Fame thrust upon me

I shared this diagram of camera lens designs in the "Vintage Lenses" group on Facebook and have gotten nearly 900 "likes" in less than 24 hours.

Click on it (maybe twice) to see it at full resolution.

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Competitive pessimism

I posted on Facebook yesterday to report a political development (another court has ruled that Trump has no authority to impose tariffs), but I had to take it down because competitive pessimism broke out in the comments. If you don't believe everything is about to be completely ruined, you are just not with it.

Does anybody remember the competitive pessimism of the late 1960s and early 1970s? We were all sure to be killed in a nuclear war, or else starved in a population explosion, or else (a tad later) ruined by a petroleum shortage, or you had a couple of other choices such as, maybe, having your civilization wiped out by race riots.

People competed to have the most gruesome doomsday scenario.

And none of that happened. Problems were faced and overcome. And they were faced and overcome by people who were not competitive cynics — who did not spend their time screaming and whining — but who paid attention to facts and remained optimistic about the value of step-by-step improvements and solutions, many of them unforeseen.

Competitive cynicism was actually an excuse not to attend to one's day-to-day responsibilities.

It's the same way with extremist politics today, and also with the generative AI panic that is spreading through the less-informed of our business leaders. Some people brag about being able to describe really terrible scenarios. What good does that to? It's an excuse. It is cowardly. Pay attention to facts and do concrete things to make your country better. Whining is not it.

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Hoaxes are terrorist acts

There has been a flurry of hoaxes about shooters on college campuses, and one of them hit the University of Georgia last night (Friday, Aug. 29). Around 8:50 p.m., there was a report of an "armed shooter" (not "shots fired") in or near the Main Library, which was closing at 9:00 and presumably had people streaming out of it. I am told the area was locked down for nearly two hours. I have heard no more. The library is in the northernmost block of campus, near the downtown entertainment district, which presumably was full of people, both because it was a Friday night and because it was the night before a football game.

My concern is that the hoax was itself an act of terrorism. It was not a prank. Find the hoaxer and find out who's behind him or her.

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Cataract report

I had my left eye done on August 27, so today is Day 4 for the left eye and Day 18 for the right eye.

Optically, results are satisfactory. The left eye still fluctuates in refraction a bit — from the intended -0.25 to about -0.75 — and the right eye has been doing some of that but is settling down. The tear film on the left is also somewhat gooey and irregular, so the view usually isn't perfect, but it is a great relief to have both eyes focusing at the same distance. I'm no longer a one-eyed bandit. (During the interim, I only used one eye but did not cover the other; I didn't want to look theatrical.)

I got a minor corneal abrasion during the second surgery (for which the doctor apologized), and that is probably why the left eye still feels irritated. Through yesterday I had to spend a good bit of time resting with my eyes closed, listening to carefully chosen YouTube videos that could be followed without looking at the screen. That may continue today. I'm surprised at how much time I lost from regular work. Much of that, of course, is due to the large refractive change in both eyes, and would not apply to someone whose refraction was close to normal before the surgery.

I have looked at the starry sky and been glad to see stars without glasses. Binoculars with a 4-mm exit pupil work very well. I have not tried larger exit pupils, but there is definitely no sign of anything optically wrong. If the final refraction is -0.25, I will indeed wear weak glasses for the best view of the sky.

One last note. I am glad to be rid of the edge-of-field distortion from strong glasses. Coming home after the first surgery, I saw pincushion distortion when looking at door frames because my brain was still trying to correct for the barrel distortion from my old, strongly negative glasses. That quickly went away but showed me how much edge-of-field distortion had been part of my life.

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Hazel Roberts Covington, 1925-1985, centennial

Today would be the 100th birthday of my mother, Hazel Roberts Covington, née Hazel Jeannette Roberts. Sadly, she died shortly before her 60th birthday in 1985.

She was a South Georgia farm girl, the daughter of Joseph Clayton Roberts (Sr.) and Annie Bell Trawick Roberts, and was born in Worth County. We no longer know the location of their Worth County residence, but my understanding was that it was in the southeastern part of the county, close to their next two locations.

In the late 1920s the family moved to Colquitt County, to a house near Crosland (no longer standing, on Elton Clark Road at latitude and longitude +31.285 -83.615) and, soon afterward, to another house close to there, now designated 1816 Livingston Bridge Road, Norman Park, Georgia (+31.273, -83.603). The latter two houses are believed to date from the 1870s. The last of the three is the one I remember as my grandparents' house, and a cousin still lives there.

The Roberts house on Livingston Bridge Road.

You'll note that, like a proper historian, I'm giving exact locations, not descriptions like "next to where Buddy's barn used to be." In 2000 I compiled a short book, Who's Who in the Roberts Family, about the history of our the large extended family; it has been deposited in the genealogy collections of a couple of libraries but is not distributed publicly. Relatives who would like a copy are welcome to contact me.

My mother was one of seven siblings, the last of whom, Betty Jean Roberts Branan, died quite recently. Here are four of the girls some time in the 1930s:

The nearest towns were Crosland (very small, 3.5 miles away), Norman Park (7 miles), and Moultrie (17 miles). The Roberts children went to elementary school in Crosland, at a school from which my parents and I gathered a few books when it was about to be torn down in the early 1960s; an orange health textbook survives in my collection. For high school, they went to Norman College, a Baptist college in Norman Park that provided public high school education through some arrangement that I don't know the details of. My mother graduated as salutatorian (second in the class) during the darkest part of World War II.

From there, she decided to aim for town life rather than stay on the farm. At some point, she learned to type and became quite good at it, and could also do Stenotype. Working in Moultrie (I don't know where), she met a young state law enforcement agent, Charles Gordon Covington (1923-1966), and the rest is history. They married on December 26, 1946, and lived successively in Moultrie, Albany, and Valdosta. I was born in 1957 and my sister in 1960. After I was born, my father got transferred to Moultrie, then Columbus (Ga.), then Moultrie again, then back to Valdosta.

Tragedy struck in 1966 when my father, then at ATF agent, was killed while out on patrol. Because his death was unsolved (until much, much later) and was at first thought to be self-inflicted (contrary to obvious physical evidence), there was a long delay getting his life insurance and also his workers' compensation pension. Through herculean effort, my mother managed to support us on her job at the Credit Bureau of Valdosta, and we kept the house, the car, and the standard of living.

The insurance, pension, and estate were sorted out by the late 1960s and life became distinctly easier, though my mother still had to work very, very hard. Her work obligation and the unsolved murder (leaving us not knowing whom to trust) are the main reasons I spent my middle-school years at home, reading a lot and teaching myself science, and wasn't much involved in the community.

In 1973 we moved to Athens, a move contemplated since 1967, and in many ways it was a fresh start. My mother worked for the credit bureau there and moved into top management. We prospered; my sister and I went to college; and by 1985, both of us were more or less on our own. Sadly, that was when heart disease crept up on my mother, depriving her of a well-deserved retirement.

May her memory be eternal.

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Cataract progress report

One week ago, I had cataract surgery on my right eye, done by Dr. Kyle Royalty; the implanted lens is an Alcon Clareon monofocal lens, type CC60WF (clear rather than yellowish). This was carefully planned over many years, and I discussed it with two ophthalmologists locally and a couple more on astronomy forums.

One week from today I'll have the same operation on the left eye.

I plan to write more later, but the main thing that is unusual about my case is that I'm getting a large change in refraction. The main symptom of the cataracts was actually that my eyeglass prescription has been changing rapidly for about three years; I've become more nearsighted, and just before the operation, my prescription was about -7 in both eyes.

The other symptom was a loss of sharpness, mild in the left eye, severe in the right eye, which developed a large blurry patch in the center of the field. For about a year I had been relying on the left eye for fine details.

I chose to have both eyes corrected for distance vision (prescription 0, or, actually, my doctor aimed for -0.25; he seems to have hit it very close). Although many people choose to have one eye corrected for far distance and one for reading, I had eyes that worked that way when I was a child, and they gave me headaches. So I chose equality.

I chose monofocal lenses — lenses that do not try to focus on more than one distance. The reason is that true presbyopia-correcting (focusable) lenses have not been perfected; instead, multifocal lenses give you a sharp image superimposed on a blurry image, or at best, they focus only part of the incoming light from any given distance. I keep hearing from people who were sold expensive multifocal lenses (they cost more, so they must be better, right?) and got disappointing results.

According to the literature, the Alcon Clareon CC60WF does include slight asphericity, as does the lens of the eye itself, and this is supposed to increase depth of focus, but I have not noticed perceptible spherical aberration.

A few notes:

• The operation was quick and painless. During the operation, I was given very light sedation from which I did not feel any effect. I took Tylenol the first day for slight stinging; there has been no eye pain since then.
• Immediately after the operation, I could tell the new lens was in focus, but there was a blurry glare around everything because my eyes were dilated so wide that light could pass around the edges of the 6-mm-diameter lens. That remained the case for about two days!
• I am counting on my eyes not to dilate wider than 6 mm in the dark. At my age, that seems realistic. As I will explain more fully later, astronomers' belief that eyes dilate to 7 mm is actually a mistake about naval binoculars, which have 7-mm exit pupils to allow variation of eye position on a rolling ship, not because people's eyes are actually that wide.
• Focus will continue shifting slightly for days as my eye heals.
• Colors looked considerably less yellow through the "new" eye, but within minutes, I felt intuitively that the new (bluer) colors were correct (matching my memories) and the old eye's yellower colors were unpleasant. The difference was about equal to a CC15Y photographic filter (as have just verified by comparing eyes and using actual filters; earlier I estimated CC30Y, which was too much). The picture in Alcon's ad may exaggerate it somewhat. (Alcon's model number, CC60WF, is not related to photographic CC filters.)
• In the first minutes after the operation, my color vision was disrupted in another way, brownish, apparently because of the very strong bluish-white light from the operating microscope. That cleared up very quickly.
• I have had only a couple of brief opportunities to do astronomy with the "new" eye, but it is startling to look up at the sky and see pinpoint stars in the sky without wearing glasses. They are often sharper than the view I had with glasses in the past. There are no problems with telescopes or binoculars with exit pupils up to 5 mm (the largest I have tried). I have not yet been out under a dark country sky.
• Right now, my main problem is that the left eye hasn't been corrected yet, and with my postoperative glasses (which are 0 to +2 progressive readers), it gives a very blurry view. I tried substituting the left-eye lens from my preoperative glasses, which have matching frames, but the mismatch of image size and edge distortion is so severe as to be unusable. So I am doing my work one-eyed and not driving.
• Without strong -7 glasses in front of it, the right eye gives an image that is about 15% bigger. Also, to a person looking at me wearing my newer, thinner glasses, my eyes look bigger and farther apart.

One last note. I had no idea how tiring the whole process would be. Partly, it's that walking around with mismatched eyes is like wearing crutches. And partly I think there was some physical strain involved. I'll be glad to have it over and join the ranks of the farsighted!

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Music & Sound (M&S) Inter-Call D-2 intercom repair

Here is what you've been waiting for. I finished repairing the intercom in the grandchildren's house and made a video about it — not the best video I've ever made, but useful to people working on similar intercoms (there must be one or two in the world). In the video I describe the circuit in some detail, showing the diagram, before launching into the repair.

Tariffs are here

I'm hearing of people getting packages via UPS or DHL containing things they bought from overseas, and to their dismay, a tariff is due — sometimes a large fraction of what they paid for the merchandise. The carrier, such as UPS, had to pay this in order to bring the package into the United States, and they have to be paid back for it.

And I'm hearing loud complaints, "The other country is supposed to pay the tariff!"

No, no, no. That is not how tariffs work. United States tariffs are taxes paid to the United States by whoever brings something into the United States.

I am sad that so many of my fellow citizens did not know this or have been deceived about it.

The United States cannot make "the other country" pay taxes. (Can Sweden or Canada make you pay taxes?) Countries don't tax each other. That is part of what it means to be in one country and not another.

The nearest "the other country" could come to paying the tariff is this: If the United States puts a tariff on something, the foreign manufacturer might lower prices in order to keep the U.S. selling price the same. In that case, U.S. buyers would still be spending as much as before, but some of the money would be going to our government rather than to the maker of the product.

But that doesn't have to happen! The foreign manufacturer might decide it doesn't mind losing U.S. sales, since there are plenty of other countries to sell to.

Or they might lower prices only partly, so that U.S. prices go up, but not by the whole amount of the tariff.

If someone told you "the other country pays the tariff," meaning the tariff is extracted from the other country without affecting your price, you were deceived. It's that simple. People who know about international business have known how tariffs work all along.

And that is why economists, particularly conservative economists, are almost always against tariffs (with the possible exception of a low tariff on all imports as a way of raising revenue).

It is also why tariffs never make prices go down. At best, prices might not go up by the whole amount of the tariff, if the seller is willing to cut prices. But a tariff is an extra tax on goods coming in, and it's not going to make them cheaper.

Would a 20% sales tax make your groceries cheaper? Even if it pressured Kroger to cut some prices a few percent? Same thing. Now you know.

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Fixing the intercom

Our daughter Cathy and her family live in a house built in 1960 that has an intercom similar to the intercoms in two different houses I lived in as a child. It did not work. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to fix it, although it took me a while to get around to doing the work.

There will be a long video on YouTube about the details of the repair. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek (in lower resolution than the final video will be):

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No astro?

There hasn't been much astrophotography here lately, for two reasons. One is that we have had a remarkable spell of cloudy weather, with only a few clear nights — none of them very clear — since the beginning of June.

The other is that my eyes need some work. I'm getting cataract surgery on August 13 and 27 (one eye at a time).

I've had detectable cataracts for several years, but in the past three years or so they've been making me need frequent changes of eyeglasses, and now the right eye has irregular astigmatism, so it is not in focus with any eyeglass lens. It will be the first one to get its lens replaced. Stay tuned for details.

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