What My Aging Garden Teaches Me

"I grow old, I grow old,” the garden said.

Robert Finch

As my garden prepares to bed down for the winter, it’s hard not to feel a little sadness creeping in.   I watch the shadows lengthen on the sundial, observe the colored leaves turning brown and feel the autumn chill on the still-moist ground. My garden is fading and losing its freshness. The summer growing season is over. Yet, though my garden withers, it is precisely at this moment that it provides me with my greatest source of inspiration.

It is in my garden that I find displayed the cycle of life in all its glory; the literal transfer of energy from above to below. While on the soil surface the plants' leaves shrivel, deep underground their roots remain strong. I know this resting phase is essential. Without it, the life of all plants would be compromised. Resting, but ready, inscrutable and obscured, the roots continue to sustain the plants through the cold winter months. Come spring, they pulse forward with growth, translating into a burst of new life on the surface.

On the surface, the plants wither, but their roots remain strong. Every year, new life returns from the same source, pushing its head upwards through the inky black soil. Each plant is a descendent of the same family:  One, but not the same, offering us another season of joy in the life of our garden.

Posted by Carole Funger

#gardens, #aging

Chesapeake Bay Stripers Are Getting Ready To Rock

While the summer is winding down for many Chesapeake Bay vacationers, things are just heating up for fall fishing. October marks the time when striped bass, otherwise known in the Bay region as rockfish, start swimming home.

The migratory fish, most of which have been summering up north in the cool waters of New England, join the rest of the coastal stock in the Bay once temperatures start to drop. Packing on some extra pounds (some as much as 50), the rockfish pause to feed on smaller fish that migrate out for the winter. After their stopover, most head further south to winter homes off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina.

Once in the Chesapeake, the rockfish prefer to munch on Menhaden, Spot and Croakers, closely following the forage fish along the 200-mile main stem of the Bay. Location of the group varies according to water temperature and salinity. A cool fall can signal a banner year for fishing in the Maryland portion of the middle and upper Bay, while a warm fall can make for more challenging conditions in the lower sections. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) keeps track of the fluctuations in water temperature and salinity through their Interpretive Buoy System, key to finding the fishing hotspots.

You can join the thousands of fishermen from around the country that will descend on the Bay October/November for several rockfish tournaments. Visit the Maryland Saltwater Sportfishing Association (MSSA) Fall Classic or book a charter through Miss Grace Charters and join the action.

To learn more about Rockfish go to http://www.striperspace.com/chesapeake.html

Posted by Carole Funger

Artist Puts A New Face On the National Mall

In a recently commissioned work by the Smithsonian, Cuban-born artist, #Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada has added a new face to Washington, DC’s National Mall.  The “facescape,” titled “Out of Many, One” covers six acres of ground next to the Reflecting Pool, where from the air, it can also be seen peeking out from under the Mall’s trees.

Workers toiled for four weeks to create the piece, hauling in over 800 tons of dirt and 2,000 tons of sand and gravel to compose the image. They used high-accuracy GPS technology to map the piece onto the lawn and placed 10,000 stakes and miles of twine to make the template.

The result is a handsome young man of ambiguous ethnicity, a blend of white and black faces in a portrait that explores the question of identity as well as Rodriguez-Gerada’s own experience growing up in the States as a young Cuban-American. Crafted from 50 photos the artist took on DC’s streets of young males ages 18-25, “Out of Many, One” is a reference to the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, which is also the motto on the seal of the United States.

The facescape is on view until the end of October, at which time it will be plowed back into the earth. Walk through it at ground level, where it feels a bit like a zen garden. To see the face in full, visit the west-facing window of the Washington Monument, see it from the air (window seat on a flight into Reagan National Airport.)  or visit it virtually at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgmNP_ieiEo

Posted by Carole Funger

Nobel Prize Week Deciphered

And What It Means for You

This week’s Nobel Prize announcements by the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee included winners in the categories of chemistry, physics and medicine. Lofty news that can seem hard to understand and tempting to ignore.  Yet, on closer look, the awards showcase groundbreaking advances and life-saving inventions that have great significance for our everyday lives. They're worth thinking about. They're probably going to make our future a whole lot brighter.

Here’s what the prizes were for and why they’re important:

Chemistry

On Wednesday, three scientists, Stefan Hell, William Moerner and Eric Betzig won the chemistry prize for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.” What does this mean and what does it mean for us?

This has to do with groundbreaking work in the development of powerful new microscopes. Together, the winners discovered a way to overcome all known barriers to optical resolution, making it possible to see tissues at the level of a single molecule. With this discovery, there is now no

structure too small to be studied. Researchers will now be able to peer inside living nerve cells, even view the process of DNA being transferred from one place to another.

Super-resolution microscopy will allow scientists to watch our brains firing when we’re creating memories or learning. We’ll now be able to study and track protein formation in degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. And, we’ll be able to study in real-time the molecular development of the human embryo.

This has huge ramifications for just about everything.

Physics

On Tuesday, Inventor Shuji Nakamura and Professors Isamu Akasake and Hiroshi Amano shared the physics prize for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy=saving white light sources.”

While red and green LEDs have been around for a long time (think laptops), the discovery of the blue LED has made white light sources (think LED household light bulb) available, offering high-efficiency and longer bulb life span to consumers. Currently the world uses over 20 percent of its electricity for lighting. With the adoption of LED lamps, this number should drop to just 4 percent.

Additionally, due to their low energy requirements, LED lamps can be powered by cheap local solar power, bringing light to more than a billion people around the world who are currently without.

Medicine

On Monday, the British-US scientist John O’Keefe and married couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the prize for medicine “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”

Our brains allow us to position ourselves in space and to navigate our environment. These discoveries identified the cells behind this process. It turns out that certain cells are capable of forming a coordinate system much like a GPS to help us determine our location and to memorize our surroundings.

The scientists identified “place cells”

in the brains of rats that were activated when they moved from place to place, suggesting they were recording their movement in their memories. Further research revealed the existence of “grid cells” that essentially created a coordinate system similar to a GPS.

Why is this important? The researchers were able to show similar processes occurring in the human brain. The discovery of this human GPS has opened new pathways into our understanding of memory, thinking and planning. It will also make it easier in the future to understand the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, whose first symptoms often involve the inability to recognize and map their surroundings.

Lofty ideas, yes, but all great news for the advancement of mankind.

Posted by Carole Funger

Can You Taste A Song?

What does the color yellow sound like? Can you see a sound? Can you taste a song?

In an innovative project designed to intertwine the senses, a group of students at Hyper Island in Stockholm, Sweden has combined food, music and digital technology to explore how to convert music into food. Can food be customized to your musical taste? The project Beatballs believes it can. Beatballs has set out to create personalized meatball recipes that taste like your favorite tunes, all in the hopes of heightening your musical enjoyment.

We’re all familiar with using music to enhance a meal, but transforming music into a meal? Now that’s something new. “We have developed a code that converts music into taste,” the Beatballs experts say.

Here’s how it works. Beatballs uses a custom code derived from the music intelligence company Echo Nest to algorithmically break down the various components of a song across such dimensions as tempo, tone, key and popularity. The data is then converted into ingredients for a meatball recipe tailor-made to increase the intensity and sensory pleasures of the song.

This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Actual scientific experiments have been conducted on the associations between variations in musical pitch and the perception of sour, sweet, bitter and salty tastes. The studies found, for example, that participants rated toffee as sweet while listening to a high pitched piano piece and bitter when eaten to the accompaniment of lower-pitched brass instruments.

Or consider synesthesia, a neurological condition where senses cross over. Patients with synesthesia can sometime hear colors and see sounds. It’s believed that the abstract painter Vassily Kandinsky had this condition.  And it kind of makes you wonder about Lennon’s magical world of marshmallow pies and marmalade skies (although there are other ways to encourage senses to cross over.)

Could it be true that each song has its own DNA? Can the act of tasting music contribute to our enjoyment? Beatballs points to the historical, cultural and social associations between music and food to show it can.  Think Cajun French music and spicy shrimp gumbo, “The Godfather” and pasta and winter season and mac & cheese and you get the idea. Translating music into taste represents a whole new level of cross-pollination between the two.

Whether or not meatballs are to your liking, the project does bear some consideration.  The group claims at least one successful pairing; that is, their garlic and chickpea meatball and Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy.” To evoke the high energy and mood of the song, the recipe includes dashes of lemon zest, curry and strawberries.  Not for everyone, but certainly some food for thought…

The Creators Project focuses on using technology in innovative ways to push the boundaries of creative expression. To date it has showcased more than 500 artists from around the world.

Posted by Carole Funger