Virginia Woolf – Portrait comparisons

Virginia Woolf photographic portraits made by George Charles Beresford in 1902.

Virginia Woolf - 1902 - My idealized cleaned photo.

The images which were available on the web were all contaminated with various forms of detritus. So I spent several hours cleaning these up with digital photo shop to see something closer to my idealization of what Virginia looked like in the originals. The second photo seems to not to have been shot at the same instant but on the same camera a few seconds later because it has a slightly different viewing angle which can be seen on the eyebrow to the left . Multilens cameras had been used in early portrait photography because of the difficulty of making copy prints so if you can get two of them you can get nice stereo pictures. But, that’s not the case in this pair.

Virginia Woolf - 1902 portrait

A portrait of Virginia Woolf from a very slightly different angle obviously taken within seconds of the other photo but not stereo. Also she has turned her eyes downward a little.

On close observation it appears that the top photo has been stretched horizontally. Which gives her a strange alien appearance, I mean outer space alien. The bottom photo with her looking at the horizon lo0ks more like a college coed. I know what I feel when I say this but I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.

It is difficult to get all of the random artifacts out of some of these old photos. Lots of things are easier to cope with than the general blochiness of the original web photos I was working with so I spent a lot of time removing the obvious artifacts manually before doing any of the easy automatic operations. The procedures in this case ended up looking a little more like oil paintings because of the computers over-handling of the digital noise. It was especially noticable in the hair. These pictures can be seen in higher resolution by clicking on them.

Virginia Woolf from - A Writers Diary

This picture is cleaned up from the cover of A Writer’s Diary
available from Amazon.com

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I didn’t go out today because I supposedly have a cold. In fact if I hadn’t told anyone it would be impossible to tell because I have zero symptoms. This is 48 hours after I had a fever of 100°+F. I did go to the Med yesterday and only those people who had read my blog asked me how I was feeling because even only 24 hours after the fever I was okay. Not 100% but okay. Today I have been 98.6% okay, not perfect but I have to observe very carefully to notice anything whatsoever. Part of my cure the flu with hot baths procedure is to take a bath for two more days after the last symptoms have gone away. I had an experience or two in the past when I quit taking them the instant the symptoms abated and the flu came back a couple of days later with renewed force. The baths are not unpleasant so it is just an hour of lollygagging about.

I have cured the H1N1 flu – hurrah – maybe

I have cured my H1N1 flu but maybe I am cheering a little too soon. I am sitting in my favorite coffee shop, the Mediterraneum, here in Berkeley typing this blog. This almost exactly two days since I first had a scratchy throat or any other clear manifestation of a cold. I will admit that I had been feeling a bit depressed for two days and had taken hot baths each day as a precaution against possibly catching a flu but even though I observed myself quite carefully I didn’t know if I actually had a flu until day before yesterday when I posted, My treatment of today’s flu worked okay, and then yesterday when I definitely had a flu and posted, My flu germs are doing better than I am. I did take a hot bath this morning but then visited with an old buddy of mine who comes by every Monday morning for an hour or two but he didn’t notice anything different from my usual healthy demeanor. Then I came to the Med and talked to two guys for an hour and they didn’t notice anything either. However, I must admit I am starting to feel a little tired so I might go home a little bit early so I can take a second bath today.

Yesterday, I clearly had a cold, with a high temperature and later after going to bed at midnight I had a coughing spasm which got worse the more I coughed but it went away after I succeeded in mentally suppressing it for several seconds. Some friends just came in so I am going to go chat for a while. 3:45 PM

—

Later… After chatting a bit I was feeling less than perfect and as the weather was rainy and cold and looked like it might get worse I thought I better get home. So, I headed out on the mile or so walk to BART and got home after encountering only modest rain. I took another hot bath and after cooling down felt okay, not perfect but okay. Now four hour later, having watched an exciting episode of 24 it’s time to finnish up this post and go to bed.

One good measure of how sick one is from a cold is how much yellow snot one can generate and so far by that standard I am below a quarter teaspoon. That is something to sip on.

My flu germs are doing much better than I am.

This is now the third day of what most people would call a cold. It has been almost totally in my sinus and upper throat coupled with an over-all higher than normal temperature. At half time of the Superbowl XLIV I had a fever of 100° F so I decided that My flu germs are doing better than I am, and I should take another hot bath. The Indianapolis Colts appeared to be doing just fine and in the pre-game betting they were supposed to win by six points so it appeared they didn’t need anymore of my lackluster help.

When I got out of the bath the game was down to the last couple of desperate nimutes for the Colts and they got stopped at the goal line. However, even if they had gotten that goal they probably wouldn’t have had enough time to put some more points on the board. The skill of these players is amazing and HDTV really makes watching a game a much better experience.

There is an old joke that if you treat a cold with everything known to modern science it will take fourteen days to clear out a cold but it you totally ignore it the cold will be gone in only two weeks. Or, was it the other way around?

I have used my hot bath treatment on myself since 1994 and rarely had a cold last anywhere near two weeks. This one came on a little differently so it will be interesting to see what happens and how long it lasts.

My flu germs are doing better than I am.

 This is an update on my blog of two years ago and of yesterdays report on my current flu symptoms. I am using that blog, A cure for the common cold using 105° F baths as my guide for treating this flu.

6:23 PM —  I took two hot baths yesterday and one more this morning and have been feeling okay until about an hour ago. Then my nose started running with a watery fluid and now I have started sneezing occasionally but it’s only this last hour than any person other than myself would think that I had a cold. I had all of the usual seasonal flu shots  last month but not the H1N1 shot. It is reported that the flu now going around is H1N1 so I suppose that’s what I’ve got.

Cure the H1N1 flu with 106° F baths. - - Maybe.

I have drawn another hot bath and it’s now stabilizing while the hot water heater recovers enough hot water so I can keep the tub temperature at 106° F. We keep the hotwater heater set at it’s very lowest setting, to save energy. When writing yesterday’s blog I had the feeling that I had started my hot baths at the very first sign of that cold and that I could count those baths as part of my treatment sequence. In the past I had not started my hot baths treatments until the symptoms were more noticable, about like they are now. My body temperature is now 98.6° F. which for me is a slight fever. In a few minutes I will get into 106° F bath water and run my body temperature up to 102° F. This temperature is one degree than my former recomendation but infact I just run the temperature up and let it drift back down to  106° F so it isn’t all that different.

10:02 After the bath, we watched the movie, Temple Grandin, which for me was a real tear jerker and a fine distraction from my fairly mild symptoms. I don’t think I am evenly mildly autistic but many of the things said and done in the movie, like her searches for motivations of other beings by putting herself in their place, and her unique struggle to find something to make life meaningful. She felt okay with the fact that cattle were raised to be eaten but thought they should be treated with respect and kindness while they were alive. It reminded me of my super hero alternate identity — I am Apophenio! I see what others don’t! For me that’s a little joke which is fun to spring on people at costume parties but there is some truth in it. For Temple Grandin these ideas were portraied as all consuming passions. My temperature is now 99.6° F which for me is definitely a fever so I am going to bed and plan to take a hot first thing in the morning.

My treatment of today’s flu worked okay.

Apparently I was a little too close to some flu victims on the BART subway train last week. I noticed there were several people coughing and I heard one sneeze nearby but they weren’t immediately next to me so I didn’t think there was much exposure to what ever it was they had, if anything. However, apparently I was mistaken, as I so often am, and three days ago I was feeling glummer than usual. Usually I feel quite happy so feeling even a little bit glum is very apparent in my world perception.

At first this glumness didn’t feel like a cold or a flu because it was just a distant feeling that things were not quite right. I did my usual things and my blogs are reasonably upbeat although the noise of the world was more annoying than usual so that bum subject, The curse of modern civilization is noise,was that day’s blog.  But because things weren’t quite right it seemed that a hot bath might be appropriate, following the dictates of my blog, Cure the common cold with 102°F voluntary fevers. That wasn’t entirely appropriate for the physical feelings I was having because I didn’t have an itchy throat or the beginnings of a fever. So this bath was more of a pleasure bath but I did run my temperature up to 102°F as a precautionary measure. It is easy to do and it can’t hurt. I raise my voluntary fever to that higher temperature for only a couple of minutes and after hitting it I get out of the hot bath immediately and cool down to completely normal temperature in about a half hour.

The next morning I felt a little bit worse and had a touch of fever and chills sensation. It wasn’t anything anyone else would notice, not even a doctor taking my symptoms, but I felt them so I took another bath as above. Early in the evening I was having a bit of fever and chill feeling again even though my temperature was still 97.2°F which is lower than most people’s temperature but normal for me. I took another hot bath.

This morning when I got up I had a definite bit of itchy throat and a little of the fever and chill feeling so it appeared I was in fact exposed to a standard cold and had succeeded in suppressing the disease to a very mild condition. This is exactly what the hot baths are intended to do — to suppress symptoms by alerting the body’s disease fighting defences to go on the alert and hold back the disease while the antibodies are being created to kill the infecting organism. This procedure doesn’t kill the flu it only suppress it. It takes a couple of days for the body to learn how to make the exact antibodies needed and thus to become effective.

This evening I wasn’t feeling any particular symptoms but I took a hot bath and I will take at least one hot bath tomorrow even if I don’t feel any symptoms. I do at least one hot bath for two days after the last infectious itchy-fever-chill feeling has gone away. One time I stopped taking the hot bath immediately after symptoms eased up but the next day the cold came back so now I do two more. It’s so easy and even pleasurable and it’s the end of the symptoms.

At no time in this whole episode did I manifest any symptoms that anyone else could have observed and I doubt if I was infectious because you have to be putting out some sneeze phlegm or some snot on the hand. I didn’t have any of that and no fever in public. So, I have hope to be totally normal in a couple of days.

I have done something very new and unusual during the hot bath procedure for the last couple of years. I have drunk about 2¼ ounces of vodka after I reach the body temperature of 102°F. I used to drink it straight, neat, after measuring it into a cup but after considering that the hot burning sensation might be telling my body that it wasn’t such a good idea I have diluted it, 1 vodka to 4 water. The reason for the dilution is that it eliminates the burning sensation. There is a reported association between drinking alcohol and mouth cancer, throat cancer and stomach cancer so why take any unnecessary chance? I am taking the alcohol because it might help dissolve any plaque that has built up in my arteries. At the dilution of alcohol in the blood that would be a very slow process but doing it a couple of times per year might be all that is needed. I am not recommending this and only saying that I am doing it. It is just a personal experiment.

The rabbit Achilles finally catches Zeno’s tortoise

That silly hare sometimes named Achilles has pursued Zeno’s unnamed but wily tortoise for over two thousand years now and most philosophers are still flummoxed as to why he hasn’t caught up?! Every university in the world has a philosophy department which means that there must be thousands of professional philosophers in this world being paid professorial salaries. This is the absurdity of it all. Why is the public squandering so much money on this obvious nonsense?

The average person in the public might think these professional people wouldn’t waste any more time on such a question but – NO. I have attended several valedictory lectures for departing philosophy professors and they always, in jest they claim, make some profound proclamation about Zeno’s paradoxes.  His paradoxes are not dead but very much alive. And these brilliant modern folks are still bewildered. And I wonder why it always falls on my poor undereducated intellect to solve their problems when I merely observe the obvious way of getting out of their self imposed box. Perhaps, I do deserve my superhero cape because, I am Apophenio! I see what others don’t! — Ah-Haaa !!!

The usual persentation of  Zeno’s paradox is — In a race to the finish line a rabbit which is postulated to start off after a tortoise has started can never catch the tortoise  because to do so he must go half way toward the tortoise but he can’t do that without first going the first half way and yet again half way to that position, which goes on forever ad infinitum. For these philosophers it means the rabbit is stuck, can’t even get started in the pursuit. He is frozen in time. They freely admit it is a farcical problem but they also admit that they can’t shake themselves free of it. But, for me in my Apophenio guise, it is very easy to do; I merely start from the other end.

I propose — The rabbit has just caught up with the tortoise but to do that he must first have come half way from his earlier point. But before he did that he must first have come half way from some earlier point and so on ad infinitum just as in the problem above. It is exactly the same problem but stated from the ending point rather than the starting point. Here’s the difference. Because the rabbit has caught up with the tortoise he obviously had to cover half the distance and done so repeatedly or he couldn’t have caught up and because he has caught up it is absurd to say he couldn’t have come half way and equally absurd to say he couldn’t even get started because he was frozen in time. Thus, in the real world, it becomes easy for rabbits to catch up with tortoises, easy for things to get started and come to conclusions and easy for the world we live in to proceed in the ways we normally perceive it to do.

Perhaps philosophers would do more good for the world by shoveling rabbit pellets. If it tastes like rabbit poop it probably is rabbit poop.

The most amazing map of our mother Earth.

Earth's population by latitude is shown to the right.

I made this human population map to graphically illustrate the location of people on Earth. Humans are a species almost exclusively inhabiting the northern hemisphere. Even those in the southern hemisphere are clustered northward close to the equator. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina may loom large in our imaginations but their populations are quite small compared to the north countries. Those small peaks in the south are in Brazil and Java. Those beautiful southern countries just don’t compare in overall population mass to China and they don’t even form a blip at this scale of resolution.

What’s even stranger is that a sphere, such as the Earth, gets noticeably smaller as one proceeds towards the poles and yet there are still vast numbers of people living very far north but few living even modestly south. Several major capitol cities are located 60° North — St. Petersburg  the capital of the Russian Empire for more than two hundred years,  Helsinki, Finland, Stolckholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway. That is almost as poleward as the tip of Antarctica at 63° which in an unimaginable place for a city. Venice, Italy which most people consider quite a balmy climate, on the Mediterranium Sea is 45° North and most of Europe is poleward of that. By comparison from 45° South there is only few large towns. Punta Arenas in Chile at the pointy tip of South America is the only one very far south and Comodoro Rivadavia in Argentina and in New Zealand, Invercargill at the tip of New Zealand and Dunedin just up the coast. These are not very poleward and close to 45°. There are more people living poleward from 45° North, the top horizontal line than live in the entire Southern Hemisphere which is a much larger area.

There is a lot more open ocean in the Southern Hemisphere where only a few people can live on the islands and much of what appears to be habitable continents, like Australia is in fact a flat desert with no mountains to pull rain out of the sky and it will remain sparsely populated. Sub equatorial Africa has been inhabited since humanity emerged and so it is already close to the carrying capacity of that land. The current population is presently being supported beyond the natural carrying capacity by imported food and food producing energy in the form of oil for powered equipment and fertilizers. That leaves only Brazil as a large land mass capable or sustaining large numbers of people and it is there where a population explosion and economic explosion is presently taking place. The ecologists are of the opinion that the Amazon will quickly be mined of its nutrients and collapse within a hundred years. Young people alive today may see that happen. But for the immediate future Brazil is a wonderful place to be.

The future population graph similar to the one above probably won’t change much visually to the casual observer over the next decade but in four decades there will be a noticable lump in the south appearing from Brazil’s population explosion. The maximum human population growth will probably be in the equatorial zones. Even though the world population is doubling in about 39 years the northern-most countries are already experiencing population stasis and declines. Africa’s population is a big question mark and most projections are based on the last few years of growth. That would indicate massive population growth but that seems unlikely when those areas already experience occasional famines. Even a doubling of population in the south won’t make much of a blip in the graph of the southern zones.

The theme song from the old TV series The World at War is flowing through my feelings at them moment. That melody reeks of the world-sorrow of humanities struggles.

The curse of modern civilization is noise.

noise - noiSE – -  NOISE — — NOISE — ∞ ≡ ◊< • NOISE — is making everyone crazier and stupider. The 19th century philosopher, Schopenhauer wrote an essay complaining of noise especially the noise of a cartman’s whip occasional snaping into his consciousness. He wrote, The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity. Today a cartman’s snap heard occasionally in the street outside would seem a quaint solitude compared to today’s aural assaults. We are being forced into insanity and compelled to be more stupid.

Sitting in my coffee shop, The Med, trying to have a conversation requires astounding patience and tolerance for very loud and sustained noise. The coffee grinder totally prevents conversation for over a minute a couple of times per afternoon. But even that deafening din is topped by the unremitting decibels whined out by the juicer machine which takes maybe two minutes of hands over the ears face scrunching emotional suppression for me to survive. And to what end? It’s to enable some environmentally correct dweeb to have a carrot juice beverage. Bah humbug! Let the little ones chew raw turnips and onions.

A thoughtful conversation is one of the most pleasurable and valuable of all human experiences. Perhaps it is even more pleasurable than the essential animal pleasures, eating, sex and defecation. A conversation is what is uniquely human it is how human beings came into existence, which I discussed in  Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish where female sexual selection was evolved into artificial selection. A good conversation requires sustained back and forth exploring of a subject by the conversationalist until the very essence has been penetrated and the peripheries have been explored. Whenever some noise or other annoyance obtrudes into the conversation the details are lost and the flow is perterbed.

Why don’t we go to the tables outside? Okay, and so we do sometimes. Sometimes, out on Telegraph Avenue it is quite pleasant for minutes at a time. But, that isnt enough anymore because of the new assaults from the criminal element. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what are you whimpering about?

Yesterday, I saw in the news that UC Berkeley was the 4th worst campus in the United States for property crimes. We reached that unenviable record with over 500 property crimes per thousand students. The crime isn’t very visible just an occasional broken car window with pretty glass diamonds on the street. Panhandling isn’t a crime here, so it’s quite prevalent. Some times and some places it has been a crime but we are tolerant here and move the definition of acceptable behavior a bit and with that liberality in comes the more clearly definable criminal behavior. It is a form of noise.

Sitting at the tables out in the street attracts the panhandler, the cigaret moocher and the drunk to an otherwise orderly conversation. Usually, they move on in a minute but it destroys the preexisting conversation. The fire engines, police cars or the ambulance will proceed past a couple of times per day because Telegraph is the primary access to the UC Campus area. These have super-sirens that are so very loud that their crews wear shooters ear protectors inside of the vehicles and those vehicles have heavier than usual glass windows which helps them even more. However, those of us sitting having our quiet conversation in front of the Med are only three steps away from the sirens as they pass. The students generally show off their courage by not covering their ears but they are surely suffering hearing loss from these assaults.

The public vehicles are the worst! Perhaps the very worst for hearing loss are the screechy breaks on public transportation busses. These are particularly bad because they pass very close to their intended patrons while squealing their particularly destructive hissy noise.

I could go on and on because there is much more to complain about but it is making me tired just thinking about it and realizing that absolutely nothing will be done.

Sara Frucht – a good friend and a great artist.

Friends are wonderful. Sometimes, most times, that simple fact is easily forgotten in the whirl of the daily hubbub. My hour or two of routine coffee shop word-slosh at the Cafe Med is a complex mess of ego clash masquerading as a high-principled exploration of eternal truths.  

We older Med-heads are disparagingly referred to, by the young zombie-kids of Telegraph Avenue here in Berkeley, as the wax museum. The mutual dissing-epithets are not entirely wrong. The youths dress themselves in shabby black clothes, cover their skin with tattooed skulls and move with drug induced staccato gesticulations. In contrast, we mellow geriatrics dress ourselves more conventionally and spurn personal tats but we waxen-people haven’t moved for half a century. However, beneath the wrinkling skin, we are just as weird as the younger zombies. To outsiders we older zombies’ arms appear permanently cocked in various frozen configurations of getting coffee into our brains or in gesticulations of defiance at each other’s innuendos.  But, to us — it’s our life. 

I have said more than a thousand times, Any one is excused for coming through the Med’s  front door the first time but anyone who comes thru it a second time must be crazy. Yet here we are, locked in amiable-acrimony as the millennium and the decades go scooting by, waiting for the return of the enthusiasm of the good old days, usually thought of as the 60’s, or death. Unfortunately, all too many of us have taken the second option for leaving the Med — death. By my definition, we living Med-heads are all crazy.

In the midst of all this bizarre mucking about, like the lotus blossom of Buddhist mythology sits my friend Sara Frucht — artist. I guess we all have our better qualities but one of Sara’s is spectacular — paintings. She paints with a luminous lighting which stimulates one of my old habit exercises, Observe the color and translucency of things. Sara has developed her observational skill to a high art and distilled out the light of things into a spirit-form which we all can see and appreciate — just by looking. Every time, after watching Sara’s paintings for a while, I walk through the world with my eyes cleansed, seeing the translucent glow of our wonder-filled world more vividly and feeling a soft sublime pleasure in being part of it.  

Nasturtium leaves

 

 Que - Sara – Sara !  

Sunflowers

 

Thank you! Sara.  

Ivy

 

Look at Sara’s paintings for a while before you take a walk and your life will be more quiet and joyful.

Coffeeshop Mediterraneum, Peet’s and Starbuck’s upgrades

People are now using coffee shops as study halls rather than conversation venues. The coffee shops typically require patrons to buy a minimal amount of coffee for the use of their seating, tables and otherwise FREE INTERNET wifi hookups. Because of this new form of coffeeshop usage there needs to be some upgrades to their structure and functioning. What students want now is a reasonably distraction free zone for studying while at the same time being in a safe comfortable socially open environment. They want the option of conversing privately with other people but without being disturbed or listened to. Also they want instant service for their coffee and instant refills without a lot of fuss about trivial things.

There is a way that all of this can be accomplished easily in any typical open room. There could be several parallel long tables set up like this depending upon the room. Then place some movable sound walls between the patrons. Place arbitrarily but fairly long 48 inch wide 29 inch high tables in the center of the room with access to both sides of the table. These could be made of standard sound proofing material with a T foot set in at the bottom for standing them vertically. They would be 18 inches high which would create privacy but permit surveillance by the management. The carrel station would be about 24 inches deep 29 inches wide and 18 inches high. This is big enough for a lap top computer a book and a cup of coffee and pastry.

One advantage of this system is that when a person wants to have a private face to face conversation they can rotate the spacer between them. This rotation of the separator will work either to the side or across the table and if four people want to talk the intervening separators can easily be moved, rotated or removed.

The patrons should like this system because it gives them some private space and the coffee shop owners should like it because it permits them to get more people into their floor space.

A second improvement would be the speed and ease with which coffee can be purchased and refilled. At my favorite coffee shop there is often too long a wait to bother waiting in line and I just go sit and down with my friends before they leave rather than waste time trying to buy coffee. This is very bad for the proprietor’s profits but why should a willing patron have to wait fifteen minutes for a cup or coffee or a refill which he can tap himself in ten seconds.

The owner may sat that his patrons will steal the coffee if it is to easily available. But, I would say, it is easy to set up an easy to see and refill coffee spigot and an equally easy to see pay point. Have these items place well towards the back of the counter where the patrons arms and hands must to reach out full length to get the coffee and to pay into the receptacle. There could also be a camera pointed at the counter for any serious arguments about the transactions. Here is another new possibility, have a place where the money is placed inside of a transparent one way ratcheting bin before the coffee spigot becomes visible. The barista then only has to verify that there is money in the visible dump bin before he slides the lever exposing the spigot. It is rather like the automatic coffee vending machines except the opening is controlled by the barista. The opening bar could run the whole length where the barrista is usually stationed and his verification of money and opening the door need only take a single second.

This setup should be given a trial run to see if everyone would benefit and like the setup.