Low-cost microscope photography

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Those of you who aren’t retired must think that I have entirely too much time on my hands. So please pardon me for another nerd post. And do keep in mind the importance of always doing and learning new things for as long as we’re living.

My interest in microscopy is closely related to my interest in photography. It’s a new way to see things and a new way to photograph things. When my Nikon Model S microscope was made back in the 1970s, doing photography through a microscope was a pretty expensive operation. These days you can do a passably good job of it with a smart phone and a $14 bracket device that holds the smart phone’s camera lens over the microscope’s eyepiece.

And though my microscope is equipped only for viewing semi-transparent objects with light that passes up from below and through the specimen, I’ve figured out that I can get remarkably good images by aiming a light source down at the object from above. I’ll do more of this kind of photography as I have time. Tiny flowers, which are plentiful this time of year, look great under a microscope. I’ll have some photos of those in the coming weeks. The three-dimensional nature of objects such as flowers presents a bit of a problem in microscopy, because a microscope’s depth of field is very tiny. That is, only a part of a specimen can be in focus at a time. But I’m guessing that the old-fashioned pressing of flowers inside a book, protected by parchment paper, would flatten the flower, making focusing much easier while also preserving much of the color and detail of the flower.

The device that attaches the smart phone to the microscope also will work with a telescope. I have a telescope. So naturally I’ll have to see what kind of photos I can get through the telescope as well. Every photographer wants pictures of an enormous moon rising behind a landscape. To get the moon to be truly, unnaturally, dramatically huge, you need a really long lens — or a telescope. I’ll see what I can do.

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What’s next around here?

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The county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, April 21


In July, this blog will be eight years old. Soon I’ll reach the 1,000th post. Any blog that has been around this long is bound to go through changes and fallow periods. But I’m not going away. I’m just trying to get clear on what comes next.

One of the things I’ve had to figure out is just how much involvement I want to have in local politics. I learned during last fall’s political campaign just how exhausting local politics can be, especially when you lose. It took all winter to recover from the burnout. It’s tempting to stay hidden in the woods. I also think that local politics doesn’t make very good blog material, except insofar as the political drama here in Stokes County echoes what’s happening in other places.

I have rolled up my sleeves and decided to stay involved in local politics. Earlier this week, at the county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, I was elected county chairman for a two-year term. I also will continue to be involved with No Fracking in Stokes.

Rural counties like this one are in trouble. We are losing population. Our young people leave us because of the lack of jobs and lack of anything to do. Increasingly, jobs don’t pay living wages. Our social services and health departments are overwhelmed. Our schools are begging for help. Even worse here in Stokes County, it is thought that some frackable gas reserves might exist in our river basin, the Dan River basin. Conservatives and progressives have very different views on what needs to be done. Conservatives think that fracking is economic development. As a progressive, I can’t think of a quicker way to ruin and impoverish our county than to let fracking in. Our other assets, such as our state park (the most popular park in the state), our river, and our unspoiled rural beauty, have far greater economic value, economic value that would be ruined by fracking. But conservatives are suspicious of tourism, because it invites people into the county who will never vote Republican.

Conservatives want to fiddle while Rome burns and measure their performance by how low the tax rate is. The burning political issue in this county at the moment (other than a county budget that is not going to balance without a tax increase) is whether emblazoning “In God We Trust” on the side of the county courthouse requires that the county similarly emblazon “In Reason We Trust.” This comes on the heels of a drawn-out and divisive fight in the town of King about flying the Christian flag at a veterans’ memorial. It led to a lawsuit, which conservatives predictably lost. Conservatives somehow convince themselves that symbolic and sentimental issues like these are the things that matter most and around which our futures turn. Meanwhile, Republicans in Raleigh are busy selling off the state to the highest bidder. A test well to look for frackable gas is going to be drilled soon in the little Stokes County town of Walnut Cove. Our own state tax dollars will be paying for the drilling.

Our work is cut out for us.

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An all-Republican board of county commissioners hears about “In Reason We Trust.”

Goodbye, Professoressa


Corriere della Sera, Milan

I was very sorry to read today in the New York Times that La Professoressa — Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini — has died at age 103.

I posted about La Professoressa back in 2009. Periodically I have checked to see if she was still living. I believe she was going strong until the very end. In several interviews after she turned 100, she said that her mind was sharper than it was when she was in her 20s. She went to work in her laboratory every day. In some interviews, she credited the sharpness of her mind to the substance she shared a Nobel Prize for discovering — nerve growth factor. In Italy, I believe this substance is available in eyedrop form and is sold as a treatment for certain eye ailments. I believe it has not been approved for sale in the United States. A little research reveals that there are supplements available that may naturally stimulate the production of nerve growth factor in the body. One is an Asian mushroom called monkey’s head mushroom. The other is a derivative of an Asian moss called huperzine A. Here is the Wikipidia article on huperzine A.

By all accounts, huperzine A is safe. Whether it’s effective or just another way to spend money on useless supplements is not really known. However, I could not resist trying the stuff, and I ordered some of it a couple of weeks ago. I’ll post something about my experience with huperzine A after I’ve used it a bit longer. It’s interesting that many of the Amazon reviews say that it stimulates dreaming. As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on that, but it seems possible.

Meanwhile, farewell Professoressa. You were an inspiration.

Dying of consumption


Smike on his deathbed, dying of consumption — Nicholas Nickleby

It’s a dark pun, but the people of the 19th century, and we in our own time, are stalked by the same wasting disease that leads inevitably to ruination if not death — consumption.

Today is “black Friday.” The media (feeding the frenzy while pretending to cover it), is already full of horror stories. At a Walmart in Los Angeles, a woman shot pepper spray at 20 people so that she could grab the consumer goods she wanted first. At a mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, there was gunfire. Last year, as I recall, people were trampled in stampedes when Walmart opened its doors.

These people were not looking to feed their families. They were looking for stuff, stuff that will be in landfills in a few months.

And here is yet another story from the right-wing blogosphere on how ill-prepared Boomers are for retirement. Fifty-six percent of retirees have debt. Forty percent of Boomers plan to work “until they drop.”

Metaphorically, at least, they are dying of consumption. How can they know so little about personal finance? I was stupid with money too when I was young, but I came to my senses around age 40 when I realized that I actually would be old someday (young people think that growing old is impossible). And I realized that I did not want to work for the rest of my life.

Strangely enough, we could learn much about personal finance from our archenemy — corporations. I’m talking about honest corporations, of course, not those that are looted in leveraged buyouts or executive scams.

I was lucky to have worked for a good corporation for the last 15 years of my working life — the Hearst Corporation. Hearst is a private corporation, so it doesn’t have to worry about a stock price and kiss the behinds of Wall Street. It was cash rich and, at least I was told, never borrowed money. It always spent cash. It didn’t lease — it bought outright if it needed something. And I was told that it didn’t even buy insurance, because the corporation had enough cash to be self-insured.

For years, I had to create budgets for my department and get them approved. I was in San Francisco, but the main office in New York approved the budgets. I never ever, in my career, went over my budget, though other managers sometimes did. It was a point of pride for me — to be able to anticipate my needs for the next year, to budget for those needs, to justify the costs, and then to stick to it.

There is a very important principle in how corporations handle money that every household would do well to keep in mind. That’s the concept of expenses versus capital improvements. Corporations do it that way because of tax laws that don’t apply to households, but the principle is still valid.

Expenses are roughly equivalent to consumption. Expenses, for a household, are things like electricity, groceries, gasoline, clothing, gadgets, etc. You can’t live without incurring expenses, but if expenses are not controlled they will eat your income and prevent you from making capital improvements and prevent you from accumulating assets. Expenses are the money we pee away. Expenses drain our income and do nothing to improve our future.

Capital improvements have to do with things that last a long time and that improve your quality of life. One’s house is the main capital item. A car is another. Even a washing machine is a capital item. A Jaguar, though, is not transportation. That’s a luxury. When you spend capital, you determine what meets your needs and buy that much, no more. Where cars are concerned, for example, the right solution for me was a Jeep, which was a good San Francisco vehicle because it’s short and has real bumpers, and also a good country car, because I now live half a mile down an unpaved road, in the boonies. Similarly, a McMansion is not a dwelling, it’s a wasteful luxury. I have found that 1,250 square feet is more house than I need most of the time. Money well-spent on capital needs also can reduce your future expenses and thus help pay for itself — gas-frugal cars, for example; or energy-efficient houses; or an efficient new heat pump to replace an old, energy-hogging heat pump. In a corporate budget, a capital item must be “justified.” It has to make sense when you do the hard-nosed, cold-blooded number crunching. It has to get past the “bean counters,” as we called them.

If you look at how chronically poor people spend their money, you’ll usually find that they are pissing away their income on consumption and wasteful “expenses,” leaving no surplus for capital improvement and asset accumulation. And, when they incur debt to acquire a capital item, they tend to buy far more than they need because they bought what they wanted rather than what they needed and could justify.

It used to be, in this country, that the centerpiece of household finance was to buy a house with a 30-year mortgage, pay it off, and then retire in that house, mortgage free. The abandonment of that idea is one of the things that is killing the middle class. People started drawing on the equity in their homes to increase consumption. Even when they spent that equity on their homes, it was on stuff that cannot be cost-justified, like granite countertops. Thus they end up with no assets, debt that financed consumption, and out-of-control expenses for processed food, eating out, gadgets, gas-guzzler gasoline, cable television, and stupid luxury items that they saw on TV.

I often tell any young person who will listen the two most important things about personal finance that I ever learned: You must spend less than you make, substantially less when possible. And you must accumulate, else you will have to work forever.

And if I was made dictator for a few seconds, long enough to be granted one wish for my pathetic fellow Americans, it would be this: I’d cut off their cable. That would save them $150 a month while cutting off their access to propaganda and advertising. It also would kill a few corporations that deserve to die — Fox, for example.

But let’s learn from our enemy — corporations, the very people who sponsor the propaganda and the advertising. Again, I’m not talking about scam corporations like Enron. I’m talking about real businesses that actually do productive things and make money at it. They are usually very prudent and hard-nosed in how they spend their money. And that’s one small reason why they are rich and we are not.

Population growth? Run for your life…

Sometimes I have survivor’s guilt. I got in my Jeep, I drove and drove and drove, and I escaped the corporate life. Not only that, but many people struggling to get closer to the troughs in the corporate feedlots tried to eat my lunch back then, but I beat them back. It was self-defense, but my hands are stained.

I even cleverly managed to keep Wall Street from tricking me out of the secret stash I’d hoarded while in the feedlots. With that stash I built my little refuge in the woods. I had gotten too old to fight anymore. I am as far as I can afford to be from everything that is corporate, where the top dogs rake it in and leave the rest of us to fight over the scraps.

The U.S. Census bureau released numbers yesterday for population growth in North Carolina for the 10 years between the 2000 census and the 2010 census. The population of the Raleigh area grew by a horrifying 43.5 percent. Stokes County’s population grew by 6 percent.

Why do I use the word horrifying? Everything looks different when you’re no longer a poor hunk of pork getting the life rendered out of you in today’s pressure-cooker economy. Once upon a time when I was of working age, I too had to go somewhere where the money was, and I went to San Francisco. But that was then, and this is now. When you finally get to step off the corporate treadmill, you want to be as far from the corporate feedlots and kitchens as you can possibly get.

I have not been to Raleigh in decades, but I have been to Charlotte. What 43.5 percent growth has done to Raleigh can only be worse than what 32.2 percent growth has done to Charlotte. Charlotte is hideously ugly. It has no focus, no center, no charm, no style. It has sprawl, traffic jams, and people who, having gone where the growth is, are always in a hurry. Charlotte seems unaware of what has happened to it. The story in today’s Charlotte Observer is self-congratulatory and cheers this population growth, taking for granted that it’s a good thing. But to my eyes, what growth has done to America’s regional inland cities is as horrifying, ugly, and unhealthy as what steam-driven industrialization did to 19th-century England.

As I see it, the dog-eat-dog dynamic of today’s working environment is only going to get worse. There’s a story going around the blogosphere. It’s about David Koch, one of the billionaire oilmen who have financed the tea parties and the “think tanks” that produce the right-wing propaganda that Fox News disseminates. The story has many variations, but it goes like this:

David Koch and a tea partier are sitting at a table. On the table is a plate with a dozen cookies. Koch grabs 11 cookies, then looks at the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”

Recent polls indicate that working Americans support Wisconsin’s unions more than they support Wisconsin’s union-busting governor, who takes money — and phone calls — from David Koch.

Maybe Americans are finally starting to figure out who it is who is eating their lunch (and their cookies). And does anyone (other than those who live in the fog of Fox News lies) think that corporate America cares any more about workers in general than it cares about unionized workers like teachers and firemen? The effectiveness of the propaganda on Fox News is really quite terrifying. It can cause Red State Americans of very modest means, and who would be hard up but for Social Security and Medicare, to vilify government and not only vote for, but also cheer for, the interests of the rich.

For those of you who are still working, I hope you’ve found one of those rare safe spots in this globalized Brave New World that Wall Street is creating.

And I hope that someday you too will be able to find a place where the growth is not.

Ruralpolitans?

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Wall Street Journal

I have often wondered why we weren’t seeing more signs of a dropout movement, or a back-to-the-land movement, during this economic downturn. Maybe it’s happening. The Wall Street Journal had a piece this week about migration to rural areas, calling these back-to-the-landers “ruralpolitans.” It’s a rational thing to do. And yes, having the Internet makes it easier and diminishes the feeling of isolation.

Living to be 100

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The Island of the Ancients

The Huffington Post has an article today on the growing number of people living to be 100 years old. One of the reasons cited for this is “improved diet.”

I think it would have been more accurate to say “the possibility of improved diet.” The diet of the average American has decidedly not improved. The July 20 issue of the New Yorker trumps the Time magazine piece on why Southerners are so fat with a piece on why Americans are so fat. The position of the New Yorker piece seems to be that the obesity epidemic of the past few decades has primarily been caused by corporate influences — food engineering, corporate agriculture, corporate research on food’s addictive qualities, pushing larger portions, marketing, etc.

We can take advantage of brilliant new research on diet and health, we can take advantage of the availability of healthier foods, and we can cook the right stuff for ourselves at home. Or we can eat what television commercials tell us to eat and make certain corporations richer. That’s what it really boils down to.

Merrill Lynch calls it a Depression

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Above: Household debt-to-income ratio [Merrill Lynch]

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Above: Personal savings rate [Merrill Lynch]

I am strongly of the opinion that economic literacy is a personal survival skill, like knowing how to cook, or fix a leaky pipe. This recent article from Merrill Lynch does an excellent job of pulling together and charting some of the factors and trends that point to very hard times ahead. The report says that this is probably a Depression, not a mere recession, and it attempts to define the difference.

One of the most unpredictable areas, it seems to me, is the tension between deflation and inflation. Prices for many things are dropping as global demand drops and supply exceeds demand. But already the American Federal Reserve is buying treasury bonds, which means that we are printing dollars. Printing dollars can only lead to inflation. And yet, this is a global phenomenon, and it’s possible that the dollar will remain relatively strong compared with other currencies. Personally I fear that we’ll be whipsawed as deflation quickly reverses into inflation at some point. Some economists argue that there can be no severe inflation without a wage-price spiral, and wages aren’t going anywhere. No one knows. But we have to keep trying to look ahead.

New York Times on Boomers' second act

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A local example of a humble house in the provinces

The New York Times has a story today on the very strategy I used for early retirement — taking the proceeds of years in the city to buy or build debt-free in an area where the cost of living is low. Personally I cannot imagine going into retirement with mortgage debt. Nor was I interested in so-called “dream towns” for retirement such as Asheville, even if I could afford it.

Moved to Stokes!

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Where I live now…

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Where I used to live. You decide if it’s a step up or a step down…

The trailer towed nicely yesterday, but it was a pain in the neck maneuvering it over the soft ground and backing it into its space between the trees. Jake, the RV maintenance man, did the towing for me and most of the work of leveling the trailer.

All the hookups are working — water, electric, and septic. More later about how I’m connecting to the Internet.

It sure is quiet here.