowledge whether he appreciated the impact of Einstein’s famous E = mc2 which was published in 1905.
Postscript: I am certain that I did not know of the existence of a paper entitled “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars” which was published in October of 1957 since it was not listed in my References. Remember in the days (actually decades) before Google, the equivalent in the form of scientific abstract journals weren’t published until a year or more after the original paper was published. To this day, this paper continues to be the definitive paper on the formation of the elements beyond hydrogen and helium despite the fact that the synthesis of the elements is based totally of what was known of nuclear chemistry at that time (roughly twelve years after the explosion of the first atomic bomb) and excludes any notion of the synthesis of the elements in a very early life of the universe. In fact, this paper has become somewhat of a celebrity in the realm of scientific papers by simply being referred to as B2FH which stands for the initials of the authors of the paper, K. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle. B2FH even has its own website where the original paper can be found along with related material (www.b2fh.org).
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Florida Dreams
Our recent Florida vacation brought to mind memories of previous Florida trips. One in particular is worthy of note:
In 1946, my parents traveled to Florida for the express purpose of buying a travel cabin business. I use that term because the term “motel” (motor hotel) had not yet come into use. The kind of travel lodging we are familiar with, namely, a multi-story building with rooms off of a central corridor or off of an outside walkway, was not yet the norm. It wasn’t until 1952 that Mr. Kemmons Wilson, envisioning predictable, quality accommodations for travelers, opened the first Holiday Inn in Memphis, Tennessee. Even as late as 1958 there were only 50 motels, although the number expanded rapidly with the construction of the interstate highway system.
Cabins for travelers were just that: small buildings that contained one bedroom and bath. They generally were separate buildings although some were built as row houses similar to the residential row houses we have in Philadelphia. However, they always were single story.
This is a picture of typical cabins of the period.
During the war years of 1941 to 1945 my father came to believe that travel cabins would be a good business after the war. Our family had visited Florida in 1941 to visit my mother’s sister, Aunt Helen and her husband, Uncle Stanley who lived in Jacksonville. He saw that Florida was already a popular travel destination and it was likely to expand after the war. Another factor was that my sister Natalie had been discharged from the Women’s Army Corp and had not yet found a job in Buffalo. She would help manage the cabin business.
I don’t recall all the various places in Florida that we visited, examining cabin businesses that were for sale. I do recall a place in Daytona Beach that was being considered and another in Kissimmee, Florida.
But the point of this story was a place in Orlando, Florida. Apparently there must have been a place there that was being seriously considered. I remember that we were parked under a southern oak tree on the city square with the court house in the center. It was terribly hot. (Recall that cars in 1946 were not air conditioned.) There was a discussion in the car about whether to proceed with the purchase. I don’t recall all the issues under consideration but I do know that one of them was about me. I had just enrolled to start at Canisius High School in Buffalo in the fall. There was the question about whether I would find a similar school in Orlando. There also was concern about leaving Buffalo and all the relatives. The final, bottom-line point was made by my mother: She asked why anyone would come to Orlando in central Florida. It was not near the Atlantic or Gulf beaches, and was surrounded only by orange groves. That seemed to clinch the argument against buying the property.
We returned home to Buffalo, and dad continued his job. I started at Canisius High School. Natalie, not finding a job in Buffalo, decided to go to California where some of our cousins had settled. They had reported that Los Angeles was booming. This was the beginning of the migration of the family to California; later my sister Arline and family moved there, and eventually my parents retired there.
I never heard one word of regret from my father about not getting into the lodging business in Orlando.
Epilogue: The population of Orlando was over 52,000 in 1950 but climbed to over 235,000 in 2009. Metro Orlando has a population of over 2 million. The Disney Company announced its intention to build an amusement park in Orlando in 1965. Today Orlando is the third most visited city in the United States. Even if we had established ourselves in Orlando in 1946, it still would have been a 19-year wait for the rapid growth to start.
Edited by eki.
In 1946, my parents traveled to Florida for the express purpose of buying a travel cabin business. I use that term because the term “motel” (motor hotel) had not yet come into use. The kind of travel lodging we are familiar with, namely, a multi-story building with rooms off of a central corridor or off of an outside walkway, was not yet the norm. It wasn’t until 1952 that Mr. Kemmons Wilson, envisioning predictable, quality accommodations for travelers, opened the first Holiday Inn in Memphis, Tennessee. Even as late as 1958 there were only 50 motels, although the number expanded rapidly with the construction of the interstate highway system.
Cabins for travelers were just that: small buildings that contained one bedroom and bath. They generally were separate buildings although some were built as row houses similar to the residential row houses we have in Philadelphia. However, they always were single story.
This is a picture of typical cabins of the period.
During the war years of 1941 to 1945 my father came to believe that travel cabins would be a good business after the war. Our family had visited Florida in 1941 to visit my mother’s sister, Aunt Helen and her husband, Uncle Stanley who lived in Jacksonville. He saw that Florida was already a popular travel destination and it was likely to expand after the war. Another factor was that my sister Natalie had been discharged from the Women’s Army Corp and had not yet found a job in Buffalo. She would help manage the cabin business.
I don’t recall all the various places in Florida that we visited, examining cabin businesses that were for sale. I do recall a place in Daytona Beach that was being considered and another in Kissimmee, Florida.
But the point of this story was a place in Orlando, Florida. Apparently there must have been a place there that was being seriously considered. I remember that we were parked under a southern oak tree on the city square with the court house in the center. It was terribly hot. (Recall that cars in 1946 were not air conditioned.) There was a discussion in the car about whether to proceed with the purchase. I don’t recall all the issues under consideration but I do know that one of them was about me. I had just enrolled to start at Canisius High School in Buffalo in the fall. There was the question about whether I would find a similar school in Orlando. There also was concern about leaving Buffalo and all the relatives. The final, bottom-line point was made by my mother: She asked why anyone would come to Orlando in central Florida. It was not near the Atlantic or Gulf beaches, and was surrounded only by orange groves. That seemed to clinch the argument against buying the property.
We returned home to Buffalo, and dad continued his job. I started at Canisius High School. Natalie, not finding a job in Buffalo, decided to go to California where some of our cousins had settled. They had reported that Los Angeles was booming. This was the beginning of the migration of the family to California; later my sister Arline and family moved there, and eventually my parents retired there.
I never heard one word of regret from my father about not getting into the lodging business in Orlando.
Epilogue: The population of Orlando was over 52,000 in 1950 but climbed to over 235,000 in 2009. Metro Orlando has a population of over 2 million. The Disney Company announced its intention to build an amusement park in Orlando in 1965. Today Orlando is the third most visited city in the United States. Even if we had established ourselves in Orlando in 1946, it still would have been a 19-year wait for the rapid growth to start.
Edited by eki.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Radio Daze
My father liked to tell the story about his father-in-law, Jacob Czerniak, who came to our house to help him install an antenna for our new American Bosch radio. This was in the 1930’s. In those early days of radio, a long antenna was necessary for good reception because the signals were weak. The antenna wire was strung from the radio in the dining room, out the window, up the outside wall and then out to a mast at the end of our house. From there, the wire was strung across the back yard to another mast mounted on the garage roof. Whereupon my grandfather asked: Where does it go from here? He could not understand that the antenna wire simply ended in mid air.
My next venture into radio construction did not occur until I was in graduate school, and my room mates and I decided that we needed an FM radio in our dining room where we spent most of our time together. I managed to make a very simple radio from some parts I found in the lab from a circuit design sketched out by one of the instrument makers in the chemistry department.
By the time Bette and I were married in 1959, long playing records, turning at 33 1/3 rpm, had become well established, and with the “extended play” feature, a single disc was capable of holding a complete symphony, albeit on two sides. This was a boom to the classical music recording industry. LP’s soon totally replaced the 78 and 45 rpm records for all types of music. Further, the fidelity of the recordings had increased so that the old record players built to the standards of the 78 rpm records where considered inadequate. However, high quality record turn tables and amplification systems had not yet been marketed at reasonable prices. Consequently, shortly after our marriage, we bought a Heath high fidelity “hifi” kit (Heathkit Mark IV). It took a couple of weeks to assemble a preamplifier and amplifier on a card table in the living room of our rented apartment. Tucked away in our hi-fi cabinet we still have about 166 of those old LP records waiting to be converted to the latest technology.
But the thirst for better and better fidelity was launched. Our next venture in this direction was the purchase of an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder/player. The reels were 7 inches in diameter and had 4 tracks playing at 7 ½ inches per second. Again a complete symphony can be captured on a reel. But in the era of the late 1970’s and 1980’s technology was developing very fast, and the reel-to-reel technology did not catch on widely. We ended up having only about 35 reels of music, and the obsolete recorder/player is still mounted in our hi-fi cabinet.
In the early 1980’s Sony introduced the “Walkman” portable stereo cassette player in the United States. Of course, everyone had to have one. The first introductions in the States were expensive and our children were still young. But it just so happened that Bette and I were going on a vacation in Japan and we thought that we could get a good buy there. After gathering courage to use the Tokyo subway system, we managed to find the Akihabara district in central Tokyo, famous for its many electronics shops. We bought three Walkman that were guarantied to play in the US. They did, but, perhaps because these were early technology models, they were soon superseded by more light weight and reliable models.
We completely missed the 8-track cassette mini-boom. This boom was probably short lived because it was developed under the impetus of the Ford Motor Company to be used in automobiles. Use outside of automobiles did not become widely popular.
Soon analogue technology was replaced by digital technology and there was a mass movement to CD recordings. Compact, stand-alone CD players quickly became available and our home acquired a “quality player” for serious music listening as well as CD units as part of boom boxes and radio/CD combination players in various rooms.
However, that was not the end of the pursuit. MP3 technology came on the scene via computers and soon we were able to hear high quality music from devices no larger that a cigarette lighter or a thin stack of playing cards. These latter devices also can show photos and short video clips.
And finally, even radio has gone digital. We now have an HD (high definition) FM radio, probably the first of many as we will one day be urged to replace all our radios with this latest technology.
What’s next?
A related link (mentions 78 rpm records):
Fantasia, Toscanini, and Music in the Air
(My grandfather’s puzzlement is not unlike a question I have in trying to understand how people can be walking about with a cell phone to their ear and the signal “knows” where they are; they could be in Seattle or Philadelphia. Another puzzle is seeing multiple people in a relatively small area on separate calls. Are we being irradiated with telephone signals all the time, wherever we are?)The American Bosch radio was like a piece of furniture, an elegant cabinet standing on its own legs. I was fascinated by the complexity of the “innards” of the radio, as they could easily be seen from the back by sliding out the chassis to see all the glowing vacuum tubes and other electronic parts. The tube filaments were easily visible because the radio tubes were the size of a cucumber. As best I can recall, that radio looked something like this:
 |  |  |
This is the radio that the family used to listen to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats. 
Despite its age, its sound remained good for an AM radio, and the family kept this radio as long as I can remember, at least up until the time I left home for graduate school in 1954.
My own direct involvement with radio began with building a crystal set radio. Before radios were developed that had built-in amplifiers and speaker systems as in our Bosch radio, some adventuresome people had crystal set radios. A crystal set radio is a “passive” radio in the sense that there is no amplification of the signal. For this reason, ear phones are necessary to hear whatever signal is picked up by the antenna. A mineral called galena (lead sulfide), a forerunner of today’s semiconductors, has the property of responding to the faint currents brought in by the antenna. When a “sensitive” spot on the surface of the crystal is touched by a conductive probe, the signal is strong enough to be heard on the ear phones. The probe consists of a straight, stiff wire, mounted on a pivot so that the wire tip can be moved about the surface of the crystal to find a sensitive spot. Hence, crystal set radios were often referred to a “cat whisker’s receivers.”
All that is needed to create a crystal set radio (other than the crystal) are ear phones, an antenna and a winding of copper wire around a cylinder such as a discarded toilet paper core. For those so inclined, this is a sketch of the radio.
My next venture into radio construction did not occur until I was in graduate school, and my room mates and I decided that we needed an FM radio in our dining room where we spent most of our time together. I managed to make a very simple radio from some parts I found in the lab from a circuit design sketched out by one of the instrument makers in the chemistry department.
By the time Bette and I were married in 1959, long playing records, turning at 33 1/3 rpm, had become well established, and with the “extended play” feature, a single disc was capable of holding a complete symphony, albeit on two sides. This was a boom to the classical music recording industry. LP’s soon totally replaced the 78 and 45 rpm records for all types of music. Further, the fidelity of the recordings had increased so that the old record players built to the standards of the 78 rpm records where considered inadequate. However, high quality record turn tables and amplification systems had not yet been marketed at reasonable prices. Consequently, shortly after our marriage, we bought a Heath high fidelity “hifi” kit (Heathkit Mark IV). It took a couple of weeks to assemble a preamplifier and amplifier on a card table in the living room of our rented apartment. Tucked away in our hi-fi cabinet we still have about 166 of those old LP records waiting to be converted to the latest technology.
But the thirst for better and better fidelity was launched. Our next venture in this direction was the purchase of an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder/player. The reels were 7 inches in diameter and had 4 tracks playing at 7 ½ inches per second. Again a complete symphony can be captured on a reel. But in the era of the late 1970’s and 1980’s technology was developing very fast, and the reel-to-reel technology did not catch on widely. We ended up having only about 35 reels of music, and the obsolete recorder/player is still mounted in our hi-fi cabinet.
In the early 1980’s Sony introduced the “Walkman” portable stereo cassette player in the United States. Of course, everyone had to have one. The first introductions in the States were expensive and our children were still young. But it just so happened that Bette and I were going on a vacation in Japan and we thought that we could get a good buy there. After gathering courage to use the Tokyo subway system, we managed to find the Akihabara district in central Tokyo, famous for its many electronics shops. We bought three Walkman that were guarantied to play in the US. They did, but, perhaps because these were early technology models, they were soon superseded by more light weight and reliable models.
We completely missed the 8-track cassette mini-boom. This boom was probably short lived because it was developed under the impetus of the Ford Motor Company to be used in automobiles. Use outside of automobiles did not become widely popular.
Soon analogue technology was replaced by digital technology and there was a mass movement to CD recordings. Compact, stand-alone CD players quickly became available and our home acquired a “quality player” for serious music listening as well as CD units as part of boom boxes and radio/CD combination players in various rooms.
However, that was not the end of the pursuit. MP3 technology came on the scene via computers and soon we were able to hear high quality music from devices no larger that a cigarette lighter or a thin stack of playing cards. These latter devices also can show photos and short video clips.
And finally, even radio has gone digital. We now have an HD (high definition) FM radio, probably the first of many as we will one day be urged to replace all our radios with this latest technology.
What’s next?
A related link (mentions 78 rpm records):
Fantasia, Toscanini, and Music in the Air
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Fantasia, Toscanini, and Music in the Air
As I watch our grandson, Bilalay, grow up, I have been thinking about how different my own early childhood was, and wondering about how my various experiences as a youngster may have influenced my later life. I have already commented on how the simple act of traveling to and from my dad’s fishing places on Lake Erie may have influenced my interest in science and, in particular, chemistry. [See blog: Fishing, Epilogue Part 2, May 11, 2009] Here I speculate about some possible sources of my pleasure in classical music. It remains to be seen how Bilalay is being influenced by growing up in the digital age
‡ ‡
Although opera music wafted through our home every Saturday afternoon emanating from a radio mounted atop the refrigerator in the kitchen, I believe my first formal exposure to classical music probably was seeing Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia.
I clearly remember being taken to see Fantasia by my sister Natalie in one of the fancy theaters in downtown Buffalo,. I was ten years old and Natalie joined the Women’s Army Corps later in the year (1942). I can still see Leopold Stokowski stride to the podium, not knowing what to expect, but quickly being transported into the world of cartoon animation a few moments after the music began. Even to this day, I have strong visual images of the Mickey Mouse character donning the wizard’s hat and cape, and commanding the broom to carry water, resulting in a flood because he did not know the magic words that would stop the broom; all of this was to the music of Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I can still picture grazing deer being frightened by an approaching storm as suggested by a thunderous passage in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (#6). I have a clear image of the fearsome birds flying about in the Night on Bald Mountain (Modest Mussorgsky).
While Fantasia was widely applauded as a landmark in animation in which the craft of animation was applied to the interpretation of music, there were some who called it kitsch. These critics felt that music is an abstract art form and that any intrepreation was simply one person’s vision of the meaning of the music, if music has any visual meaning at all. In any event, as a youngster, it seemed that the visual scenes were entirely appropriate to the accompanying music. As it turned out, as an adult, I have the ability to enjoy music on its own without the necessity of creating a mental image to accomany it.
(How has the brain stored these memories for 67 years?)
My friend’s parents had a washing machine repair business a few blocks from our home in Buffalo. With the coming of the “television age,” they decided to carry television sets as part of their retail business. When a Toscanini program was scheduled, my friend Paul would invite me to come to the store after hours. The one television in the window was turned around so that it could be viewed in the darkened store.
In those early days, TV was literally a vast waste land meaning that the few programs that were broadcast were in prime time only. For much of the day only a test pattern was broadcast so that TV owners could adjust their sets and television stores could display the reception quality on their various TV brands.
Nothing was automatic as it is now: There were several controls at the front of the TV to adjust focus, brightness, and contrast; to adjust the height and width to make a more perfectly round test pattern; and to adjust for vertical and horizontal hold to prevent “rolling” or “tearing” of the picture. Unfortunately, these controls were not independent in the sense that making an adjustment of one parameter would often result in the required readjustment of another parameter.
After much set adjustment and with great anticipation, the Toscanini program came on and what Paul and I saw was almost a silhouette of a white haired figure, who with obvious stern intensity, brought forth music of great beauty.
Perhaps it was not the music itself but the mesmerization of the new experience of seeing and hearing musicians in real time playing from a distant location – tele-vision, that made it so memorable.
The National Broadcasting Company eventually broadcast ten Toscanini concerts from 1948 to 1954 at which point the network disbanded the NBC Symphony Orchestra. I don’t recall how many of these I saw at my friend’s store or on my parent’s TV that they purchased sometime in the early 1950s.
In graduate school, I started a collection of thirty-three and a third rpm long-play records. I was constantly reminded of my Toscanini experience a few years earlier when I saw his black and white image appearing on the dust jackets of recordings of those historic broadcasts.
I recall that my sister Arline bought a 78 rpm vinyl record of Chopin’s Polonaise. I was often called upon to quickly run to the phonograph to turn the record over to play the other side. Because of the short recording capacity of 78s, only about roughly half of the 7 minute Polonaise could be recorded on one side. Since the Polonaise has a certain momentum to it, no doubt something was lost in the transition. Nevertheless, given the state of the art at the time, this record was played over and over again with no concern about the loss of musical continuity.
By any measure, our family would not be considered classical music devotees. Nevertheless, as I look back on those years, there apparently was enough of this type of music in the air that I gravitated toward it as an adult.
Although opera music wafted through our home every Saturday afternoon emanating from a radio mounted atop the refrigerator in the kitchen, I believe my first formal exposure to classical music probably was seeing Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia.
I clearly remember being taken to see Fantasia by my sister Natalie in one of the fancy theaters in downtown Buffalo,. I was ten years old and Natalie joined the Women’s Army Corps later in the year (1942). I can still see Leopold Stokowski stride to the podium, not knowing what to expect, but quickly being transported into the world of cartoon animation a few moments after the music began. Even to this day, I have strong visual images of the Mickey Mouse character donning the wizard’s hat and cape, and commanding the broom to carry water, resulting in a flood because he did not know the magic words that would stop the broom; all of this was to the music of Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I can still picture grazing deer being frightened by an approaching storm as suggested by a thunderous passage in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (#6). I have a clear image of the fearsome birds flying about in the Night on Bald Mountain (Modest Mussorgsky).
While Fantasia was widely applauded as a landmark in animation in which the craft of animation was applied to the interpretation of music, there were some who called it kitsch. These critics felt that music is an abstract art form and that any intrepreation was simply one person’s vision of the meaning of the music, if music has any visual meaning at all. In any event, as a youngster, it seemed that the visual scenes were entirely appropriate to the accompanying music. As it turned out, as an adult, I have the ability to enjoy music on its own without the necessity of creating a mental image to accomany it.
(How has the brain stored these memories for 67 years?)
‡ ‡
My friend’s parents had a washing machine repair business a few blocks from our home in Buffalo. With the coming of the “television age,” they decided to carry television sets as part of their retail business. When a Toscanini program was scheduled, my friend Paul would invite me to come to the store after hours. The one television in the window was turned around so that it could be viewed in the darkened store.
In those early days, TV was literally a vast waste land meaning that the few programs that were broadcast were in prime time only. For much of the day only a test pattern was broadcast so that TV owners could adjust their sets and television stores could display the reception quality on their various TV brands.
Nothing was automatic as it is now: There were several controls at the front of the TV to adjust focus, brightness, and contrast; to adjust the height and width to make a more perfectly round test pattern; and to adjust for vertical and horizontal hold to prevent “rolling” or “tearing” of the picture. Unfortunately, these controls were not independent in the sense that making an adjustment of one parameter would often result in the required readjustment of another parameter.After much set adjustment and with great anticipation, the Toscanini program came on and what Paul and I saw was almost a silhouette of a white haired figure, who with obvious stern intensity, brought forth music of great beauty.
Perhaps it was not the music itself but the mesmerization of the new experience of seeing and hearing musicians in real time playing from a distant location – tele-vision, that made it so memorable.The National Broadcasting Company eventually broadcast ten Toscanini concerts from 1948 to 1954 at which point the network disbanded the NBC Symphony Orchestra. I don’t recall how many of these I saw at my friend’s store or on my parent’s TV that they purchased sometime in the early 1950s.
In graduate school, I started a collection of thirty-three and a third rpm long-play records. I was constantly reminded of my Toscanini experience a few years earlier when I saw his black and white image appearing on the dust jackets of recordings of those historic broadcasts.
‡ ‡
I recall that my sister Arline bought a 78 rpm vinyl record of Chopin’s Polonaise. I was often called upon to quickly run to the phonograph to turn the record over to play the other side. Because of the short recording capacity of 78s, only about roughly half of the 7 minute Polonaise could be recorded on one side. Since the Polonaise has a certain momentum to it, no doubt something was lost in the transition. Nevertheless, given the state of the art at the time, this record was played over and over again with no concern about the loss of musical continuity.
By any measure, our family would not be considered classical music devotees. Nevertheless, as I look back on those years, there apparently was enough of this type of music in the air that I gravitated toward it as an adult.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Psycho-Economic-Babble
On the Sunday talk shows (February 7, 2010), we heard a lot of psycho-economic-babble about why the unemployment rate remains high. Many of the explanations came from the mouths of supposedly knowledgeable commentators. Complex explanations were offered which ranged all the way from the huge size of the national debt to fears about the cost of the proposed health care legislation and to concerns about possible taxes on business.
Actually the explanation is much more elementary: The personal savings rate increased to over four percent in 2009 from the three percent range or less in 2008. Presumably the higher-than-previous savings rate has persisted into 2010. That is a one-third decrease in purchasing power that has been removed from the economy. While decreasing the national debt, giving tax cuts to business, or removing the uncertainty about health care costs may influence the unemployment rate in the long run, none of these factors will directly and immediately increase the spending for goods and services which is the ultimate driver of the economy. Hiring will readily begin as soon as businesses have orders on their books to fill regardless of the psycho-economic cloud overhead. People will start buying goods and services at a more brisk rate once they feel that their future will be more secure, and that won’t happen until they see that they and more of their neighbors have jobs again. This is what makes the problem a vicious circle.
Actually the explanation is much more elementary: The personal savings rate increased to over four percent in 2009 from the three percent range or less in 2008. Presumably the higher-than-previous savings rate has persisted into 2010. That is a one-third decrease in purchasing power that has been removed from the economy. While decreasing the national debt, giving tax cuts to business, or removing the uncertainty about health care costs may influence the unemployment rate in the long run, none of these factors will directly and immediately increase the spending for goods and services which is the ultimate driver of the economy. Hiring will readily begin as soon as businesses have orders on their books to fill regardless of the psycho-economic cloud overhead. People will start buying goods and services at a more brisk rate once they feel that their future will be more secure, and that won’t happen until they see that they and more of their neighbors have jobs again. This is what makes the problem a vicious circle.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Rug Making
My mother made a large number of braided rugs which were scattered about my parent’s home, our relatives’ homes, and our own home in Huntsville and in Jenkintown.
Braided rugs have a long history dating back to the Colonial era. Braided rugs were also referred to as “rag rugs” for obvious reasons. The popularity of the “arts and crafts” movement in the 1890-1910 period stimulated a renewed interest in this craft. Braided rugs were popular around the woolen mills of the Northeast in the early 1900s, utilizing the cast-offs of the local textile industry.
I don’t know what prompted my mother to take up the craft of rug making but it might have been suggested by a good supply of starting material. Mom’s rug making was made possible by the fact that my Aunt Gertrude worked for many years as a seamstress at a mattress manufacturer (Serta, I think). Aunt Gertrude would bring remnants of mattress cover fabric to my Mom. Mattress fabric is very tough material and creates rugs that are practically indestructible.
The first step in braided rug making is to prepare the strands that will be braided. Mom would cut the remnant fabric into strips about 2 inches wide. These strips are folded in two steps to make braiding strands. The first step is to fold each strip edge in to the center of the strip. Then, the strip is folded on its center. In this way, the fabric edges, which are prone to unravel, are incased within the folds. The bi-folded strand is then ironed to make the folds stable. The remnant strands are sewn together to make one continuous length. Three such strands are needed before braiding can begin.
Braiding of the strands is the next step. The strands often were not made from the same remnant material. Hence, there is the opportunity to select combinations of three remnant sources to create rugs with different color designs. Here the judicious selection of contrasting or complimentary colors ultimately determines the aesthetics of the rug. All three strands of fabric could be the same color, or two the same, or none the same. However, the selection of the color choice of the strands was often primarily determined on what was available from Aunt Gertrude at the time.
To start braiding, Mom would tie the three selected strands and secure them under a heavy rock* on the table, and proceed to braid in the conventional manner. As the braid became long enough to approach her body, she would lift the rock and secure a finished section under the rock. She would proceed in this manner until it was judged that the braid length was sufficient to complete a rug. This braiding process often took many days, and depending on other activities, might be spread out over a month’s time.
Finally, having enough material for one rug, the assembly process begins. The braids are snaked together and secured by heavy butcher’s twine using a strong, flat crocheting needle that weaves the twine between the loops of the braids. The twine becomes virtually invisible. The length of the first straight braid ultimately determines the size and shape of the rug, in this case an oval rug. If a circular rug is desired, there is no first straight braid; the braids start making a circle from the very beginning.
We had one braided rug in Jenkintown which eventually was relegated to the basement and then to the garage. But, alas, when the garage was converted into an artist studio the light orange braided rug, still sturdy and strong but now quite soiled and water stained, it had to be discarded after some 40 years of ‘rugged’ service.
* This is a very special rock: This was a dark grey rock I picked up on the shore of Lake Erie because of its near perfectly round shape, about the size of a grape fruit, and because it contained a cream colored vein in a delicate bird’s foot design.
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