Walkabout

Just a brief mention of two items that may be of interest. The first is, I created a webpage about understanding the aperture within your camera – what it is, how it works, what it does for your photos, and so on. Lavishly illustrated and a nonstop rollercoaster ride from start to finish, it can [...]

Unfortunately, I don’t use this blog to demonstrate composition in nature photography as often as I should, and instead you get illustrative, detail, or portrait-style images. I do a little of everything: illustrations and identifying details are important for many uses, but it never hurts to have a well-composed image as well. So now I’ll [...]

Anyone who has ever spent time in a discussion about religion and lack thereof, or even about the value of the scientific approach, has come up against the argument of “meaning.” “But if we live in a random, uncaused universe,” comes the plaintive cry, “then life has no meaning.” This is a curious statement. After [...]

All right, I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while now, and since it’s come up again in my personal life, I think it’s about time. Very frequently, when I’ve been present on blogs and forums debating about the existence of one thing or another, a common proverb is set forth: “Absence of [...]

What follows is my extra special beef rib recipe, because the subject came up on the Bad Astronomy blog. Bear in mind that I cook by eye, so these measurements are approximations and, should anything seem too much for you, adjust as you see fit. I don’t tend to write things like this down. This [...]

Some days back, I made an offhand note about trying to get some lightning pics, and decided the revisit the subject (and springboard from it) for a new post. Lest I give you the wrong impression, no, the image above isn’t recent, but actually a composite of two frames, taken minutes apart, from Florida a [...]

I treated the idea of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy in three parts earlier, starting here. But something that I kind of blew past is the idea that we have already been contacted – let’s face it, a lot of people can argue that this really is the case. So, I’m [...]

Yeah, I’m still at it – there are links where you can find Part One and Part Two of this extended essay to catch up or keep continuity. Meanwhile, I’ll keep going with the idea, which basically is, what are the chances of us contacting intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy? This time, I talk [...]

This continues a rather long-winded essay on my part. In Part One, I talked about the idea of extra-terrestrial life from the standpoint of cosmology, the planetary conditions that might be needed to produce it. In that post, I went out on a speculative limb, always a dangerous thing from the uneducated. Here, I’m going [...]

I’m warning you ahead of time, this is going to be long, as evidenced by the “Part One” bit above, but hopefully it’ll be interesting as well. I’ll do my best. One of the staple topics of all-night bull sessions, and not just in college dorm rooms, is the concept of intelligent life elsewhere in [...]