Stumbled upon this one while visiting the nearby river:
I had teachers that used to look at me with the exact same expression.
The same baleful, striped yellow eyes too…
Author: Al Denelsbeck
I have my reasons
While this is a bit of pointless personal information that really isn’t going to change anything, I feel the need to make the statement in the face of rather obsessive popularity among the public at large (it is a blog, after all,) and so: I really don’t like cell phones.
Some of this is personal, I admit it. And some of it is because I tend to look at things critically, especially those
Just because, part 12
Just a pic from today that I liked. I took a few minutes to check out how the colors were advancing, but the thin overcast conditions weren’t going to bring them out very well. In this case, the muted light seemed appropriate for the subject, letting the greys come through. I kind of like the way the main plant came out in the crisp tones of well done B&W work, while the rest of the image
Happy Halloween, again
Yes, I have to do this:
This is actually the first specimen I’ve found this year, which was a slight frustration since there was a particular image that I wanted and couldn’t find a model. Just in case it wasn’t immediately apparent, this is a southern black widow, Latrodectus mactans, distinguished from the northern variant (we have both here) by the lack
So, why should we bother?
In a previous post detailing the difficulties and uncertainties of tracing our hominid ancestors, I kind of led up to a question, expressed now in this post: Why should we bother? It’s a lot of effort to determine something that happened in the past, which is highly unlikely to have much
A matter of timing
I’ve been watching the autumn colors developing slowly, wondering what this year’s conditions are going to be like. The pursuit of “peak colors” is a routine activity for anyone who chases landscape images, and some photographers and painters are quite dedicated to it, ensuring that they’re in a prime location in time to see the best displays. I’m
You can call me Al
Over at the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has an article on the difficulties of pinning down hominid species, which illustrates an interesting perspective in biology, but is unfortunately a little too brief. There are a couple of factors at play, and no easy way to resolve them.
The very first thing to bear in mind is that ‘species’ is an arbitrary distinction in many ways. The word was
My bad this time
If you’ve had trouble getting in, or receive a new post that you saw two days ago, I’m here to take the blame. In trying to correct some stupid error message coming up since the last round of upgrades (that did not disappear when I rolled back,) I messed up some stuff and had to restore from a backup file. So a post I made two days ago is about to reappear.
Meanwhile, if you get some
Quick spider fix
I was about to pick up a plastic storage bin out in the yard today when I noticed a little crab spider perched on it, so naturally I went to get the camera. He (yes it’s a male) was amusing himself by trying to balloon away, casting a webline into the wind until it was carried off, whereupon
Happy Halloween
The weather has been spastic as all git-out, and I’ve actually postponed meetings with a couple of students because it’s been raining frequently and unpredictably, despite many meteorologist’s claims otherwise. Yesterday as the weather cleared I got out to a park that I don’t visit too often, having left early to beat the rush hour traffic, and had some time