Smells Like Home

California chaparral has a very distinctive smell. It's part warm dirt and part plant life and part air that's close enough to the sea to turn just barely humid. It's a smell that I grew up with, and I associate it with sunscreen and open air and early mornings shooting arrows at paper plate targets. I was biking home the other night, three thousand miles away in a city that hasn't had space to stretch its legs in three hundred years, and I smelled it. It smelled like this:

And this:

And this:

And this: 

It smelled like open space, and oh god, if you think I don't miss this sometimes, you are sorely mistaken. It's funny what a smell will do to you like that. One breath, and I wanted, suddenly and intensely, to be back in California, somewhere where I could see all the way to the horizon and walk more than a hundred feet without seeing something made out of concrete. Visual memories are like old photo albums - kind of faded and familiar, and you can pull them out whenever you want to. Olfactory memories jump out of freaking nowhere and clock you over the head with vivid images and emotions.

It turns out there's a reason for that. The physiology of the olfactory system is such that the primary olfactory cortex, of the brain-bits that process sensation, is physically closest to the hippocampus and the amygdala, which deal with memory and emotion, respectively. Not only that, the olfactory nerve is only a few synapses away from both those structures. Naming odors seems to also have an effect on both the ability to access an olfactory memory as well as our opinion of the odor. For example, someone who smells lavender and can't identify it will probably dislike it, whereas someone who can name the odor will find it pleasant. 

That which we call...lavender.

Science doesn't seem to have a clear reason for why we have olfactory memories. In fact, it's sort of  mysterious - your average olfactory neuron dies after only 60 days. The human sense of smell is sort of the low man on the totem pole - relatively poorly understood in comparison to sight and hearing. Taste and smell are physically and physiologically different than sight and sound. Receptors in your eyes and ears respond to different frequencies of a (light or sound) wave, and your brain translates the frequency into something you perceive as a red, chirping bird. To taste or smell something, your own receptor molecules have to come into physical contact with what you're perceiving. Smell goes one step further: it is the only sense in which receptor neurons interact directly with the environment.

I won't pretend to know the neurological details of why olfactory memories are so strong or so vivid, but everything I've read points to the fact that the olfactory system is a visceral, immediate, and far-reaching one.  Most of our olfactory memories are made in childhood, which may explain why these memories seem so sudden - on smelling boxed birthday cake mix, we don't remember the office party two weeks ago, we remember our sixth birthday party instead. 

Who knows? Maybe after a couple more years in this city, I'll move away and find myself with a new set of olfactory memories to tie me here. I'm not too sure, though. This is an old place, covered in concrete and bricks. I don't know if I want to remember what it smells like. 

Precision, Clarity, Honesty

This may not be the time or the place for it, but recent events have gotten me thinking about some more abstract issues than I normally deal with here. Said events have kept me a bit too busy for a solid blog post, so in the interest of not letting this page go dark for too long, I'm posting this to tread water until I can write intelligently about something more interesting.

Let me be blunt: society, the way we talk to each other, American social culture, something - is innately deceptive. Our communication, mostly verbal, but written as well, comes with an asterisk: *this is probably not precisely what I want to say or what I really mean. This footnote is pervasive and invisible. There are rules about what you may and may not say to someone, depending mostly on your relation to that person. Unwritten rules - untaught, too. Learning occurs by osmosis or observation or desperation. What do you get at the end of that training? Circumlocution in the name of politeness. Equivocation as self-preservation. To be professional is to hide your meaning behind layers of words, not one of which means exactly what you want to say.

I am part of the Net Generation; the free flow of information is my air and water. To feel no pressure to equivocate is a relief. To speak freely without second guessing the words I choose is like taking a long drink when I didn't know I was thirsty. My theory of communication, ingenuous and naive, is this: we both need the same facts if we are going to have a productive interaction. It's the linguistic version of leveling the playing field. Mushy language allows for misinterpretation (possibly intentional!) and doubt. Be direct and clear with me. I will be direct and clear with you, and even if we find that we disagree, at least we are not floundering around not knowing where we stand.

I could play devil's advocate and speak in favor of ambiguity. The invisible laws of professional interaction provide a framework for anyone to speak to anybody else. Navigating the professional world within these boundaries is predictable and safe. Politeness greases squeaky wheels and smooths abrasive personalities. The language of professionalism is, however unfortunately, quite necessary. I'm well versed in it, so help me. I could choose to stand in favor of it, but I would rather say this: it is (and here is where I take issue) about presenting an image - language as a marker of professionalism. It feels dishonest. I will also say that there is no need to sacrifice politeness for honesty. There is a difference between brusque and honest, curt and clear.

Nothing is going to change - of course not. I'll even admit to some relief that there'll always be that safety net of indirect speech to fall back on. I'm just tired of padding my meaning and talking around issues. Here is what I want: precision, clarity, honesty. Those are my markers of professionalism. Are they yours?

Thumbs: Now Greener Than Ever

When I started this blog, I had the idea that I would never post about the same subject twice in a row. For the last three days, I've tried and tried to come up with a decent topic that didn't have to do with plants. Hindi? Too much work right now. SketchUp? Not really feeling too architecturally creative. Something programming related? Tends to attract snark from my boyfriend, and he makes up a significant percentage of my audience. And, trumping that: I cannot get gardening out of my mind. I want to plant seeds and go absolutely mad with anticipation until they sprout. I want to set up large window boxes to be filled with herbs. I want to plant something that I can make dinner with in three months' time. Then I thought, hell, it's my blog. If I want to go garden-crazy for a week or two, well...I can do that!

I just came back from the gardening center. Oh dear. Cue gratuitous growing-things shots.

Plants absolutely everywhere. It's orchid week, did you know?

I should probably not be allowed in a nursery on a springlike day with a respectable amount of disposable income at hand.

These are not blurry in person, I promise.

A quick aside on these hanging plants: they are called Nepenthes, or pitcher plants, from the family Nepenthaceae (a word on the Latin naming system: Latin is dead. Say it loud, say it proud, and no one will ever know the difference.). They're native to Malaysia, India, and Australia. The "pitcher" portion of the plant is filled with a fluid to trap and/or digest insects that may find their way inside. Interestingly, the fluid is effective even when it's diluted with rainwater, as inevitably happens with this morphology. The name "nepenthe" in Greek means "without grief" and in Greek mythology "is a drug that quells all sorrows with forgetfulness." (source: here)

Possibly my favorite type of plant.

I thought these were daffodils, but now I'm thinking probably narcissus. Whatever they are, I adore them. I should do them more justice next time and take a picture that's actually in focus. If I thought I could get one of these to survive indoors on my desk at work, I would probably have six of them already. Maybe seven.

A little dark, but you get the idea. Plant in a bowl!

This one I like for the interior design aspect of it. I also like the composition of the shot. I could even pretend it took me a few minutes of careful setup, rather than the shoot-from-the-hip phone camera technique that I actually used.

But enough about the nursery, although I could have spent another hour in there browsing. I got these:

From left to right, that is: oregano, basil, marigold, green onion, romaine lettuce,  lettuce salad blend, basil, eggplant, and cherry tomatoes.

I'll leave the seed descriptions there for now, but know that I have much, much more to say on the subject (and of those tomatoes, in particular).

Artsy shot of same.

I also have two tiny flowerpots that I found at Target at Christmastime. They were $1 each in the stocking stuffer section, so I got myself two. As stocking stuffers, naturally.

Not shown: a large bag of potting mix and some fertilizer. They weren't very photogenic.

I have tentative plans in place to start planting things tomorrow. I need to do some research on the heavy-hitters (eggplant, tomato) that I haven't grown before and will eventually be planting outdoors. Those seed packets are all marked up with details like "Start indoors 5-7 weeks before last frost date" (May 3rd here, for interested parties). I need to figure out if I can start them even earlier and just transplant them after that date or if that'll stress the plants for some reason (too little light as seedlings? getting transplanted too late in the growing process?). I am giving no such consideration to the basil, however. I had so much basil last year that I was considering giving away half of my plants.

Tomorrow it'll be spring!

Gardening on a Whim

One of my always-on-the-back-burner project ideas that never really comes to pass is to grow a proper garden. I have dreams of fresh eggplant, fresh tomatoes, and fresh herbs all waiting to be picked, right in my front yard. I guess that in my dream of the idyllic garden, I can waltz through my patch of home-grown vegetables, fruits, and herbs, clipping at will, and eating fresher-than-thou produce all summer long.

Thanks, Wikimedia Commons user Srl!

Obviously, some education is in order.

For starters, I have no yard to speak of (well, I do, but I also have a landlord), so it'll have to be container gardening, probably indoors, although I could potentially co-opt the landing just outside my window, which is really the landing for the third-floor neighbors' stairs. Placement will definitely be an issue. Two points for an indoor garden, though: I have very large, south-facing windows, so sun will not be terribly difficult to come by, and two: I live in hardiness zone 6-ish, so plantng indoors will alleviate some of the "oh god, when's the last frost??" stress.

Secondly, I have never grown a garden. I have had some success with herbs - that is, last year I grew far too many basil plants, a lonely oregano plant, and I have never once gotten a rosemary plant past its third week. My basil made it through the winter indoors (hallelujah!), but I let it flower (bad!) in order to start over this year  (yay!). I would post pictures of the plants I have, but I'm far too lazy to get out of bed. I used Urban Garden Solutions' garden planner-majiggy to pick some plants I think I'd be happy to see in September/October: 

From the top left, in rows: basil, tomatoes, eggplant, flower x (type to be determined), lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, flower y, oregano, edamame, spinach, flower z. 

Obviously I can't go dig up the front lawn and put plants there in that configuration, but I'm planning on buying 12 approximately-1-sq-ft pots and arranging them on the porch (landlord permitting), on the neighbors' landing (neighbors permitting) or inside (boyfriend permitting). I'm also planning on doing plenty of research, because I've grown exactly two of these plants before. My first call will be to my lovely and knowledgeable grandma, green thumb extraordinaire, who has been gardening probably twice as long as I've been alive. 


I complained last night that it took me hours to make eggplant parmesan and roasted asparagus. Now here I am planning dinner for September. Bring it on, garden!

Photoshop Drabble

This poster is the result of the confluence of "hey, we need a sign here" and "hmmm, I wonder if Photoshop could....". I might be persuaded to do a tutorial on this technique if a couple people were interested, but at the moment, I'm just gonna throw it out there.

Actually, that really is what it feels like - throwing something I made out there to be caught by the wind until god knows who finds it and uses it as they please. The internet isn't known for respecting intellectual property, but I slapped a watermark on there just in case. I'm even throwing in a creative commons license for good measure:


Wordy recycling by Emily Wachtel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Will it help? Yeah right. But I guess it's a little like bringing water wings on a plane in the event of  a "water landing" - they might help in a crisis, but that's really out of your control. Plus, you brought water wings on a plane, so you're probably feeling kind of silly.

Anyway. Wordy Recycling. The words say "recycle" in as many different languages as I could grab off of Google translate.

Quick and Dirty Photoshop Tutorial - Modifying Old Black-and-White Photos

Let me say before I even start that I mean to step on no one's toes. The author of this textbook, the lovely and accomplished Keiko Fukuda, has  done more for women's judo than anyone else in the history of the sport. She recently celebrated her 98th birthday last year and is still active in promoting and teaching judo. She's the highest ranked female judoka in the world - ever. They're making a movie about her. So when I say that I mean absolutely no disrespect with this photoshop tutorial, know that I mean more than that. This woman is amazing, and I would not EVER (literally or figuratively) step on her toes.

I've been working on ju-no-kata, literally the "forms of gentleness", for maybe 2 years now. It's not terribly polished, but someone was around with a camera and took this picture:

I think this is the third form in the first set, if inquiring minds want to know.

That's me there in the blue. My partner there sent me the file and said something about it being a good picture but an awful background. No problem! I said. I'll Photoshop us out and put us in the Kodokan. She replied that if I put us in the Kodokan, she'd blow it up to poster size. Well now. Challenge accepted.

I may have failed straightaway by not actually putting us in the Kodokan. (Turns out there aren't too many great matside pictures there that I could use as a new background.) Instead, I decided to 'shop us onto the front cover of Fukuda Sensei's textbook:

I promise to try not to be presumptuous.

So here's a quick and dirty tutorial on the quick and dirty photochop that I did this afternoon. A word of warning: these are not the best techniques you will ever see in photo retouching. They are quick, though, and luckily for me, these were both pretty forgiving photographs. Onwards.

1. If you're following along at home, I'll assume that you have one modern, in-color photograph that you would like to insert into an old-timey, black and white photograph. Import both of them into Photoshop on their own layers and make a copy of your color photo. I always make a backup copy of my image right off. I know I'm going to make mistakes, and it's easier to start over if I have my original image right there.



Sorry that isn't too readable. Just know that those two layers on the right are the same thing.





2. As you can see, in the modern-day photograph, we're facing the wrong way. The first step is to flip flop the photo horizontally. Select the top copy of the image by holding down Ctrl and left clicking on the thumbnail picture of the layer in the Layers tab. Press Ctrl+T to transform it. A box with handles should appear around the entire selection. Don't touch them yet, just right click somewhere inside that box and click on the option that says "Flip Horizontal". 



Flipped. 





3. One of the things I struggled with most while I was learning Photoshop (still, actually), was how to select and extract the bits you wanted, and how to discriminate between them and the parts you didn't. There are a couple options - the Magic Wand tool is fantastic, but it only works really well if you have an image that is fairly homogeneous in color over the piece that you want to keep, and a fairly homogeneous different color over the piece that you don't. No good here - our heads blend right into the background. The Quick Selection tool is good for the same type of thing - an image that contrasts sharply with the background. Nope. There are a few others - Quick Mask, Extract, that sort of thing, but I hope you'll trust me when I say I tried all of them and ended up, sadly, with the Pen tool. It's a last resort, but for this sort of detailed, low-contrast image, it's a good bet. What you'll have to do is zoom in and start drawing the outline of the figure you want to extract. Ideally, you'd fit curves to all of the figure's edges by clicking two points down, and using the handles to dial in the curve. I'll admit that I'm not a fan of the way Photoshop handles Bezier curves with the Pen tool - I like Illustrator for that better - so for some of it, I went the quick and dirty way. If you put enough points close together, they'll imitate a smooth curve just fine. It's calculus! Here's my completed path:



Once you've finished the path and connected the ends, save it! Go to the Paths tab and change the name to something memorable.

4. Once you've saved your path, go ahead and right click on it and click "Make Selection". A box will pop up that will allow you to select a feathering radius. I used a radius of 1 px, just to smooth out any sharp edges I left when I got too lazy to use Bezier curves.
5. You don't want to delete what's inside your path, you want to delete everything else. Press Ctrl+Shift+I (Select>Inverse) to select the "everything else" part, and press "Delete".
   



6.  If you're not working on this particular photo, this step won't apply to you. When you're competing in kata, you only wear a white gi. That means some color surgery here. Even though the final image is in black and white, I can't just desaturate it because the blue will turn a different shade of gray than the white. So, color surgery. Here, we get to use one of my favorite tools: Replace Color. Go to Image>Adjustments>Replace Color. You should get a popup box with a black and white image of your photo in the middle. Use the eyedropper to click on your original image and select the color you want to get rid of. Play with your color selection and the "Fuzziness" slider until the white part of the thumbnail represents the piece of your photo you want to change. Then select a "To" color by clicking on the colored square on the bottom. Here, I chose something close to white. If it's tinted, it won't matter so much because we're just going to desaturate it in a second anyway.



The white bit is what I want to change from blue.

7. If your color swap isn't perfect, don't worry. Just get it close, and the next step will erase a multitude of sins. With your figures selected (Ctrl+click on thumbnail), press Ctrl+Shift+U.
   

Not perfect, but better. 

See? Sorry for the weird cropping.

Good lord, I am GIVING UP on interspersing pictures into an HTML ordered list. Hell with it.

8. Ok, now we start the interesting stuff. Place your extracted figures layer on top of your black and white target layer - I used this book cover. Select your figures once more and press Ctrl+T (Transform). With both Alt and Ctrl held down, drag the handles of the transform box until your figures are the size you need. If you are covering something up, as I am here, you may need to use the Distort function to cover up as much of the original as you can. You can distort something quickly by using the keyboard shortcut: hold Ctrl and click/drag the transform box's handles.

Maximum overlap without looking grotesque.

9. This step is why I had to deem this whole tutorial "quick and dirty" - I have one screenshot for a process that took me 15 minutes or so. Here's the process: You'll be using the Clone tool to mimic the background over the areas where you can still see the original figures in the black and white photo. I did it in chunks: I cloned the stairs and the crowd over the top woman's feet and legs, then the mat over the second woman's feet, then the crowd over the second woman's legs. This will require some fiddling on your part, but I got lucky here - my photo was taken long enough ago and with low enough quality that I could look over some imperfections in the final product. This technique will not work if your photos are good quality!

If you look closely at the crowd, you can see heads and arms being repeated where the original figures were.  Luckily, this image will never see a printer or resolution that's higher than this, so I'm not worried.

10. This is decent, but the modern picture is much better quality than the old one. Let's age it a bit. The first step is to really overexpose the two foreground figures. If you look at the original textbook image, you'll see that their gis are almost totally white with no definition. Select the two original figures and apply a Contrast/Brightness adjustment layer. Up the brightness to something like +46 and the contrast to 10 or so. Your mileage may vary.

After I added the adjustment layer, I also used the Dodge tool to highlight certain areas. I don't have a screenshot of it, but if you want to overexpose your image even more, choose the Dodge tool with a soft brush set to about 40 px and 10% exposure. Start with the shadows and start overexposing a bit at a time. Use a light touch...less is likely going to be more here, especially when you start working on the highlights. Go through the shadows, midtones, and highlights slowly, trying to maintain some detail in the folds of the cloth, for example. Remember that once you've dodged something a little bit, you can mess with your Brightness settings to bring out the white even more.

11. That's better, but the foreground image still looks very crisp. In this step, we'll add some film grain to make that go away. Select your foreground figures and make a copy in a new layer. Title this layer "noise". Go up to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. In here, you can mess around with the settings until you like the amount of grain you see. I set mine to Gaussian, monochromatic (important!) and about 4% grain. Click OK.

12. That's not bad - maybe a little much, though. Turn your "noise" layer's opacity down to about 75%. You could also experiment with using the Blur filter, but I didn't find it necessary.

13. Last step. Even with the extra noise, the foreground looks a bit too crisp for my taste. To fix that, select the Blur tool and a brush with 0% hardness. Set the size to about 200 px. With very small strokes, gently blur your figure. 

Much better.

And there you have it! Here's my final version:

Here's the original for comparison:

Maybe I could have gone a little easier on the blur. 

That's all, folks. I know this was pretty slapdash, so feel free to ask for clarification in the comments.

"Be strong, be gentle, be beautiful." - Keiko Fukuda

How to Keep an Idiot Busy for Hours - the VBA edition

Triviality has many faces. You can have something that is both trivial and inane - like "Thou must not end thy sentences with prepositions" (another topic for another day). You can have something that is trivial and interesting - the banana slug on the sidewalk this morning, for example. There is a third category I'm going to posit: the things that are trivial, inane, and make me smile. This category includes hats with ridiculous pom-poms, "Sh*t _______ Say/s" videos, clever graffiti, and this bit of code I wrote this morning:

Sub FindMeThisCell()
   Worksheets("Sheet2").Activate
   Range("A2").Activate
   X = Range("A2")
   MsgBox X
   ActiveCell.Font.Bold = True
End Sub

This code does next to nothing. It's worse, actually - it does next to nothing and it doesn't even do what it says it does, namely, finding a cell. There is no searching involved here, to be honest. You should never, ever code like this, and if you do, you should find absolutely no enjoyment in using it. You should never smile at what it does, nor cause it to execute multiple times in a row because you think it's actually kind of cute.

Let me explain exactly how bad this really is. This snippet of code is a subroutine. A subroutine is a bit of code that you stick in your spreadsheet's module (accessory code) that you can call up whenever you feel like it - when today's date is after May 5th, when you click a button, when cell B1 turns green, whatever. Subroutine (abbreviated "Sub") FindMeThisCell  has a name - FindMeThisCell - that I can use to identify it later. The parentheses at the end just tell you that you don't need any information to run this code. *

So much for Sub, End Sub (does what you think it does), and FindMeThisCell(). The next two lines 

Sub FindMeThisCell()
   Worksheets("Sheet2").Activate
   Range("A2").Activate
   X = Range("A2")
   MsgBox X
   ActiveCell.Font.Bold = True
End Sub

pick out a particular cell in my file and turn it on - "activate" it. This is sort of like playing Pokemon. Go Sheet2! Activate! Go Range("A2")! Now cell A2 in Sheet 2 is ready and raring to go. 

Now I pick a variable - the quintessential "x", why not - 

Sub FindMeThisCell()
   Worksheets("Sheet2").Activate
   Range("A2").Activate
   X = Range("A2")
   MsgBox X
   ActiveCell.Font.Bold = True
End Sub

and read the contents of A2 to it. "X" dutifully memorizes this information. Next I choose a Message Box (or "MsgBox" - can't ever spare the vowels, those boxes) and tell it to recite whatever "X" says. 

Sub FindMeThisCell()
   Worksheets("Sheet2").Activate
   Range("A2").Activate
   X = Range("A2")
   MsgBox X
   ActiveCell.Font.Bold = True
End Sub

The next part is the worst bit. It takes the active cell, A2, and makes it bold. For absolutely no reason. No one benefits from this. The world is not better for it. I'm not any happier about it. It's worthless, and here I am wasting another whole paragraph about it. Enough!

Sub FindMeThisCell()
   Worksheets("Sheet2").Activate
   Range("A2").Activate
   X = Range("A2")
   MsgBox X
   ActiveCell.Font.Bold = True
End Sub

Now I go back to my original spreadsheet. I show the Developer tab (Office>Options>check "show Developer tab in ribbon"). In the Forms toolbar, I click on the rectangular icon

 to make a button. I title this button "Find me data!" and link it to the FindMeThisCell macro.

 And lastly, abashedly, I go to cell A2 and type in "Found me!" 

Then I click the button. And god help me, I smile at it. 

Click. Found me! Click. Found me! Click. Found me!

Isn't it awful?

*(As a counterexample, if you wrote some code to calculate the area of a rectangle, you would have to write Sub FindMeTheAreaOfThisRectangle(height,width), which would mean that every time you wanted to run it, you'd have to go and track down a rectangle to use it on. Very inconvenient..)