Our garden in early winter

In the garden, I found some cluster amaryllis are blooming. It may be due to the Indian Summer for the past few weeks. They are supposed to come out early in fall.

The petals are kind of shrunken due to the low temperature. It gets frosty in the morning here.

PS; After having uploaded this post, I asked my wife, a bit better gardener than me, about this flower. She answered me it was "Diamond lilly", which ought to come out in this season. It might be planted by my father. Apology and correction!

Winter has surely started here. Magnolia tree has had a half of its leaves fallen. It might get ready for beautiful flowers early in next spring.

Poor tomatoes are going to die soon. In 2 or 3 days, I will harvest these immature fruits and try to fry them.

I have cleaned the dead Cosmos and Mary gold in the garden. Seeds have been taken. They will revive in the garden next spring. A couple of apple trees have been planted. It seems we should care for them to be grown to be abundant with good apples. When could we crop them? As my parents left the plum tree for us, I wonder if anyone will enjoy the fruits from these trees in years.

Fishing efficiency

Since I have fewer callers nowadays, I am always experimenting to achieve more efficient way of calling CQ. Of course, I also watch the bands carefully as well. Hearing nothing, I start to throw fishhook with a bait. Various kind of baits are available. In my experience, each bait has more efficiency in this order.

1)Hand key nearly equal to bug key or side swiper

2)Electronic keyer manually sent

3)Electronic keyer automatically sent, that is, memory keyer

It seems our ears love something fluctuating. It might be related with the variable heart beat. Some people may say it is a memory in uterus of the maternal heart beat.

I know 1) is most efficient as a bait. But it makes me tired and bored. I often compromise with 2) category. i put an accent before giving my call. That is putting a small pause before my call. It may give an alert to listener that something important will be sent.

I must admit I sometimes surf the internet while sending CQ, because I have too few callers on the band. In category 2), I am apt to repeat CQ for many times without being conscious of that. Even worse, I forget calling CQ with category 3) and realize that transmission has been on due to the quietness. I should apologize to the callers in such occasion if any.

Anyway, I have scarcely considered of the efficiency of the bait some years ago. From now on, however, I need to make tricks to augment the efficiency of each bait. As if fishing on a lake where very few fish is in.  

We should advocate CW to young new comers

I have posted twice in the reflector of FOC yesterday. It was regarding the difference between contesting/DXing and ragchewing. Ragchewing should be described as ordinary conversational communication on CW. Based on the article I introduced here,  I would like to say these two genres of CW activities are handled at different areas in the brain, if partly overlapped, so that the resulting pleasure or sense of rewarding must be different each other.

Even if we should admit of the diversity of the way how to enjoy CW, we should be aware of this distinction in CW operation. Judging from the overall activity in each genre, I should say contesting/DXing is occupying the most portion in the club activity. Some members have endorsed me either on the reflector or by personal mail. But it seemed those having priority in contesting/DXing were the majority in the participants of the club.

We should learn how different they are each other if they use CW for the tool. Understanding it, we should know which we stand on. It will cause quite a big difference which standpoint we are on. It may determine the ethos of the club.

This morning, while talking to a member in the West Coast on 15m, who told me the new members would get inactive for ordinary QSOs but get on only for contests, I realized it was the problem of aging. When we get older, we won't be interested in the others. Aged people won't have the inner energy or lose some kind of intelligence to understand the others. It should not be blamed. It is a natural course of human being. Due to the indifference to the others, they may not communicate to understand each other. But they just enjoy CW as a tool for the games. 

Otherwise, it is quite difficult for me to understand the trend for contesting/DXing prevailing in the world of CW. We should advocate CW to the younger new comers or CW may vanish sooner or later. FOC is not an exception even if it has the calling to maintain and convey this mode for real communication among people to the next generation.    

In the season with the height of the band conditions

Yesterday afternoon, around 06Z, forty meters was open to the East Coast. Surprisingly, the path to there was even better than that to the West Coast. In the bottom of the sun spot cycle, I have heard this band had been open to the North America all day long. I am often amazed thinking that the hams who established the World Wide CW contest have chosen this time in a year for this one of the oldest and most major contests in the world. It is the time when the bands could blast.
The only problem was that there had been no East Coasts calling me except for some of the skimmers there.

There were a number of statessides on 15 meters this morning. Everyone seemed cheerful and happy. They have had or were going to have the Thanksgiving dinner with their company. Dick K4XU have told me he had plowed even 30cm of snow on the driveway, which had taken him 90 minutes. He quit radio telling me there was odor of cooked turkey from somewhere. John W7KCN has had a dinner party with 10 family members there. He is an 88 year old ham and is still very sharp in memory and keying. It was a fun to hear from him. Bill K1YT has called me at the moment when the path was almost over. Fast QSB has made it a bit difficult to read him. But slowing down the speed helped me a little. I am sure he has had a nice dinner also with his family. He has reminded me of my trip to his home in Stow Mass almost a quarter century ago. It was in the end of Oct. In the declining condition, I have called CQ for several times. The band has turned quiet again when I turned off the gear.

Every friend kindly visiting this blog, have a pleasant holiday season. See you often on the air.

The meaning of the modern music

I have been wondering what has brought the modern classical music in the world. I mean the music of atonality. They say one reason was the will to get out of the heavy romanticism which has covered the world of music since the end of 19th century. I could understand the composers in that age have felt almost suffocated with the expanded emotions in the late romanticism in music. The modern music composers might need to get into the atonality as a new achievement in music. It could be a drive which has lead composers to new style of music in their age.

In addition to all of those motivations, I guess, it was the expression of the era trend of thoughts those days. It was just before they got into the era of total war. They have had to endure the pain and agony of total war twice very soon. As artists sensitive to the trend those days, they must have felt that era preceding to the other people. In late romantic music, there used to be such a composer who had preempted that trend of anxiety and fear for the death. One example was Mahler. But such attempt by late romantic composers has not succeeded in it and was followed by the modern music composers, who have done thoroughly, if it was successful or not.

This quartet by Schoenberg is deemed the watershed dividing those two eras. Each motifs sound very beautiful with faint feeling of tonality. When the soprano enters in the music, the atonality dominates it. It may express the anxiety of existence in the era trend. It appeals to our mind even after over a century since it has been composed.

ex JG1FDX story

We will have the 38th anniversary in a couple of days. The time has passed quite fast. The longer marriage we have had, the more we know each other. Even though I don't know what she thinks of that, it is not bad to get older together.

We were the class mates at the med school. She is 3 years younger than I am since I entered the school after finishing a college. We have started our honey moon life at a dorm of the med school where we served our residency. Hectic days. I should have been more helpful to her raising our elder son those days.

I have uploaded this photo before. At the campus of the med school. We were young. We were expecting our 1st baby. How hopeful we were for our future!

We have moved here, that is, my birth place in several years. I felt we need some place to be settled down. I must confess a place for bigger antenna was necessary for me. My parents have moved here and have helped us to raise 3 children. 

It was the time without cell phone. She has taken a ham radio ticket to get in touch with me through radio. She got her call as JG1FDX. Only on phone. She was too shy to talk to people unknown to her. We used UHF FM to get in touch. When our daughter was learning violin at a class near to my wife's hospital years ago, I have brought her with violin to a place half way to the class. She was waiting for us there. We couldn't do that without that UHF.  

One time, I borrowed her car. I happened to turn on the cassete tape recorder on the car. Surprisingly, Morse code practise tape was running there. Yes, she was practising Morse code in secret. I asked her why she had wanted to master code. Her answer was that she would beat me in Morse code technique. I think it was half what she had thought. She is a girl who would learn something continuously. She might find learning Morse code was a good object for her to master. Since her project turned out public to me, she gave it up thoroughly. Her ticket with the suffix, "Fanatic Doctore XYL", has been expired then. 

As written earlier in this blog, she has enjoyed our trip to Seattle and San Jose 3 years ago meeting many friends of ham radio. Someday, I would take her for a trip to the US or the other parts of the world to see old friends of mine. She won't say no to me, hopefully.

As I fully retired last year, I have become a full time house husband and have been trying to help her. She says she would downsize her work load soon. Introducing her old patients to other reliable doctors and getting ready financially for the retirement of the staff, she should gradually fade off at her job soon. I wish we could spend peaceful time for the rest of our lives.

Congratulations to us on our anniversary! 

Perception of Morse code and understanding its message are involved in different processes in brain

It has been one of the main interests for me to know how
Morse code is perceived and understood by us. We are doing 
that process without being conscious of them when we operate 
on this mode. But It might help us to train ourselves for 
communication on this mode and convince it is worth spending 
our lives learning codes and communicating with this mode.

I have spent attention about how the modern brain physiology 
on this issue with scientific words. There have been a few studies 
published on this theme. This article with its abstract shown below is 
one of them recently published and suggestive in our understanding 
of this issue..

Quote;

Hum Brain Mapp. 2015 Nov;36(11):4512-28. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22939. Epub 2015 Aug 25.

From perceptual to lexico-semantic analysis-cortical plasticity enabling new levels of processing.

Schlaffke L1, Rüther NN2, Heba S1, Haag LM1, Schultz T3, Rosengarth K4, Tegenthoff M1, Bellebaum C2,5, Schmidt-Wilcke T1.

Author information

Abstract

Certain kinds of stimuli can be processed on multiple levels. While the neural correlates 

of different levels of processing (LOPs) have been investigated to some extent, most of 

the studies involve skills and/or knowledge already present when performing the task. 

In this study we specifically sought to identify neural correlates of an evolving skill that 

allows the transition from perceptual to a lexico-semantic stimulus analysis. Eighteen 

participants were trained to decode 12 letters of Morse code that were presented 

acoustically inside and outside of the scanner environment. Morse code was presented 

in trains of three letters while brain activity was assessed with fMRI. Participants either 

attended to the stimulus length (perceptual analysis), or evaluated its meaning 

distinguishing words from nonwords (lexico-semantic analysis). Perceptual and lexico-semantic 

analyses shared a mutual network comprising the left premotor cortex, the supplementary 

motor area (SMA) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Perceptual analysis was associated 

with a strong brain activation in the SMA and the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally (STG), 

which remained unaltered from pre and post training. In the lexico-semantic analysis post 

learning, study participants showed additional activation in the left inferior frontal cortex (IFC) 

and in the left occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), regions known to be critically involved in lexical 

processing. Our data provide evidence for cortical plasticity evolving with a learning process 

enabling the transition from perceptual to lexico-semantic stimulus analysis. Importantly, 

the activation pattern remains task-related LOP and is thus the result of a decision process 

as to which LOP to engage in. Hum Brain Mapp 36:4512-4528, 2015. © 2015 The Authors. 

Human Brain Mapping Published byWiley Periodicals, Inc.

© 2015 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

KEYWORDS:

cortical plasticity; fMRI; learning; levels of processing; perception

Unquote.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
The function, either definite or speculative, of the brain areas quoted in this article are as foolows.

SMA

the postural stabilization of the body, the coordination of both sides of 

the body such as during bimanual action, the control of movements that 

are internally generated rather than triggered by sensory events, and the 

control of sequences of movements.

IPL

the perception of emotions in facial stimuli,^[2] and interpretation of 

sensory information. The Inferior parietal lobule is concerned with language, 

STG

 auditory processing, including language

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

It seems to me that both perceptual and understanding process are involved 

in the same areas, that is, lt premotor cortex, SMA and IPL. On the other 

hand, lt IFC and OTC, known to be the areas of lexical processing, are activated 

in uderstanding process after training. 

It is beyond my knowledge discussing what the difference of the areas activated in 

each process means. What I could say from this article is as follows;

It is amazing that Morse code perception/understanding in brain could be a topic 

in this field of science. While it is our concern how they describe about it in scientific 

terms, the researchers must take this learning process as one of the scientific 

epistemological findings. The communication mode composed of the simplest symbols, 

that is, dashes and dots, must be a good tool for that purpose.  

Perception of Morse code and understanding its message are handled, partly, at the 

same areas in brain. On the other hand, the latter seems to involve in the higher 

lexicological center. As the other report indicated that reading Morse code is 

comparable to reading printed matters, understanding its message must be a highly 

intellectual process.

Further discussion to try to correspond each process to the actual operation of CW 

mode is a quite personal speculation of mine. DXing or contesting should be 

involved in the perception process or, at least, some extension of its process. Each 

operation handles only exchanges of meaningless symbols. Understanding 

messages is the essence of ordinary QSOs. Through the system of symbols of 

Morse code, we understand what the others mean in their message. This process 

should be handled by the lexicological center in brain. This study seems to tell us we 

should discriminate these two aspects of CW operation. It means a lot to us. I will 

discuss about this discrimination from this perspective in another post.  

PS; Sorry for the irregular fonts in this post. It seems a kind of bug in the blog format,

which I could not do with at all.