Eye eye, Captain!


Aw, c’mon! Some titles you can’t resist!

This jumping spider (genus Phidippus, perhaps a Phidippus audax) produced a great pose while I was working with it, appearing to salute with its pedipalp, or maybe shield its eyes form the sun. In reality, it was cleaning its eyes, perhaps trying to wipe away the spots in its vision from my strobes going off right in its face. read more

Yeah, on the bandwagon

Just in case you haven’t already come across enough recaps of the Reason Rally, I’m going to succumb shamelessly to the fad and feature a few of them myself, vicariously through several people who were able to attend. While I want to get these out of the way before recaps of Rock Beyond Belief come rolling out, I also greatly admire the various perspectives evident in the Rally.

One thing read more

Turn ’em off

I feel bad about this, because I think I should be more in the loop, but this really is the first I’ve heard about it. “Earth Hour” is tonight, between 8:30 and 9:30 PM. As a show of support for energy efficiency and easing our reliance on limited resources, people across the world are shutting down as many electrical appliances as possible for an hour tonight.

read more

Personal god

Walkabout podcast – Personal god

I am, if nothing else, a fan of perspective. One of the greatest benefits of critical thinking is that it can often encourage people to take stock of a situation, compare it against other experiences, and most especially, to see where a common attitude can lead us to fall for unwarranted assumptions or misleading values. So I’m slightly irked in that read more

If you can read this…

First off, your assignment for today: read the post found at The Diamond In The Window – it shouldn’t take five minutes. I’ll wait here and chase the cat off the keyboard.

oiuc3uvcdugfybel,,l

Done? Good. That was a great example of how too many school systems within the US have completely lost sight of their goals, and most especially, a demonstration of the issues with “teaching read more

Not quite over it yet


I know this is a poor showing for National Wildlife Week, but hey, I think every week is National Wildlife Week, so chill. I been busy.

Anyway, in poking around today after staging a few shots for a presentation, I came across this little lovely, in a very typical place for such: on a rock, in a cranny sheltered by a clump of leaves. This is a southern black widow (Lactrodectus read more

But that’s different!

To everyone reading this right now, kindly send me your Social Security number. I am a taxpayer, and I help pay to support this program, so you need to send it to me so that I may confirm that your own contributions are in order. I have no intention of carrying more than my share of the burden while you remain off of the grid, shrouded in privacy.

I also need to know what car you drive read more

Macro photography, part three

I threatened earlier to return to this if you weren’t good, so you only have yourself to blame, but herewith, a quick tutorial on a method of macro photography called dark field photography.

Most times, this is used with microscopic subjects, which technically isn’t macro photography but photomicrography instead. The essence is, the visible background of the image is dark, yet the subject read more

1 283 284 285 286 287 319