While I had been planning to put this post up soon, Dr. Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution Is True beat me to it with his own post about snakes, but his includes some great video, including a stunning sequence of an egg-eating snake! I hate it when someone on my blogroll to the right upstages
Author: Al Denelsbeck
This is not satire
That’s the frightening thing: it really isn’t satire, since it’s far too accurate. We’ve had a long run of stupendously ignorant politicians recently, and it’s really shameful.
I don’t do much about politics, because I really don’t have the patience for it. This is one of my vices while I spend no small amount of time promoting critical
Things change
Just a few posts ago, I featured some yellowjackets working on their underground nest. Today, I discovered I was not the only one who had found them.
Sometime in the last few days, something had dug up the opening into the nest and removed several large portions of comb, leaving them strewn about the ground nearby. It was a bit curious, because the excavation wasn’t
Get back to me with Phase Two
Like many pursuits and interests, critical thinking involves a subset of information, discussions, and approaches, many of which don’t capture the attention of those who aren’t interested in critical thinking. I’m well aware of this, so often you’ll see me break the blog posts up with the “Continue Reading” tag, so that no one is forced to read a topic that doesn’t
Can you see the light?
From time to time, I play around with infra-red photography, because it can produce some really cool effects, and also because there are ways to make it relatively easy. An old digital camera of mine, the Canon Pro90 IS, can not only capture infra-red light, it can focus it and calculate exposure reasonably as well. All that’s
Do you want to know why?
In the same discussion I mentioned a few posts back, a particular quote from Christopher Hitchens came up, which was basically, “Religion poisons everything.” This kind of statement is fairly hard for many people to accept, and it is often treated as hyperbole, senseless exaggeration to make the case seem stronger. But I maintain
More from the neighbors
Early this evening, as I spoke on the telephone while standing on my upstairs patio, a “conversation” from the trees across the driveway drew my attention, and I cut the call short. While I couldn’t see anything, some very soft “wheet-a wheet-a” sounds were emanating from quite close by. Naturally, I grabbed the camera and started tracking
Frustrations, part four
So this afternoon, noticing the massive activity at a yellowjacket’s burrow in my yard, I decided to try and get some nice close shots of their work. That would be called, “foreshadowing,” in English Lit classes, wouldn’t it? Ah, not in the way that you’re thinking…
Eastern Yellowjackets (Vespula maculifrons) are generally ground-nesting wasps,
Disrespect my authoritah!
In a discussion on religion a short while back, I got to hear one of the more amusing arguments that has been forwarded frequently, apparently (somehow) in favor of religion: that atheism is simply a rebellion against authority. This argument has so many levels to it that I figured it deserved its own post.
On composition, part five: It’s the law!
Yes, I know, I just did a composition post. But the last one got me to thinking, and this one is more than simply composition. Bear with me.
The compositional guideline in photography that everyone learns quickly is the Rule of Thirds. Simply put, and illustrated above, you break the frame into thirds, a tic-tac-toe board, and then place your key elements on the lines, or for preference, on the intersection