Just once, part 34

living sand dollar order Clypeasteroida beginning to bury itself
Another example of time just slipping away, because I remember the trip where I obtained this image, and would not have said that it was eight years ago (tomorrow, actually.) Then again, my beach trips have been scarce recently, ‘recently’ meaning, ‘in the past several years,’ so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Off the ocean side of the middle of Jekyll Island, Georgia, the calm beaches there played host to countless sand dollars (order Clypeasteroida,) able to be found by gently running your fingers just below the surface of the sand just offshore in shallow water, and we found plenty of them, of all sizes. I collected one in the macro aquarium that I’d thought to bring with me, and did a photo session in the bathroom of the motel late at night while everyone else was asleep. Unfortunately, the water hadn’t had the several hours needed to let the turbidity fully settle out, so the specimen goes softer with the greater amount of water between my camera and itself. It was still enough to see the tiny little ‘feet’ that it uses to bury itself in the sand, or alternately to stand upright (on edge) in the currents while feeding. These feet could also be felt moving gently within your hand if you held onto one for more than a minute or so.

What I find amusing is that, as familiar as we all are with the off-white skeletal remains of sand dollars, their appearance while living is what a child might imagine, based on the skeleton – just put a thin layer of flesh over it all and that’s what it looks like, right? And in this case, it is. Except perhaps for the color, which even I find a little odd – I definitely expected ‘sand,’ followed by brownish or something. Not olive.

I think we had two other trips to Jekyll planned since this was taken; one got canceled because of a hurricane, and the other we cut short after only a day because of another hurricane, only this one was aimed directly at our home in NC rather than at Jekyll, but we thought it would be better to be back there in case power got knocked out or the petsitter couldn’t get by. We did decide not to plan such trips for hurricane season from then on, though.

Sorting finds n+9

First off, I know it’s going to be hard to maintain posts for a few weeks, so they may become sparse, but they will be back up to normal after some stuff goes down – they might even increase in number. Well, I mean they always increase in number, because there’s only one or two posts that I’ve actually taken down, so the count keeps climbing. What I mean is, the average number of posts per week might increase a bit. But we’ll get to that later.

Right now, we’re back to posting a few images that I reminded myself of when doing the photo sort into their appropriate categories – I really haven’t been taking much, and most of what I have pursued has been sunspots, monitoring how they’re progressing. But there’s an outing scheduled for tomorrow, so we’ll see what that might produce.

The first three came from the beginning of the month, from the Science Museum of Virginia, one of those places that has a big vaulted rotunda that features a pendulum; I first saw this in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Given a free hinge, i.e., the ability to swing in any direction, a large pendulum will slowly change its direction of swing as the Earth rotates, eventually traveling through 360° provided the momentum is enough – precession, in other words. To demonstrate this, such pendulums are ringed with something to knock over periodically, to show that the direction is gradually changing – you should be able to predict roughly when one will get knocked over because it’s an increment of the length of the day. While I was there, I endeavored to try and capture the moment when it did so.

pendulum in Science Museum of Virginia causing pin to wobble
I realized, in watching, that the pins were slightly bottom-weighted on their hinges so it would take a solid strike to topple one, as this one wobbled but returned to upright. The pendulum took about ten seconds to do a full sweep, and I could see that there was a slightly oval component to its swing, because it would miss the pin notably to one side on the return swing.

pendulum in Science Museum of Virginia almost knocking pin over
Another pass, another wobble. The pattern of pins toppled were semi-consistent: here, they were facing in towards the center, but at one point they switched to facing outwards instead, indicating how the pendulum would topple them on the outward part of the sweep instead of inward. It was the same for both sides of the circle.

pendulum in Science Museum of Virginia finally knocking pin over
Success! After three passes where the pin righted itself, this time it went down. It took just a little patience and there was only so much time I was going to devote to this since I had other things I should have been doing, but it was much easier than, say, waiting for woodpeckers.

And finally,

newborn five-lined skink Plestiodon fasciatus basking on front steps
This was only a few days ago, and not the first that I’d seen it, but the first that I’d gotten a photo. This is a very young five-lined skink (Plestiodon fasciatus) basking on our front steps, and those bricks are standard size, about 50mm in width, to give you the scale. I honestly don’t know when it hatched, but it was only a week out where I could spot it anyway. It’s not far from where the anole had been found for a while, now mostly vacated – I went for a couple of weeks of not spotting it, worried that it had fallen prey to something, but then found it again a few days ago. Territorial battle? Can’t say, but it’s good to see the little guys anyway.

Shall we play a game?

I could easily have been doing this as installments over the past, like, year and a half, but if I’d started, the gods of fate probably would have caused it all to peter out quickly. So we’ll have a couple of posts now, after things have played out a bit.

Starting premise: my friend Dan Palmer started talking to me about a new playing card deck that he was creating, similar to one we’d worked on a decade before; he gets the concept down, but it’s up to me (if I choose to do so, which is of course a given,) to do the graphics work. Up front, it all seems simple, but the finer details soon reveal that a lot of thought has to go into things.

Gnomon deck PGC cardTo begin with, we needed background images which in essence were the three primary colors, Red, Green, and Blue, and ideally would be apparent what they were when examined, but not distracting and mostly just being a background color. Within these criteria, however, they could not clash with or disguise the symbols which would lay over top of them, also in those primary colors, which meant that whatever we chose for ‘Blue’ could not be too close to the 16-bit RGB value of 0,0,255, because the symbol would disappear against the background if this was too close. They also could not have any shapes within that might be mistaken for shapes of the symbols and thus make it confusing in any way what the card represented. This might seem like we’re being nit-picky, but it’s easy enough to glance too quickly at a card and make a mistake when you’re involved in playing a game. Not too long into the design process, we realized that the RGB value for Green (0,255,0) was actually too bright to be used, and switched to 20,217,20 instead. The background color decisions kicked back and forth for a short while, and in fact, we ended up switching the Red image after the first test printing of the deck.

Then came the fun of representing two characteristics of the card symbols. One set was Filled (solid,) Partial, and Hollow (outline,) and we played with Partial for a while before settling on a simple diagonal line pattern – easy to be told at a glance even at a distance, difficult to mistake for any other. Note, too, that each of the characteristics had to begin with a unique letter, because they would be represented by such in the card margins and, again, couldn’t be mistaken for any other.

Gnomon deck Triangle cardAlso needed were cards to represent shapes of the symbols without any color at all, trickier that it sounds at first. So, a grey Circle, right? No, because that appears to be a Filled Circle, or even a Hollow one, so we needed a circle without any internal pattern. Eventually, we settled on a curious gradient shadow around the outside of the shape, over top of a starfield background, kind of doubling down on the ‘void’ concept. Because I do things like this, the center of the starfield image is actually the ‘center’ of the Milky Way, or at least the direction that it lies in Sagittarius.

Worst of all were the images to represent True and False, and I’ve even posted about this before. To date, we still haven’t really settled on how to visually represent these without resorting to tired cliches, and without having any misleading shapes or colors in there. For instance, in the running were solar and lunar eclipse photos, but they’re both circular and, in the case of the lunar eclipse, red. At one point I found an image of a nearby tree during a heavy snowstorm and thought the opposite would be in full leaf in high summer (we’ll let you figure out which one would be True,) but searching through my image folders, I found I didn’t have any such matching shot. No problem – it was summer, so I’d go get it right away. Only the tree was dying now and looked terrible. Scratch that.

[What we’re using now is an abstract cloud shot, mostly yellow, and its monochrome counterpart – we have yet to find or create images that seem to indicate “True” and “False” on appearance alone, but that’s why the margins have it spelled out.]

back image of Gnomon playing card deckAmong all of this sits what every designer and commissioned artist has to accommodate: the desires of the client. I submitted countless images for just about every aspect before we settled on what’s in use now, generally starting off with three or four choices but, for some, this went on for a while. Specifically, the image for the card backs was a challenge, since it had to be abstract and non-oriented, not easy to mistake for any of the face images, and not dominated by any one color. Eventually we settled on a sunset clouds grab shot that I actually obtained one evening while the selection process was ongoing. “Green,” however, was intentional manipulation, since Dan is a big fan of ginkgos and I knew he wouldn’t reject that one.

There was one mistake that we made, somewhat unavoidable in the circumstances. We’d done an initial printing of a few decks, and even a couple of very large, demo decks. But then I changed the background image for Red, and it looked fine on both of our monitors, so we sent it off for a larger quantity printing right before the conference. Only to find that the printing wasn’t quite in agreement with what we saw onscreen, which happens fairly often – you should always have proofs done for print jobs, but we were getting these done online, overseas I believe, and there wasn’t time for a proof and then a large order. So the red symbols don’t stand out well enough against the red background – they’re visible, but the contrast is low enough that from a distance they’re far less distinct. Now, we have redundancies built right into the deck: the cards all have identifiers right in the margins as seen above, so gameplay is only slightly hampered, but they could have been better.

There’s still more to the saga (sordid story, tale of horror,) but that will wait for another post. Once again, you can go to the site that we set up for the deck, but it’s terrible right now – we needed it for the conference and didn’t have time to do a full treatment, and still don’t. But it will give you a good idea at least.

Just once, part 33

common loon Gavia immer cruising past at sunrise
This is one of the few images for this weekly topic that I uploaded, rather than using the images already uploaded from the previous appearance, because I was looking at the very faint pastel colors of the sunrise sky reflected in the water and thought, We need more emphasis on those. This is a common loon (Gavia immer,) taken less than a year ago during a trip to Beaufort, North Carolina (which is pronounced differently from the Beaufort in South Carolina, because.) This one very kindly swam out from its cover on the shoreline of the estuary and passed close by me, and I did my part in holding as still as possible while snapping off frames – this allowed it to swim even closer for more frames. Can I credit this to my experience at being unobtrusive, or simply that the loon wasn’t that concerned and might have done this for anybody? I couldn’t possibly say for sure, so I’ll go with my remarkable abilities.

Now, some years back I’d snagged a red-throated loon, but this was the first and so far only common loon, and I didn’t have the fortune to hear it calling, which is a great sound (unlike the loons you hear in singles bars and such.) I really have to work on getting more exposure to coastal and estuary kind of subjects…

I didn’t know

I went out yesterday morning when it was finally clear to take a shot at the Perseids meteors, as well as the aurora if it bothered to show. Same ol’ same ol’ – I saw a couple of small and brief meteors, and captured the barest streaks in images, but not at all worth the effort on either count. It did not help that the humidity was high and cutting down some of the ‘seeing’ for the evening.

But while out there, I watched a bright star rising over the lake, eventually realizing that it was a pair in close proximity, and pretty bright – they reflected well in the water while the air was still.

Mars and Jupiter in close proximity rising over Falls Lake
That’s the two of them center frame, while Pleiades is the cluster to the right (which I tended to keep in the frame, because I had it in my head this was the Pleiades storm and not the Perseids – that’s higher and to the left.) Later that day, I pulled up Stellarium to see what I’d been seeing and discovered that it was Jupiter and Mars in close conjunction – and that they would be in even closer conjunction this morning. How did I not hear about this?

But before we go, we’ll take a full resolution look at that frame.

full resolution inset of frame with Mars and Jupiter rising, and a very small meteor streak
Most of the streaks – the ones all going the same way – are simply because this was a 30-second exposure and that’s how far they move because of Earth’s rotation. But the other little streak that isn’t in sync is a meteor, one that I never saw and likely wouldn’t have even if I’d been looking right at it, since it was way too short.

So, yes, I did get out this morning and chase the pair again, this time when they were roughly a moon’s width apart in the sky (our moon, not any of the others.)

Mars and Jupiter in close conjunction, showing the four Jovian moons
That’s Mars at top, and Jupiter with (from bottom) Ganymede, Europa, Io, and Callisto attending. This is the best that I’m going to get with a 600mm lens, but at least it shows the proximity quite well.

I keep saying this and it keeps not happening (like how I said that as if it’s out of my control?) but I really need to get the telescope and tracking motor happening. About an hour from now, Io will be throwing its shadow across Jupiter’s face, right along the Great Red Spot, which would be a cool pic. But to get Jupiter big enough in the frame to see those details, it would be moving quite noticeably, and I’d have to counteract with the tracking motor to snag the exposure. One of these days…

Historical residents

I got these photos some time back – not quite a month ago, looking at the date stamps – and then set them aside when I was doing the image sorting some time after that, and am finally getting around to doing a post about them, now that I’ve seen no sign of either for a while, though admittedly I haven’t been looking closely. These were residents of one of the butterfly bushes (Buddleja davidii,) and might still be if I looked a lot closer, because they’re both great at remaining hidden.

crab spider Mecaphesa perched within blossoms of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
First up we have a variety of crab spider, and from BugGuide’s indicators, one of the 18 species of Genus Mecaphesa that we have in this country, which is as close as I’m getting. To the species name, anyway – I can get closer to crab spiders, and even handle them, anytime I want – I just don’t choose to. Despite the apparently aggressive stance, this is a typical pose for them, ready to immediately snag anything (of the appropriate size) that comes within reach to partake of the flowers. When actual danger threatens, they usually tuck in closer and slide around to the underside, or deeper within the crevices among the blossoms.

If you know your butterfly bushes, you know that the blossoms are somewhere around 8-10mm across, to give you the scale. This will come in handy later on.

crab spider Mecaphesa spread atop blossoms of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
Not long after a rain, my specimen was found perched high on the bloom spike, beseeching the heavens to stop – or to produce more rain, I’m not sure which. These are one of the species that sometimes makes itself apparent when we’ve been having hot, dry periods and I go around some of the choice plants with a misting sprayer – they’re not as exuberant about it as mantids, but they definitely come out to get some water.

crab spider Mecaphesa perched within blossoms of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
This was the image that I used to semi-confirm the Genus; you can see that the outer front eyes (anterior lateral) are a little larger than the middle (median) two, plus the spider is hairy, which most crab spiders are not. The other four eyes are out of sight from this angle, crowning in a crescent over top of the head and visible from above. The smoothly tapering nature of the pedipalps (those two little front ‘legs’ near the face) peg this as a female, since males will have club-shaped palps. I never saw this one with any prey while I was passing, but it would be easy enough to have something smaller and I’d never notice it unless I was right on top of them.

And now the other resident, sitting only a few bloom spikes away.

jagged ambush bug Phymata hiding among butterfly bush Buddleja davidii blossoms
It’s a shame these guys are so small and hard to light, since their detail is amazing. This is a variety of jagged ambush bug (Genus Phymata,) and they also adore the butterfly bushes, but are often twice as hard to spot. Their exoskeleton always puts me in mind of the classic Samurai illustrations, and while they tend to avoid me when I lean in close, they’re pretty confident when going after prey – that’s probably where the name comes from.

head-on shot of jagged ambush bug Phymata behind blossom of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
This is a slightly better view, but also check the blossom that it’s hiding behind – the overall length of the arthropod doesn’t exceed 10mm, and this one was slowly sidling out of view every time I tried for a better angle. The macro softbox rig is on a flex-arm and quite adjustable for light angle, but this doesn’t mean that other branches of the same bush won’t be preventing me from achieving the angle that works best, and even bumping them can cause a subject to panic and go for cover. I have a lot of shots (well, I mean, I throw them out) where another branch threw a shadow across my subject.

jagged ambush bug Phymata sheltering under blossom of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii while showing adhering raindrops
Perhaps the best lighting angle, because it shows the knobbiness of the chitin as well as some adhering raindrops, though the detail of the legs, pincers, and proboscis aren’t adequate. If you look closely, there’s a ‘smiley face’ on the foreleg that marks the serrated edges of their viselike pincers – you get a much better view here.

The flowers of butterfly bushes don’t last very long – about a week or so – and while they come into bloom at different times, it’s only about two weeks before the entire spike is dead and brown and not attracting any food for these guys. I watched the ambush bug here work its way up to hiding out among the only two faintly-living blossoms at the tip of a brown cluseter, not in a hurry to abandon the spike, and missed my opportunity for a shot then. The next day it was gone, and I have to paint this picture, since on this bush, the branches are all long and decently separated, so the ambush bug had quite a trek down the stem to another branch and back up to the end where the blossoms are – I looked, but could not find it either on a new spike or making progress to one. The crab spiders have it much easier: they can simply cast a webline in a faint breeze and take a shortcut across between blossom clusters, with the added benefit that they can see which spikes look the most promising. For the ambush bugs, they’re making the choice way down at the base of a fork, likely unable to see which branch is going to produce new blooms soon. Maybe they have some method of telling otherwise? You got me. As adults, they will have wings, but it’s also likely that at that time they’re not pursuing prey anymore, interested only in reproduction like many arthropods, and so the advantage of wings wouldn’t be for choosing a nice ambush spot.

But for these reasons, when I’m deadheading the butterfly bushes, I always drop the cut off dead blossoms into the pot at the base of the same plant, so if I do inadvertently cut a blossom where a spider or ambush bug (or anything else, really) is hiding, they’re still within reach of their chosen feeding locations.

I was a teenage sun

I had a small change I wanted to make to the solar filter holder that I’d created, and it required 3D printing a new part – so of course, the printer started printing very undependably and in a weird manner, and it took me no small amount of time to find it and fix it. Once I’d done so and finally got the new part printed and ready, the sun viewing conditions went to crap.

So finally, this afternoon, there were some breaks in the clouds and I made the attempt.

sun breaking through clouds seen through solar filter, with some sunspots beginning to be visible
It should be said that, naturally, just about the entire sky was devoid of clouds except for right where the sun was – and those were quite slow-moving. But it was better than this morning’s overcast, and complete openings did slide past from time to time. I finally got some unobscured images of the sun’s face.

sun through solar filter showing numerous sunspots of varying sizes
That’s… a lot of sunspots; Over a dozen active regions, when seen in high resolution. Sunspots are indications of heightened coronal activity, which produces solar arcs and prominences (which I’m not going to capture without some very specialized and expensive filters,) as well as the charged particles that produce the Aurora Borealis and Australis. This explains why I’ve been getting aurora alerts on my phone for the past several days, even when they didn’t look likely to reach down to these latitudes. Tonight, however, might be different. Plus we’re still in the Pleiades active period.

I feel obligated to tell you that I named the above image, “Clearasol.” You can’t compete and you know it.

Scattered, with total disregard

I think these are the last of the random images, though I still have a collection of thematic pics from before the trip, but I’ve been involved in other things right now and have been neglecting my sworn duties to provide content that no one reads, so we’re gonna have this and be thankful. Right?

solar halo from cirrus ice crystals
When down at the lake one day, not even sure which right now, I glanced up and realized that the conditions had provided for a distinct solar halo. These are semi-common, just often going unnoticed because what kind of idiot stares into the sun? They’re formed from high-altitude ice crystals, typically in cirrus clouds as seen here, somewhere between five and ten kilometers (16,000-32,000 feet – rough conversion for convenience, don’t waste your time.) They’re often called 22° halos because that’s how wide they span, refracting through the ice much like rainbows do, with one principle difference: rainbows appear opposite the sun, since the light reflects from the curved back surface of the water drops after passing through, and gets refracted on the way back out, while sun halos surround the sun (from our perspective, anyway) because of ice crystals that allow the light to pass through them while still refracting it into a prism. This becomes a little more obvious with some tweaking.

sun halo with heightened contrast to display refracted colors better
Boosting contrast hugely brings out the colors that I could see faintly but washed out in the initial exposure settings. It also brought out some prismatic colors from the spikes around the sun itself, but I feel confident saying this was a lens effect rather than atmospheric, possibly even meaning I was due for a lens cleaning.

This is a simple example, and the more common types are sundogs, which can be spotted often. But such halo effects can be pretty elaborate in the right conditions.

Just once, part 32

black-capped squirrel monkey Saimiri boliviensis requesting a gift of a film can
First, a bit of trivial nonsense (like this is somehow different from the rest of the content.) When creating these ‘Just Once’ posts, I used to determine what photo to look for in the thousands that exist in the blog library alone by right-clicking to download and seeing what name it wanted to save as; this is now impossible since I disabled right-clicking at the server level. I could always go back into the folders for 2017, when this first appeared, and skim through the only-hundreds of images therein, but I’m lazy, plus I had some ideas. So I simply put a few terms into the media library search field within the blog admin pages themselves. The first was, naturally, “squirrel,” since you undoubtedly recognized this as a black-capped squirrel monkey (Saimiri boliviensis,) but that did not turn up this image. Then I tried “beseech,” since I vaguely remembered using that to describe the actions of the monkey, but that didn’t work either. Then I tried, “please,” which pulled up the photo, since it’s titled, “PleaseSah.jpg.” I’m lousy at remembering people’s names, but I can dredge up shit like that.

Anyway, this squirrel monkey was in the Brevard Zoo in north Melbourne, Florida, sometime in 1999. This was back in the days of film and I was switching out rolls when the monkey spotted the film can and desperately wanted it, seeming to recognize it. I did not offer the can, but took advantage of the pose, perhaps rather crassly. Nowadays, this image puts me in mind of someone running for office from prison, don’t ask me why…

There’s something odd that occurred to me as I considered this photo for the post, and I’m not sure if it’s only me. Smaller primates like this don’t stir much ‘social recognition’ or ‘fellow feelings,’ despite being a primate that’s closer to us than most other animals; they don’t look much like us or even act in such ways, unlike gorillas and chimpanzees for instance. But we (or I, at least) get stronger feelings of such ‘communication’ and even ‘family’ from cats, and I’m sure others do for dogs, despite the fact that they’re very much different from us in appearance and behavior and have far less recognizable expressions, much further than the monkeys. Is this because we’re so used to domestic animals and have conditioned ourselves to their traits, or is it because the monkeys behave too radically, often hyperactive and a bit manic? Or is it a variation of the ‘uncanny valley‘ effect, where ‘close but not close enough’ makes us distinctly uncomfortable? There’s a paper in there somewhere, at least if I’m not the only one, but it probably should be written by someone edumacated…

Zero for five

For the past several days, I’ve been far, far away (well, about 150 minutes anyway,) attending a conference, something that’s been building for a while now. I do have to say, it went quite well, and if things go as hoped, this is only the start.

I’ve hinted at this before, and intend to go into it in detail in a few posts (from my own perspective, of course,) but the gist of it is, my friend Dan Palmer created a new playing card deck, and I was enlisted to do the graphics end of it, contributing snarky comments, rejected names, and bothersome questions pro bono. Along the way, Dan wrote a paper on the physics of the deck and submitted it for consideration of the Bridges 2024 Conference on mathematical connections in art, music, architecture, and culture, for which it was accepted and he was invited to give a short presentation there. I was invited along even though I’m inept on all five counts – I think I was the court jester or something.

The comments on the paper were distinctly encouraging, and the subsequent presentation on it went over quite well. The follow-up to this was having a table at the conference’s Family Day at the Science Museum of Virginia, right in the opening rotunda, which meant lots of people going past to see what was happening, and more than a few stopping by (and playing a round!) out of interest. Out of the four-hour session therein, there were only three periods when no one was at the table, and all of them lasted less than five minutes. Not only that, but we had people of all ages there – Dan has several games already developed for the deck and they range in difficulty and, most especially, between cooperative and competitive aspects. We have a basic website for it that we made sure we had available for the conference, and this can be found here – it’s terrible right now due mostly to time constraints, but it will be changing rapidly.

We weren’t really set up to do this properly, but we did get an offhand video of Dan’s presentation, which he has graciously allowed to be public, so I include it here – it’s only ten minutes, but it goes into how the relationships of the new deck work. Dan, literally, was working on new games overnight while we were at this conference, because that’s Dan.

The Mathematics and Design of a New Deck of Playing Cards from Al Denelsbeck on Vimeo.

We have to give credit to the organizers of the conference, which had widely varied subjects and presentations, along with some fantastic art, and ensured that everything went extremely well despite Richmond’s attempts to discourage car travel. We also have to thank all of the volunteers that showed for Family Day, including the two that assisted us, Noelle and Charlie (I hope I have those spelled right – I didn’t think to check.)

More will be along – we’re going in several directions right now, above and beyond our regular pursuits, so they’ll sneak in here and there – but the response so far has been gratifying. And if you want to know more, you know how to reach me.

Dan Palmer and Al Denelsbeck at Family Day of the Bridges 2024 Conference, Richmond, Virginia
Dan Palmer (front, dark blue) and Al Denelsbeck (standing back) at the Family Day table for the Bridges 2024 Conference at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond; Glenn Hurlbert, one of the Chairs and organizers of the conference this year, is seated in the foreground in black.
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