U3A thrives

Two in a row

We had two U3A events that were interesting within 24 hours this week.

Thursday afternoon our monthly general meeting met as usual in the Sportfishing Club rooms at the Port. There were about 100 there; total membership is 230 and growing all the time.

Speaker this month was our friend Roger Hanson, who writes a weekly column in the Daily News on Science. He was talking about the evolutionary connection between fishes and humans.

We watched, among other interesting things, a video from a BBC TV programme of a baby's face developing in its mother's womb. At one stage, as the three parts of the face came together, it looked just like a fish, and then it gradually moved together to become a perfect baby.

From my point of view it was fascinating, because you could see exactly how a cleft palate and lip condition is caused by the failure to reach quite the final stage of this process.

Among other videos was one showing the way the continents had shifted through plate tectonics through the geological record back as far as 500 million years.

Roger's key points were that the breakdown of proteins in our bodies occurs so quickly that the repair process has to move rapidly to keep up, and that ultimately our systems fail to keep pace - a process we know as ageing.

He explained that in order to repair the worn proteins quickly enough, we need to have a clear set of instructions (DNA), and an efficient method of obtaining energy and raw materials for the repairs, through our food intake and digestive systems.

Given the slight variations in proteins caused by mutations in the DNA, some individuals have slight advantages over others in this repair process, and so have a better chance of survival and reproduction.

This is what drives the evolutionary process. I don't think I have ever had such a clear explanation presented to me - it was great; the audience was fascinated.

 

 

Sketching

Then, the next morning, we had the first real meeting of our Sketching Group for the year. The weather was bad, with intermittent rain, so we had to be inside. We met here in our lounge, seven of us, and  had a look at a book about Pencil Sketching by a former professor of Architecture at universities in the US, Thomas Wang, originally published in 1973.

The book is presented very simply and clearly, with copious pencil illustrations of what he is saying. It has lots of helpful hints and pointers towards starting to grasp some basic techniques. I had had several copies run off.

We looked at a page about how to create a line-drawing that depicted a building or a landscape so that the basic shape is clear, the foreground is distinguished from the background (and the middle ground too), and different planes are distinguished from each other.

I had selected a photo of a roadside pub in a village in Cornwall which, unlike lots of travel shots, shows the building from an angle and gives quite a sharply contrasted perspective. It had the advantage of having highly contrasting colours of white and nearly black, which meant it was relatively easy to ignore the problem of colour.

We all had a shot at sketching it. Everybody produced a creditable representation. It was a successful session and there was much enthusiasm for the next meeting in a fortnight; we are getting together at the Pukekura Park Kiosk. And they all wanted to buy their copy of the book!