Sunday slide 9

Al Denelsbeck

First off, the backstory, because it leads into the image better.

I think it was 1999. I was touring Florida on one of my photo trips, and working my way back north along the Atlantic coast, having gone down on the Gulf side. Sitting in my motel room one evening, I was determined to make one more significant stop someplace before wrapping the trip up, but didn’t have any good ideas. I was a member of the NC Zoo at that point and thus of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which provided reciprocal discounts at various aquariums and zoos across the country. I had thoughtfully kept the member list in my wallet with the card, and took it out to see what might be nearby. Just names were listed, not cities, and when I came across “Brevard Zoo,” I was delighted to discover that I was spending the night just south of the county, and the zoo itself was perhaps fifty kilometers away, about a half-hour drive directly up the interstate. Kind of a no-brainer at that point.

It wasn’t a large zoo, but it had a wide variety of geographical areas covered, and some quite interesting species – I was especially fond of the tapirs, which excitedly accepted some bananas from a keeper as she sprayed them with insect repellent, but I was also pleased to see capybaras for the first time. Look both of these up if you’re not familiar with them because they’re cool.

Standing alone under an overhang of grapevines, if I remember right, I was looking with chagrin at the enclosure of the black-capped squirrel monkeys (Saimiri boliviensis) from behind a barrier. The wire of the cages was too prominent, and squirrel monkeys too “handsy” to let people get within reach, so I wasn’t able to do the typical trick of getting right up against the cage and either shooting a tightly-cropped version that avoided the wires, or fuzzing them almost to obscurity with a short depth of field. I resigned myself to not being able to get anything useful from a stock photo standpoint – it would be too obviously a zoo shot.

When I was switching to a new roll of slide film and was juggling the film can, one of the monkeys became captivated by this sight, and seemed quite familiar with the object in my grasp. Stretching out from the front of the cage, the primate beseeched me, soundlessly, to hand over the film can:

black-capped squirrel monkey Saimiri boliviensis requesting a gift of a film can
I toyed briefly with the idea of tossing an empty can to the monkey, sure that it couldn’t get it through the wires even if it did successfully catch it, but I was also sure that it could manage to get into other mischief with it, even if only intense agitation when the can couldn’t be pulled through the wire. Also, zoos tend to frown on that kind of thing (with good reason.) But of course I snapped a few frames, with the flash producing an intense sparkle from the eyes that only seems to enhance the proffered handshake. It’s always bad news to shake any hand extended through a barrier.

Two little items of trivia. The souvenir sea turtle shirt that I purchased in the gift shop remained my favorite for better than a decade, becoming The Girlfriend’s favorite once she laid eyes on it some years afterward – I still have it but it’s not really in condition to wear now, and we’ve searched in vain for a new one. More interesting, however, was that when I lived in Florida from 2002 to 2005, I lived in Brevard County, but never got the chance to visit the zoo again, one of my bigger regrets. And I’ve been saving my film cans too.

Friday color

Al Denelsbeck

Yeah, I could have had this up sooner, but let’s be real: there aren’t that many people checking in routinely to see what’s being posted anyway.

possibly cherry blossoms, I don't know, white against a blue sky, okay?
The Girlfriend tells me these are cherry blossoms, so we’ll go with that since I’m not knowledgeable enough to tell otherwise. They’re the first of the trees in bloom in the immediate area, and everyone feels this is pretty early, rivaling the daffodils. But it was nice out today and I managed to do a few shots here and there, even though overall it’s still wintry-looking; the almond tree in the yard is just starting to bud, and the rose bush is kicking out a good number of leaves, but nearly everything else still looks bare.

The Canada geese (Branta canadensis) were cavorting in apparent recognition of the unseasonably warm weather.

Canada geese Branta canadensis splashing about
This looks like a composite even to me, but it’s simply one frame where several geese just happened to act at once. There was a lot of activity going on, short take-off runs only to plunge back into the water 20 meters away, sometimes disappearing entirely under the water. Maybe there were some localized gravity fluctuations happening…

Okay, more than a few

Al Denelsbeck

For the Sunday slide entry two weeks ago, I mentioned that I might be back “in a few days” to elaborate on another aspect of the shot. I figure I might as well bring it up now before the original gets pushed below the ten post limit I set for the main page.

The image had originally appeared to illustrate a “middle of nowhere” post some years back, which I think it does nicely. So much of photography, however, is just as much about what you don’t show as what you do, and in this case, the viewer has no impression that a high-rise resort hotel sat only a few hundred meters behind where I was standing for the shot. Granted, it was down at the end of the road on the barrier island, the last little bit of ‘civilization’ before empty dunes and marshes, but this was Wrightsville Beach east of Wilmington, NC, which is much more developed than I prefer, and certainly more than the photo indicates. If you like, this link will take you right there if you have Google Earth installed, or you can enter “34.237377 N 77.776623 W” in the mapping service of your choice.

I always have misgivings about revealing ‘secrets’ about photos, because the primary appeal of images is what you see, not what was real – I especially don’t like taking a chance of ruining an impression. But I also find value in teaching people how this works and how to be particular about their scenes and framing, so I’ll sacrifice an impression for the greater good. Or something like that – I can make it sound even more dramatic if you like. Regardless, it wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere, but I’m fine with calling it the edge of nowhere if accuracy is important – very desolate if you faced in one direction, not very isolated if you turned around. And far enough from the really developed areas not to have traffic or construction noise and all that ‘civilized’ rot.

As I was mentally framing this post, I started wondering where my most isolated photos had been taken, ever. And came to the conclusion, pretty quickly, that none of them were all that isolated; I’ve never done long hikes out into the wilderness to find that remote locale, and while I don’t mind exploring, there’s a certain risk to venturing out alone a long ways away from, for instance, ambulance access and fresh water and all that. It might produce some unique photos, true – and it might not. I’m usually not struggling to find something to photograph with even short hikes out into the woods or down the beach, so the amount that I’ve been “out there” is minimal, really.

Right now, I’m pretty sure I know the remotest location, and again, it’s not that impressive, but it’s still noteworthy. Back in 1999 or 2000 (the processing lab that I used at the time did not print the date on the slide mounts,) I took a ‘business’ trip out to Portsmouth Island, one of the barrier islands on the coast of NC between Ocracoke Island and the Cape Lookout/Beaufort area. It was ostensibly a fishing trip, though for most of the guys I traveled with this translated to drinking like fish, and very little angling was done. I don’t drink, and I was planning on getting up before sunrise, so the evening was rather tedious for me. Portsmouth is a largely undeveloped island, though, with only a handful of buildings, mostly rental cabins, and no roads whatsoever; access is by ferry, and you’re only allowed onto the island if you have a four-wheel-drive vehicle that can handle the sand – we rented one for the occasion. There wasn’t even electricity, so cabin lights and heat were provided by propane, and food was kept in coolers and maintained with ice deliveries by daily ferry – lettuce, as I was to discover, doesn’t like being kept in a cooler full of ice.

The second evening that we were there, the sky cleared and we drove down the strand a ways to the end of the island, where some of the guys actually started fishing (spending about 1/10th the amount of time doing this that they had drinking the night before,) while I tooled around looking for photos. Overall, I shot maybe two rolls of 36 exposures on the entire trip, probably less – that’s not a photo trip, as far as I’m concerned, but some of that was due to bad weather rolling in the evening we arrived. Nonetheless, I have some nice keepers from the trip, including two images in the main gallery, one here and the other linked from that page. And of course, there is a Google Earth placemark on both, but it’s the same one so clicking only once is enough. Or use “34.855740° N 76.316729° W”

Technically, the photo location is only about 3.5 kilometers (2.25 miles) from the nearest road, which would not be considered an arduous hike except that this is measuring directly across Core Sound, and if you can hike that, more power to you – it was farther than that up the island to the cabin where we were staying. And to get there, we had to take the ferry up and around the tidal shallows, so the actual path was 14 kilometers (8.75 miles,) half of that by boat. Granted, most of it was still spent in the truck – I wasn’t enduring any hardships getting there.

But now it gets interesting. This link (34.898682° N 76.257028° W) is the ferry access, just northeast of the cabins, and if you compare the two locations, you’ll notice they’re not even on the same island. They were, back at the turn of the century (I love saying that,) but barrier islands are like that, subject to radical reshaping by storms. A few years after our visit, a new channel cut across the island, while the channel that I shot those photos alongside filled in and joined another island farther southwest. The Immobile Mr Bugg had said that he wanted to visit the island to shoot from the same location, but he actually can’t since it technically doesn’t exist anymore.

[I’ll take this opportunity to mention the same thing that I’ve told him: while some locations are photogenic, most times, it’s not the location that’s the key to a great photo, but the conditions – with the right light and sky and grasses and all that, many locations might provide a lovely scenic shot, but you have to recognize and exploit the conditions when they come together, and often this is subject to the vagaries of the weather, not to mention your skill as a photographer. Hiking out to the same spot Ansel Adams shot from doesn’t mean you’re going to get his images.]

This is where using Google Earth is more interesting, because you can roll the dates back and see the aerial images from earlier, watching the island reshape itself – it’s pretty dramatic for that particular area (I wouldn’t recommend buying property there.) And this brings us back to the original location from the Sunday slide post, the marsh channels off of Wrightsville Beach. Back in 1992, I had trekked a short ways off of that loop at the end of the road, up past the hotel, and had camped on the sand dunes, having a pretty miserable night from the summer heat. In trying to get some breeze into the tent I had left the rain flaps open, but screens aren’t adequate to stop blowing sand, which was often carried into the tent with every gust to adhere to my bare and sweaty chest – I’ve had better nights. A couple of years later I revisited the area and out of curiosity intended to go back to the general spot where I’d camped, but was stopped quite distinctly by the fact that it was under at least two meters of water by then – a storm in the intervening time had gouged a channel through the island right where I’d been sleeping fitfully. You can roll this back in Google Earth too, any date from 2002 and earlier, and after that you can even see the planted beach grasses to stabilize the dune and hopefully prevent the water from coming as close as it did to the hotel. I imagine the insurance rates for the building are astronomical.


Just a small aside here. This image was also taken during that trip, obviously aircraft parts, but I have no information on how they arrived there – one beach wreck survey that I came across speculated on them washing ashore from an artificial reef, ones usually created by sinking derelict ships, but I don’t imagine aircraft parts are the material of choice in such a turbulent coastal area. There has always been a lot of military activity in the region, including a small airfield just inland, so there are a lot of ways this could have arrived. I found it a curious little tableau, myself.

Sunday slide 8

Al Denelsbeck

Mediterranean house gecko Hemidactylus turcicus on artificial setting
This week, we hearken back to my brief interlude in Texas, when I stayed in Houston for a couple of months in 2001; September and October, actually – I had two job interviews on September 11th, and to no one’s surprise, didn’t nail either of them. Which I’m kinda glad about, because I really didn’t like Texas, but that’s irrelevant. My photography was sparse then, yet one of the few subjects that I captured (literally) during my stay was a Mediterranean house gecko (Hemidactylus turcicus.) Geckos are adept at clinging to any surface and can run across a ceiling with ease, which of course meant that my methods of housing this one for even the short photo session had to take this into account. The setting seen here is all artificial, a small sprig cut from a variety of landscaping bush placed in front of a house plant. It really didn’t take much, which you’ll understand once you see the size of my model here. But first, let’s take a closer look at that eye.

Mediterranean house gecko Hemidactylus turcicus eye closeup
This is a full-resolution crop of the original slide (even the one above it was cropped a little from the full frame,) and you can see the limits of the grain and focus, with some potential loss from the Minolta Scan Dual III scanner. But those pupils! I get a kick out of the different types of pupils displayed by some animals, and knowing how the shape of the opening affects focus quality, I’m curious as to what difference this makes to the species that have them, but as yet I have no real information – it’ll be a subject for a later post. Now, let’s see why this was so challenging to show clearly.

Mediterranean house gecko Hemidactylus turcicus on dime for scaleI’ve been having a hell of a time getting the color register right for these slides and I have to see if I can zero out the color balance of the scanner, but this one, unlike the slide above, has a better excuse: I had forgotten to calculate the light loss from the extension tubes that I used to get closer for this frame, so the slide was too dark, lightened in editing for my purposes here. The key part, of course, is the dime for scale, showing just how small my specimen is, and while this might be slightly smaller than average for the species, it’s not by much. Take out a dime for comparison right now, because the eye was about the same size as three digits of the date, and this was before I had developed my macro skills and equipment to the point they are now. The Sigma 105 EX Macro was a good performer (up until the aperture started acting up,) but I don’t think it compares to the Mamiya 80 Macro.

I mentioned geckos’ ability to climb, and this is due to the special structures of their feet. A few years later in Florida, I captured another variety and housed it in a small macro tank for some detail shots of the feet.

close up of gecko foot pad, unknown species
This specimen is different from the Mediterranean house gecko above, and much larger, but I didn’t pin down the species while I had it, and didn’t get any good shots of the eyes. While the foot looks petty cool, the structures that actually allow geckos to cling to just about anything are microscopic and not going to show in a mere macro photo. This is still the Sigma 105 and extension tubes, by the way – the subject was much more restrained in movement and I wasn’t worried about having to snag it before it ran away across the apartment, so that probably helped my steadiness and subsequent sharpness.

This shot is done vertically and believe me, the gecko wasn’t having any difficulty running up and down the glass. I didn’t see anywhere near enough of them and caught much fewer (I think these represent the only two that I’ve ever had my hands on and both were released after the photos,) but they’re very cool to observe. Since they’re nocturnal, checking out the places where lights sit near foliage are the best places to look, since that’s where they’re most likely to be found hunting insects.

Just because, part 22

Al Denelsbeck

Still the slow season for photography right now, but getting better by centimeters. In the meantime, a couple of pics from the fall.

bare trees and blue sky reflected in still creek
I had passed on posting both of these back when I took them, but they keep catching my eye from the blog images folder and I have to admit I like how the colors work for both. I would really have liked some hidden little detail for this one, something lurking on the opposite bank, but it was not to be.

You’re still looking for it though, aren’t you?

tall trees in fall colors from underneath
Actually, I’d like to do something like that from time to time, have a little something that can be seen in the images if you’re paying attention, but staging it could be hard. We’ll just have to see what happens.

Or has it already?

Inspired to do… what?

Al Denelsbeck

So I’m sitting here with a free day, recognizing that the posts have been thin and that I should get something up here, but I’m lacking a little motivation to get it going on. Lucky for me that this is the interblobs, and it’s not hard to find an inspirational message that will fire up my spirit and get me to pump out a couple of posts before Sunday rolls around again. Let’s see, what can I find here…

“You’re great!” Well, that’s obvious, but I’m still not great enough to be writing something.

“You’re special!” Special? In what way? That’s kind of an amorphous and subjective term, isn’t it?

“You have the strength within you.” I guess, though it’s not exactly strength I need right now, but something to either spark the creative process or get me pissed enough to rant about.

Curiously, this is the nature of many inspirational efforts, from the motivational posters in work that no one took seriously because they didn’t tell us how to deal with an asshole boss, to the simple images that can be found in so many locations online anymore. And I have to wonder whether they actually accomplish anything at all, even with the bar set so ridiculously low. Because, let’s be real, exactly what kind of emotional state or psyche is going to be affected by such simple and especially indirect messages?

Pop psychology is a hard thing to avoid, partially because it’s human nature to try and understand other people, but also because pop psychology is so ubiquitous that, when we see it, we’re inclined to think that it must have some value because everyone else keeps doing it. Yet in many cases, like inspirational messages, it reflects an incredibly condescending and demeaning attitude towards other people and the problems that we all face. Those that suffer from depression, clinical or just the generic kind, are tired of hearing, “Cheer up!” – it simply doesn’t work that way, and to believe that this would be effective implies that the recipient has a infantile mind. When someone is injured, no one is stupid enough to say, “Just stop feeling pain,” but somehow emotional or mental states are much easier to fix, it would seem.

Yes youNow, there are effective methods of outreach, and some of them aren’t too difficult; I don’t want to diminish the real and useful efforts that can be found. But often this is specific to an individual, and almost always consists of something more than a passing positive comment or pretty picture. I tend to view most inspirational messages now as “slacktivism,” that new term that applies to internet activities where someone posts something on their wall, or asks for upvotes or whatever, and thinks that they’re making a difference with virtually no effort expended at all. How often are such things merely a placebo, letting the person who posts or forwards them believe they’re fulfilling their personal obligation to do something useful? “Ah, there we go! I tapped my touchscreen in a couple of places and now the world is a better place!”

Yet there’s a more pernicious tendency within the topic, closely related to this, because such a large percentage of these kind of things are aimed at making an individual feel better about themselves, often without any particular reason. And what, exactly, does this accomplish? While I am sure there are a few people that are desperately in need of a little reassurance, a little boost to self-esteem, I can’t imagine it’s a lot, and the number that would receive a benefit from an anonymous assertion that they were great has got to be so trivial it can’t be measured; seriously, if we’re not fooled by this, how much stupider do we think others are? And, even if this did work, do we really need to foster and emphasize self-absorption?

We have superlatives for a reason. When we want to distinguish the extraordinary efforts of someone, when we take note of the qualities above the average, that’s what we can, and should, reasonably consider “great,” or any variation that you prefer. That’s what we really want for ourselves, isn’t it? Do I want to be just as “great” as everyone else? No, actually, I’d like to be even better than that, to stand out, to be recognized for something particular to me (if I ever find this, I’ll let you know what it is.) But even that is just ego, and right now we probably have enough of that in this country; I might go so far as to say that we have a surfeit. Maybe, and I’m just throwing out wild ideas here, we can consider recognizing and even encouraging behavior that positively affects others, that genuinely improves our community overall? Does anyone have an argument against that?

To me, that’s the kind of inspiration we should encourage. There’s far too much “me” in our society, and not enough “us” – too much emphasis on how good we feel about ourselves, as if this made some difference to anyone else at all, much less provided some improvement to the world at large. To say nothing of the ridiculous amount of time we spend actively competing against others of our own species, whether it be the progress of a sports team or whether we’re making more money than our neighbors or even how we drive on the road. Why not turn that around, remind people that helping others or improving our conditions are immeasurably better goals? Hey, maybe we feel shitty for whatever reason, but there are others that have it worse and can use our support. Or maybe we can just spend a little time helping out, teaching someone, throwing a few bucks at a decent cause, whatever.

And you know something? It not only produces a real, measurable, meaningful improvement to the world, it makes us feel good too – the same thing that the vapid inspirational messages attempt to do, but this method is a lot more effective. Why encourage being wrapped up in ourselves?

Hey, look, I found a topic after all…

Sunday slide 7

Al Denelsbeck

matching spider webs in mountain trees
This week, we have a shot from 2005, I think, my first trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The fog was lifting (or the clouds passing – way up in the mountains it’s pretty much the same thing) and a couple of dew-covered webs were catching the emerging sun.

“Catching the sun” – isn’t language stupid? Spider webs are amazingly strong for their mass, but even the toughest probably couldn’t actually catch the sun, should it come close enough to earth to even make it possible. The sun would likely break free eventually…

Way behind schedule, but anyway…

Al Denelsbeck

old and new sea turtle tire covers compared
So, I finally managed to finish off a project started for last christmas, which is the repainting of The Girlfriend’s spare tire cover. The first had been done back in 2009, and despite our best efforts with UV protectant spray, the vinyl cover was showing its age and starting to tatter at the edges, so it was time for a new one.

I had intended to find a hard shell cover instead of a vinyl one this time, but nearly all of them made for that car have “Honda” embossed into the shell, which wasn’t going to work. The company that I bought this from glossed over the fact that the face was hard, but the rim was still vinyl – easier to paint, but still beholden to the elements and expected to last no longer than the previous. By the time it had arrived I was up against my christmas deadline and wasn’t going to play around with another order, but it means I still have another project waiting in the wings for when I find a full shell cover.

Nonetheless, I had the chance to correct a couple of things with this one, notably some proportional errors and the number of scutes on the turtle shell, at the same time bringing the color a bit closer to reality – it’s nice to have good photos to work from. It could still be more accurate, but I’m pleased, and so is she, which is the important bit.

sea turtle tire cover head detail
I’m most pleased with how the head turned out, especially the reddish ‘tint’ of the scales, but even the fading minor scales came out well. I’m not an artist or painter, though I dabbled back in school and did a shit-ton of model kits which at least contributed to my handling of a brush. We look at things like this and think, “Oh, yeah, it just curves around, I can do it,” but the truth is (at least for me,) that three-dimensional aspect can be very hard to render, getting the shape and distortion of the scales right as they follow the curve of the head. I could point out the significant errors still present, but I suspect that most people would miss them, so I’m okay with this for now; the next one will have to be better, though.

[Okay, fine. See that scale above and behind the eye, right at the corner? The one on the opposite side of the head should be positioned at the same place in regards to the eye, but it’s nowhere near it, is it? Happy now? You can also see the color-matching issues when you’re this close, but you really have to be this close for it to be noticeable. I’m making excuses, aren’t I?]

The grasses had been a corrective addition to the previous version, since I hadn’t stretched the cover to the proper placement on the tire that I had when I painted it, and the turtle came out off-center. It was much easier to center this one, but The Girlfriend thought the grasses added to the atmosphere (aquasphere, whatever,) and so I kept them for this. But I have different plans for the next – it’s just a matter of whether I can adequately pull them off or not. And proper shading would be a nice thing to develop. We’ll see.

Standards of evidence

Al Denelsbeck

Some time back in a discussion on religion, someone once told me that we weren’t going to come to an agreement on the existence of god because, between us, we had “different standards of evidence.” And I’ve heard similar sentiments many times over before and since, notably in regards to whether or not we’ve been visited by extra-terrestrial intelligence. The phrase itself most often sees usage in the US justice system since there are different criteria among civil and criminal courts to establish “beyond reasonable doubt” – it’s disturbing how wishy-washy the language is when it comes to determining just what it is we’re going to sentence people with. The issue with the concept, however, isn’t what we hold as standards, but what our goals actually are, and there’s a distinct short-sightedness that’s present in too many such discussions, one rarely recognized.

Some religious pundit, who will go unnamed since because I don’t feel like looking up his name, once made an open cash-challenge to anyone to prove that the Earth was not the center of the universe; apparently, geocentrism was being considered a point in favor of god in some way. He was hoping to capitalize on the simple idea that a center was meaningless without outside borders, and therefore he could consider Earth the focal point of the universe if he damn well pleased. Even a lot of religious folk don’t put any weight behind such non-negative arguments, with good reason: they establish absolutely nothing, and when it comes right down to it, the physics behind the mass-gravity model of orbital mechanics not only explains the behavior of everything in the universe quite handily, they work amazingly well to predict results when it comes time to, you know, put a planetary probe in parking orbit around another planet. A “center” to anything is an arbitrary and useless concept; what matters is, how will the probe behave in proximity to any collection of mass it approaches?

Which begins to highlight the fundamental (a ha ha) difference that exists. Nobody cared that the pundit wanted to believe that the sun actually orbited the earth, therefore god – personal opinion doesn’t provide anything of further value. There’s a distinctive, and vast, difference between self-affirmation and actually deriving something of future use to us as a species. UFO proponents are notorious for simply wanting to win some debate. But while it would be of remarkable interest to nearly everyone to know that extra-terrestrial life, in any form, had been found, the real value lies in actually having some useful information, and especially in being able to take this further. How can we study it, how much does it differ, how did it develop, how old is it, how close is it, how does it reproduce, does it have a DNA analog, and on and on in that nature for the next umpteen decades. These are not yes/no questions, and there is no stopping point to be found – and hopefully, the answers would not just satisfy some facet of curiosity, but provide something for us to use as well, some way in which we can improve our own standards of living or fix some issue that we presently have. That’s really what the pursuit of knowledge is all about, isn’t it? It’s almost certainly how we even evolved to have it, since it worked much better than simply accepting things as they were without question or interest. Notably, a lot of species have this investigative property to some extent, albeit less than we do; we’ve all seen kittens and puppies puzzling out whether a leaf is actually animated or simply driven by the wind, and crows and squirrels can easily be observed to utilize cause-and-effect reasoning, figuring out a way around some obstacle when trying to get food.

Does the puppy believe the leaf is imbued with free will and intelligence, perhaps visiting from another planet? Does the squirrel believe it is being punished for violating some commandment when it comes up against the skirt around the bird feeder? Answering these questions might give us some insight into the thought processes of such species, but no one is bothering to investigate them or really cares. Why not? Probably because, not only do we not think squirrels can provide us with information about supernatural beings, mostly it’s with the knowledge that if they did hold such beliefs, they’d still be wrong. We know where the squirrel-shield came from, and it’s hard to express how little value a theory of a Sciuridicentric universe would provide. Sure, it might make the squirrel feel better about itself, but how does that solve the issue of obtaining food?

Quite often, this is the point where someone feels obligated to state that mayyybe dry leaves really are self-animated and we just haven’t discovered it yet, abandoning that standards of evidence thing altogether and thinking the lack thereof is somehow significant – often this is slyly couched in terms of being “open-minded.” Yet there’s an obvious difference between being open to new evidence, and just trying to salvage a pre-existing belief with whatever two-step one can. For every “maybe” there’s a “maybe not,” and it’s even more open-minded to recognize that too, and hold out for something that leads someplace further than appeals to ignorance.

The value of knowledge is its utility. We don’t need to have any “standards of evidence” – we just need it to work and produce dependable results. At such a point, there’s no debate, and whatever someone’s personal opinion is has no effect or impact. We should never be looking for affirmation or emotional indulgence, we should simply be looking for functionality. That’s how progress is made.

Nothing but iron

Al Denelsbeck

Yesterday, knowing there wasn’t a lot of lunch-style food in the house and not having been in a while, I hit the nearby pizza place on my lunch break. I ended up having to get it to-go, however, because the place was packed. Later on when I got home, I started seeing things on various sites about National Pizza Day, which explained the crowd, though it made me feel bad because I generally don’t bother with stuff of that nature. I don’t make a point of non-conformity, but I definitely avoid both fads and manufactured holidays. It was just a coincidence, I swear!

What made this ironic is that today is National Coincidence Day, the day we should all recognize the meaningless coincidences in our lives. I had apparently jumped the gun on celebrating that one, again without even meaning to, which is perhaps celebrating it doubly so. Even worse, tomorrow is National Contrition Day, which means I’m really out of synch and hopelessly trapped amongst the mindless sheep.

But then I found out that the day before yesterday was National Pizza Day, so we’re all good now. It had been getting all irony up in here.

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