Phrase Shift

Monarch on Toyon

Maybe Doris Day popped into my head this morning, although I can no longer trace the line of thought that would have led to such a thing. But the French phrase, “Que sera, sera” (“Whatever will be, will be”) popped into my head, followed directly by the American phrase, “It is what it is.” I asked myself what those two phrases might say about the respective national characters that produced them.

The French phrase seems to put the emphasis on the future, and the American phrase seems to put the emphasis on the present. In fact, though, the French phrase is actually suggesting that we enjoy the present and shrug our shoulders about the future. The American phrase suggests that we accept the present (because we’re too taciturn to “enjoy” it) and shrug our shoulders about the past.

I guess that’s the “national character” difference in a nutshell. The French remind themselves to enjoy the present, and the Americans simply accept that they’re stuck with all the bad decisions they’ve made. The French ideal is to drink champagne in the face of, for example, a changing climate and its portents of catastrophe, while the American ideal is to say, in the aftermath of the latest flood, drought, heat-wave, or wildfire, “No use crying over spilt milk; deal with it.”

The future will take care of itself, and the past is past. Nothing to do about the former, and nothing to learn from the latter.

Or, as Annie Hall would say, “La-dee-da, la-dee-da.”

And that, my friends, is why we call ourselves Homo sapiens, “the wise people.”

Pipevine Swallowtail

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Phased Out

About this time a year ago I was out for my morning walk around the neighborhood when I saw the crescent moon rising behind Twin Peaks. The gorgeous silver sliver was positioned so that the moon appeared to be at rest just above the cupped peaks, almost like a sacrament held above open hands. After I got home I took a picture even though the moon had moved out of position, in part to help remind myself to try again the following year.

So the year passed and I was ready for that last thin sliver before the new moon to make its appearance on Monday. I was also thankful for a clear sky. I skipped my morning walk so I could be in place with my camera for the repeat event.

I first saw the crescent when it appeared just south of the base of Sutro Tower. It was a beautiful sight, but I could already sense that something wasn’t quite right.

From the position of the moon at that point, it didn’t seem like its trajectory was going to be exactly the same as the moon phase that occurred last year on October 15. When I looked through the viewfinder I could tell right away that the 300mm lens I used for last year’s shot was going to be too tight. This year I had to use a 105mm to get the moon and the peaks in the same frame. 

If I had waited until Tuesday to try the shot (which would have been in keeping with last year's sighting, being the day before the new moon), I'd have been skunked by fog. In any event, the crescent moon doesn't rise along the same angle or even at the same time from year to year, although the Photographer's Ephemeris had Tuesday's moonrise far enough south of Monday's to have probably made all the difference in the world; foiled by Carl the Fog again). Maybe next year....

As I watched the moonrise it was interesting to recall that there weren't so many airplanes flying across the frame last year, and sightseers weren't allowed to drive up to Twin Peaks.

Last October I was already amazed that the pandemic had continued to keep me working from home over the summer. Now another whole year has gone by, and my office isn’t scheduled to reopen until January 2022. That’s despite the fact that almost everyone has been vaccinated since last spring.

I do wonder if we’re being over-cautious, but it’s even more wondrous to me that so many people seem to believe it’s more risky to get the vaccine than the disease. I recently saw a comment on NextDoor by an anti-vax person who claimed to have several friends who contracted myocarditis, but she neglected to mention that you’re six-times more likely to get myocarditis after a Covid-19 infection than you are after an mRNA vaccination.

Speaking of playing the odds, I wonder if the moon will ever repeat the trajectory I saw last year. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled, just in case.

Waning Crescent Over Twin Peaks
October 4, 2021

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Circular Reasoning

 

Brocken Specter

I pushed the shower door open this morning and played with the arc of water droplets falling off the far edge of the door onto my bath mat. By pushing with a steady, even pressure I took pleasure in controlling the uniformity of the arc that drew itself on the mat. That’s probably the same pleasure that Jackson Pollock felt when he dripped paint onto canvas. There’s something pleasurable about creating a design on a surface without coming into direct contact with it. In a way, photography is like that. If I photograph a landscape, the subject is the dripping water, and the light sensor is the bath mat.

But I digress. Once I saw the arc forming, the pivot point of the door reminded me of a compass, which got me thinking about the arc in terms of degrees. A circle is an arc of 360 degrees, but what is the minimum degree of arc you need to know in order to calculate the circle’s radius and, by extension, its circumference?

Glory with Brocken Specter

Although I love questions like that, I have very little patience for finding their answers. I searched the internet in the hope of finding an easy answer, and I guess I did, because I found out it’s not possible. You can’t calculate the radius with the degree of arc alone because you also need what they call the sector angle.

The sector angle is formed by two radii extending from the center of the circle to each end of the arc, like a slice of pizza. The arc length is equal to the radius times the sector angle. I was trying hard to remain patient as I encountered these mathematical terms until I saw that you have to convert degrees of arc into radians, a term I was not familiar with despite the fact that I used to ride a Yamaha Radian motorcycle.

I almost stopped my line of inquiry at this point, but I found the conversion of degrees to radians as easily online as I could have found the conversion of dollars into yen. Enter “convert degrees to radians” into a Google search bar if you don’t believe me.

As you’ll see, each degree of arc is “worth” 0.0174533 radians (a radian equals pi divided by 180; not so tough after all).

But we’re still stuck with the fact that you need two of three numbers to calculate the third number. So I thought of a new question: Couldn’t you draw straight lines that just touch the ends of each side of the arc and converge in what would be the center of the circle?

I couldn’t do it in my head, and I feared I was treading close to calculus or something, so I set a nickel down on a piece of paper and used a pen to draw part of a circle. I looked at the arc and used a bookmark to draw a straight line past both ends of the arc. Sure enough, the lines converged on a point and created a slice of pizza, but was the point of intersection actually the center of my circle?

To find out, I set the nickel back down and drew the rest of the circle.

Long story short, the point was not in the center. Not even close.

Glory Photographed With Polarizing Filter

By this time I realized I had spent an awful lot of time following my curiosity into a mathematical dead-end. But at least it was time enjoyably spent.

Similarly, I recently went to see the Joan Mitchell show at SFMOMA. I do not consider myself a fan of abstract art, and my artist wife was braced for the possibility that I might not like the show. One of the cool things about art, though, is that it can affect you in a way that leaves you speechless.

Sandhill Cranes & Waning Crescent Moon

You could walk past a Joan Mitchell painting, or even a whole room full of them, glancing at them one by one before moving on to the next, and be confirmed in your suspicion that abstract art was useless. But the minute you stop wandering and actually plant yourself in front of one of these paintings, you get sucked in by its power.

Waves of light reflect off the paint and enter your eyes, triggering a cascade of neuronal impulses that converge on the point in your brain where your soul resides, producing more electrochemical cascades that release an emotion that spreads through your being like a drop of ink dispersing in a glass of water. What that emotion is, I can’t exactly say. I guess it’s a kind of awe. Whatever it was, it was deep and powerful, and I felt amazed and grateful for having experienced it.

The show continues until January 17, 2022.

Crane With Rising Sun

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