In earlier posts I have tackled, I think, all of the aspects about to appear within this one, but I think it’s worth having them here in one collection, under a heading which makes it easier to find. On top of that, the argument is a common one, and probably cannot be answered often enough. Sooner or later, every atheist is challenged to address all of the benefits of religion
Author: Al Denelsbeck
Not spiders
You know, if I’m telling you in the title that spiders will not be found in this post, that only means some following post is not going to be good for arachnophobes…
Since the move, I’ve been taking the opportunity on occasion to scope out the new area, trying to determine what kind of decent shooting locales can be found nearby. One stroke of luck is a large pond, close and easy
Too cool, part 23
Here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, we celebrate our independence from our former British overlords (permitting us rampant handgun crime and overpriced healthcare) by viewing huge displays of fireworks, as well as stealthily setting off our own illegal versions while drunk as hell. Yes, it sounds like a cliché, and it’s also perfectly true.
Unlike my current residence of
The long-awaited mantis update
Posting is still slow – I’m finding a lot of my time taken up with other things, boring things from a blogging perspective – but I’m trying to keep up with images at the same time. There will be another post featuring various arthropods coming shortly, but for now I’m going to focus on just one.
One of the many mantises that had inhabited the Japanese maple has now switched
It’s just to illustrate, honest
A few posts back I talked about a cool lens effect, where defocusing a subject far enough could make it virtually disappear. Yesterday, I captured an image that illustrates it even better. That’s really the whole purpose of this post. It’s not to creep people out or anything.
Your
On composition, part 22: Distortion
A fundamental part of photography is focusing light onto the recording medium, be it film, digital sensor, or even our own retinas. And the method used for doing this the vast majority of the time is a lens, a transparent substance with a certain index of refraction – the trait of bending light when it passes through the surface of the substance. Put the right correct surface angle
Fighting with abstracts
This one’s going to be a little bit weird. I mean, more so than usual. It started as just an offhand comment, but grew into a strange bit of philosophical inspection.
I recently read, yet again, the journalistic cliché about someone “beating the odds.” Which is complete nonsense. No one ever beats the odds, though they might fall right in line with the odds in a favorable way –
Repost: You don’t look a day over eighty
This is cheating, I know, and especially lazy when the posts have been so thin lately. I could have just linked to it while providing new content, but I find the original from last year to be pretty complete. Plus I’m not sure who actually follows links…
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So not only is today the summer solstice, but also World Humanist Day – which is, admittedly, an odd
The depths of your eyes
Yeah, that title’s fairly similar to a post from about a year ago, but the difference is significant. That one was about a fly with a maze-like pattern in its eyes (thus, “lost,” get it?) while this one really does involve depth. I spend hours on these titles…
Anyone who’s had a close enough encounter with a praying mantis knows about the false pupil, even if they haven’t
Other ways of getting the results you want
Every once in a while, you will get to hear the phrase, “other ways of knowing” – almost invariably, it will be in defense of some topic that is sorely lacking in demonstrable evidence or repeatable results. But this doesn’t matter, because science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, since there are other ways of knowing. While, not surprisingly,