otoh

Volume can refer to the amount of space occupied by a three-dimensional object. Architects shape the volume of the spaces we live and work in. We find things to fill the volume. Sometimes we fill it with silence.

Volume can refer to the loudness of a sound. Pump up the volume, crank it up to ten (or eleven) and rip off the knob. But a volume knob I think must be a 20th century expression. I wonder sometimes if we have lost something when we have only bigger sounds.

Volume can refer to a series of of issues of a periodical or separate bindings of a very large work like an encyclopedia. Some of us write volumes. And I’ve heard it said that silence speaks volumes. But that is another post.

Today I’m wondering, if I increase the silence, has the volume gone up or down or both?

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You know the old saying, “The qualities in a person or thing that as a whole give pleasure to the senses reside within an idea that is believed to be true or valid without positive knowledge within the discernment of that which can be seen from a certain point by an individual to the exclusion of others.” You may know it better as, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

In the Art of Science Competition “the Princeton University community [was asked] to submit imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science.” The results are truly stunning and 55 images are posted in the gallery.

What I found just as fascinating (geek that I am) yet startlingly silly in a way are the text descriptions that accompany the images. They all make perfect sense according to my Nerd-to-English dictionary.

Like these:

This image illustrates evolving dynamical patterns formed during the spreading of a surface-active substance (surfactant) over a thin liquid film on a silicon wafer. After spin-coating of glycerol, small droplets of oleic acid were deposited. The usually slow spreading process was highly accelerated by the surface tension imbalance that triggered a cascade of hydrodynamic instabilities. Such surface-tension driven flow phenomena are believed to be important for the self-cleaning mechanism of the lung as well as pulmonary drug delivery.

An optical micrograph of spun-on polymer-blend film. When a chloroform solution of poly(9-vinylcarbazole) is spun on to a glass substrate, the resulting film has a very rough surface because the chloroform evaporates too fast.

This represents the 16th iteration of the function f(z) = (z*z + r*c)/(z*z – c*c) as a function of c, beginning with z = c (r is a complex constant), in a small region in the complex plane. The hue is determined by the argument of the final value, and the saturation and brightness are determined by its absolute value, decaying to white at the origin and to black at infinity. The white areas thus identify zeroes of the function, while black areas represent its poles.

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I’ve never had to describe someone to a police sketch artist. As far as I know, no one has ever described me to a police sketch artist either, but that’s another story. (As Ron White says, “I’m between six-one and six-six depending on which convenience store I’m leaving.”) Anyway….

Forensic artists provide a difficult and valuable service. Now there is software that can be used to create the same kinds of composites. Just for fun, which is what I’m all about right now, you can try your hand at software that creates composite “sketches” online.

If you need a little help with the proportions, take a look here.

The sketch below is a sort of self-portrait I made. In real life, I’m not quite that good looking.

For a quicker and funnier composite based on a text description, you have to give this a try.

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I need something light. In addition to the coverage of the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, news from the Gulf coast continues to be mostly grim, but maybe improving slightly. I need a break from that. On the brighter side Tropical Storm… I mean Hurricane… I mean Tropical Storm… I mean Hurricane… I mean Tropical Storm… Ophelia meandered generally northward leaving very pleasant weekend weather here in Central Florida. Michael Brown was relieved of command of the Katrina relief effort on Friday and today resigned as FEMA director. And last Friday, the idiots in Las Vegas that put a severed finger into Wendy’s chili pleaded guilty to that attempt to extort money from the company. For at least a couple days I plan posts that are cheap and superficial — just like me!

Whenever I go to a Chinese restaurant and get a fortune cookie, I play the fortune cookies in bed game. (If, by some chance this is new to you, the rules are simple. Each person has to read their fortune out loud and tack on the words “in bed” to the end. I’m always amazed at how much greater and funnier the fortunes can be that way.) Recently someone gave me Dove chocolates and I discovered that they have little aphorisms inside the wrapper. As a chocoholic, I find these much more satisfying than fortune cookies! And the “in bed” game works just as well.

Here are a few of the sayings from the Dove chocolates chosen randomly. Read them out loud with “in bed” added at the end. And smile….

Smile. People will wonder what you’ve been up to.
Do what feels right.
Whisper in the dark.
Learn something from everyone you meet.
Make your eyes twinkle.
Be mischievous. It feels good.
Count the stars.
You know what? You look good in red.
When two hearts race, both win.
Age is nothing but a number.
Remember your first everything.
Go against the grain.
There’s a time for compromise. It’s called “later”.

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On the MSNBC news show Countdown, Keith Olberman recently ripped into the poor response to providing aid to the vicitms of Hurricane Katrina. Ticked off by a slip of the tongue that he says defines the government’s response to the crisis, he lays down a thought-provoking barrage. The slip was made by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff in his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”(Umm, pretty sure that Louisiana is still a state, not a city…) I especially liked these comments:

…most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

and

For him [President Bush], it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick “I’m not satisfied with my government’s response.” Instead of hiding behind phrases like “no one could have foreseen,” had he only remembered Winston Churchill’s quote from the 1930’s. “The responsibility,” of government, Churchill told the British Parliament “for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence.”

As a side note, Ophelia is now a hurricane but there is still no clear indication of which direction she may go. She’s not going anywhere very fast.

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Tropical Storm Ophelia is hanging out nearby in the Atlantic. I just looked at the forecast from the National Weather Service.

The “Forecast at a Glance” reads like this:

• Tonight - Occasional Showers
• Thursday - Scattered Showers
• Thursday Night - Scattered Showers
• Friday - Chance of Showers
• Friday Night - Chance of Showers
• Saturday - Scattered Showers T-Storms
• Saturday Night - Scattered Showers T-Storms
• Sunday - Scattered Showers T-Storms
• Sunday Night - Scattered Showers T-Storms

Welcome to the freakin’ Sunshine State! Still, while flooding is already an issue in the coastal counties, we won’t have it nearly as bad as the Gulf coast areas hit by Katrina. In fact, I’ve been thinking that we didn’t know how good we had it last year when we got hit by an unprecedented four hurricanes in August and September. I’m sure that’s little comfort to those that did lose their homes and more. But, even though Florida isn’t exactly mountainous it is mostly ABOVE sea level. (Two of the five highest peaks in the state are Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain at Disney.) My home is at a nearly staggering 98 feet above sea level. No wonder I feel light-headed when I stand up too fast.

The outer bands of what was then a Tropical Depression started hitting us on Monday. The high temperature in the Orlando area only got up to 88 degrees (F) that day ending a streak of 56 consecutive days of 90+ temperatures. One might expect that it’s not unusual for the Central Florida area to be above 90 degrees every day through the summer, but in fact the previous record was 49 days in a row. This year, every day from 11 July to 4 September reached 90 or above.

What really gets to me though is the heat of the night. The average LOW temperature for the month of August was 76.2 degrees, another record. Some nights it didn’t dip below 80. Ugh! The humidity clings to you like hmmmm… sorry, I’m just too tired to think of a good simile for such a hot, muggy, sticky, sweaty, stifling, depressing experience.

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I started blogging more in a stumbling, bumbling manner than in any sort of planned excursion. I think a lot of us did. Then our blogs evolve over time. We give them new skins. We find our voice. Sometimes we gain an audience.

When I started my first blog just about a year ago, I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be. I knew I did not want it to be like any of the celebrity blogs I had read. I didn’t feel comfortable publishing anything as personal as what I have often written in my paper journals. My daily life is way too boring to simply recount the day’s activities. But, with more ideas of what I didn’t want than what I did, I signed up for the Blogger account planning to jump in and see what happens.

And then I needed a name for the blog. A name? I have given my journal entries titles for years, but I never named my journals. A name… hmm, this could have long-term repercussions. I hadn’t even read a lot of different blogs, but I guessed that there were some great titles that must already be taken. (I was right.) After all, I wasn’t exactly on the bleeding edge of this phenomenon.

A name, a name, a name…. Think, think, think…. Several years ago I helped to edit the monthly newsletter for a local social group that I belonged to and I wrote a monthly column that was ostensibly about creativity. That really meant I could write about pretty much whatever I wanted to. Would it be too much of a cop-out to reuse the title of that column for my blog? Oh, how terribly uncreative to reuse the title of a column on creativity! Well, maybe just the initials.

I didn’t think anyone else would care, but I have always been a little embarrassed about it. For the first several months, I refused to tell anyone why I chose OTOH for the title. (Even when someone [Dawn] suggested it might be On Top Of Harold.) And for those first several months, the words On The Other Hand never appeared anywhere on the site. When I did put them in, it was in the sidebar without calling attention to them at all.

At least I didn’t choose IMHO or ROFL. That would be really embarrassing!

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One year ago today I made my first post on Blogger. We had survived hurricane Charlie and hurricane Frances was about to screw up our holiday weekend. Ivan would pass us by, but Jeanne gave us one more smack-down. The city of Winter Park lost about a third of its tree canopy, most of that during Charlie. Coastal areas had more homes destroyed but even in Central Florida homes were destroyed or damaged so badly they were unliveable for months. Localized flooding plagued areas across the state. Power outages lasted days, weeks for some. Gasoline was in short supply. Some of the stations had gas, but no electricity to run the pumps. Food spoiled from lack of refrigeration. People lined up daily for water and ice. It was bad, but…

Today the devastation from Katrina in the panhandle of Florida and the Gulf coastal areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana — especially New Orleans — boggles the mind. The ripples reach long distances and will last months to years. Evacuated residents wait in limbo while those who didn’t evacuate wait in hell. Check out Wired News for links to information and where to donate to relief efforts.

What a difference a year makes.

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