Aside From Coins, Do You Have Any Other Hobbies?

Is that a ballpoint or fountain pen?

 

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I draw mazes?

 

A-maze-ing!

 

Every professional ought to have at least one nice fountain pen. I have a few, but this Pelikan is my favorite...

 

I have a full set of Langendorf DC superheroes stickers, Walter Johnson candy company(dick Tracy series #3 24 of 24, #'s 121-144 uncirculated)

 

I have 2 rocks shaped simular and 1 has a substance on what I call the bottom and lines going through it as though it was used as a grinding stone. I'm in the middle of moving right now but maybe in a week I'll get them out and post a picture of them

 

Boeing CH-47F “Chinook” ~1700 pieces.

 

Please do so when you can.

 

I started collecting antique maps a few years ago. I don't have many, but this is an amazingly cheap hobby.

12 maps of ancient empires by Jehoshaphat Aspin. All maps printed 1816-1819.


Favorite of the 12. The Anabasis of Xenophon and the 10,000 Greeks.

Ancient Greece by Louis Vivien 1834.


The Jehoshaphat Aspin maps were $7-9 a
piece. The large Louis Vivien map was $35.

Cartography would have been an incredibly interesting occupation pre plane/satellite. A combination of Geometry, Geography, and Art.

Mike

 

Were these maps issued loose or are they cut from books?

 

The Louis Vivien was printed as a standalone. The Aspins were all cut from an atlas.

 

One of my latest pottery acquisitions:
(Images used with permission of Artemis Gallery)


Ancient Greece, South Italic, Apulian, ca. 4th century BCE. A gorgeous lekythos created in a pottery workshop in the Apulian region of southern Italy where potters were known for introducing additional pigments to the red-figure painting technique - in this case red, yellow, and white. This example presents a lovely Lady of Fashion with a wavy coiffure adorned by a laurel leaf wreath and long ear ornaments - her profile visage beautifully painted with delicate facial features - surrounded by trumpet flower vines. The field is additionally ornamented with a band of triple dotted motifs followed by a band of larger dotted motifs in white and yellow along the shoulder, an egg and dart register below the lady, frets on the lower neck, and striated bands on the base. The form is just as elegant, boasting a stunning silhouette with a globular body, a narrow neck, a conical spout rising to a flat rim, and a curvaceous handle joining neck to shoulder, all upon a concave foot.

Mike

 

My educated guess would be that well over 90% of antique maps for sale come from old atlases. (I've been collecting antique maps and city views myself since I was in high school and used to buy them from the dollar bin at a rare bookstore, and have quite a few dating back to the 1600s, as well as a couple from the 1500s.)

 

A map of "Modern Rome," from about 1630. I bought it in Rome in 2008, when I took my son there on vacation as a high school graduation present. (I assume that the outlined areas in green are supposed to represent the seven hills.)

 

One of my "city views": a view of the city of Freiburg in Baden, from 1549. My maternal grandmother was born in a Black Forest village not far from there, where her family had lived for more than 200 years until they were all deported in 1940. My great-great-grandparents were buried in Freiburg in the 1910s. (Jewish people were finally allowed to return there following the full emancipation of 1862, after being barred from living there, or even staying there overnight, for more than 400 years. So there were no ancestors of mine in Freiburg at the time this city view was created!)

 

I have a funny story about Freiburg. Well, it's funnier now, so many years later.

On my very first night in Germany with the Army, I hopped on a train to visit an Army friend who was stationed three hours northwest of me, in Friedberg (just north of Frankfurt). Somehow, I ended up three hours southwest instead, in Freiburg. I must have pronounced it incorrectly when I bought my ticket.

I thought maybe the young pair working the ticket window at the Freiburg train station would understand my dilemma and let me get on the right train for another three hour ride north, but no - they had a good laugh instead and made me buy a new ticket. So a three hour train ride turned into a six hour train ride, and I hoped the next 2-1/2 years in Germany would go better than the first night did!

 

"Freed-bairk" vs. "Fry-boork"; they sound more different than they look. Bet you got a handle on those pronunciations pretty quickly!

 

@DonnaML how do you verify authenticity of the maps?

 

Map reproductions are almost always on modern paper -- which looks and feels completely different from the paper used for maps in the 16th-18th centuries. And the kind of old maps I've bought (mostly miniature maps, no bigger than 5" x 7", like the Rome map) simply aren't expensive enough to make it worth anyone's while to forge them on genuine old paper. In any event, when I was buying old maps, I only bought them from reputable dealers in antique maps and prints. Not from random people on ebay. Pretty much the same approach I've tried to take when buying old Japanese woodblock prints, which I've also collected from time to time. Or coins!

 

I don't know what I have count as hobbies. I have a few I'd like to get into but no manouvrability to do so. I'd like to for instance go to dried up ocean seabeds (because I'm scared to death of the oceans) and dig up shark teeth, especially Megalodon. I'd like to get a metal detector and look for gold nuggets. I bought some basic electronics equipment and would like to get into electronics repair, I have bought maybe 100 very cheap watches and would like to repair those. I bought my first model set (a WW2 Japanese battle ship) because it was cheap and would like to tackle that.

One thing I am doing, but haven't touched much for months is self-teaching programming. Later I want to learn game design. I have created various things, my most recent is a program that reads from MIDI to computer perform piano pieces. I'm not sure how MIDI works and I'm reluctant to call it a MIDI player. I believe MIDI players probably use libraries with little programing involved from the various programs that play such files. There is no difference between them, and indeed the MIDI (for better or for worse) sounds like how the designer intended it to sound. Some MIDI files can sound great (even without changing soundfonts), most sound rather ordinary. Most people don't flip the right switches to bring the best out in the format. My program however is my interpretation of these MIDI files with barebones notes/volumes/tempos and a fantastic open source collection of piano samples. My program does not sound like the MIDI file intended, it does not use it's designations for instruments for example, and personally I think it sounds better. But I just received a thumbs down and no thumbs up for a video of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata so what would I know? (Personally, I'd like to know what I done wrong so I'd rather a comment to that thumbs down so that I may know what I am suppose to fix.)

I'd like to use programming in this way: to learn about multiple things simultaneously. In the example above, I am learning about music while doing it. I am currently (haven't touched for months because I feel tired all the time) working on a basketball statistics project, but I resent some advanced statistics. I would like to program in a chess engine as I am trying to learn chess (very bad player, but I intend to see this through).

I don't know if collecting counts as hobbies, but I have been collecting chess sets, playing cards (including vintage, some borderline antique from the 1920s and missed a few from the 19th century). Gaming in general. I have a very large steam library of games I never get around to playing because people and weather won't let me sleep, around 9,000 titles, including lots of 'shovelware' from various bundles I've bought over the last decade.

I used to like films. Fantastic hobby, huh? I watch films. Like 99.999% of the rest of the human race. But I was a member of the defunct IMDb boards, I do have thousands of movies in my collection from all periods, and I am particularly fond of the South Korean and Japanese obscure films from the 1990s and 2000s, ones you can only usually get from Hong Kong or South Korea because the west (unfortunately) doesn't care about them. One of my favourite films ever is The Classic, a South Korea drama film. Reluctant to call it a romantic film as it's so much more. However, over the last decade I've become colder inside and feel my appreciation for such films withering. I am also a big fan of Japanese and Korean music. (I am German-English-Scottish in ethnicity so no ethnic bias.)

I also like to tackle the issues with the riddle of the universe basically in my own way. I don't find it easy to learn like others do. I can't learn from people teaching me, I have to forge my own path. And it's awkward, especially when it comes to physics as you have to learn complex math, both of which I have tried to understand but fail at. But with the help of a geometry program, I have found things like not only lorentz factor to explain the time-velocity relationship in relativity, but also composite velocities and I like to think I have conceptualized it in a unique way. I am trying to wrap my head around dimensionality, including possibly more than 1 dimension of time, and various things.