I know, I know, that’s not a caterpillar. Earlier today Yesterday [I have to stop doing these so late at night, or start ignoring the midnight change] I had checked on the green lynx spider young’uns, which are surprisingly
Author: Al Denelsbeck
The Street Cafe at the End of the Universe
Just a throwaway post for the time being – there are other things in the works but they’re not done yet.
Many years ago, a friend and I tried an idle challenge to create a soundtrack for a (then nonexistent) movie based on a book we both knew – the idea was to create the soundtrack, then play it and let the other guess the book from the progression of music. This was before the
Seeing is believing. But not necessarily true
Perspective, in the usage of considering some topic from a different standpoint than originally, is a great thing, and something I play with a lot on this blog. In the usage of how things appear to us visually, based on our position, it’s a useful thing to play with in photography as well. But sometimes, it’s hard to override our mental perspective to recognize the visual one.
Crepuscular
Suppressed
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…
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