July’s abstract


Yeah, now I’m feeling obligated

This one’s from not quite a week ago, an earlier morning outing. The sun had finally broken through the foliage and was attempting to burn off the overnight dew that had been surviving in the shade. In the brief time slot where the light was hitting it, before it evaporated within a couple of minutes, I played around with short depth images at f4, read more

Occam’s stubble

There is a concept, a meme if you will, that shows up a lot in critical-thinking circles, and I’ve even tackled it a few times before here. Commonly known as “Occam’s Razor” but also by the less folksy term of parsimony, it provides a very simple measuring stick: if multiple explanations can be advanced for any given facts or events, the simplest read more

Hey! I just saw a UFO!

Well, very briefly, anyway. Almost as soon as I got the binoculars on it, it became Identified.

Here’s the whole, sordid story. The Girlfriend was outside at roughly 10:25 pm EDT chatting with a neighbor when they saw the light in the sky, and came in to summon me, telling me to get the binoculars. By the time I came out it had disappeared, but I got specific location and directions from them read more

Let’s check back with the mantids

Gosh, it’s been, what, six whole hours since I’ve posted anything about the resident mantids? I cannot apologize enough – I know how you must feel.

Okay, it’s been a bit longer than that, and in fact, this first image was taken nine days ago and not posted then. [See what I did there? I prefaced with hyperbole and followed with a contrasting statement, and now another read more

Look to the skies

Just a quick note along a neglected blog topic, but the next few nights will host two meteor showers: the Delta Aquarids for tonight and tomorrow night, and the Capricornids for tomorrow and Thursday. Since discontinuing the blog calendar, I moved some of the events over to my personal calendar as a reminder to post reminders.

While I have witnessed countless meteor showers, I have photographs of read more

Just some recent ones


While I have a handful of photos from the past week or so, there isn’t a whole lot to say about them, so I’m mostly just going to throw them up here without a lot of exposition. Right at the moment, I have not identified the dragonfly above, which was hanging around the front garden for a few days being cooperative and photogenic, but I do have to draw attention to the read more

Monday color 25

So, for this Monday color we have an image that’s faintly unsettling to me. Not for any peculiar associations I have with the Digitalis family (though in truth we haven’t gotten along since that incident at the airport,) but because the color seems off, and not able to be corrected in any way. It has the appearance of something that had originally been shot in monochrome, like read more

Just some morning pics

Most of the time recently, the skies are so clear at sunrise that they’re boring, lacking in rich colors and clouds to throw some textures into the mix. But this morning looked like it was going to be different, so I trotted over to the pond to see what would develop as the sun came into view. While the sky did not quite produce the qualities that I was hoping for, I received the cooperation read more

Monday color 24


For today’s Monday color we rely on a recent image, taken the same night as the photos from this post when I was playing with the ultra-violet flashlight. For reasons unknown, this dead leaf was fluorescing in weak red at select patches (the purplish-blue being the visible light emitted by the UV LEDs.) Probably evidence that aliens had landed there.

Facing the grim reality

You know, there comes a time in everyone’s life when they realize something that they’ve denied up until that point, some ugly facet of themselves that they really never wanted to believe was true. Sure, they might even joke about it, make an admission in a self-deprecating way before someone else does, but they never quite believed it even then. And since that’s what a blog’s read more

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