More spiders – lots of spiders

Al Denelsbeck

I’m sorry, it’s what I’m finding to photograph.

ExpectingLynx
So about a month ago I mentioned that the green lynx spiders (Peucetia viridans) that I’d been observing had all made egg sacs; one on the dog fennel plants, one on the butterfly bush, and one on the rosemary bush. They have all since hatched, and I’ve been watching the new spiderlings until they cast away soon – if I get lucky, I’ll get some pics of this occurring, but I’m not counting on it. At macro magnifications I expect they’ll flash out of focus almost instantly.

LynxletCluster
In the meantime, I’m going out and trying for interesting compositions and closeups, which can be problematic. The newborns tend to stay clustered, head inwards for protection, and helicopter mom advances quite aggressively whenever I loom too close or the softbox starts bumping against the outer web strands. In the image above from the dog fennel, you can see how the egg sac was placed deep in protective foliage, and the out-of-focus blur to the right is mama in the foreground.

ProtectiveMamaIn fact, this has allowed me to get some better portraits (for a given definition of “better,” anyway) of the adults, who previously were too shy to allow really close approaches, but in the throes of protective motherhood they practically climb onto the camera. This is the same specimen as the one at top, and the one seen in this post – note how much color change has occurred. The one on the rosemary bush, however, disappeared on the same day that one of the pregnant mantises was seen on the same bush, so it’s quite likely she provided protein for mantis eggs and now her offspring, hatched after her disappearance, are fending for themselves. Since they’re in quite good cover and practically invisible, they don’t appear to be doing too badly so far, but I haven’t tried counting the clutches to know if the numbers are dwindling.

As impressive as this visage might be, know that the body length of the adult is just 17mm (about 3/4 inch,) and the face you’re seeing here is roughly 6mm long, less than the width of a pencil – getting those measurements meant that she did indeed take a shot at the calipers, which did not appear to notice. I’m pleased to get those little brown fangs, because they really can’t be seen in any normal circumstances, but also note the sensitive hairs on the inside edges of the chelicerae near the fangs, which help tell the spider what’s going on with their prey.

Here’s another shot from the butterfly bush, with mom running interference:

LynxletnMom
It was a misty day when I took it, thus the water drops in the web. The smaller orange blob in the background is a sibling, but the overall brown mass is the egg sac, still serving as home base though the young do not re-enter it at all.

My favorite image, however, remains this one, from the orphans on the rosemary:

WetBabyLynx
The overnight dew on the abdomen is a delightful detail, as is the safety ‘dragline’ of webbing extending from the spinnerets, which is virtually always present for spiders yet rarely visible – in these cases, it helps contribute to the cocoon of webbing that protects the young and alerts mom that there’s a strange dog in the yard. To the best of my knowledge, the white sphere is pollen – but I suppose it could be a crystal ball, and I was interrupting their mother telling them everything was wonderful in The Beyond and that heaven was filled with fat, slow flies.

But how? Part 11: Certainty or confidence?

Al Denelsbeck

Note: I’ve had this is draft form for several days, tweaking it and waiting for a good opportunity to put it up; I try to rotate and space out posts, and just recently put up another of the numbered series posts. Then this morning, Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True posted virtually the same sentiment, and now I look like I’m copying him. So here it is anyway.

*     *     *     *     *

This one is almost an extension of the ideas put forth in the agnosticism episode, and also reiterates portions of the Pascal’s Wager post, but there’s more to it than those ideas. It seems, at least in this country, any outspoken atheist is very likely to receive the challenge, “But how can you be so sure there’s no god?” – or any variation thereof. So let’s play around with certainty and confidence.

First off, recognize that the question itself comes from the cultural perspective of a large number of people being religious – it arises far less in countries with a lower percentage of the devout. This is unsurprising, but many people are unaware how much culture is responsible for attitudes towards gods, and life’s meaning, and how important it is to have a phone that takes pictures. The question is a broad assumption, from a standpoint that something supernatural is a given, and that those who fail to see the importance or likelihood of this are somehow radical. Taken from the perspective of science, logic, or really, anything else not weighted by assumption, the question gets turned the other way: what evidence does someone have to propose a god in the first place? What effects can be seen, what properties does such a hypothesis explain, what function is it, what does it predict? Everything in science operates on this simple principle (which is why it is taught in schools,) and from this perspective, all religions have a long way to go.

But again, while I throw these questions out there for contemplation, that’s not the purpose of these posts – the points need to stand on their own, not merely challenge other perspectives. And indeed, there is an underlying problem with being sure there’s no god, in that we can never be sure of anything (though the weight of the evidence may make us pretty damn confident,) but worse, there is no such thing as negative evidence – there’s simply the lack of positive evidence. There is a common saying, known especially among UFO proponents and conspiracy theorists, that says, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” – something can still exist even if we don’t know about it. At least, that’s what the saying seems to imply, but it’s both true and false. The sentence really should be, “Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence,” which makes it a lot weaker to use as a proverb, actually highlighting the flaw within. Because the only thing that’s evidence of absence is [drum roll]… the absence of evidence. I know we’re out of toilet paper because there is no toilet paper on the shelves. And while someone might try to argue the difference between a narrowly defined set of circumstances like toilet paper ready at hand, and a supernatural entity, the point is just the same as the null hypothesis that science starts from, indicating that positive evidence is the only thing that has value.

The whole idea of supernatural entities (I purposefully try to be vague to accommodate every concept of god and religion that exists, because someone always whines) stems from culture, and nowadays largely from scripture. And when the word ‘scripture’ is used, too many people automatically fill in their own favored example and ignore all others, but this is an unnecessarily narrow view. Since we’re supposed to be talking about a supernatural being that created all life on the planet, considering only one example is a bit biased; nearly every culture across the globe has/had their own creation stories, all claiming to have been imparted as Truth™ from on high. The broad assumption of most religious folk is that everyone else has it wrong, but this means that a majority of cultures on the planet are following mythology, imagination, delusion – call it what you will. So not only do we have the basic logical conclusion that it is easy to be completely mistaken about divine influence, we have the conundrum that every culture insists on their own special, “chosen” status but most of them had to have been completely forsaken by the supreme deity/deities. It’s hard to examine the plethora of religious belief across the world and make any claim that they have any common origin at all, especially when monotheism is a very recent concept, less than 2,000 years old and still not wholly embraced.

(By the way, the survey results that show atheists scoring higher on religious knowledge, on average, than religious folk ties in directly with this, even when many people get the cause and effect reversed. The knowledge of how radically incompatible religious belief is across the globe, indicative of serious problems with claims of divine inspiration, is what helps foster atheism – a little learning is a dangerous thing.)

We can, of course, look to scripture itself to try and determine accuracy, and by extension divine information, but unless we treat this as a foregone conclusion and pay attention only to the ‘hits,’ we find scripture to be so woefully inaccurate as to be incapable of proving its authenticity. And this isn’t just a matter of metaphorical usage, couching things in terms that the people of the times could understand, or even translation error, all of which have been proposed to salvage the provenance of scripture from the damning of reality; it would have been phenomenally easy to provide accurate accounts of creation, the nature of the sun, or even the shape of the planet – it’s what we would expect from information imparted by a deity. Yet not one scriptural tale got any of these right, among countless other examples – some of them border on the laughably naïve. Once there is any inaccuracy, of course, the accuracy of any other portion becomes questionable as well, to the point where it’s easier to simply investigate the world for ourselves. The disturbing thing is how often the devout will actually resort to claiming that their scripture is still completely accurate, and it’s reality itself that’s got it all wrong – and then whine that they deserve respect for their beliefs.

It should be noted that the routine actions of gods within scripture are something we see not the faintest trace of nowadays, implying that the direct interactions were abandoned wholesale in favor of hiding, for whatever reason. The various explanations put forth to explain this range from free will to Master Plans, almost all speculative since scripture is silent on why this change occurred (the ability to see the distinction between the actual content of scripture and the imagined explanations adopted as doctrine is possessed by few religious folk, by the way.) The idea of a deity which changes its mind implies not only imperfection, but a lack of omniscience and/or omnipotence.

Which leads to a further issue. Predestination is obviously a bit of a problem for religion, because it removes all influence that religion has, but worse, it makes an omniscient deity beyond our ability to grasp. Omniscience and immortality are a recipe for total inaction, in fact the total cessation of thought – what can there be to do that is not already known? What can be imagined that is not already proscribed? One cannot even connect one thought to another since it is already done. Obviously, humans cannot have thinking processes that resemble this in any way or we’d go neurotic immediately, and in fact, it makes existence (ours or a deity’s) to be completely pointless. Without omniscience, of course, a deity’s plan is an intended goal, but still up for revision.

Perhaps we can ignore scripture, for whatever reason, and contemplate the posit of an unspecific deity, going the theistic or deistic route – one that is responsible for creation and/or moral judgment but has no specific attributes. The first problem that comes up is, without scripture or organized religion, what is making anyone propose such a being in the first place? While various theological arguments have been forwarded, all of them have flaws, some so egregious as to render them ludicrous (actually, I find that “most” is the operative word here.) It’s not really hard to make any proposal sound logical, but logic is a funny thing – it only works in very rigidly defined circumstances, and it requires solid information as a starting point; logic is actually just the patterns of cause-and-effect run into abstraction. The primary test of a logical posit is the “If/Then” statement: If A is true, then we should expect to see B occur. Any posit not based on evidence and not providing any prediction that can be tested is not logic at all. Claims that “everything must have a beginning” or “the role of mankind is to seek perfection” are mere assertions, unable to be supported in any way and not demonstrated anywhere in human experience. It’s just as easy to say, “everything must have an end,” trashing the idea of an immortal soul or deity, and this is no different, and no more logical, than the counterpart.

Quite often, a preferred deity is said to be at work in the mysterious or unknown aspects of physics, such as quantum variation or even just coincidence. If there is no distinct physical law describing the phenomenon, that is where a god has chosen to flex their might – this is derogatorily known as the ‘god of the gaps’ argument. There are two distinct problems with this. The first is, it’s a great example of what I’ve called unevidence, claiming ignorance of a cause as support for any favored idea – “we don’t know,” somehow being translated into, “therefore god.” Amusingly, this actually implies that our knowledge is complete up to the realm of the supernatural, an attitude that no small number of religious folk get quite upset about when they interpret this as coming from sci-ence. But the second problem is that it posits a deity that bears no resemblance to the one they want to believe in, one so incredibly weak that it seems a waste of time. Maybe it’s just me, but praying for quantum decay seems somewhat out of proportion when breathing on something provides millions of times the impact.

The natural end of things – in other words, physics – explains how things work amazingly well. We can trace nearly everything back to four physical forces, and the interconnectedness of it all is both astounding, and exactly what we should expect to see with a lack of supernatural influence. This manages to explain everything from the behavior of stellar matter down to why we have a desire for morality. The very reason why anyone makes the various ‘god of the gaps’ arguments is because physics works so damn well. It is even possible to see why religion has been adopted into cultures, the evolutionary influences that make us prone to such beliefs. Again, we come to the scientific approach, where the hypothesis not only explains why something occurs, it gives us the ability to understand human motivations and see how they tie into other evolved behaviors – and seeking understanding is one of those prime human motivations anyway.

Now for the fun part, because we haven’t even touched on whether religious belief is a good thing or not – all we’ve dealt with so far has been plausibility. However, there remains the separate consideration, even if some deity could be proven to exist, as to whether religious belief or practice is actually beneficial. Most people don’t even think about this, assuming that if it’s supernatural, it’s good, but these are not synonymous in any way. And so we must consider whether the behavior fostered in religious folk is actually providing a benefit (which is a really hard thing to objectively support) and whether any such benefit cannot be achieved without religion (which no one has made the slightest case for yet – blind assertion is not an argument.) The fact that “religious violence” is a common phrase is pretty damning all by itself, but the perpetual history of religious persecution, privilege, judgment, and war is something that there’s really no need to belabor. Even if we accept the premise that these are tendencies of humans, religion has not tempered these to any useful degree, and the frequency of religious motivations among so many conflicts demonstrates inarguably that religion cannot sanely be said to even make people pause and consider. To all appearances, it makes them even more murderous by providing a belief in divine justification.

That would be more than reason enough, all by itself, for any reasoning person to completely ignore religion, even in the face of real miracles – obviously the deity isn’t too concerned with mankind, so why worship such a thing? But we can even, for the sake of argument, ignore all of that and stick just to individual, local behavior and see that nearly every religion spends more time promoting privilege and creating dividing lines than fostering any goodwill between humans, placing emphasis on faith and in-groups much, much higher than beneficial actions. It is solely through the constant repetition of “religion=good” that we can even believe such a thing, because rational consideration doesn’t actually support the idea. Moreover, it’s childishly easy to promote good behavior, far more efficiently, and without any baggage or threats whatsoever. It’s not like we have to obtain it only as a fringe benefit of religion.

But that, admittedly, has nothing to do with whether a god exists or not. The final aspect that I’ll tackle here is just the practical one: does the existence of a deity, or the mere belief in one, provide anything of value to us as a species? And pardon me, but I’m going to crassly dismiss the personal angle, just as I won’t consider the music someone likes to count as providing a benefit to us as a species – we’ll stick to something measurable. And taking that scientific angle again and looking for the explanatory and predictable nature of the hypothesis, we find virtually nothing that religion predicts; in fact, we find the very distinct lack thereof being claimed, somehow, as a benefit, something we can’t fathom but must nevertheless be good. No religion the world over served to explain much of anything, even as it went into great detail about creation and history and meaning and moral guidance – we’ve spent the last five centuries proving all of them both completely wrong and worthless as moral guidance. The assertions that we would be even worse as a species without religious influence have been proven wrong by the higher social standards of countries with low religiosity – in fact, the direct correlation with religion and lower social welfare, while not explaining which caused the other or indeed if either is causative, still gives a strong indication that benefit is not a factor. And then of course there’s the repeated demonstrations, now and throughout history, that religion negatively influences tolerance, education, medicine, and science, often extending into censorship, persecution, bigotry, and violence. Aside from the lack of benefit (which is putting it mildly,) we are left with three possible conclusions about gods from these facts: either there is none, or any that exist don’t give the faintest damn about what humans do in their name, or they’re simply shitheads.

If we take everything above into consideration, however, there’s simply one conclusion that fits every part of it without the need of special circumstances, explanations, proposed properties, or philosophical manipulations: there is no god. While anyone may decry such a definitive statement, especially from the perspective of stating a negative, the attempts to refute the above points have been rickety structures of sophistry and supposition. Probability can only be based on available evidence, not imagined scenarios, and this is how many atheists have arrived at their confidence.

This is in stark contrast with the certainty of the faithful, which usually relies on assertions and selectivity – when it’s not simply emotional affirmation. Examining probability or logical consequences rarely ever enters into the picture; these cannot charitably be said to form the backbone of religious certainty in the same way that I’ve laid out above… which actually makes the topic question itself, when asked by anyone who claims a faith, to be rather hypocritical.

Can the conclusion that there’s no god be wrong? Of course – anything can be. But seizing on the possibility and making this a foundation of any argument is hardly objective, especially when every religion can be wrong as well, and every law of physics, and every concept of electronic theory, and every belief about who our parents really are. It’s why we go beyond mere “maybes” to look at probability and predictability in the first place. We accept that germ theory explains a significant percentage of illnesses because it works, and while it could be wrong, such speculations really don’t have any effect unless we find the evidence that shows that it is. That’s confidence.

Too cool, part 20: Stop it, you’re creeping me out

Al Denelsbeck

L.viridisScale
Lyssomanes viridis, known to those of us who do not speak dead languages as the magnolia green jumping spider, is a lovely translucent green spider that wouldn’t hurt a fly um, is harmless to anything larger than a honyebee and is undeserving of any arachnophobic reactions. Until you get close. Really, really close.

Because, while all jumping spiders have the same equipment, on the magnolia green jumper, you can actually see it. In operation. The ‘anterior median’ (big center two) eyes are quite well-developed for an arthropod, allowing jumping spiders to accurately judge the distance to their prey and across the chasms they leap. Since the cornea of the eyes is part of the exoskeleton of the entire spider, shed with everything else during a molt, the moving bits of the eyes are inside. The translucent chitin of the magnolia green jumper lets light shine through their cephalothorax and even through their eyes, making them blend in with the rest of the spider in most circumstances. However, at times the spider focuses just right and the retina all of a sudden becomes visible as a dark background within. The retina can move in all directions, and even does so independently for each eye:
L.viridisEyes1
L.viridisEyes2
L.viridisEyes3
I caught this little girl yesterday scampering up the door of the car, and when trying for some quick, casual macro shots, I saw the eye effects. I’d only seen this once before in a video, and knew I had to get better images, so into the film can (ask your parents) she went to come home with me and do some studio work.

MGJS-sideWhat became apparent through the macro lens was that you can even see the eye moving around from the side, here visible as a dark spot peeking out from underneath that Gen Y hairstyle. I really need to branch out into video, though I imagine I’d still be trying to bring all the conditions together – it’s easier to let someone else do it. In that clip, I suspect the spider was concentrating on the meal and just idly looking around, since the movements are much slower than what I was seeing. My specimen couldn’t decide if she should go to the underside of the leaf to hide, or jump gleefully onto the camera lens and play keepaway when I tried to get her off. She showed no adverse reaction to running across my hand (something that some jumpers seem to instantly recognize and abandon,) and yesterday during my attempts at capturing her from the side of the vehicle, she actually cast a web into the wind and ran across it to my chest. I really have to work on a bug siphon…

I have had a previous encounter with the strangely visible anatomy of the magnolia green jumper before, but hadn’t spotted it in the viewfinder, only finding the effect when I unloaded the camera (and was perplexed for a long time over it.) While my subject above is likely an immature female, this one’s a male, with the club-ends of the pedipalps and much more pronounced chelicerae; it’s the only one I’ve found on the property so far:
Whoa
The images may make it evident how short the focus range is for this kind of macro work, and I have lots of photos where the focus is blown. There are rigs that slide a tripod-mounted camera very finely into sharp focus distance, and I even have one, but working on a tripod is out of the question for a moving specimen. Sometimes, however, even the out-of-focus shots are useful, as in this case when I missed the portrait, but actually got the retinas into halfway decent sharpness.
L.viridisRetina

Isn’t that the real truth?

Al Denelsbeck

Just in case anyone hasn’t seen this subject the last nine times I approached it, I find ‘free will‘ to be a corrupt concept, a common belief without rational support (which gives it plenty of company.) And no, I’m not going to broach it again. Instead, we’ll look deeper into the question of whether we should retain some illusions.

A recent article at Mind Hacks highlighted several studies that seemed to show that not believing in free will actually makes people less sociable. The article admits that this is a very superficial result as yet, and more studies would need to be done to understand the response better, but for the moment, let’s assume it’s accurate and consider if it’s better to either live a lie that produces better behavior, or understand the world and ourselves as accurately as possible.

The ‘comforting lie’ argument crops up in numerous topics, from religion to medicine to child rearing to social interactions, and when you stop to think about it, as a species we’re pretty resistant to bold reality quite often.

“Am I ugly?”

“Well, yeah, on a scale of one to ten I’d rate you about a three.”

or

“Do you want the last donut?”

“Of course I do, you twit – did you think just by asking I’d deny it out of politeness or something?”

If you bother to take all of our social interactions and quantify them on their level of honesty, you’d find that we lie all of time, and probably would become pretty neurotic if we dealt with nothing but truth. So as lies go, perpetuating the idea of free will is a drop in the bucket.

Now, there’s a curious conditional in here, in that if you’ve heard any arguments against free will that sound kosher (I can provide a few if you like) and nothing that refutes them, you’re liable to think that ‘free will’ is all nonsense; someone then telling you otherwise (or simply that it’s better to believe in it anyway) isn’t actually going to eradicate this info from your mind. Once you know something, you can’t un-know it without doing something you probably shouldn’t – so the only way of dealing with the social consequences is to ensure that no one actually learns the issues with free will in the first place.

That puts us in the territory of scientific censorship, and/or of halting any research into decision-making, motivations, neurological responses, and so on – not really a viable or recommended program, and we’re only talking about free will itself. Imagine all the other things that can be affected if we start to consider that comforting lies are to be encouraged if some social benefit can be found.

There are definitely times when a certain amount of self-deception is a good thing. Take phrases like, “If you put your mind to it, you can do anything.” That’s obviously horseshit, but even if we keep it in the realm of things humanly possible, most people will never write the novel they planned, or simply don’t have the writing ability to interest a publisher if they did. Most will never become a sports legend; most will never rise to the top of their profession. But facing such truths is discouraging, capable of destroying our motivations to even try. Belief in the value of hard work and dedication is a minimum requirement for those who do succeed in their endeavors.

[As a curious side note, recognize that the chances of getting that novel published are hundreds of times higher than of winning ‘the jackpot,’ yet many people will get discouraged from the former while spending ridiculous amounts of money on the latter. But that’s fodder for another post.]

Then, there’s the perspective that a little learning is a dangerous thing – the key bit in that quote is, “little,” not, “learning,” since it was intended to encourage deeper investigations. The initial reactions we might have from some new information, which changes our beliefs or attitudes, may change over time as we consider all of the ramifications, or place it in a more realistic perspective. While most people won’t have their novel published, largely this is because most never finish it, while some never try to find out what makes for good writing (save the comments.) But unlike sports, publishing is an open-ended pursuit with an unlimited market – there can always be another writer, and it doesn’t matter how old they are, and isn’t limited by season or team size. To a significant extent, the lack of success is due to the lack of motivation.

And when we return to free will, we can recognize that the apparent lack thereof has always been there, and this only had an effect if we believed otherwise. Tell someone that they have no free will and they are immediately motivated to prove otherwise, often without realizing that this isn’t addressing the points in the slightest – it’s only through careful consideration that they come to understand that it’s the concept that’s stupid, and doesn’t lead to them being an automaton or there being no consequences of their actions (however predictable, given a few jillion bits of information that would be impossible for our minds to grasp anyway.) If the experiments were prefaced with the simple statement, “People that believe they have no free will tend to be antisocial,” how much will that skew the results in the opposite direction, making people go out of their way to prove they’re not assholes? Even without that, does the antisocial tendency last any time at all, or is it just a side-effect of bringing the topic to mind during the tests?

When we talk about comforting lies, we’re placing emotional supplication higher in value than dependable knowledge, which by itself is enough to send up warning flags. If we don’t like a fact, this doesn’t indicate something wrong with reality, but instead that our expectations or wishes are poorly aligned with such – this is probably a good thing to correct. Evolution deniers very frequently disparage the idea that we’re related to monkeys (usually not even capable of getting the ‘apes’ bit right,) but this has quite a lot to do with finding monkeys distasteful or inferior – such people are frequently coming from the belief of being a higher, Chosen™ species, so the apparent fall is abhorrent. The problem is that they were wrong to begin with, and that we’re not any more (or less) special than any other species.

It’s fairly easy to make a case that self-delusion is something we should avoid as much as possible, yet those earlier examples of our inability to handle bare honesty throws that into question. Could we actually handle the truth, all of the time, everywhere? If not, how and where do we draw a dividing line? Most especially, is the risk so great that we should consider not following through on any given avenue of investigation?

Overall, I find it fairly easy to answer that we should investigate as much as possible, and our fragile emotions be damned – they’re not that fragile anyway. We get used to new ideas fairly quickly, and it’s impossible to say where a more accurate perspective can lead. For my own part, realizing some of the ramifications of being an evolved species has led to a much greater understanding of human motivations, reactions, and thinking processes – surpassing by miles any distaste I would have felt over being related to a ‘monkey,’ had I actually possessed that warped perspective in the first place. While a patient with a condition that’s been fatal in 90% of the cases may do better if they don’t know this fact, the doctor can certainly benefit from the knowledge, even if only to recognize that death is not a strong indication of improper treatment. And if we become a little nastier with knowing that free will is a ridiculous concept, well, that’s life. When it gets to the point of creating suicide bombers and televangelists, we’ll revisit the matter.

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I just have to add this, but it only tangentially touches on the main point so it gets relegated to the basement. When I first heard the premise of the linked article, I found the conclusion unlikely, and as I went through, I started noting flaws. But I soon realized this was exactly the kind of thing that someone does when they dislike the information, and was not necessarily a rational response even by my standards – after all, it wasn’t just one study, or even one methodology, that produced the results. I still think there are reasons to find the tentative conclusions to be questionable, and the article admits that anyway, but I can’t deny that I want to find the conclusion false. There’s an old saying that finding the results you hoped for in research is reason to be extra suspicious, because humans are prone to bias, and I’m self-obligated to admit my own prejudice here.

And yet, it is amazingly easy to influence someone’s thought processes, even with something as simple as descriptive terms (search under “Dr. Elizabeth Loftus” for plenty of examples,) so offsetting any real detrimental effect might be trivial. And with free will being such a poorly understood term, there are reasons to believe that discarding the whole idea would have a varying impact, since it would require more than simply saying, “It’s nonsense” – people have long ingrained ideas about their motivations, abilities, and ‘place in the cosmos,’ very often completely unsupportable by facts. As they change, so might any aspect of their behavior, in any direction, and over a period of time. Returning again to my own example, a deeper knowledge of science didn’t take away any magic, it actually made the world that much cooler to experience. And treating morality as a function of human social interaction, rather than following the rules of some overseer, makes it far more useful. So I can’t be too concerned over the anti-social changes that may occur if everyone finds out ‘the truth about free will,’ in the face of all the changes we could be making. If Ayn Rand didn’t collapse civilization, the disappearance of the concept of free will sure as hell won’t.

The title, by the way, is homage to a classic Simpsons episode with Leonard Nimoy. Since YouTube is so remarkably undependable and the clip may vanish at any time, I’ve simply embedded the audio clip:

On composition, part 19: Distractions

Al Denelsbeck

While the pole could be cropped out, the wires just don't fit with the old barn (this is infra-red, by the way)
While the pole could be cropped out, the wires just don’t fit with the old barn (this is infra-red, by the way)

When we’re learning how to do something even vaguely artistic, there is a series of pitfalls that can arise: while concentrating on following “rules” or guidelines or better techniques or whatever, we can get too wrapped up in details and forget the more important aspects, like style and message and appeal. This particular topic is one, in the photography field, that is horribly prone to it, so I’m still feeling out the best approach. Bear with me as I hash out, with due recognition of the irony, the topic of distractions.

The main part is fairly simple: the strongest images are the ones that convey the intended impressions without anything that detracts, changes our focus, or makes us wonder; everything in the frame contributes to and supports an underlying concept, whether it’s as abstract as “neglect” or as simple as an identifying shot of a bird. So if there’s something in the frame that isn’t supporting your intended idea, get rid of it. In reality, however, this is not as simple, since very often, what we deal with are not yes/no decisions, but the consideration of how distracting something is. This bit in the background is out-of-focus, but what colors are still capable of drawing attention away from the subject? How fuzzy is enough? Where can it be in the frame? If I eliminate all distractions, I won’t even have a photo.

All of those questions are what we might call ‘advanced’ considerations, since the basic premise is to be aware of distractions in the first place. People are notoriously good at inattention blindness, which in photography usually manifests as concentrating solely on the subject and not seeing anything else in the frame. The current internet meme of ‘photobombing’ is a great demonstration of this, missing out on the expressions, positions, or just presence of someone in the background, plainly visible when the image is viewed later on. While any photo may be of something, in reality what we’re producing is a scene that fills the frame, and so, we need to be aware of what the frame contains. This sometimes makes it hard to be spontaneous, since it may provoke a pause and the anxious examination of the whole area visible in the viewfinder, drawing attention away from the actions of the subject, not solving the inattention blindness problem but simply switching the focus.

However, once we become used to this, what happens is almost automatic: the background is examined first, routinely, and the subject framed usefully before anything even happens. This is where we become most aware of our three-dimensional surroundings, since it is often easy to shift sideways slightly, or change shooting angle, to provide a better background or remove the drunken idiot (or in the case of nature photography, ugly trash – same thing) from the shot. Wedding photographers are often intensely aware of the clutter of the background, and locations or angles that provide a better setting for their images – it’s part of the planning of a good shot.

The shadow is bad, but the contrasty, blotchy, complicated background is a triple-fail
The shadow is bad, but the contrasty, blotchy, complicated background is a triple-fail
Of course, the smoother and less complicated the background, the better, something that portraiture emphasizes in spades. Many other genres don’t have the advantage of planning the setting, but again, there are often options. Trees and leaf litter are notoriously bad for producing a cluttered, complicated, often contrasty background, occasionally even making the boundary between subject and surroundings indistinct – remember that we have inherent depth-perception, easily able to distinguish distances and separate our close subject from a distant background, but the act of capturing the image often destroys this, flattening everything out into two dimensions. So one technique is to choose a setting that enhances the difference between subject and background, in color, texture, or brightness, all of which can be considered ‘contrast.’ Framing against the sky is a favorite (though it occasionally introduces exposure issues,) or finding an area with more evenly distributed color or texture. This might mean getting higher or lower to change the perspective.

The second most-used technique is depth-of-field, and it’s also the one with the most pitfalls by itself. If we can show a distinctive difference in focus between subject and background, then the distractions are minimized – the viewer’s eyes always go to the sharpest part of an image. Using such a technique requires a significant distance between subject and background, with ‘significant’ being a very qualified term; it depends on the focal length (“zoom”) of the lens, the magnification, and the actual focal distance – subjects that are closer to the camera and well away from the ‘infinity’ end of focusing are easier to separate from the background.

But then there’s the viewfinder trap. SLR cameras (film or digital) all maintain the aperture at maximum, wide open at the limit of the lens, until we actually trip the shutter – this is to provide the brightest image in the viewfinder, and the best autofocus ability to the camera. What this means is that the background is often well out-of-focus as we are composing the shot, but if the aperture is set significantly smaller than maximum, it closes down just before the shutter opens and depth-of-field increases, making portions of the setting sharper. So things that are inconsequential blurs in the viewfinder may become much sharper, and more distracting, in the final image. This is why there exists, on many cameras, a depth-of-field preview function, often a button alongside the lens mount, which closes the aperture down temporarily to allow us to see what effect the aperture setting will actually have. It will make the viewfinder darker, sometimes much, but often there’s still enough visible to see how much sharper the surroundings have gotten. With practice, it is also possible to predict what will happen even without such a function of the camera, because we can easily look around the camera and notice what is visible and how far away from our subject; if it’s fairly close, it may become much sharper as the aperture closes.

There’s another related trap, one that’s even harder to predict, and that’s when a flash or strobe is used. The bright light coming from the camera illuminates a lot of shadows, often from a different direction than the ambient light, and can make some distractions a lot more prominent in the resulting image. Redeye is one example, and with it discovering what portions of someone’s clothing have reflective patches on them, but the crowded room is the biggest hazard – people and objects only a short distance away may be too dark to catch our attention when framing the image, but quite noticeable when the flash goes off. And just as a side note, be aware that the light throws down into cleavage very well too ;-)

So what are the big distractions to look for in an image?

You may recognize this setting from an earlier post (and thus get an idea how exposure can affect the mood,) but the distraction is the couple in the frame, especially that white shirt against a dark background
You may recognize this setting from an earlier post (and thus get an idea how exposure can affect the mood,) but the distraction is the couple in the frame, especially that white shirt against a dark background
• Clutter – too complicated or busy setting/background

• The color splotch – something that contrasts so distinctly that we can’t help but look at it

• Anachronism – something that simply doesn’t fit with the theme, mood, or setting of the rest of the image (or at least the one you want to convey)

• The killjoy – the face of someone who fails to fit in with everyone else, or the apparent mood; wedding and event photographers especially need to watch for these

• The weirdo – perhaps an unkind title, but it means someone doing something more interesting (not necessarily in a good way) than the subject

• Break or split – Something that causes a distinctive line or separation right where it’s most noticeable; the horizon line running right through someone’s neck is a good example

• Eye contact – This is an obscure one, but when shooting something like an event, playing the part of the observer, the person looking right at the camera (and by extension the person viewing the image) grabs our attention

• Road signs, electrical poles, wires, trash – Yes, they all fit under clutter, but they deserve their own mention since we’re so used to seeing them we tune them out

• Vehicles – Unless they’re a specific part of the image, get rid of them

• Shadows – Especially our own. We tune these out too, but the increased contrast of photography makes them prominent. Definitely keep them off of peoples faces

• The cutoff – A person’s leg, a single tree branch at the edge of the frame, something that by its incomplete nature seems to imply that we’re missing something. As a general rule, all the way in or all the way out.

Again, all of this can be hard on both the spontaneity and the ‘vision,’ the subconscious part of us that produces an image with emotional impact. By trying to be too precise, the calculating portion of our mind (we share one, you know) takes over from the artistic portion, and we might worry too much about making it perfect, making it sterile instead. Yet distractions can also ruin a shot. But what happens eventually is a greater awareness, the ability to take in every element within the frame at once, and easily spot what’s not going to work (usually, anyway.) It’s all part of the process.

… be true

Al Denelsbeck

StartToFallThis is largely a continuation of an earlier post, where I went in too close to a particular species of spider, and I’m going to do it again. It’s all legal if I provide a warning.

I went down to the river yesterday, because I hadn’t been there in a while and I wanted to see how autumn colors were progressing – the river is one of the better locations close by to see a wide variety of trees, and since it’s near a water source the trees tend to change earlier there than in other areas. Our Female Host from Savannah (sounds dramatic, doesn’t it, like sword n’ sorcery novels? “Shandor, from The Village In The North”) has said that she wants to visit when the colors are good, and now that I’ve exposed that to my thousands of readers, she’s committed, and can’t possibly back out or they’ll seek her out when she eventually starts her own blog and hound her mercilessly.

Anyway, one thing I noticed was that there was strong evidence of the water level having recently been much higher, like as much as two meters – at one point I was standing on a rock in the water and had river debris dangling from a branch at eye-level. No doubt the heavy rains we got a few weeks ago, the same storm system that flooded parts out west, had no small impact on the river here. And this may have been responsible for this next bit.

DeadLongJawd
A long-jawed orb weaver spider (genus Tetragnatha) was spotted in hidey mode on a branch overhead, but it didn’t look quite right – this was because it was long dead, possibly drowned by the high waters while it clung to its perch. You can actually see the mold growing on its abdomen. However, this provided the opportunity to photograph those jaws a bit closer, without desperately dancing around a live specimen or bothering to kill one just for pics, so I collected its corpse and brought it home for a closer peek.

BottomJawd
This is a look from the bottom, and it becomes clear that those chelicerae are used for grasping their prey. This started me wondering again, and I did some web searching, at first trying to determine if Tetragnatha venom was so weak it wasn’t able to immobilize prey, and the spider had to grapple. Eventually this led to learning something entirely new.

You see, I always thought spiders used the chelicerae (fangs) not just to inject venom, but also to suck up the liquified innards of their prey, and that they had no other mouths to speak of. I’m slightly embarrassed to find out I was wrong, and spiders do indeed have mouths, some of them even chewing up their prey as mantises do – they do not suck in anything through the chelicerae. Various species, like Tetragnatha, use them for grasping and tearing up their meals, so what you’re also seeing here, I believe, are some of the spider mouthparts, two plates extending up the base of the chelicerae. In trying to identify these positively, I have found no place online that diagrams arachnid mouths at all, and few sites that even mention anything other than chelicerae, so I don’t feel too embarrassed anymore.

TopJawd
Here’s a view from the top/face giving a good peek at the eye layout, though the discoloration has made them harder to distinguish – there are eight, in two rows of four. What can also be seen, in both images, are the pedipalps extending from either side of the chelicerae, long and with two joints. The one towards the top of this image has a peculiar appearance, but this is because you’re looking lengthwise down the last segment, running in and out of the short focus range at this magnification. The clublike ends indicate a male – those are the testes, but the pedipalps are also used as feelers and to manipulate prey, so presumably they’re not as sensitive as mammalian orbs. Either that or spiders really are badass.

MyPalSpikeThe body length of my Tetragnatha specimen, eyes to abdomen tip, is around 11mm – the chelicerae alone are roughly 5mm folded. The legs at maximum stretch (meaning in the straight line hidey mode that lets them blend in with water reeds and twigs) may exceed 80mm – the forelegs alone are 52mm in length. Which means that enterprising tiny spiders like the one shown at right, only a millimeter in body length, can spin a web between the legs of a dead Tetragnatha as if it’s a tree, and come along for the ride when one is collected to serve as a photo subject. She’s still there, annoyed at how often I shifted her scaffolding to get better angles but otherwise unaffected. And yes, you’re seeing a few of the eyes peeking between the legs there. If you scroll back up to the first image on the branch, she’s even visible there near the leg tips, out of focus. I suppose I might have to go hang the Tetragnatha corpse on the dog fennel, which is in bloom now, so she can catch something to eat.

Leftovers

Al Denelsbeck

CedarMossThis is just showing off a few more pics from the Savannah et al trip, ones that didn’t fit into the text of the previous posts too well (I know – this implies I actually do some editing, which is startling in itself.) The problem is, all of them are vertical orientation, which is much harder to fit among the text, so the format is going to go wonky, or even wonkier than normal (since monitor resolutions are so variable, I just aim my layout for 1024 pixels wide and to hell with everyone else. Seriously, there’s no easy way to accommodate all the different formats out there and no reason to try.)

Anyway, a quick shot from the parking area of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, because I liked it and occasionally get fartsy. While complicated, I think the selective focus brings out the details nicely, but then again, I would think that of my own work.

[That’s not perfectly true – I throw out lots of stuff that didn’t work as intended. But this doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be throwing more out, either.]

PondOspreyOn two mornings, an osprey (Pandion haliaetus) paid a visit to Our Hosts’ pond, perching for a short while in one of the taller trees overlooking the water before deciding that the human activity beneath was too unsettling. Here, I was getting my shots through gaps in the trees before coming out into the open, knowing how likely it was that the raptor would take flight when I did so. I’m fairly certain this is still a juvenile, from body shape and coloration not immediately apparent in this image – it’s likely this year’s brood. Shooting like this is tricky – it’s very important to at least keep the face and eyes clear of any obscuring vegetation, because even out of focus, it’ll produce a hazy patch that detracts from the sharpness of the eyes. You can see I just barely managed this in a small gap, with lots of places where the foliage blur can be seen. And it’s obvious that even in my position beneath the canopy, the osprey knows full well I’m down there, and took flight as soon as I came into the open. But I don’t think I could have asked for a better light angle.

EarlyMorningPairStill too cool in the morning for the insects to get started. The backlighting produces a nice outlining effect, but there’s another subtle thing at work too: notice how the background colors work to offset the dragonfly and butterfly, dark against the bright transparent wings and light against the near-silhouette of the butterfly. This is how a subtle change in position can help your subject stand out better.

SparkleGatorAnother alligator because, you know, gators. This was one of my attempts at throwing a little creativity at it (another can be seen in the rotating header images if you wait long enough.) If you want a good idea of scale, know that I could cover both eyes by cupping my hand across his head – well, if I was stupid. As small as this, he’d still have some serious teeth in that snout. My days working with wildlife occurred in North Carolina, not while I lived in Florida, though I wouldn’t have been averse to handling gators, with the right equipment of course. That, however, would only have been for rehabilitation and nuisance control reasons – healthy wild specimens not bothering anyone, like this one, need to be left alone. As do snakes, and bats, and groundhogs… they all live on this planet too. We can share.

CemeteryStackAnd finally, another image from Colonial Park Cemetery in downtown Savannah, this one being a ‘stacked’ or ‘HDR’ edit, blending the foreground in with the sky colors and the only clouds I had to work with throughout most of the trip. I made two exposures – one for the foreground details, one for the sky – and cut them together with no small amount of Photoshop work. Part of this was because I did not do what one should always do when intending such things, which is to take both exposures from exactly the same vantage with the camera locked onto a tripod – both exposures were handheld, and from slightly different camera positions. This meant, especially because I was using a wide-angle lens not terribly well corrected for distortion, that I needed to do a fair amount of stretching and distorting one of the images to get it to match the other in the areas of overlap. You can get some idea of the difference in exposure by looking at the lamps; the closest was taken from the sky exposure, but the others were from the ground exposure and are noticeably brighter, a bit blown out. I’m still pleased with the results, especially because the clouds have now imprinted the word “miasma” in my mind, but there’s a couple little detractors from the overall effect visible. Can you spot them?

Limitations

Al Denelsbeck

Several years ago, I witnessed a particular action from a friend’s dog that startled me. The dog had come into their living room on a lazy afternoon and looked around for a place to lie down, to find the other dogs had already claimed all of the best snoozing spots. He actually got a slightly pained expression, tail dropping and ears twitching back slightly as if hearing a harsh sound – then he immediately turned and trotted into the adjoining room, one with a window overlooking the driveway. With a single sharp bark, he woke the other dogs and sent them into a mad frenzy of barking and scrambling for the window, eager to protect the house against intruders (and likely, to no small extent, competing with the others to show how good they were at it.) But in this chaos, he dashed past them in the opposite direction and claimed the best spot for himself, with what can only be described as a satisfied air.

I was impressed. I’d worked with animals for a long time at this point in my life, which included training dogs for obedience and working with wildlife in rehab, and I had some background in observing behavior. This was a level of thinking that seemed well above normal, actually quite clever for a canine. If you’re familiar with dogs, you’ll know that most times there’s either a dominant one who will claim a favored spot for itself every time, or one might simply crowd another out of a prime snoozing location (our cats do this all the time.) This dog not only imagined a scenario based on a stimulus response, he used deception.

There are plants that, when being attacked by parasitic insects, develop a chemical response that not only repels the insects, it carries on the wind and is detected by other plants of the same species, triggering their own chemical response – the plants produce a ‘group effort’ in repelling damaging attacks. Species of bees and ants, when crushed, emit a chemical that causes others to either avoid the area, or to swarm to it and attack at the point of emanation – this is the cause of the dangerous bee swarms that make it into the news from time to time.

For these latter examples, we generally see this as simply an evolved mechanism, a cause-and-effect apparatus – we don’t believe that plants or bees think about their actions, or plan them, or understand them. It’s just something that worked and was incorporated into the species by preferential selection. In the dog’s case however, we see a level of cognition, of planning an action to invoke an observed response, yet we still can’t imagine the canine to be capable of playing checkers or figuring out how to run the lawnmower, even if we leave the keys in it. Even though the dog recognized and exploited a simple canine trait, that of maintaining territorial boundaries, he probably didn’t fathom how this trait came about or how it differentiated dogs from chickens. With these examples, we can see that behavior may involve a spectrum of neural activity ranging from mere stimulus response to imagining a scenario based on observed patterns, at some point in there crossing into cognition, and then thinking, and eventually intelligence. And we place ourselves, Homo sapiens, at the pinnacle of this pyramid.

Now, this is a justifiable perspective, if we limit ourselves to just species on this planet (not unwarranted,) and if we consider intelligence in terms of abstract thought and the ability to change one’s environment – it should be noted, however, that intelligence does not equate with ability to survive (bacteria thwart this attitude readily) or represent a direction natural selection must be going in. Yet, we still often believe that we have the ability to puzzle out all of the secrets of the universe.

Think about this for a second. In terms of complexity, our minds are not significantly different from those of dogs or chimpanzees, especially when compared to the range of neural networks available throughout the animal kingdom. We live in a tiny thin shell on the outside edge of a rather small planet, an infinitesimal fraction of matter just in our immediate cosmic neighborhood. We have no good idea how long our ability to form abstract thoughts has been around, in the species that led up to us, but it’s safe to say it’s a tiny fraction of the life of the planet, itself only a third as old as the universe, or at least the bits we have managed to figure out so far. The only experience we have with all of this are the physical laws we’ve so far puzzled out, based on what occurs here on Earth or just outside, and nothing but light from the vast remainder, observed at a remote distance. To believe that we will even grasp what occurred 13.7 billion years ago at the supposed start is ego on a stunning scale (one might almost say “universal.”)

Sometimes we’re aware of our limitations, knowing we can see only a narrow spectrum of light or that there remain rules of physics that we haven’t grasped yet – but that “yet” is always in there. Consider that we are organisms evolved to exploit the conditions surrounding us, as much so as a halibut. It’s fairly safe to say that a halibut, even the biggest genius among halibuts, has no concept of space, as in the stuff that contains planets and comets and perhaps a teapot, and if we were to try and explain this concept to halibuts, we’d be hard pressed to be able to communicate it even in analogies. This is, of course, after having surmounted the obstacle of halibut language, or even the likelihood that there isn’t one and we’d have to wrangle out some symbology that works in its place. And then determine what an expression of sudden comprehension looks like on a cubist piscine face…

We even struggle with the attempt to explain color to a person blind from birth, and they speak our language! So it’s no surprise that we often believe there is little chance we’ll understand what a bee is thinking, or if grass feels pain or any analog thereof. Yet when it comes to other pursuits, largely in the realm of physics, we usually approach these from the perspective that all secrets will be revealed in time. We will discover how the universe began; we’re bound to find out how simple chemicals started on the path of combining and replicating in the process we call life; the cure for all human illnesses is waiting to be found, though it’s a race against the eventual practice of downloading minds into machinery and colonizing other planets and reaching other star systems.

The highest probability, however, is that we will never know most of these. What happened between three and four billion years ago to start life on this planet is not something we will know with any surety; the same with what happened 13.7 billion years ago. Laws of physics that are visible throughout the cosmos are probably not going to be violated, or shown to be limited in scope, by primates on a young planet that still haven’t gotten the interspecies cooperation thing down yet. If the laws that unify physics really are rooted in additional dimensions as string theory proposes, there’s little chance we three-dimensional beings will be able to confirm this. Some things are simply going to be beyond our grasp.

The more interesting aspect of this perspective is how it applies both ways too: we’ll never actually know what information will remain forever unattainable. There is no point in the search process where you can confidently say, “Nope – it’s impossible for us to know,” so all we can do is keep trying. And this underscores the other side that we also need to remember, which is the stunning amount of stuff that we have figured out. The fact that we observed local physics, and did a lot of math and extrapolation, and actually predicted discoveries that were made later is pretty damn impressive. We sit here at a scale that finds millions of atoms to be a tiny speck and have managed to piece together how the parts that make up the atoms behave, dependably enough at least to use this in countless ways (anyone that wants to argue how much we don’t know in the area has to recognize that the Higgs boson was a predicted find and supports our current model of particle physics.) And at the same time, we’re here in our tiny prison of air and warmth and measuring the gravity of galaxy clusters that run that scale thing in the opposite direction, making our entire planetary system a speck in comparison.

It leads to an interesting, narrow line between perspectives. It’s not hard to find plenty of people who believe transcending all physical limitations, such as the speed of light or the conservation of energy that makes cold fusion unlikely, is something that we will eventually accomplish – this is often the argument of those who claim the existence of extraterrestrial life, or those who promote the artificial intelligence revolution, but it’s rather fatuous to think that there are no real laws of physics. On the other side of the coin, it is plainly detrimental to start believing that we’ve reached a limit at any time, as evidenced by those who said we wouldn’t achieve powered flight or the eradication of polio. We certainly have limitations, but we can’t ever know what they are, so it works best to keep trying.

And this may sound almost ridiculous, but one thing that is limited is our imagination – or at the very least, we suffer too often from self-constraint. Some of the biggest scientific advances in the past century were not searched for or predicted, but stumbled upon while pursuing other things – penicillin and dark matter, to name two – while others like CT scanning and MRIs are spinoff technology. This tells us that discoveries aren’t always something that we look for, and that science shouldn’t be viewed as a directed pursuit with specific goals. We have the drive to explore, understand, and reveal, and can readily see how much this accomplishes for us; this is one indulgence that we can encourage. We’re certainly limited, but we shouldn’t let that stop us.

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