Science or Sentiment, Generalized

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Career “trophies”, coffee mugs, one of which was created by dye printing technology (depicting our development team), the other a memento commemorating the issue of an arcane patent.

There is a more general problem related to the “what to do with old lab notebooks” that some of us face.  It is what to do with our shoeboxes of photos (virtual digital shoeboxes and real ones).  And written correspondence.  Love letters.  Birthday cards and holiday cards that caught our attention enough that we saved them.  The trophies, actual physical trophies, or the certificates of commendation for a job well done.  Birth and death announcements.  Souvenirs of our travels, the mementos of the high points of our lives. 

All of them carry great meaning to us, invoking a romantic haze of fond memories from those times and places, for those people and events.  Yet those memories are internal to us; they are not shared, even with the persons we may have shared the moment with—at least not exactly. Each of them has his or her own version of those scenes.  And they are not shared in the same way with our children, and certainly not their children.  Our lives are an abstraction to them.  They weren’t even around when the main story was unfolding.

I have come to realize this in the last few years as I have processed the items left behind by my parents after their deaths.  I have a high regard for my father’s technical acumen and his many projects.  Some of them were to gather and archive family history, others documented his personal interests.  He was always an early adopter of technology and embraced digital photography well before I did.  He acquired a large collection of both film and digital pictures, organized in shoeboxes and digital folders.  He worked to digitally scan historic family photos that dated back to the 19th century. 

There is a treasure trove of history here, some even recent enough to overlap with my own, yet I do not find myself compelled to explore it.  And therein lies the problem.  If I am not inspired to carry forward the artifacts of prior generations, why would I expect subsequent generations to propagate mine?

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Science or Sentiment

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The title page of my grandfather’s PhD thesis, a thick volume of scientific discovery, each page typewritten in carbon-paper triplicate by my grandmother during their time at Harvard. Interestingly, it was submitted on his (54th) birthday.

“Long before the term ecology became a part of the vocabulary of the scientist, primitive man, looking out over the expanse of blue-green water which characterized his favorite fishing haunt, was probably aware of the fact that notable alterations in the color and clarity of this body of water would occur as the seasons changed.”

The introductory sentence of Theodore Olson’s PhD thesis on algae blooms.

I was witness to my grandparents’ transition to an assisted living apartment from the home they had kept for more than half a century.  Though modest, it was the center of a busy family’s activities, and had accumulated the corresponding mementos through the decades.  It had also collected the technical artifacts of my grandfather’s scientific career, specimens of insects and fish and algae from his ecological and entomologist specialties.  He kept copies of his and his peers’ published works, along with those of his doctoral students, who carried on these disciplines, with the scientific rigor and methods that he taught them over their years in his tutelage.

I was there on the day when he had to empty the ‘wall of books‘ in his home library, which included the dissertations of his students.  There was no space for everything at the new apartment.   A few important reference volumes could be retained, but the others?  What to do with them?  Here were the compiled and distilled understandings of pioneers in biology, acquired through years of painstaking research, building upon the pyramid of human knowledge.  These breakthroughs of their time have now been incorporated into our general understanding of modern biology. 

What should happen to the first-ever photomicrographs of blue-green algae blooming to produce cyanobacterial toxins?  What should become of the tabulated counts of seasonal species of mosquitos that were the vectors of mosquito-borne diseases?  What should be the fate of that first chart correlating taconite processing and asbestos-like fibers in Lake Superior?  All of these new discoveries had been first reported in his research and in the dissertations of his PhD students. 

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Image Metadata and Ancestor Discovery

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A scanned portrait of an unidentified woman in the family photo collection.

My father, an early adopter of nearly everything, took on a project to digitize a collection of historical family photos that had accumulated over many generations and that were now in his possession.  It was the early years of digital photography when scanning technology was barely up to the task, and computer image file formats were crude by today’s standards.

Nevertheless, he forged ahead and built a repository of over 700 scanned photographs dating back to the 1800s.  He recognized a weakness in the collection—there was no context, no annotations, no identifications of the people portrayed.  Old photographs lose their value when this information, originally held in the memories of those who were around at the time, is not recorded. 

My father knew this and wanted to somehow attach the information about the photo, in the scan of the photo.  I know this, because he asked me (an imaging scientist) about how to do it.  Unfortunately, at the time, there was no standardized way to embed such “metadata” within existing image file formats.  He was a man ahead of his time.

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When Given Cold Weather…

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A flash-frozen soap bubble.

When given lemons, make lemonade. 

When given subzero temperatures, freeze soap bubbles. 

This is one of those things that I have wanted to do for some years.  Living in a place where the temperatures drop to levels well below those in your freezer that solidify water and can preserve slabs of reindeer meat, each year I enjoy a few days of dangerously cold weather.   One can throw a pot of hot water up in the air and it turns into a spectacular cloud of steam and snow; no liquid lands on the ground!  It is also possible to blow soap bubbles that freeze into gossamer ice globes.  They are delicate and beautiful, and I have long wanted to photograph them.

Each year when the outdoor temperatures drop sufficiently, I have tried to do this.  Invariably, there is too much wind—any wind is too much—and the bubbles wander away.  The ones I can catch, usually burst before I can take their picture.

This year however, I had a new strategy.  We recently installed windows on our outdoor screen porch.  The temperature remains cold, but the wind is completely blocked.  I can now make soap bubbles and they won’t get away!

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The Wall of Books

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This is adapted from a tribute that my father made at the memorial of his father, Theodore Olson, after whom we are both named, who died in 2002 at the age of 97.  I post it here for the online access of posterity, and to provide a portrayal of the scientific mindset of a family patriarch that influenced not only his students, but his entire family and several generations beyond.  Here is my father’s rendition of our family history.

The start of this story goes back almost 150 years. In about 1860 in Norway, Hans Opjörden left home and went to Oslo. Hans had the misfortune to be the second son in his family, and that meant that his older brother would inherit the family farm. Hans left home and headed off to Oslo, where he went to work in a shipyard building boats. After a while he decided he really wanted to sail on the boats instead of just building them. At this time Norway was a province of Sweden.  Shrewdly, Hans changed his name from Opjörden to Olson (with a Swedish spelling) and got Swedish sailing papers.

He went on several voyages and along the way befriended a shipmate named Peter Magnus Peterson.  We can imagine a conversation between them based on what subsequently happened.  Hans confided that he’d really wanted to be a farmer but had no prospects of getting land—and that being a sailor was not his “dream job”, but was good paying employment. 

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A New Home for Nightscapes

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“Climber Trails”, from my gallery of film startrail classics.

The internet has evolved tremendously since its early days when I first tried to use web pages to show the results of my nighttime photography.  Back then, our (dial-up) Internet Service Provider (ATT) offered a home page and a URL subspace to their customers.   I took advantage of it and crafted some pages to hold my pictures and stories.  Later, I acquired my own domain, nightscapes.net, found a host, loaded my stuff onto it and even got some professional help to re-organize when it became unwieldy. 

I learned that maintaining a website can be a lot of work; the technology evolves, links and scripts break, web page conventions, html standards and visitor expectations change.  I’m not a programmer (despite a lifetime of doing it), and my interests are in the art and science of images, not the latest network and browser technologies for supporting the latest desktop/laptop/tablet/phone displays.

So I was excited to discover a website service oriented toward photographers, a platform with a small army of support people who maintain it, with features that display photographs at their best, regardless of display or browser, keeping up with the latest updates to internet programming standards.  They offer additional services for professional photographers (“buy print”, etc), and at an earlier time I might have subscribed to them.

But I am happy now to keep the shopping cart icons suppressed and not distract from the images themselves.

I have transferred my collection of nightscapes accumulated over the last two decades, over to smugmug, where you can find it at thorolson.smugmug.com.  I know people don’t power-browse through large collections of pictures, so I consider this to be really more of an archive, to continue my project of making a digital coffee table book of my favorites.

But I will also use the site to display my more recent work, as I complete it.  It will be a relief to have a way to do so without the overhead of manually creating and integrating new web pages for them. 

I intend to make posts to this, my personal website, when I add new photographs.  I invite you to subscribe or “follow” me, which will send you an email when new posts are made.  If you are intrigued by the types of pictures I like to take, well, I take enjoyment in sharing them and would love to have you as a follower.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

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Enjoying the beauty of the BWCA in Superior National Forest. See https://www.sylvansport.com/go-field-notes-boundary-waters-mn/

Andy Warhol, the celebrated pop artist of the 1960s, is credited with the quote “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Well, I guess we have reached the future, because here is our fifteen minutes.

We are the proud owners of a trailer that converts into a tent-like camper. It’s made by a US company, Sylvan Sport. We first learned about it from my cousin Bonnie Norman, an early adopter of nearly everything, and when I finally relinquished my VW Eurovan Westfalia pop-up (to a deserving family eager to enjoy and care for it), this was the obvious replacement. We have enjoyed our “Go Trailer” for several years now and somehow (from Bonnie?), Sylvan Sport learned of our enthusiasm and wanted to feature us on their website.

Our travel plans this last year were modified, along with everyone else’s in this time of covid rules. We didn’t make the cross-country trips we expected, but substituted numerous short trips to our wonderful Minnesota State Parks. I also redeemed a coupon from the Gerard sisters, to guide me in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a destination I was embarrassed to admit as a lifelong Minnesotan, I had not yet visited.

It was a beautiful fall week and I took my usual collection of cameras. Sylvan Sport sent a photographer to capture it as well, and a writer later called to interview us. The result is a promotional piece on their website that depicts the experience nicely, despite being truly impossible to portray the full beauty of Boundary Waters.

Nightscape Odyssey Goes to Press!

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By the miracles of modern technology (a technology I contributed to!), it is possible to self-publish a book without a minimum printing run of thousands or more.  I recently took advantage of one of these services to make a limited edition of my collection of stories and essays, Nightscape Odyssey, posted previously on this site. 

It was tricky to get the layout just right; it took two proofs, but I’m happy with the result and the experience was satisfying, especially taking delivery of the final copies.  Even more satisfying was giving them away as gifts. 

If you didn’t get one, it was because you probably aren’t one of my nephews or nieces, whom I felt should have some artifact of their odd uncle’s interests, and stories about what road trips were like way back when.   Don’t worry though, if you really want a copy of this book, the same company that published them for me can make one for you!  You’ll have to pay the going rate however, and you may find it more than you want to shell out for just another coffee table book. (https://www.blurb.com/b/10435240-nightscape-odyssey)

But if you don’t insist on an actual physical hard-cover book, Nightscape Odyssey can be had for free!  A pdf version is available for download (20MB).  I hope you enjoy it!

A day in the life of a covid quarantiner

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The path along Minnehaha Creek, a popular route for our daily walks.

Every day begins with coffee, of course.

Which fortifies me as I peruse the headlines and digest my various online sets of news sources.

Eventually, I reach my fill of virus and political news, but it can take several hours.  By this time, it is mid-morning and I think about which collection of projects to work on that day.  I have several categories:  some of them are administrative, the overhead of life, like gathering info for filing taxes, or processing the mail that has accumulated, aging any viral contamination on its outer surfaces.  Or making another pass at compiling the email addresses for my high school class, which drafted me onto its reunion committee.

Another category is more physically constructive.  It includes working in my garage shop, on a woodworking project or attending to the never-ending items on the home repair list.  If it is sunny, I will opt for the session in the workshop, whose clerestory windows provide a strong boost to the positive mood that comes from working with tools and material in my hands.

Lunchtime brings me back to the house to enjoy something delicious that Poldi has cooked up.  These days in quarantine have led her to expand on her already extensive skills in the kitchen.  I am the beneficiary.  She updates me on whatever news she has gleaned from her sources.

The afternoon brings another set of options.  We listen to the press conference of the state health department, absorbing the meaning of today’s covid infection and death counts.  We once again are appreciative that as retirees we can easily isolate, but fear for our neighbors, friends and family, who must somehow continue to carry on with their business and livelihoods but must curtail it to conform to the allowed social distance.

While the sun is still amplifying the ambient temperature, Poldi and I strike out for a neighborhood walk.  I have analyzed the relative risks of contracting the virus while outdoors and crossing paths with passersby, and our masks are at standby on our neck.  If we engage someone for a conversation, or enter a storefront, the masks are immediately deployed.  The outing in our neighborhood is therapeutic.  Although I am an introvert, Poldi needs more connection.  A walk around the block is not enough, but it helps.

The evening brings us back to home life.  Poldi pursues her passion for cooking.  I work on my various interests including my archives of photographs, wondering how best to curate them for subsequent generations and researchers.  Yes, I know, it is a bit of hubris, but it helps me follow Carl Sagan’s advice when asked about the purpose of life:  “To do stuff!” 

Our evenings wind down in front of the television, finding programs and episodes that distract us and amuse us.  We fall into bed, sometimes exhausted by the day’s events, and sometimes relieved by our shared life throughout the pandemic. 

We are the lucky ones.  We are confined to our home with someone we love. We wish you the same.

Checking the Mail

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John checks for mail at Rural Route 2, Box 619, later to become 292 Heather Lane.

In 1965 we moved into a newly-built house on the outskirts of the town of Long Lake Minnesota.  Today considered an “exurb” of Minneapolis, at that time it was a rural community at the very edge of urban influence.  I turned twelve on the day we moved in and was starting to explore the possibilities presented to a teenager in those years. 

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