How not to be a conspiracist

Al Denelsbeck

While this post was sparked by some recent discussions (it’s that time of year, or at least, it was a little over a month ago,) what I talk about here is quite common, and I’ve seen it all over and over again. So, I figured it was time to address it again.

“Conspiracist” is defined as someone who believes or promotes a conspiracy theory. Which means that my use of it herein is not going to be perfectly accurate, because I have yet to hear anything that actually qualifies as a theory; a theory, in scientific usage, is an explanation that best fits all of the known facts. Believe me, nobody even comes close, so using the word in application to things such as Kennedy’s assassination, 9/11, fluoride in drinking water, chemtrails, and all similar topics is abusing a language that is already on the ropes. However, since you still know who I mean by the term, it’ll be better than coining my own.

It is interesting to note that, in my experience anyway, very few people want to be considered part of this crowd, even as they actively promote the conspiracy ideas; apparently they are in tune with the greater consensus that such people are “kooks.” I can’t say that I really blame them, but there really isn’t any firm definition, no dividing line between someone who is a serious investigator and a chuzzlewit looking for spies within the bushes. Yet, there are some distinctive traits that can very often be seen in these circles, and by avoiding them, one can greatly reduce their chances of being lumped into any such derogatory bin. To that end, I have compiled a short (and admittedly incomplete) list of things to be aware of when dealing with any topic of this nature.

1. “Conspiracy” is not a crime, or even a firm definition. A conspiracy actually requires specific actions of a covert nature, usually coupled with the attempt to disguise these actions. It does not automatically arise with gaps within, or the mere weakness of, The Official Explanation, nor can you charge anyone with just “conspiracy.” To avoid being considered a kook, one should always have a specific set of actions/crimes, and of course the people who committed them.

2. Never rely on the argument that something “might be possible.” Conspiracists dearly love these, but for every, “might,” there is also a, “might not.” Emphasis should only be on what can be shown as most likely; not the exceptionally low bar of “possible,” but a careful comparison of probabilities.

3. The key is not raising questions, but finding answers. A hallmark of a conspiracist is that they can usually only find problems with The Official Explanation, and lack any ability to explain what happened in its place. Apparently, they feel that mere uncertainty is adequate to allow any other explanation.

4. There is no such thing as “negative evidence.” Even if there is good reason to question The Official Explanation, this does not suggest, promote, or strengthen any alternate explanation; that requires positive evidence in support of it. If I drop my neighbor’s phone in the cesspit but no one saw me do it and has no evidence thereof, this does not in any way suggest the idea that fairies did it, nor does it even prove that I did not – it is nothing more than a lack of confirmation.

5. Avoid double-standards. Conspiracists are inordinately fond of finding nitpicking inconsistencies or curious gaps in The Official Explanation, but seem blissfully unaware of the disproportionately huge gaps in their suggested alternate events – if there is any alternate at all. They are also amazingly accomplished at selecting testimony or evidence that supports their ideas, while openly ignoring, discounting, or outweighing any and all evidence that contradicts or weakens their ideas. If, for instance, five eyewitnesses all have conflicting accounts, how can only one be selected as accurate?

6. Do not conflate “improbable” with “impossible.” Conspiracists seem unable to grasp the concept that events with a low likelihood can still occur, and they will usually consider improbable events as impossible. Of course, once they are impossible, any other event of ridiculously high improbability can be inserted in their place (see ‘double-standards,’ above.)

7. Do not ignore multiple explanations. Very few events or items of evidence could have only one possible explanation, yet conspiracists will often take this stance – curiously, it will be in favor of the one possibility that supports their conspiracy. Anyone else aware of the other possibilities, however, will see this selectivity for what it is.

8. Do not weigh options unrealistically. When recognizing multiple potential explanations, also recognize that they will certainly not all have the same weight, or probability of occurring. Something that has happened numerous times in the past is unarguably more likely to reoccur than a rare event.

9. Do not rely on ‘common knowledge’ or experience gained from cultural depictions. What ‘everyone knows,’ like how being shot can hurl someone backwards, is very frequently inaccurate; what we expect to be the case is not necessarily true. Conspiracists are fond of proclaiming how things must be, but thoughtful people take advantage of those with extensive experience, and studies with dependable results. Moreover, there is no figure of authority so complete that they could not be wrong; what they can demonstrate with facts gives the weight of probability over any pronouncement, yet such probability can never be absolute – there is no ‘proof,’ just highest likelihood. This is true for all of science, and in fact, anyone who is 100% certain is someone to distrust, because nothing in life can be that certain.

10. Use the most accurate sources of information, and take all of it into account. Conspiracists always have a favorite, secondary source of info, be it a website or radio program or a book that promises to blow the lid off, yet the further it is from the original sources, the more inaccurate it is likely to be – to say nothing whatsoever of the ulterior motive of such sources, which are virtually always making a bundle of money by providing this info. People love conspiracies, so any source promising to reveal one is almost guaranteed to garner sales; it shouldn’t need pointing out that anyone motivated by such is not very likely to present all of the facts in a comprehensive and unbiased manner. But even without the money angle, that love of conspiracies is enough to make people ignore all factors that weaken the conspiracy.

11. Do not manufacture connection or relation. Regardless of the nature, conspiracists will often find every curious element to be related in some way, much like the superstitious and the hypochondriac can always find something to blame for their misfortunes. If the argument is that two or more items are related, then one should be prepared to demonstrate how they are related, and not simply unconnected elements.

12. Do not assign meaning without reason. Conspiracists are fond of believing that an eyewitness using one word instead of another is a clue, rather than a simple case of stumbling over one’s words, or that adding up all the numbers of the crashed flight provides a rebus that points to the real answer. Yet, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; if claiming that it’s something more, one should be able to demonstrate how and why.

13. Think parsimoniously. Parsimony is the concept that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be correct, and thus, the more complicated, the lower the likelihood. While it is a mistake to believe that the simplest explanation is always correct, it is a much bigger mistake to seek complication without support. A better guide is the phrase, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – if one proposes an elaborate, covert scenario, then one should be prepared to show the evidence that leads in that direction. It also helps to keep a firm goal in mind. Conspiracists are usually just motivated by winning an argument, but most others believe that any conspiracy should be tried in court, and that requires something really solid to present.

14. Do not ignore the consequences. Conspiracists are quite fond of throwing out new scenarios, and almost never consider that any new scenario would have effects all its own. Is there a second shooter? Fine; who is it, where were they shooting from, how come no one saw them, what happened to their bullets? Nothing happens in its own pocket of space – everything has some outside impact. Very often, another scenario is proposed to explain why we don’t see any of these effects, and it doesn’t take long before the conspiracy involves dozens to hundreds of participants, all of them faceless and perfectly loyal. This becomes especially ludicrous (and helps fill out the “kook” label) when it is proposed to explain a minor discrepancy in witness accounts or physical expectations.

It is probably quite hard to argue that any of these points are unwarranted, or a show of bias or dismissal. Yet, what may be found when applying all of these is that the conspiracy vanishes. Most telling at this point is that conspiracists will lose their nut over this prospect, and try to find any way to salvage the conspiracy – but why would anyone want to salvage the conspiracy against the application of rational criteria? If, as is so often claimed, the point is to find The Truth™, then is there a better way to determine it? And what if the truth is that there simply is no conspiracy? That’s acceptable too, right?

To the conspiracist, no; it is the conspiracy that’s important, not the truth. And you’ll notice I’m using that separately from The Truth™, for a good reason – the latter is something that they possess the knowledge of, and is always different from what the general public understands, not necessarily anything to do with the facts. It is an emotional gratification, and as such, often pursued with the same type of zeal and rationalization that the addict wields.

But for those interested in knowing, as closely as possible, what really happened, the answer is simply wherever the evidence leads, regardless. And for those, it’s important to recognize that no explanation is ever airtight, no single answer ever to be found – life just isn’t like that. We can only go with what presents the greatest probability, that fits all of the factors the best (and indeed, this may change with new evidence.) If it helps, think of it as a court case, where you do not aim to convict someone on suspicion, or a single point of evidence, but strive for the idea of “beyond a reasonable doubt” – and not every situation will be able to present this to us. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know for sure – but this seems most likely, given the evidence.”

Moreover, we should see ourselves as the jury, and not either the prosecution or the defense – if we have the goal of only trying to prove guilt or innocence, we’re only on one side of the equation. Now, while everyone believes they’re open and unbiased, the favoritism is easy to find within such topics, so it appears a lot of people aren’t as unbiased as they believe. If we take more pleasure in evidence that supports one conclusion over any other, if we are quick to be skeptical over another factor and immediately start looking for ways it can be wrong, well, that’s a pretty good indication that we’re not being neutral. And while anyone can hold whatever opinion pleases them most, if we’re intending to be convincing to others, we should be able to demonstrate that we’re as objective as possible.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Al Denelsbeck

Evolution's Witness - How Eyes Evolved bookI’m hoping everyone is enjoying themselves, not getting unduly stressed, and eating in a most unhealthy yet satisfying way – if not, let me know, because we have more cookies here this year than we can manage…

I’m not much for blogging about personal details, but I do have to enthuse a little about one of my gifts, Evolution’s Witness – How Eyes Evolved, by Ivan Schwab. I’ve had my eye on this book (a ha ha) for, well, ever since this post on Panda’s Thumb, so that’s actually longer than I thought. The same image was the subject of a post here as well. I’ve only had a bare moment to flip through the book, but I’m already captivated, so I might actually be featuring snippets and items of interest in ongoing posts, sort of a long-form book review.

Now, in looking up an appropriate link for the book, I find that Dr. Schwab also has a blog, and a TEDx Talk video to check out – why didn’t I think to look up his name earlier? In fact, I’m just going to go ahead and embed the video, because in it, he talks about two subjects that I’ve had a particular interest in.

Which subjects were they? I can’t believe you’re asking – it only means you haven’t done the required reading (which is every single one of my past posts, and of course the entire photo gallery.) But they were the jumping spider’s eyes, which I’ve done twice, and the curious facets of the grass shrimp’s eyes (a species discussed in the immediately previous post as well.) The satellite he mentions in there, by the way, is the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

cat's eye within the christmas treeThat’s enough links to make you think I’m alternating font colors for the post, so let’s see if I can manage to avoid any more. The easiest way is by not writing much beyond this, so I’ll leave you with an appropriate image from a few days back, as one of the cats peered out from beneath the tree through a gap in the branches. This was their first christmas tree, and they were very well behaved with it though, granted, we did not put any ornaments within easy reach. They appeared to enjoy the day as well, since they had plenty of wrapping-paper balls to slap across the floor, and a Nerf-like gun shooting fascinating darts for them to chase (yes, it was my gift, and yes, I’m 49 years old – what’s your point? You got something to say?)

All the best, everyone!

Tanks for the memories

Al Denelsbeck

I really have to stop doing stuff like that with the titles…

As a section of the photo gallery shows, while I lived in Florida I ‘maintained’ a small saltwater aquarium – not exactly intentionally, and certainly not in the way that aquarium enthusiasts do. Instead, it was born simply from finding critters of interest in the nearby sound, or a little further off on the Atlantic shore, and wanting to photograph them. Actual in situ photography, capturing images of aquatic animals within their habitats, is very involved and quite expensive, something that wasn’t going to happen then (or now, for that matter) – not just some highly specialized equipment, but also the ability for the operator to remain for adequate times within an environment that they are not at all suited for, and must be, uh, suited for. You know, scuba gear and all that. But the smaller critters, at least, could be temporarily housed in a small aquarium, which also provided lots of options for setting and lighting.

For reasons I honestly cannot explain, ‘fish’ do not really count among the subjects in which I have an interest; most piscine species are remarkably boring to me, no matter how colorful they may get. Only the bizarre, or at least subtly malevolent, species get some attention. But also inexplicably, I find the crustaceans to be fascinating.

Collecting small examples of crustaceans in the Indian River Lagoon (the ‘Lagoon’ part invariably dropped in all references by the locals) was easy, almost effortless. Just about anything underwater would host some small species of crab, and careful observation when snorkeling would reveal plenty of examples. I would go out once or twice a week for fresh water and seaweed, which would contain food sources for the tank residents, and would scout around the area for anything new or interesting. At times, this would be done at night, since there were more species active then, and more visible since I would hold the flashlight underwater, eliminating any obscuring reflections from the surface; I could also adjust the angle of lighting to help spot something better. One night, I espied two tiny ruby reflections on a piling, coming and going with the light angle, and eventually determined that I was seeing some minuscule nearly-transparent species, though at that time I hadn’t determined what it was. I eased a shallow bowl into the water and came up behind it, successfully scooping it up and bringing it to the surface. Just as I was transferring it into a jar, it gave a defensive kick and flipped itself out of the bowl, wriggled momentarily on the dock I lay upon, and dropped back into the water. I was quite chagrined, since I still hadn’t determined what it was, except for perhaps 2 cm in length. Looking defeatedly back into the water, I found that it had either returned to almost exactly the same position, or another was now occupying the space. With a little more care this time, I effectively captured it and got it into the jar, to be closely examined back home.

grass shrimp Palaemonetes pugio

grass shrimp Palaemonetes pugio swimmingWhat I had was eventually determined to be a grass shrimp (Palaemonetes pugio,) sometimes sold in aquarium shops as ‘ghost shrimp,’ which seems a more appropriate name. They are remarkably transparent, which makes them challenging to photograph, but also quite interesting to observe. While they can walk about on the bottom and forage, more often they simply drift through the water, suspended by the frantic actions of the little limbs underneath their tails, called pleopods, which thrash in a mad blur that causes the shrimp to waft along as if propelled by a gentle subsurface current. The detection of any threat by those long antennae, however, provokes a flip of the entire tail, flicking the shrimp backwards so quickly they almost seem to vanish and reappear a few centimeters away. I usually had several in the tank at once, and they found more than enough to eat attached to the seaweed I would collect. Nothing else in the tank was inclined to eat them, so they seemed to lead a cushy, carefree existence during their time as my guests.

porcelain crab
Another species that I usually had within the tank were the porcelain crabs, one of two species (or perhaps examples of both): Petrolisthes armatus or Porcellana sayana. Small and very flat, they could press themselves so tight to any surface they could be challenging to collect, but I’m glad I made the efforts, because they were always entertaining to observe. Many crab species are scavengers, finding deceased critters or loose organic matter to tear up and feed upon, and on first glance these seemed well-equipped for such a diet, possessing quite large pincers (chelipeds) for their size. However, I never observed any such behavior; instead, the porcelain crabs were filter feeders, sweeping through the water with two delicate forelimbs topped with broad fans, collecting plankton and microorganisms that they would wipe off into their mouthparts. These fans are actually visible in the pic above; one tucked into cleaning position between the right pincer and the blue mouthparts (don’t ask me why blue,) the other extended over the left elbow. Or there’s this view:

porcelain crab in feeding display
They were always very mellow, insofar as any such personality might be assigned to a crustacean; not territorial or competitive, not dangerous to other residents in the tank, and not aggressive. Later on I found out that they are an approved addition to any saltwater aquarium for exactly these traits, since many species that can be obtained are incompatible with others, and that whole food-chain thing means you have to pick one or the other lest they make that choice themselves. Most amusing was watching them actually sitting atop a hermit crab many times larger, riding along with aplomb.

While I had them, I obtained a brief segment of video that shows the feeding behavior; this was taken with a Sony DSC F717 camera, not exactly known for its video quality, so this isn’t going to impress you, but it does show how those little feeding arms work, as well as a crab’s glare-equivalent towards a blundering amphipod:


Perhaps the most charming members of the crustacean family are the hermit crabs, and it’s not just me saying that – people that find crabs to be creepy often seem just fine with hermit crabs, which somehow manage to unlock the ‘cute’ achievement. Many crabs are actually shy, but few people get to witness this; it’s the hermits that demonstrate it routinely, as well as having the pleasant exterior of a discarded snail shell. I suspect it also has something to do with their legs being gathered in front, breaking that visual pattern of a lot of legs on either side like spiders. Loads of tiny hermit crabs could be found in the lagoon, and they fed happily on the algae that would come along with the seaweed I collected, so I always had at least a half-dozen in the tank, usually more. Most of these were roughly pea-sized, and trundled around the tank busily during just about any observation; occasionally, I would find a much-larger thinstripe hermit crab (Clibanarius vittatus) that I would collect for a few photos, but never keep more than a day or so, because there simply wasn’t enough food for them in the tank, and they likely would have reduced the populations of other species that I had. The little guys, however, could stay indefinitely.

small hermit crab portrait
Looking at this image just now, I realize it seems to have the same marking as the larger ones that I’ve positively identified as thinstripe hermit crabs, so it’s possible this is a much smaller, younger example; I have no idea how big they are when born. To give an idea of the size disparity, compare this pic with the one here, especially noting the crushed shell underfoot – if it helps, this one is probably half as wide, measured across its shell home, as the porcelain crab atop the larger species.

Now, I don’t want to give a completely misleading impression; I did have a couple of fish in the aquarium. The most distinctive was the flounder, a very small specimen, actually the second that I’d caught in the lagoon of almost exactly the same size. The first I’d seen undulating on the surface while I was wading, but I wasn’t maintaining the tank then and didn’t keep it beyond the time it took to obtain a couple of slides (yes, film – ask your parents.) The second was a lucky capture, and borderline stupid: I was snorkeling and gently pushing on the sand with my hands, when I felt something wriggle under my palm. I immediately closed my hand over it to enclose it, which might have been bad had it been something with proper defenses – I was in a saltwater sound that housed things like stingrays, after all. But my suspicions were correct, and I brought home another flounder, which remained in the tank for quite a while.

tiny flounder camouflaged in substrate
This pic is far from the most illustrative of anatomy, but does a great job of showing how well they blend in. You can see the faint difference in color and texture in comparison to the crushed shell substrate, and at far left, directly under the snail shell, a dark spot (with an apparent white slit pupil, actually only a bit of shell) that marks one of the googly eyes that flounder have; the other sits right alongside it, facing entirely away from us and thus invisible in this shot – the flounder is ‘facing,’ as poorly as that word can be used here, directly left. At least, that’s where the mouth sits, with the tail to the right. Here’s a bottom view from one of the times it was resting vertically against the glass, facing the same way.

flounder bottom view
This one was just big enough to hide a quarter coin underneath, but a silver dollar would have shown around the edges, so about 2 cm wide and 3 long. I am assuming this is a young one, but I’m not sure. Flounders are born looking much like other fish, their anatomy arranged to swim in a typical vertical orientation, but they instead stay on their side along the bottom, and soon their ‘bottom’ eye starts to migrate sideways around the head to join the other eye on ‘top;‘ since this had already happened, I have to assume mine was not terribly young, but I honestly don’t know how long it takes, or even what species this is. Notice that you can still see the gill on this side.

While the flounder could be disturbed from lurking on the bottom, I’d watched the small hermit crabs amble over top any number of times without provoking a response; whether the crabs themselves noticed any change underfoot I cannot say.

Gulf pipefish Syngnathus scovelli
Another fish species I had, briefly, were Gulf pipefish (Syngnathus scovelli.) Basically resembling stretched out seahorses, I was delighted to snag one when collecting seaweed, and began watching for them when snorkeling. I couldn’t keep them in the tank long, however, since they consumed a lot of food, primarily things like brine shrimp, and I rarely had many of those in the tank. The pipefish seemed fond of one particular spot that I visited in the lagoon, only a handful of meters wide, and I never determined why that section got all the attention, since it seemed indistinguishable from the rest; perhaps I just happened upon a breeding patch. One type of longneedle pine overhanging that area of the lagoon routinely dropped short twigs, the base stem of the needle sprays, and the shape and size of these was nearly identical to the pipefish, meaning I got a lot of false alarms, and on at least two occasions misidentified pipefish as a twig, clued in to my mistake because the authentic twigs never, during my observations, swam away. The pipefish (and the twigs, really) measured about 8cm in length, perhaps 4-6mm in width. The one shown here is curled in front of a string of snail egg cases (almost certainly of the king’s crown conch, which I had briefly in the tank) and a small crab, hiding behind the dorsal fin – you can see the legs peeking out. Later this same day, one of the grass shrimp hatched out a brood, filling the water with tiny newborns – briefly. The couple of pipefish I had ate them like popcorn and had the water clear within an hour. Noticing their efforts, I snagged one of the newborn shrimp for some macro work; what you see below measures 4-5mm in length. It was photographed in the translucent lid of a film can, allowing for backlighting and also a shallow depth of water so the shrimp couldn’t wander out of focus, this being before I’d made my “tiny tanks.”

newborn grass shrimp Palaemonetes pugio
I had one other fish species that stayed for a while, a type of goby I think – these seemed to have a symbiotic relationship with some of the crab species out in the lagoon, since they were often found in close proximity. The gobies tended to like little hiding places, and I learned that if I spotted both halves of an empty mussel shell still hooked together, I should close the shells before picking them up; more than 25% of the times I would capture a goby within. At one point, I watched, and video’ed, a hermit crab that appeared to be very deliberately herding the goby across the tank, though whether this was correct, and what purpose it would serve, remains unanswered.


little anemoneThe red rock with the snail’s eggs, seen behind the pipefish above, was a notably bare exception (though it appears in a ridiculous number of my images,) since most of the rocks I had in the aquarium were ‘living’ rock – in other words, bearing living matter thereon. I was startled to see one of the stones I collected, early on in the tank’s history, sprout a garden of little anemones soon after putting it in the water; it had spent the short trip back from the lagoon on the floor of the car out of water, because I hadn’t realized it was occupied. The anemones retract protectively when threatened and become very low key, but will otherwise wave their blossom-like heads in the current collecting food. Unlike flowers however, these critters could move about, not just ingesting food but actually changing locations within the tank, albeit at much less than a snail’s pace. They would also reproduce by dropping new, tiny versions around their base, and when they did this on the aquarium sides I would have to scrape them off. I rarely saw them feeding, but they seemed to be finding enough, and this one captured quite a mouthful. Or somethingful.

The rocks also supported one or two oysters (one seen alongside the porcelain crab feeding further up the page) and a serious collection of acorn barnacles, which could be found everywhere in the lagoon. They’re fond of attaching to and riding along with horseshoe crabs, and I’ve even found one on the leg of a hermit crab. You can be excused if you thought of them as molluscs like clams and oysters, but they’re crustaceans instead, more closely related to the crabs seen here, and their juvenile stages are quite mobile. Seriously, check out this page, because they’re fascinating creatures and deserve the attention.

sample of Indian River Lagoon residents
This image was actually taken just a short while before the one above showing the porcelain crab feeding; you can see it creeping into position, marked by the blue arrow. The yellow arrows show barnacles feeding (actually, just about everything to the lower left are barnacles,) and the red arrow is a retracted anemone. The seaweed in the background isn’t growing, just recently collected, which distributed a new batch of food sources into the water and often sparked a lot of activity. Aside from the aerator and fresh water (about 20-40% of aquarium capacity cycled per week from the lagoon,) that was pretty much all I did to maintain the tank, and the residents were often released after I had observed and photographed them sufficiently.

While I have done some half-hearted attempts at aquarium photography since moving back to North Carolina from Florida, the water sources here simply cannot compete with the variety and fertility of that saltwater sound, which also housed stingrays, dolphins, manatees, ctenophores, and plenty of others. I’ve posted before about spider crab camouflage, pistol shrimp, and the supremely cool bioluminescence that could occur in high summer. It’s a fascinating locale.

I will close with what is almost a self-portrait, obtained by accident while getting pics of the redfin needlefish featured earlier. When it’s warm, I rarely have a shirt on, much to everyone’s horror…

beware the reflections from the tank glass

Don’t mind the gaps

Al Denelsbeck

Yeah, it’s been too long since the last post, I’ll admit it. There are various reasons, but you know what? It’s a blog – it’s not a job, or any kind of obligation except for how I view it myself (and obviously, I haven’t felt too obligated.) If there are no photos that I think pass muster, and no topics I feel I can tackle decently, then why put something up just for the sake of some self-imposed schedule? There are a lot of writers who find themselves obligated to produce something, and very often, the results don’t compare to their previous work. I’ve never liked that kind of thing.

That said, there is another post in the works, which may appear quite quickly, or may not – there is a potential long interruption looming. There are also several drafts that I’ve been kicking around for ages that I may finish up as well. More will appear, sooner or later. I’m still here, just not posting as much right now.

Some days ago, Why Evolution Is True featured a video and other content by Matthew Inman, otherwise known as The Oatmeal. While I’ve had no problem linking to The Oatmeal in the past, I’m linking to WEIT this time because there’s a bunch of additional content therein. The main bit is a video, poignant in the manner only elaborate sarcasm can accomplish, and if you’ve read much of this blog, you know I’m behind this 100%. But then there’s a following exchange that is featured, which is also quite entertaining. So check it out.

It also, I might add, ties in nicely with the other post in the works, which means I have a bit of a theme going. That’s clarss, that is. Lit’riture.

During my absence from posting, I’ve been working on various projects, a few of them photographic, many of them not turning out the way they were intended. This is no big deal; that’s how you learn, right? But some of them might eventually make it here, and there remains a few arthropod pics I could toss up, but really, I’ve been trying not to get into a rut with those, which is another reason for the scarcity of posts. Mostly, it’s been the scarcity of subjects, which is typical winter conditions, and partially due to the sinuses not being kind to me this fall.

[As I type this, there is bread in the oven and a timer ticking on my desk, which I find to be a serious hindrance to concentration – most background noise is, and I rarely even have music on, much less a TV, but ticking seems especially obnoxious.]

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one of my casual photo projects, a holiday tree ornament with the fireplace crackling in the background. It’s easy to consider something like this a simple shot to capture – until you try it. It’s mostly ambient light, which means a long exposure – that translates to tripod and a completely motionless ornament, which is hard to do with something dangling from a string, light enough to be stirred by air currents, suspended from a bouncy branch of a tree standing on a wood floor. I eventually stabilized it by rehanging the ornament to sit atop another branch. It took a little playing around to get the angle that worked best for such a narrow field of view; the tripod was crammed into a corner, barely allowing me room to see through the viewfinder. I had to cut down the fire in the background (it’s gas, so that was easier, at least) because the flames were high enough to get cut off by the top of the fireplace, giving them a curious flat-topped appearance. To give a little more sparkle and definition, the ornament and the branches have some additional illumination from an LED flashlight held off to the left – it took a few exposures to determine how long to do this for; the entire exposure was too much. And with all that, I missed having the little red bow facing front and center.

holiday ornaments on tree, fireplace in background
So, yeah. Happy holidays.

Humans overboard, part two

Al Denelsbeck

This was originally intended to be part of the previous chapter, but it probably deserves its own post, plus that last one was getting kind of long.

I suspect most people would classify me as an animal lover, or at least leaning heavily in that direction. And on occasion, I have run into a shocked response when it is found that I am not a vegetarian or vegan. My reply to this has been to tap my teeth and point out that these are the teeth of an omnivore, developed over literally millions of years of evolution, which is certainly true. And usually, my questioner ignores this and switches to the idea that my diet is unethical. No one, as yet, has stuck around to hear all the reasons why this doesn’t work, so I decided to enumerate them in toto here, because that’s what a blog’s for…

First off, let’s go back a step and look in detail at that factor which is so quickly glossed over. The dentition that we possess has been present, with little change, throughout the entire hominid line and even further back, and is still possessed by most of the primate kingdom as well. While we cannot offer any opinion on what is meant to be, since nothing is intended in evolution, what our bodies have developed to handle is a widely-varied diet that includes animal proteins. Our brains need a lot of protein to develop, and it just isn’t available (and appears never to have been) from the plant kingdom. Even now, with the emphasis on vegetarianism, it takes factory farming to produce enough concentrated proteins to satisfy this alternative diet – the development of subsistence farming some ten to twenty thousand years ago (itself a tiny fraction of our developmental span) wasn’t enough to meet these demands. Vegetarianism has only been possible in the last relative minute or so of our existence. Indeed, there were a few nearly-vegetarian hominids, inasmuch as we can tell from their teeth and jaws – and they didn’t last long, and had much smaller brains as well. What lasted was us, and we very likely did so because we ate meat (among countless other factors.)

True enough, now we have a choice, and in no way should this post be considered an effort to tell anyone what this choice should be – but it will serve as a counterpoint to the attempts, so often seen, of others to do the same. Let’s tackle that unethical standpoint now.

Life on this planet is a wide-scale competition for resources, and nearly all of these resources are actually other life – this holds true from the bacterial level all the way up to the largest species on our planet. A very wide number of species would not exist at all if it weren’t for the concentrated sustenance obtained from the lives of other animals. Ignoring this doesn’t make it go away; life often comes at the expense of others. And here’s where I have a little fun with perspective, because that very sentence can be considered distasteful, solely from its phrasing, especially with the word “expense.” If you prefer, life can also be considered an ongoing process relying on the interactions of all species – to the best of my knowledge, about the only species on this planet that can survive on their own without any others are things like algae, and even then it’s not clear that some of their sustenance isn’t altered by other life forms. This is what defines an ecosystem.

We have two rather distinctive, and quite strong, evolved behaviors that impact this topic significantly. The first is our fear of dying, which certainly has its usefulness. It should be noted, however, that it is an emergent property, a trait that survived because it was the most effective in passing on to offspring – if we feared death, we tended to avoid it long enough to have kids, and that’s pretty much what evolution will produce; obviously, the opposite is not an effective formula. Yet this fear of death is somewhat ironic, in that death is inevitable – it’s all for naught. Well, not exactly, because it does help us produce offspring, but it becomes clear that it’s a desire that cannot be fully satisfied.

Source: Dreamworks via Heroes.Wikia
Source: Dreamworks via Heroes.Wikia
The second behavior is the peculiar one of our empathy; even when we cannot feel pain, when we have no direct impact from the plight of others, we still feel a certain level of distress when others are suffering. This is a trait that helped foster our status as a cooperative species, in that our well-being did not merely involve ourselves, but certainly the family, and often the whole tribe (from an evolutionary standpoint, the distinction between these two is muddy, actually.) Most especially, we have a lot of empathy for the young, which makes perfect sense, since we have babies that are ridiculously helpless for years – if we didn’t stick around to help them out, our species would die out quickly. But curiously, this trait is also remarkably unspecific, and has been linked by studies to simple visual cues like bigger eyes in relation to the size of the head, and a bigger head in relation to the rest of the body – traits that our young have, but many other species have as well. Thus, we can get almost as protective over certain other species as we can over our own young, even though this serves no apparent purpose whatsoever, and cannot be rationally supported – evolution produces a working model, not necessarily the most efficient or specific one. It’s a reaction, not a planned action. It also varies in its affect on everyone – not everyone feels it as strongly as others. This might even be evolution at work, those behavioral variations that spring up, the most effective of which will eventually gain selective prominence throughout our species.

[The counterpoint to empathy is that we can also be remarkably aggressive, primarily in response to threat, and to a large extent this also links to appearance – species that merely look mean to us garner far less empathy. Pandas, with their huge eye spots and baby-like bodies, get thousands of times more endangered-species attention than any reptile out there, and this has nothing to do with the level of threat of extinction. And before anyone remarks about non-predatory diets, bear in mind that dolphins are notoriously carnivorous and predatory – just as much as tuna. Why save dolphins and not tuna? Because they fucking smile at us. Seriously, we really are this superficial as a species.]

Now, neither of these has anything to do with ethics. Ethics is about effective interaction within our own species; this is the only purpose it can serve, because we’re going to see no reciprocation, no benefit, from extending this to anything else. Ethics revolves around cooperation, trust, and fairness – tribal benefits – and while it is an offshoot of the empathy that helps provoke our cooperative behavior, which actually keeps our species going, it is a more specific, involved concept than merely reaction. Any way that you look at it, however, it has no bearing on any other species at all. Thus, using the word “ethical” in relation to how we handle any other species isn’t applicable; all it does is demonstrate how the fundamental reaction of empathy gets mistaken for a reasoned response with some overriding purpose and importance. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to kill animals for food – and nothing right about it either. It is solely an emotional reaction.

The next argument is invariably the inhumane conditions of livestock farms. Once again, this stems from the idea that we shouldn’t be mean to animals, only because we feel bad about it. And that’s fine, really. But there are a tremendous number of factors that are missed in here. The first is, not all farms raise animals in inhumane conditions – you will note that every source of video and descriptions of conditions never manages to tally how many such farms there are, what percentage of them among all farms in this country (or any country,) nor even the range of conditions that exist – it is always presented as a given that “livestock” automatically means “stacked in boxes” or whatever. Apparently, none of these people have ever driven past the vast expanses of pasturage devoted to raising animals – or more likely, find that presenting that balanced perspective weakens their morally superior standpoint. And there appears to be an underlying assumption that animals “in the wild” lead carefree, healthy, unstressed existences – just saying that brings up the idea that this is ludicrous, doesn’t it? Wild animals sleep in ice storms, suffer from unbelievable numbers of parasitic and viral infections, and are routinely preyed upon by other wild animals. They compete over food sources and mating rights (on occasion to the point of serious injury,) get trapped by floods and killed by wildfire, and may spend large portions of their entire lives fleeing danger. They never receive any kind of medical attention, much less routine feedings, and death can come from starvation, exposure, and having their bowels ripped out. Sorry to be so graphic, but let’s maintain the perspective here, especially as a species where far too may of us earn a living in little boxes. Oh, wait, all of a sudden that’s not inhumane?

Within this, guided by our own fear of death, sits the idea that there is such a thing as a timely demise, or even an undeserved one. But death is not a bad thing, and to counteract our species’ peculiar emphasis on dichotomous thinking, it is not a good thing either – it just happens. Evolution is the process of selecting genes that help stave this off until after successful reproduction, and for many species, that’s just as far as it extends, death occurring almost immediately after bearing offspring. We cannot offer any opinion about not deserving death (or even absolving responsibility by ensuring it simply isn’t by our hands,) without, again, resorting to emotional arguments, because there is no logical argument that holds. And there is certainly no goal or achievement that we might be depriving any species of by ending their lives “too soon” (most especially when we maintain breeding programs that actually thwart most of the selective pressures that exist outside of our influence, and you will notice I did not say, “naturally” there, since we are as natural a species on this planet as any other.)

Now we come to ‘suffering’ as the primary argument, which is admittedly far more valid than ‘death.’ What is missed, far too often, is that if farm conditions are unacceptable, then change them. It’s not hard at all to campaign for higher standards for farming, and in fact, these have been accomplished numerous times. Not to mention that such an approach stands a far greater chance of also gaining the support of those who choose not to embrace vegetarianism or veganism. Unfortunately, that’s not really the point often enough – the point is to create some kind of moralistic high ground to sneer down from, a demarcation that separates the healthy, thoughtful (ahem) vegan from the groveling savages that eat meat. Yeah, that’s always been a useful approach, all throughout history…

And so we come to the idea that vegetarianism/veganism is healthier for us. Which actually hasn’t been established very well, and cannot – the assumption is made that, with every report of one kind of food or another producing some adverse effect, then the default must be avoiding any of those altogether, and subsisting on what our forebears ate. Except, as pointed out already, our forebears didn’t really have such diets. But first off, there have been few studies that show that vegetarianism or veganism really is healthier – these categories are far too broad to apply usefully, and it is remarkably easy to develop vitamin/mineral deficiencies while pursuing them. As mentioned in the previous post, what we need is a variety of proteins, carbohydrates, fibers, fats, and sugars – these are not necessarily provided by a vegetarian diet any better than by an omnivorous one, and probably takes significantly more effort to accomplish with the former. And yes, anything to excess can be unhealthy – this includes plant-based diets, since our systems are poorly equipped to handle large amounts of cellulose (ungulates have multiple stomachs to manage it.)

[A stupid side note, which I decided not to expand upon: a lot of the problem with ‘feedlots’ and farm conditions stems from meeting demand, which stems from a burgeoning population. Not only is this never addressed by vegetarians/vegans, part of the reason it even exists is our extended lifespans. The obvious solution is not to live longer, healthier lives…]

Back to our forebears. The vast majority of our species’ existence, and that of its progenitors, dealt with quite large degrees of bacterial and parasitic contamination, sustenance in varying degrees of spoilage, food sources in less-than-optimal growing conditions, and on and on – we would avoid with disgust probably 90-95% of what our ancestors ate. I mean, the huge spice trade of our recent history did not exist because of exotic culinary preparations, but to disguise the ratty and distasteful nature of so much of our food. Germ theory is even more recent, being less than two centuries old (and in fact, there are studies that indicate how our present germophobia might actually be detrimental to our immune systems.) And yet, our lifespans are the longest they’ve ever been. To think that any diet, in our age of refrigeration and health departments and food expiration dates, can possibly be considered unhealthy, in comparison to most of our past history, is laughable. Not to mention that there’s no such healthy/unhealthy divide, and you’ll note that even the minimum requirements from the FDA don’t list foods or even types, but just factors such as carbohydrates and minerals, and those are necessarily averaged out. It’s all a spectrum, some of which depends on our own individual physiology, yet undeniably quite broad. Demarcations are only in our imagination.

So, hopefully, we’ve established by now that diet is strictly an opinion, not very dependent on any kind of quantifiable superiority in any way – but if not, let me know and I’ll bring up some of the things I left off for brevity. Opinion is naturally personal, not only unbeholden to anyone else’s influence, but also a poor choice of rationales for any form of superior attitudes. We have a culture that has glorified health and diet to the point where somehow this is everyone’s concern, up to and including how people may be judged by their impact on our health care system. This is absolutely amazing when you come to think about it, because if we’re that concerned about health and costs, we should eradicate automobiles entirely, far and away the leading cause of hospitalization and death, as well as property damage, environmental pollution and destruction, and so on.

Pronouncing one’s moral high ground is simply asking for trouble, both (as noted above) from the standpoint that it’s never been a convincing attitude, but also when one encounters the type of person (ahem) who is willing to challenge it; no one is free from exploitable guilt trips. I mean, holy shit, you condone intolerable overseas labor practices for a phone to update Facebook statuses and take selfies?!? You not only brought another kid into this world, you let your pregnancy be paid for by insurance?!? Do you have any idea what the batteries in your hybrid car do to the environment?!?

Overall, however, it’s probably better to recognize what a personal opinion is, and if we expect deference towards our own, we should be extending it to others. Eat whatever you feel comfortable with, and do so while reading what you like, watching the movies you like, or listening to the music you like. If you feel so bad about yourself that you need to judge others as lesser beings because of any personal choices like these, perhaps it might be a hell of a lot more useful to improve yourself with your contributions to society in some way – everyone wins then, and without any self-importance. Just a suggestion…

No record this year

Al Denelsbeck

shamrock flower in late autumnLast year, I was making it a point to post more than I had any year earlier, and did indeed reach that mark, just a few days past this date last year. It is safe to say that I won’t be setting any records this year, since with this one I am 44 posts away, and I don’t see me knocking out, like, three posts a day from here on.

The move to a new house had a lot to do with this, as did the fewer subjects I was finding in the immediate vicinity. The cold snaps that hit the rest of the country have not avoided this area either, and they’ve served to render a lot of things dormant earlier than usual. One exception (I think, anyway – I wasn’t paying close attention last year to their behavior) has been The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog’s shamrock plants, which have bravely staggered through the frosts that decimated many of the other plants and are still, somehow, pushing out blooms, albeit rather weakly. There are more trees in this yard, and the dead leaves are a thick carpet that can only be cleared away for roughly two hours or so.

Finding subjects to shoot in these conditions has been rather challenging, and this holds especially true for sessions with students – not just the subjects themselves are scarce, but the background conditions, framing opportunities and contrasting colors and whatnot, are also harder to find. While I am more inclined to shoot little tableaux instead of wider landscape or scenic images anyway, right now there really isn’t much of a choice; thus, students are almost forced to adopt my style, ha ha!

So for the most part, I am engaged in winter and christmas projects, writing, and odds & ends around the house – nothing worth blogging about, though I suppose I could take a bunch of pictures of my food, and put on a wool cap (or “beanie,” whatever) and do selfies. Cast your vote in the comments…

oak-leaf hydrangea Hydrangea quercifolia in autumn colorsBut I can put up a couple of images between long-winded posts, like this oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) found at the botanical garden. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in late fall, and I really like the effect – the leaves have a rich variety of colors, almost like those cheesy plastic fall decorations you can get at lame stores, only real and alive. I might have to look into planting some of these around here in the spring, since they seem to do well in shade. That’s kind of a prerequisite with this house, where large portions of the property get no direct sunlight, or little patches falling between trees that traverse the yard during the day (the patches, not the trees – those apparently only walk around when I’m not looking.) I have been making lists of plants that don’t need much sunlight to flesh out my vegetation options.

This year is virtually guaranteed to produce at least a couple of decent snowfalls here in NC, and I’ve got a few locations lined up which might prove interesting in such conditions, so we’ll see what happens. That’s the only thing I can tolerate about snow – I don’t do winter sports (or any kind,) don’t hunt, don’t ice-fish (or any kind,) and The Girlfriend and The Sprog don’t even want to get into snowball fights. The only thing I can say in favor is that this area is a lot safer for winter driving than the previous one; almost no hills, and roads which are likely to receive attention (what passes for it in NC, anyway) much sooner. There remains a possibility that I could have to go up to central New York at some point, not something to look forward to, and it’s unlikely that I’d have the time to shoot any scenic photos while there, either. That’s even if there was a proper snowfall during my visit, and not the typical grey skies over dirty, unmelting snow and plow icebergs that fill so much of my childhood winter memories. Floridians can get pretty snarky about the snowbirds (northern tourists) that visit during the winter months, but they don’t know what happens to your mood when you spend nineteen days out of every twenty with no sunlight. It’s not good.

[Floridians often have this big thing about being ‘native,’ rather than a transplant, and when someone says they’ve spent their whole life in Florida, it’s a matter of pride, and sometimes arrogance. It’s quite amusing, really.]

long-jawed orb weaver Tetragnatha on dead branches in still waterI’m continually impressed with the cold-weather hardiness of spiders. Last winter, I kept observing tiny green lynx spiders that would vanish with the snow and ice storms, only to reappear as soon as the stuff had melted. And while wandering around looking for pics recently, there were virtually no arthropods to be seen, even in the botanical garden (I spotted two, instead of the typical dozens,) but these branches clawing their way from a still pond sported a few very active long-jawed orb weavers (Tetragnatha.) There’s only one visible in this image, even if you think you see another – that’s just the reflection in the cooperatively placid water. And as tiny as it is in the pic, it’s hard to miss, isn’t it? Framing and contrast, framing and contrast…

I’ll keep looking for pics of interest (well, that I find interesting,) but I’m not expecting a whole lot now until spring. There’s still a zoo trip that may occur, and it’s been a while since I’ve been to the NC Museum of Life & Science, so perhaps I can get something in before the end of the year. We’ll see what happens, I guess.

Humans overboard, part one

Al Denelsbeck

I stumbled across an article recently that told of a potential new psychiatric disorder, orthorexia nervosa, an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. Or to put it in more blunt (Al-like) terms, being too fucking neurotic over what one eats. Now, I’m among the first to believe the psychiatric professions can be over-exuberant in describing and diagnosing new disorders – the fields do not, and can not, produce the inarguable results and unmistakeable evidence that empirical fields such as archaeology can – and what even constitutes a ‘disorder’ is an area without delineations, all shades of grey. But I don’t really have a hard time believing this one, since I see the key elements of it on an almost-daily basis; this is especially telling since I’m a trimmed beard away from being a hermit. Now, I don’t expect nor encourage anyone to take my word on anything here – in fact, I will state this right up front: go look this shit up for yourself. Get informed. But the functional part of this is seeking real info in the first place, not assuming that your knowledge is already complete, nor that your preferred sources of info are necessarily accurate. What I hope to do here is introduce some perspective to illustrate why this is even necessary.

A little background. My first job out of school was in a natural food store, one that my folks eventually purchased and ran for a while (though I quickly moved on to other things myself.) I had direct immersion into various aspects of the healthy food ‘experience,’ and plenty of contact with pretty much the entire spectrum of behavior and outlooks. And while I earlier credited a youth bible camp as fostering a lot of my current emphasis on critical-thinking, the time spent with people focused on, and downright obsessed with, the idea of healthy eating also bears a lot of the credit for my skepticism; the vast majority of information freely distributed in such circles ranges from misunderstanding of published scientific results to complete and utter fucking bullshit.

I can’t put all of the blame on the healthfood mavens, however, because a large part of it also stems from the human tendency to go overboard, as well as the ridiculous reliance on fads and trends. Two specific, timely examples: sugar and gluten.

Not long ago I found an article from a dietician who lamented that processed sugar is not a toxin, in any way, and he was extremely tired of having to repeat that. I could identify, because I’ve been reminding (or outright informing) people of this for decades. Processed sugar is almost entirely glucose and sucrose, which our bodies routinely use for their energy needs; they are, in point of fact, absolutely necessary for us to live, and processed sugar is among the most efficient ways of introducing these into the body, since the body needs expend virtually no effort in refining these molecules for introduction into the useful parts of the system. Sugar is not especially bad for the teeth; most of the enamel-destroying acids comes from starches, actually. And sugar is not especially fattening. Drinking a soda made with sugar will not automatically add fat to your system. The difficulty – the only difficulty – with processed sugar is that we like it, and can easily seek out foods with a lot of it. If we eat these foods to excess (key words here,) then we may put on more weight than is ideal. That’s it.

The ability to interpret those words correctly and without hyperbole is what mankind is rather inept at. Bare truth: taking the sugar out of soft drinks does not make them any healthier, or any less dangerous to us, by more than a tiny fraction, since they have so few dietary benefits in the first place. There are studies indicating that sugar substitutes actually produce worse effects on our system than the sugars would have. The primary thing to take away from this is very simple: don’t eat anything to excess, because there is no key ingredient that makes anything healthy or unhealthy.

I’ll use that cue to sidetrack slightly, and address the idea of toxins. While it’s not quite safe to say that toxins don’t exist – biologists use the word to describe elements that some species produce specifically to inflict on other species, in either defense or obtaining food – the idea that any substance we might encounter (outside of insects or reptiles) is toxic is, well, completely misunderstood. An article in National Geographic a few years back explained it quite simply: toxicity is not a matter of substance, but of dosage. Everything can be toxic if we receive enough of it – even water, even oxygen. But the dosages, and even the chemical bonds formed in certain circumstances, dictate how bad, or good, the effect on us is. Both chlorine and sodium are pretty nasty substances; exposure to either in concentrated and unaltered form can kill us very quickly. But sodium chloride, otherwise known as table salt, is actually necessary for the functioning of our bodies. Excessive salt (mostly sodium) can lead to various reactions such as hypertension, which in the long run increases our chances of heart issues, and very excessive amounts will clog the kidneys and lead to death very quickly, which is why drinking seawater is bad. But there’s no way to consider either chlorine or sodium a “toxin” because they’re both necessary for our continued health.

And so we come back to gluten. Gluten is just a pair of proteins found in cereal grains – “true gluten” being found only in wheat, while similar protein combinations can be found in other grains. During bread formation, gluten binds the dough together in an elastic way, allowing for the stretching, Silly-Putty-like consistency of dough and the even distribution of small pockets of CO2, the by-product of yeast that makes all those little holes in bread. Without gluten, the CO2 production forms a big bubble in the dough, which tears easily and collapses, so producing rising bread without gluten is tricky. It is not a toxin, by any stretch, and the only hazard to gluten is if you have a specific intolerance, such as an allergy, to it. That’s it. There’s nothing else. No study has ever found an inherent problem with gluten within human systems overall, nor even very serious adverse effects. Extreme reactions can happen with severe allergies, but most people who even exhibit the intolerance get the horrifying health issue of an upset tummy from it. If you’ve eaten bread all your life without issue, feel free to continue to do so, despite the plethora of products and food preparers trumpeting their remarkable “gluten-free” properties.

This really is an important aspect of it all, though, and deserves a lot of attention. The majority of people don’t read studies. The majority of people don’t even look up “gluten” when they go on a gluten-free diet, much less get advised to do so by someone qualified, like a doctor or dietician. They hear the hype, they see the grocery stores carrying more and more products advertising their lack of gluten, and think, “Holy shit, if everyone is reacting to it, it must be really fucking bad for me!” And this is the drastic misunderstanding of hype and marketing that occurs constantly, because of course the more people who think (I feel bad using that word here) in this way, the more the food producers are going to jump on the bandwagon and heave out products that pander to knee-jerk consumerism. No federal source has mandated a reduction in gluten for any reason whatsoever; no study has determined that a reduction in gluten has any effect on our lifespans. The rising number of allergies (to lots of substances) which sparked a few companies producing gluten-free alternatives for pretzel-lovers snowballed, through blind consumerism, into this pathetically ignorant fad. Seriously, don’t believe me – I readily admit it sounds stupid, and not something that our technological species should have succumbed to – and look it up for yourself.

I have to insert a vital point in here, sparked by my attempts to find an article mentioned previously. Online research requires a little discretion, and the ability to spot when someone is vomiting up utter bullshit. Simple rule: if it’s in popular media, especially if it’s a YouTube video, accuracy is completely up for grabs, but likely drops below even a 50/50 chance. Actual scientific papers, the ones where people have to show their work and then it gets vetted by a large number of other people experienced within the field, is about as trustworthy as we can get – and even that has some issues. However, if your work is utter shit, you’ll never get published in scientific journals – but you can make a video or send some press release to whatever media outlet likes sensationalist stories, and never have to worry about whether facts are involved or not. And this happens quite frequently. If in doubt about your media source, do a search within on stories about UFOs or Bigfoot; a positive hit tells you accuracy and solid info is not their forté…

There is (at the very least here in the states, but I suspect throughout Europe as well) a strong emphasis on ‘healthy eating,’ which is a topic that’s as widely variable as it is hard to define – that right there is a significant clue. Once again, it has a lot to do with not understanding what recommendations really are, but owes no small credit to fear-mongering and blatant exaggeration (see above.) To begin with, let’s step back and examine what the goal is to eating healthy in the first place. Extended lifespan, and not dying young? Fair enough. The problem is, there’s no magic formula to accomplish this. First off, there are so many variables in human lives that no single element, not even a remarkably-restricted diet, is capable of accomplishing this. The healthiest diet ever presented, for whatever definition you choose to use there, cannot prevent us from getting cancer (much less being killed in an auto accident.) And the worst diet ever conceived, same criteria again, isn’t guaranteed to kill us within a few years or even decades. Health, aside from being very hard to define, relies on a ridiculous number of factors, diet being only one of them. When anyone thinks they’re quoting from a study that says that red meat, for instance, is bad for us, they’re usually not noticing that the study has found excessive consumption is correlated with increased tendencies toward a specific health issue, such as colon cancer. What this actually means is, it’s probably not a good idea to eat red meat at every meal. It does not say that red meat will give you cancer, much less that avoiding red meat will provide a cancer-free life. These distinctions might seem obvious, but it’s not hard at all to find people who have utterly failed to interpret these correctly.

Actually, it’s hard to find someone who has read the damn study in the first place – usually, they’re just parroting the interpretation of a study that they received from some source they trusted; perhaps some daytime talk show, maybe a health-food niche magazine, possibly even something their friend said. As soon as any one of them makes any of the mistakes outlined above (or any other example thereof,) then we’re no longer dealing with real information at all. Naturally, such mistakes can be made at every repetition as well, so it takes very little time for real information to become tainted, twisted, or spun out of control.

Some of that is intentional, as well. Those who gain money from their own ‘healthy’ alternative foods have plenty of reason to promote the dire consequences of not buying their product, unsurprisingly, but even those who have nothing to gain can be remarkably exaggerative. Despite the fact that our lives are longer than ever now, and so many debilitating illnesses have all but vanished, we live in a culture where danger stalks us at every turn, from fluoride in our drinking water to high-tension power cables overhead. While it is true enough that the bran and germ portions of wheat, so often removed to make smoother, better-tasting flour, are more nutritive than the white endosperm, somehow this has been taken to mean that the skins of all vegetables are more nutritious, and that “processed food” has no redeeming value. Cooking does indeed break down a few beneficial vitamins, but what’s left behind is not a totally inert substance, much less something that is actively bad for our health. This bizarre fixation on binary thinking springs up a lot – if it’s not good for us, it’s bad; if it’s not healthy food, it’s unhealthy. This is obvious nonsense, but the attitude is pathetically quite common. There is no such thing as a ‘healthy’ food, and really, no supportable ability to even plot foods on a useful graph of health. Our bodies process all foods to extract that which is useful for us and discard the rest, and we discard every day. Moreover, everyone’s system is different in subtle, and sometimes overt, ways – I personally have developed sensitivities to peanut-butter and oregano, which makes them less-than-ideal for me (mostly due to adverse affects on my digestion, and not necessarily being harmful,) but these probably have no impact on you.

We can denote statistical averages for a lot of things, including primary diets and general longevity, or instances of some kind of cancer, but these are most often only tendencies, and not translatable to ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ in a functional manner. Moreover, such statistics cannot account for the countless variables that exist that may also be skewing the numbers, which include environment, genetics, and even just random variation. But we’re not a species that likes such vague results; we want to be able to apply a useful label to things just to avoid ambiguity. The attempt to do so, however, can just as often result in a label which is completely incorrect.

To say nothing whatsoever of seeing only the facts that we want to. Any of us can seek out and find studies that support our pre-existing viewpoint, that proves us right – even though we should be trying to find things that prove us wrong, just to see if they really exist. On top of that, we are (for some reason) infatuated with victimhood; if we feel bad, if we do not have the advantages that we believe we should have, it’s not our fault if we can find some element that caused it. This appears among far more topics than simply food. But hey, if we get a virus that knocks us down for a few days, it’s not simply a random occurrence or contact with someone infectious, but the fault of the food preparers who sacrificed our health for the sake of profits. There really is this idea that, were it not for outside influences, we would be in perfect health, as if such a thing actually existed. This is complete horseshit – not just the abstract concept of perfect health, but also that we are by default healthy. There is no equilibrium to be found, no ground state of being (despite all the averages we might calculate); life is constant change, and not just ours, but the myriad forms surrounding us as well. A virus may pop up that dodges our natural immune system, and we may take a few days to overcome it – that’s just how it goes. Some days, tension or air quality or all sorts of other factors might cause us to develop a headache – this cannot be taken to mean that we have done something wrong, or that we never would have had a headache if it weren’t for those damn fluorescent lights.

We cannot ignore the “more is better” attitude either. While it is almost certainly true that exercising is better than a sedentary lifestyle, this does not mean that conditioning for a marathon makes it even better – there are no superlatives, no absolutes, to be found. And the improvements, in most cases, probably amount to only a few percentage points, again, among the countless different factors encountered throughout our lives. We would consider it ironic that we get struck by a car and killed while pursuing our health, yet this is simply a demonstration that controlling our health is only partially within our grasp. There are many, many things we cannot change, or even account for, so fixating on any collection is next to meaningless.

We can also ask, again, what the goal truly is. An extended lifespan is a distinct possibility, but why, exactly, are we extending it? Is there some kind of record to set? Is there some reward that comes when we die? If we spend our lives obsessed with the effort of extending them, what are we accomplishing? Perhaps using the time we actually have to, you know, live our lives is something to consider? And probably makes us more entertaining at parties. I’m not going to espouse the idea of justified foolhardiness, but at the same time, I cannot espouse the idea of living in constant fear of the inevitable, either. Again, this isn’t a black-or-white decision – there’s a lot of middle ground.

The extent that this grips people is sometimes astonishing, as indicated by the potential new disorder mentioned in the opening paragraph. I’ve seen enough of this myself, and it’s also easy to find with some online searching, usually without even trying. For instance, this woman appears to live in constant fear of anything that a manufacturer might do, including thinking white glue will actually poison her children through casual skin contact (her demonstration of this, using one of the more potent natural oils, is hilarious. Hey, I cry while chopping onions – that means I’m absorbing onion juices through the knife blade, right?!?!) But if we buy into all of the fear-mongering, without ever asking ourselves if it even makes sense, that’s not a healthy approach either. Stress really can affect our health, much more so than white glue, than sugar, than bread; believing that ‘toxins’ lie in wait around every corner is hardly a mellow approach.

Anecdotal evidence is rampant within such lifestyles, and in fact, just about the only thing that is trusted. There’s something amusing about this, since anecdotal evidence is only slightly more trustworthy than reading chicken entrails. Stomach bothering you? Oh, it must be because you ate high-fructose corn syrup. Here, drink this tea. Did it go away? That’s the healing power of the tea! Of course, nearly every minor stomach ailment will go away on its own within a day, but the tea will get the credit if someone wants to believe in the power of the tea. Placebos work on the human trait where we can feel better if we expect to feel better, and worse if we expect that too. And of course, any potential correlation is seized upon, whether it exists or not. A doctor told me once that most cases of “food poisoning” are anything but – the bacteria that causes it are exceedingly rare and usually cannot survive basic food preparation, much less get reintroduced at some point along the line. But we eat two to three times a day, so any virus that causes abdominal distress in any way gets linked to the last meal. In this particular case, the culprit was kinetosis anyway…

Back in that natural food store, I worked with a woman who bought all of the health fad stuff wholesale; natural fibers for clothes, no microwaved food, no pharmaceuticals, and more herbs than you can shake a stick at. Her daughter lived the same way, but her sons didn’t buy into the lifestyle at all. Her daughter died at a young age of cancer, while her sons suffered no major maladies at all. This is, of course, just as anecdotal as any other account you might find, but think about how this must strike the person dedicating all of their life to ‘healthy’ approaches. What went wrong? What little, unaccounted-for toxin snuck past the defenses? How could this have been prevented? If you really believe that we are by default healthy, then how much more paranoid can this actually make you? If you want to find something to blame, it will be found – perhaps driving past the chemical plant daily, or eating school lunches while growing up. Does this really help anything at all? Can this possibly be considered a good lifestyle?

The professional advice, the stuff that can apply to nearly everyone, has remained the same for decades: eat a balanced diet and exercise. That’s really all that’s necessary, because it counteracts the tendencies that we have not to. It’s not a high bar to reach, and serves no purpose in repeatedly being pushed higher. Just chill. Trusting those who sell hype for a living, believing that our advanced society is brimming with dangers and toxins and carcinogens, is not just irrational, it’s paranoia. Nobody needs that. And if you want to let your diet go for a day and have a little junk food, this isn’t going to affect you in any measurable way – our bodies are remarkably adaptive and hardly so fragile that a Twinkie is going to crash the system.

Coming up: A further examination of some related factors, that I split off because this was already going too long ;-)

The days of yore, part three

Al Denelsbeck

lion cubs facing off
Some time back, after posting a bunch of especially creepy pics, I added the above image and mentioned that I should do a post about it. As you can see, I’m right on top of that, having taken only nine weeks to get to it.

It is, like all images to be seen in this post, a zoo pic, the dreaded ‘captive’ subjects that seem so dire to people at times – real nature photographers certainly should be out capturing all their images in “the wild.” Yeah, whatever – by all means, don’t tell anyone they’re wild if they’re not, but if you can get images that people like, and/or that tell an interesting story, what does it matter where they’re obtained?

lion cubs looking coolAs my own example, I give you a warm christmas eve day, 2006, at the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro. For some peculiar reason visitors were sparse that day, and the cubs, about eight weeks old then, were having their first outdoor session, having spent all their previous lives in the birthing den with the mother. The day was brilliant and clear, the temperature around 20° C (68° F.) And the cubs were making the most of it, tackling their folks, stalking one another, and pouncing on grass and twigs – basically, exactly what domestic kittens do at that age, but for some reason it’s far more fascinating and entertaining when you see wild species doing it, even though they could hardly be called ‘wild’ in this case.

There were four in total, and another test that was taking place was seeing how well dad would react to them. Now, I have to admit that I’m not exactly sure if the male lion was, indeed, the sire of the sprogs – zoos are just as likely to use artificial insemination to ensure viable genetic variation, as well as dealing with potential personality clashes. You just can’t slap together opposite sexes of any species and expect them to get it on, or even get along, any more than we can expect this of humans. Bottom line, ‘dad’ might not have been, but the staff were still waiting to see if he would serve the purpose anyway, since this was actually his first introduction, outside of controlled conditions, to the cubs. In the wild, male lions might kill the offspring of another male when taking over a pride, nature’s way of ensuring less competition for his own genetic line. It may seem barbaric to us, but that’s because we have our own instincts – curiously, they’re so strong regarding protecting infants that we even cross over into other species.

So, how was ‘dad’ dealing with the cubs?

lion father and cub chillin' together
Pretty damn well, to be honest. He could not have been more mellow and still been conscious, and while the cubs weren’t climbing all over him as they were with their mother, they probably could have without incident. In this shot, the cub had been perched atop the rock getting into pounce position when dad looked around, causing the cub to adopt the innocent, “just hanging out” look seen here. It’s never a good idea to let your prey know you’re going to attack them, especially when they outweigh you by such a huge margin. When their back is turned, however…

lion cub about to pounce on father
The cub never did complete the maneuver it was contemplating here; perhaps it realized that it did not have the appetite necessary. While we were there, we didn’t actually see any of the cubs wrestling with dad at all. But of course, there were quite a few tussles amongst themselves, and mom certainly didn’t escape their attentions.

lion cubs attacking their oblivious mother
She was just as mellow as dad, mostly ignoring their feeble attempts at matricide, which encouraged them to stalk one another more often; this might even have been intentional. She was not without the instinct of every mother everywhere, however, as some of the cubs found out when they decided to direct their attention near her face. Suddenly, it became the ideal time to keep the kids groomed, despite their (also typical among species) struggles to avoid such ministrations.

lion mother washing a protesting cub
You may have noticed a difference in angle between the two pics above of momma, and that’s because the zoo had multiple vantages over the lions’ area; we switched back and forth as necessary, though I tended to stick with the angle seen most often in these pics because of the lighting.

Like most zoos, there are some restrictions on getting nice, natural-looking, and uncluttered compositions. The enclosures still have to keep their charges safely within (and, just as much, the less intelligent members of the human species out,) and this means that very often you will have something that just doesn’t work: bad lighting, or a poor perspective on the interesting behavior, or simply evidence that it is, indeed, a zoo.

backbiting lion cubs
Yet, there’s a benefit to working with captive animals that you can take advantage of as well, since animals that are habituated to your presence are more likely to engage in behavior that is extremely hard to capture in the wild. Wild animals may not ‘let their guard down’ in areas where they can be seen easily, and may well be sensitive to your presence, or at least suspicious that something is different. So capturing some adorable interaction can be a lot easier with captives…

lion male and female nuzzling affectionatelyThis is exactly what it appears to be – a very affectionate nuzzling, including some gentle nibbling on one another. I was there with The Girlfriend and The Younger Sprog, and you can imagine the reactions at this point, as well as the frantic instructions to, “Look! Look!” and, “Get it! Get it!” They could hear the shutter snapping as well as I could, or at least they should have been able to, but it’s possible that normal sensory functions were somewhat overwhelmed at that point. They were, naturally, getting their own shots as all this was taking place.

And as I said, visitors were rather thin that day, so very few people saw this particular spectacle, and not many more got to see the cubs’ first day out. This was eight years ago, and the cubs may well have been sent on to other zoos, since most decent parks now exchange animals; the trade in capturing wild specimens, something that Gerald Durrell once took part in, has now halted among all reputable establishments, except in rare circumstances. The mother succumbed to cancer a year or so ago, but I noticed as I was attaching the link for the zoo (repeat) that a new pride has been born recently; I honestly cannot say if they were born to one of these cubs or not. We haven’t been back since that trip in 2006, don’t ask me how we managed that, but it looks like we’re going to have to try again soon.

I leave you with my favorite shot, as an impish cub halted in his grass gnawing to focus directly on me and the long lens staring down, curious as to what I was doing up there above the rock wall. Any emotions that we think we see in this expression are almost certainly imaginary, but if you see a feline version of David Attenborough, narrating a segment on the peculiar habits of humans, well, you can be excused…
expressive lion cub portrait

Are you serious?

Al Denelsbeck

pareidolia face in iceAmong the many reasons why my photography, and thus my posting, has slowed down so much is the temperature, which like most of the rest of the country has dropped significantly. The triops tank on the porch, which was no longer showing any activity anyway, had formed several thin sheets of exploratory ice crystals extending down into the depths – cool enough (a ha ha) when viewed within the water, but much more distinct when removed. Yet the real reason I’m commenting is that, unless you’re a rare individual, you will have no problem seeing a face in this image, at the very least now that I’ve mentioned it.

Just pause here for a moment and consider how ludicrous this is. About the only details that contribute to this idea are a round spot, hardly rare in nature, and a jagged gap underneath that we interpret as a mouth. But, c’mon, is there any species in the freaking world that even remotely resembles this? If we actually saw a person like this, wouldn’t we be struggling to suppress our instinct to spew obscenities (well, my instinct, anyway) for the sake of decency? While many people could spot the ‘face’ instantly, how hard would it be to program a computer to find it? Could we explain this human trait to the visiting extra-terrestrials? Maybe they’ve already seen this weird thing in us, and that’s why they’re staying away. That and some internet memes…

This tendency to see faces is very common, and called pareidolia. And it’s remarkably easy to provoke. While anyone might argue that this isn’t supposed to represent a true face, only a cartoonish caricature, that doesn’t actually explain anything – it’s likely that we can get anything out of cartoons because of precisely this trait, since if you look at most cartoons, the features that represent a face are often not much more detailed than this, certainly not anything close to human appearance by any measurement. The point is, it doesn’t take much to make us see a face, and we’re easily capable of ignoring numerous missing details, bad proportions, and extraneous spikes coming from the forehead.

It’s not just faces, as some of the examples at this page from the Skeptic’s Dictionary shows. We can spot similarities in shapes, contours, shadows, and contrast, for faces, whole bodies, and even positions. At some point, this all crosses the vague line into what we can call pattern recognition, and it’s not even clear we were ever outside of it in the first place. We are, as a species, quite adept at pattern recognition, which may provide a bit more understanding of some points on that page. They list Carl Sagan as saying that pareidolia is an evolutionary trait, but then pronounce some skepticism of this, saying that there’s no evolutionary advantage for “a hawk to be dive-bombing shadows on rocks.” This is perhaps taking a rather superficial view of evolution. A hawk attacking a shadow isn’t likely to produce anything detrimental to the hawk if it’s wrong, simultaneously being extremely beneficial if the shadow really is a prey animal – the benefits outweigh the hazards by a significant margin. And the same can be said for pattern recognition as a whole, throughout many different species. Because of the way genes dictate development, patterns in coloration are actually common, and spotting these can lead to a meal, or to determining the predatory species before they’re too close to avoid. Some species have even developed an advantage based on this trait, by showing eyespots or other traits of dangerous predators to ward off potential attackers. There is also aposematic coloration, the ‘keepaway’ warning of bright, contrasting colors, which present a distinct pattern coupled with a discouraging defense that together are firmly memorable; one bad experience being enough to merit an ongoing avoidance of the species. While patterns of behavior, and cause-and-effect, are also traits that can help a species predict an outcome, which can be useful for the fox capturing a mouse under leaves all the way up to humans planting crops for a later yield. In fact, a vast majority of our knowledge base can be attributed, at least in part, to pattern recognition, and even our scientific method emphasizes replication: ensuring there really is a pattern in the first place.

Pareidolia, then, might be considered an over-sensitivity to such patterns, recognizing a visual cue that really doesn’t exist. As indicated above, this is not necessarily detrimental, and it should be noted that no species is perfectly primed towards survival; while our upright stance provides a lot of benefits, it also leads to chronic back and knee issues in our species. The fact that our species, with very few exceptions, is so inordinately prone to finding faces and patterns is extremely strong evidence that it’s an evolved trait, even if it’s so vague as to produce a face from misshapen ice.

Having bad eyesight, I have another perspective that might have some bearing, one that we often don’t think about in our world of corrected vision. If our vision is bad, the finer details are often lost, and what we might see are vaguer shapes, defined more by contrast. There is nothing that defines perfect or optimal vision; it all depends on our environment, so everyone relies on pattern recognition in one circumstance or another, such as spotting a distant face in a crowd. Caricatures often rely upon the details we’re more likely to notice, exaggerating them far beyond reality while still sparking recognition in most people.

This has already turned out to be a much longer post than originally intended (sorry,) and I keep finding more bits to speculate upon. For instance, the amount of pareidolia that relates to religious themes seems remarkably high, leading to some thoughts about whether religious people are far more prone to seeing such images, and why this should be. However, this is assuming that the pattern I thought I saw actually exists, which is not really supportable. People can see faces in soda cans and manhole covers, and may see several a week – they’re just not remarked upon very often. Religious images, however, are validation, often considered evidence of supernatural influence and ‘a sign’ of something. Thus, it isn’t necessarily that religious folk are more inclined to see it, they may simply be more inclined to find significance in it, and from my own experience, this is practically a defining trait of religious folk. There is a certain level of amusement to be found in these; no physical description of jesus or mary exists in scripture, so anyone’s impression is either imagination, or based on artwork that was the artist’s imagination, while no one ever finds the face of muhammad because any likeness is considered blasphemous…

I mentioned above about teaching a computer to find faces, yet it’s been done – not necessarily for any useful reason, but many cellphones now have facial recognition software, because I guess humans need the help? It couldn’t possibly be because smartphones are ridiculously expensive toys. But anyway, this article has a great composite image of random polygons that, at low resolution, look like portraits – mostly of Albert Einstein, which you’re welcome to make all the snide comparisons to the above paragraph that you can. There are two more articles that I found while poking around, here and here, that may also be entertaining. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on the ice…

Measuring sticks

Al Denelsbeck

I like perspective. Not just the kind used in photography, but the kind that changes the way we think about something. It’s very interesting sometimes, in that there are bare facts, and then there’s the way we feel about them, how we classify the information and relate to it. It comes up quite a bit in the spirited (read: vehement) discussions of free will which, whether it exists or not (it doesn’t,) still doesn’t change how our lives operate. A curious place for it to spring up, however, is in regards to Pluto.

This is perhaps the most contentious astronomical subject, at least to the general public, and a lot of it has to do with how we phrase things. As most people know, Pluto was one of the nine planets almost from the moment it was discovered, up until 2006, when its nomenclature was changed to dwarf planet. Invariably, this is referred to as being ‘demoted,’ and the qualifying term dwarf probably also contributes. A lot of people resent this change, even refusing to accept it, and get surprisingly emotional about it.

First off, there is no such thing as demoting a planet, since there is no status or prestige a planet can hold anyway, except in our own eyes. Pluto remains unchanged, and quite likely (barring a lot of our physics knowledge being dramatically overturned) completely unaware of its title, or indeed anything at all – it’s a frozen rock, and was long before we apes started jumping around and worrying about HBO series. The reason the classification was changed was to help distinguish various bodies found in our solar system. We make up all of these terms, including ‘planet,’ just to communicate, and any changes are intended to facilitate this (though perhaps not successful in this endeavor.) Yet they remain just abstract ideas in our heads.

Let’s go ahead and get dwarf planet out of the way. It’s defined by a solar system object a) orbiting the star, and not another body like a planet, b) large enough to shape itself through its own gravity, and c) incapable of clearing its orbit of any debris. That last bit is the clincher, since Pluto sits in the Kuiper Belt with a lot of other, smaller bits of rock and ice, while the eight major planets have gathered up the majority of loose matter and absorbed it. Another dwarf planet, Ceres, sits within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, while most of the others are out there in Kuiper territory with Pluto, some even beyond that.

We have millions of bits of stuff in our system. The asteroid belt contains lots of rocky bodies with highly irregular shapes, lacking enough mass to pull themselves into a sphere, the most gravitationally stable of shapes. Many satellites (‘moons’) of the planets are large enough to have done this, but of course orbit their planets and not the sun, thus that distinction – this is notable, since a lot of them, including Earth’s moon, are larger than Pluto.

One of the potential new classifications, back in 2006, was that a planet must be substantially larger than its moons, which would also have ruled out Pluto. Every moon exerts its own gravitational influence on the host it orbits, tugging it around in proportion to its mass, causing a wobble in the host’s orbital path around the sun. Pluto’s largest moon Charon is large enough that they pretty much orbit each other; the common center of gravity between them lies outside of Pluto’s diameter, so it doesn’t just wobble, it circles, like two skaters spinning with joined hands.

Now for fun, let’s look at some other qualifications that we could use:

A planet should be able to support an atmosphere. Pluto would make it, Mercury would not.

A planet must have a moon. Pluto wins out again over Mercury, and Venus as well. It has, in fact, five moons, so it ranks well above Earth (one moon) and Mars (two minuscule moons) in that respect as well.

A planet should have an axial tilt relative to the orbital plane. In other words, it should spin ‘upright’ in relation to its path around the sun. This depends on how sloppy you want to get, since none fit this bill, but Mercury is closest with 2°, Venus and Jupiter close behind with 3°; the rest, including Pluto, are tilted significantly, Uranus being totally screwed. And Venus rotates the opposite direction from all the rest.

A planet should be a rocky body. As opposed to being gaseous like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

We could go on, but basically, one can create any sort of criteria one wants and pin this label on anything at all. Pluto is unique in a lot of ways, and can be appreciated for those. It is probably far older than the Earth, if you count being in a solid shape or stable orbit; Earth’s moon was likely formed by a collision with another Mars-sized object early on, and both had to restabilize. Earth may only exist, at least where it is now, because of the gravitational influence of Jupiter, which both prevented it from being drawn closer to the sun and helped clear away other bodies that would have caused catastrophic impacts. Pluto may also harbor the oldest molecules in the solar system, or very close; it is too far out for heat from the sun to cause many effects in its atmosphere, and too small to produce gravitational pressure that would catalyze any elements it possesses, which cannot be said for any of the major planets, and a few of the dwarves.

And what this is demonstrating is that all of the bodies in our system are unique. We can apply any labels to them as desired, when we think broad classifications are useful, but this in no way makes anything either unremarkable, or part of a prestigious group. In a way, this starts to sound like the misguided validation trend of the ’90s, where every child was special, but this doesn’t exactly apply; humans have a desire for recognition and improvement, and moreover very good reasons for pursuing these, so thwarting them by lowering the bar denies their usefulness. In contrast, all of the bodies in our system have something they can teach us, and no benefit to be accrued from either improvement (whatever arbitrary definition one uses) or change of any kind. Worry about the label only when the label has some application.

But this brings us to New Horizons. New Horizons is a probe currently on its way to visit Pluto, having begun its journey in January of 2006. On December 6th of this year, it will awaken from hibernation for the last time to begin its primary mission, while in January it will start actively collecting data about Pluto and its various moons. On July 14th of 2015, it will make its closest pass of Pluto before it trundles on towards even further reaches.

This might seem odd, but it’s a flyby mission, unlike many others that we know of, such as Cassini and the Mars Global Surveyor. As mentioned in an earlier post, it took quite a bit of maneuvering to get New Horizons on a path to intercept Pluto in the first place, because it’s so damn far out there; it used Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot boost to be able to reach Pluto without relying on rocket thrust. Basic premise: thrust requires fuel, which is mass/weight. Mass/weight requires fuel to move. The more fuel you boost into space, the more fuel is needed just for the fuel’s own mass. The goal is to need as little fuel as possible so the mass being boosted is something more productive, like instrumentation.

Now, to reach Pluto in the nine years it’s currently taking, New Horizons has to be booking right along; presently it’s clocking 52,704 kph (32,749 mph) in relation to the sun, mostly ‘straight out.’ So in order for it to orbit, it would not only have to turn, it would also have to slow down to orbital velocity, somewhere below Pluto’s escape velocity of 4,320 kph. That’s a lot of fuel, that it would have had to carry the entire way. Long story short: it doesn’t, and is only going to whiz past Pluto and further into the Kuiper Belt, but not before gathering as much info as possible.

Which should be significant, since nearly all of the information we have has been gathered from Earth’s immediate vicinity. There have certainly been probes that have been much farther from Earth than, say, the Hubble Space Telescope, but that doesn’t mean that they were any closer to Pluto. We tend to think in terms of the concentric circles of the orbital plots that we always see illustrated, lining up the planets (and dwarf planets and non-planets) nicely, but they all orbit; while Cassini is hanging out at Saturn, this still might be on the other side of the sun from Pluto, even farther away than Earth. The New Horizons mission had some pretty crucial timing, in that using Jupiter for velocity assistance required Earth, Jupiter, and Pluto to reach appropriate positions in their orbits, something that wasn’t going to happen again for 300 years.

So most of what we know has been obtained from a great distance – always at least 4.28 billion kilometers (2.66 billion miles,) which is the point where Earth’s and Pluto’s positions come closest together. Hubble has been responsible for the best looks of Pluto to date, which haven’t been all that detailed.

Hubble Maps Pluto
Source: Hubblesite.org

That’s it; that’s all the detail we have. Are those blobs clouds? Craters? The missing Martian canals? A Monolith stockpile? We don’t know yet. You’ve seen some of the detail that Hubble is capable of, so this illustrates just how small and distant Pluto is, but if that’s not enough, how about an animation of Pluto and Charon, taken by New Horizons in August of this year?

Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Wait – they’re not round? No, they are, they’re just too dim for all of the surface features to show in the exposures used, not to mention they’re shaped by the pixel dimensions of the camera sensor, so they get irregular outlines; again, check the distances listed in the image itself. New Horizons traveled from 429 million kilometers away to only 422 million during this animation – in comparison, Earth’s closest approach to Mars is 54.6 million kilometers, and you know what that looks like in the sky.

Also note, as explained on the page that the image links to, that both Pluto and Charon are wobbling. This is not from bad camera aiming, but because the image is pinned on the common gravitational center of the two, the barycenter. Discussing this illustrates the difficulty and relativity of orbital mechanics. If you’re on Pluto, it would seem rock-steady and Charon would be orbiting, but the same in reverse would be seen from Charon, just as we sit here on Earth orbiting the sun and think the sun ‘rises’ and ‘sets.’ But if you took Pluto’s time and distance to orbit the sun to obtain an average orbital speed, that’s the barycenter, and Pluto advances and retreats routinely around this due to Charon’s gravitational influence.

Another interesting note is that New Horizons’ mission is still being planned, with the Hubble Space Telescope still scouting targets of potential interest after the probe passes Pluto. Part of this is because the timing of the probe’s launch was crucial; part of this is because there’s a huge demand on Hubble’s time, from astronomers all over the world – anyone can apply to use the scope, but they have to petition for it and make their case for how important their research is (so you’re welcome to try, but don’t hold your breath.) As yet, while there are some potential targets in range of New Horizons‘ path and limited fuel, to the best of my knowledge nothing has been confirmed yet. Suffice to say that the folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the ones that control New Horizons, don’t consider the mission over once the probe passes out of effective range of Pluto, even though the flyby is the only confirmed mission; everything else will be gravy.

So keep watching the astronomy news. In a few months, New Horizons will be pumping out images and information about this little dwarf and its moons, providing a hell of a lot more information than we’ve been able to determine since its discovery in 1930. Meanwhile, you can go to the mission site for details and what we’ve accumulated so far.

Now for a little bonus. The change of Pluto’s status wrecked the mnemonic that untold people recited to recall the order of the planets in their distance from the sun, such as “Mother very eagerly makes jelly sandwiches using no peanutbutter,” or, “Mary’s violet eyes make Johnny stand up now period” (a ridiculous number of them use “very” in a stunning lack of originality.) It’s easy enough to change them to leave off the final P, but what about all of the other dwarf planets? Shouldn’t we be reciting them too?

And so, I took it upon myself to create one that includes them all: “Missing velvet earmuffs mean cold January storms unleash numbing pain on helpless quaking men’s red ears since breakfast.”

Got that?

It’s simple: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Orcus, Hauma, Quaoar, Makemake, 2007 OR10, Eris, Sedna, 2012 VP113.

Now, I know you’re questioning a couple of them, but bear with me. 2007 OR10 was originally nicknamed “Snow White” due to its supposed albedo, the reflectance it possessed; later on, it was determined to be red in color instead, and the original Snow White stories (before Disney) sometimes featured her sister, Rose Red – I am not making this up – so this was the obvious choice. And 2012 VP113 is occasionally nicknamed “Veep” or “Biden,” so I went with the latter, mostly because ending a sentence with “very” is awkward.

You’re welcome.

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