Wilcox began the discussion with a question of whether or not the Guilford community should seek out prophets and prophecies. Wilcox sought to relate this question to the Quaker tradition.
“This talk is about prophets and prophecy,” Wilcox said. “So the first question is, ‘What does it mean to be a prophet?’ I don’t think Jeremiah would recommend it.”
“We wanted our guests to have something to do as they arrived [while] we took pictures with our families, so we planned a kitten hour,” Colleen told POPSUGAR. “We did a cocktail hour with cocktails named after our cats for the reception, but the Quaker meeting house we used for the ceremony doesn’t allow alcohol on premises. I wanted a wedding falcon, but Iz vetoed that, and so we compromised on kittens.”
Today Google came out with a new app called PhotoScan that will scan your old photo collection. Like just everyone, I have stashes of shoeboxes inherited from parents full of pictures. Some were scanned in a scanner, back when I had one that was compatible with a computer. More recently, I’ve used scanning apps like Readdle’s Scanner Pro and Scanbot. These de-skew the photographs of the photos that your phone takes but the resolution’s is not always the best and there can be some glare from overhead lights, especially when you’re working with a glossy original pictures.
Google’s approach cleverly stitches together multiple photos. It uses a process much like their 360-degree photo app: you start with a overview photo. Once taken, you see four circles hovering to the sides of the picture. Move the camera to each and it takes more pictures. Once you’ve gone over all four circles, Google stitches these five photos together in such a way that there’s no perspective distortion.
What’s remarkable is the speed. I scanned 15 photos in while also making dinner for the kids. The dimensions of all looked good and the resolution looks about as good as the original. These are good results for something so easy.
2015 looks like it’s shaping up to be the year that online cloud photo services all take a giant leapt forward. Just in the last few months alone, I’ve gone and dug up my ten-plus year photo archive from a rarely accessed backup drive (some 72 GB of files) and uploaded it to three different photo services.
First it was Dropbox, whose Carousel app promised to change everything. For $10/month, I can have all of the digitized photos I’ve ever taken all together. It changed how I access past events. Back in the day I might have taken 20 pictures and posted 2 to Flickr. The other 18 were for all intents inaccessible to me — on the backup drive that sits in a dusty drawer in my desk. Now I could look up some event on my public Flickr, remember the date, then head to Dropbox/Carousel to look through everything I took that day — all on my phone. Sometimes I’d even share the whole roll from that event to folks who were there.
But this was a two-step process. Flickr itself had boosted its storage space last year but it wasn’t until recently that they revealed a new Camera Roll and uploader that made this all work more seamlessly. So all my photos again went up there. Now I didn’t have to juggle between two apps.
Last week, Google finally (finally!) broke its photos from Google+ and the remnants of Picasa to give them their own home. It’s even more fabulous than Flickr and Dropbox, in that its search is so good as to feel like magic. People, places, and image subjects all can be accessed with the search speed that Google is known for. And this service is free and uploads old videos.
Screenshot of Theo (identified by his baby nickname, “Skoochie”) and Julie, December 2003.
I’m constantly surprised how just how emotionally powerful an old photo or video can be (I waxed lyrically about this in Nostalgia Comes Early, written just before our last family vacation). This weekend I found a short clip from 2003 of my wife carrying our newborn in a backpack and citing how many times he had woken us up the night before. At the end she joked that she could guilt trip him in years to come by showing this video to him. Now the clip is something I can find, load, and play in a few seconds right from my ever-present phone.
So what I’ve noticed is this quick access to unshared photos is changing the nature of my cellphone photo-taking. I’m taking pictures that I never intend to share but that give me an establishing shot for a particular event: signs, driveway entrances, maps. Now that I have unlimited storage and a camera always within reach, I can use it as a quick log of even the most quotidian life events (MG Siegler recently wrote about The Power of the Screenshot, which is another way that quick and ubiquitous photo access is changing how and what we save.) With GPS coordinates and precise times, it’s especially useful. But the most profound effect is not the activity logging, but still the emotions release unlocking all-but-lost memories: remembering long-ago day trips and visits with old friends.
“What do you think of this?” It was probably the twentieth time my brother or I had asked this question in the last hour. Our mother had downsized to a one-bedroom apartment in an Alzheimer’s unit just six days earlier. Visiting her there she admitted she couldn’t even remember her old apartment. We were cleaning it out.
The object of the question this time was an antique teapot. White china with a blue design. It wasn’t in great shape. The top was cracked and missing that handle that lets you take the lid off without burning your fingers. It had a folksy charm, but as a teapot it was neither practical nor particularly attractive, and neither of us really wanted it. It was headed for the oversized trash bin outside her room.
I turned it over in my hands. There, on the bottom, was a strip of dried-out and cracked masking tape. On it, barely legible and in the kind of cursive script that is no longer taught, were the words “Recovered from ruins of fire 6/29/23 at 7. 1067 Hazard Rd.”
We scratched our heads. We didn’t know where Hazard Road might be. Google later revealed it’s in the blink-and-you-miss-it railroad stop of Hazard, Pennsylvania, a crossroads only technically within the boundary of our mother’s home town of Palmerton, Pennsylvania. The date would place the fire seven years before her birth.
We can only guess to fill in the details. A catastrophic fire must have taken out the family home. Imagine the grim solace of pulling out a family heirloom. Perhaps some grandparent had brought it carefully packed in a small suitcase on the journey to America. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it had no sentimental value and it had landed with our mother because no one else cared. We’ll never know. No amount of research could tell us more than that masking tape. Our mother wasn’t the only one losing her memory. We were too. We were losing the family memory of a generation that had lived, loved, and made it through a tragedy one mid-summer day.
I stood there and looked at the teapot once again. It had survived a fire ninety years ago. I would give it a reprieve from our snap judgement and the dump. Stripped of all meaning save three inches of masking tape, it now sits on a top shelf of my cupboard. It will rest there, gathering back the dust I just cleaned off, until some spring afternoon forty years from now, when one of my kids will turn to another. “What do you think of this?”
Update March 2017
Beyond all odds, there’s actually more information. Someone has put up obituaries from the Morning Call newspaper. It includes the May 1922 notice for Alvin H. Noll, my mother’s great grandfather.
Alvin H. Noll, a well known resident of Palmerton, died at his home, at that place, on Sunday morning, aged 66 years. He was a member of St. John’s church, Towamensing, and also a prominent member of Lodge, No. 440, I.O. of A., Bowmanstown. He is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Lewis Sauerwine, Slatington, and Mrs. Fred Parry, this city; three sons, Purietta Noll, Samuel Noll and Thomas Noll, Palmerton. Two sisters, Mrs. Mary Schultz, Lehighton; Miss Amanda Noll, Bowmanstown; two brothers, Aaron Noll, Bowmanstown, and William Noll, Lehighton. Ten grandchildren also survive. Funeral services will be held at the home of his son, Purietta (sic) Noll, 1067 Hazard Road, Palmerton, on Wednesday at 1.30 p.m., daylight saving time. Further services will be held in St. John’s church, Towamensing. Interment will be made in Towamensing cemetery.
And there it is: 1067 Hazard Road, home of my mother’s grandfather Puriette Franklin Noll one year before the fire (now more commonly called Mauch Chunk Road). So I’ll add a picture of Puriette and his wife Elizabeth with my Mom eight years after the fire, at what the photo says is their Columbia Avenue home. Wow!
The oldest picture of of my mom, Liz, from 1931. Elizabeth “Lizzie” “Grammy” Williams Noll, Elizabeth Kleintop, Puerette “Puri” “Pappy” Noll. On porch of Columbia Ave. home, Palmerton, Pa.
Update May 2026
My wife pulled the teapot from our cabinet this weekend and suggested we didn’t need it because its lid was cracked. The miracle of superglue fixed that, 100-plus years after the fire.
Also, the modern magic of image AI suggests that the teapot probably hails from Arita (Saga Prefecture) or Seto (Aichi Prefecture) in Japan and was produced between the 1890s and 1930s: “These regions are globally famous for their cobalt-blue underglaze decoration on white porcelain.” There goes my earlier supposition that it might have been packed in anyone’s suitcase during a transatlantic voyage. Nice versions of these antiques go from $40-$80 on eBay.
My long-running blog over at http://quakerranter.org has been out of the loop for awhile. I don’t often have the time for long-form blogging. The style of classic blogging feels less immediate nowadays: Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, etc. are easier to post to and get more responses. The immediacy of the social networks provides mini ego boosts. The staff at the hospital where my daughter Laura was born last week invited me to bring my camera phone into the operating room to take pictures of the new one. The hospital had public wifi so it was just a click of a button to share it to Facebook. I was receiving my first rounds of aww’s and congratulations before my wife has even been stitched up.
But being an early blogger (starting nearly a decade before Facebook became an open network), I know that the most influential posts took months and even years to make a difference. It’s not very revolutionary to find out your friends are your friends, which is 90% of Facebook commentary. Personal change happena when you meet someone new; cultural change happens when you’re exposed to people whose ideas are new to you. On the internet that happens at two in the morning when you wonder whether anyone has made a connection between two ideas obsessing you – the unexpected results in a Google search can change how you understand the world. It can starts you down the path of a new self-identity. It doesn’t matter if the post is a couple of years old: what matters is that it’s speaking to the spiritual condition of that searcher.
I know this (and I’ve written about it before) but I still tend toward short social media posts. So I’m going to integrate my Google Plus account with my WordPress-powered blog at Quakerranter.org. I’m picking Google Plus because it’s where I’ve found myself writing the more thoughtful bits and pieces. A neat WordPress plug in called Google Plus Blog (link below) will help the integration.
Embedded Link
The Google+ musings of Daniel Treadwell Google+ Blog Concept — Daniel Treadwell. View your Google+ Posts in the form of a clean and simple blog. Also home of the Google+Blog WordPress plugin.
In just two decades, the world wide web has transformed and democratized access to information all around the world. I am proud of the role Google has played alongside many others such as Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Twitter. Whether you are a student in an internet cafe in the developing world or a head of state of a wealthy nation, the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips.
Of course, offering these services has come with its challenges. Multiple countries have sought to suppress the flow of information to serve their own political goals. At various times notable Google websites have been blocked in China, Iran, Libya (prior to their revolution), Tunisia (also prior to revolution), and others. For our own websites and for the internet as a whole we have worked tirelessly to combat internet censorship around the world alongside governments and NGO promoting free speech.
Thus, imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other but the United States. Two bills currently making their way through congress — SOPA and PIPA — give the US government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial). While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.
When I watch the Pepper Spray Copy video, Google shows ad “Become a Police Officer.” No, I don’t think we want to consider this a recruitment video.
