The dude is hot. Or cold. So, so cold…

Al Denelsbeck

Courtesy: NASA
Courtesy: NASA
A few years back when I was still following the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait posted an image of odd geological features on Mars, along with the current speculations as to how they had occurred – which were not quite fitting the visible details. Definitely read the post for the salient bits, but long story short, the idea that subsurface deposits of frozen carbon dioxide sublimating into vapor, which would vent upwards and cause the overlying sand to fall away to the sides, would have produced a fanning effect at the ends not visible in the images.

This is the fun of using photographic surveys of other bodies in the solar system. Often planetary geologists have just one photo, from one angle and one lighting condition, to try and puzzle out what kind of feature they’re seeing. It’s not something that comes up often, since us laypeople generally see images of very familiar things, but the two-dimensional trait of photography can produce lots of peculiar impressions. We can’t shift slightly to the side to see how the shadows or perspective changes, we can’t use the inherent depth perception of our two eyes, and we can’t even be sure we’re seeing a real shadow or simply an area of darker material. A gully or a ridge can look exactly the same with the light coming from opposite directions, so often it’s not just a single feature that needs to be examined, but all of the conditions surrounding it.

I’m not going to even imply that I have anywhere near the abilities of those who evaluate geological images professionally, but I have done a fair share of photographic examinations, sometimes to detect hoaxes, but also just to tease out illusions. It helps to know that, for any given shape, texture, or geology, light direction tells us how oblique a surface is to the angle of light. In other words, if we imagine ourselves traveling in the same direction as the light falling onto a shape, whatever turns “uphill” to us will become brighter and more reflective, and what turns “downhill” will become dark, maybe even fall completely into shadows since it’s “out of sight” over the ridge. So, I had stared at the sample photo for a while before posting (at that time, under the nym “Just Al”):

I don’t know – looking at the first image under higher res and additional magnification, I suspect something else entirely is at work here.

Look at the shadows of the central large furrow, and most especially to the right of it. Unless I’m misinterpreting them, that furrow is actually running a ridge line, and while it turns downslope slightly (lower right) it then turns away. That somehow doesn’t seem right.

The other thing that seems counterintuitive is that the furrows, nearly all of them, show pushed-up edges on both sides. This might simply be an artifact of crosswind sand deposits, but it doesn’t seem likely that this would occur on both sides. Fluids digging furrows don’t typically push up deposits on both sides unless they’re moving pretty fast, and then they display turns with greater washouts and “elbows.” They also seem unlikely to peter out so abruptly without either fanning or “pointing.”

The lack of points also seems to rule out some kind of erosion “slipping,” the crust cracking and splitting towards the downslope side – the ends shouldn’t look like that.

Then there’s the idea that when the forks come together, the channels don’t widen, seeming to indicate that the channels were carved singly at different times.

Now, here’s what’s occurring to me right now: is there such a thing as a CO2 glacier? Because this seems to fit the furrows closer than anything else I’ve thought of so far, and the cohesiveness of a glacial body might prevent sideslipping a bit. Not a perfect idea, I admit, but the best I’ve come up with so far…

I don’t maintain regular access to planetary and astronomical studies anymore, and so wasn’t following any new developments in this area, but today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was a nice little vindication.

Courtesy: Astronomy Picture of the Day
Courtesy: Astronomy Picture of the Day

A leading hypothesis — actually being tested here on Earth — is that these linear gullies are caused by chunks of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice) breaking off and sliding down hills while sublimating into gas, eventually completely evaporating into thin air.

(Where the hell did the idea of huffing on your nails and polishing them on your shirt come to indicate smugness? Regardless, I’m doing that like an annoying bastard right now.)

None of this is proven yet, of course, and won’t be until we find an actual chunk of solid CO2 plowing its way along the Martian landscape. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to offer my services to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – for a hefty fee, I think it goes without saying…

Just more arthropods

Al Denelsbeck

EyedClick
We’ve been seeing some steamy weather lately, high heat preceding wicked thunderstorms, and I was dumb enough to go down to the river in the former looking for subjects. Between bad sinus reactions and sweating buckets, without finding much of anything to shoot, I elected not to stay long. But I did bring back an eyed click beetle (Alaus oculatus) to get some more detail images of. These are among the largest beetles to be found in the area, this one hitting about 50mm, and completely innocuous. I had been hoping for one of these when doing the illustration for the Brain Bugs book review last year, but never located one.

Apheloria
The only other species I saw was an Apheloria virginiensis montana (I believe, anyway, though mine sported only faint dorsal spots, unlike every identifying image I’ve found for the species.) This one’s just a wee bit longer than the beetle above and fairly common around here, even though they don’t appear to have a common name. If you’ve ever heard the old chestnut about the smell of bitter almonds indicating cyanide, and wondered what this actually smelled like, handling one of these will provide the experience. Accurately, as well – they really do produce a cyanide compound as a predator repellent, so at least wash your hands immediately afterward. Those bright colors are yet another example of aposematic coloration, high-contrast warning colors to make the species memorable and easy to spot, once an unlucky predator has been unfortunate enough to get a mouthful of nasty secretions.

Quite a few species exhibit these traits, all utilizing the same basic combination of distinctive, contrasting colors and discouraging response; essentially, the repelling method creates an indelible learned memory, even in species not particularly known for reasoning skills, and the colors are distinctive enough to get connected to those memories, so predators learn that festive colors do not promise a good time. I had originally suspected that somehow, many species automatically recognized bright colors, because the learning method seems rather inefficient; most predators can do a lot of damage before any defensive response could take effect, meaning the organism could die despite their defense – it seems unlikely that this system could evolve effectively. But then there’s the problem of just how any predator would have evolved the idea that bright colors mean something bad in the first place, as well as the fact that any species would only have to develop the bright colors to protect themselves, and not any other form of defense.

ApheloriaMiteCarl Zimmer talks about this trait among poison arrow frogs in Costa Rica, which display significant color variations within a surprisingly small geographic area. Be sure to read the comments for more speculation about how the process works for these amphibians. Meanwhile, one of the images I got of my multipedal subject showed an enterprising mite traipsing across the cranium (as well as some spiderwebs.) This is the best image I have of it, unfortunately – the millipede was scaling the vertical concrete walls of the spillway, and I was standing on the submerged apron aiming straight down rather awkwardly while my subject was wandering unpredictably. In short, there weren’t a lot of options at hand for those conditions. The mite was discovered only after unloading the images once back home; I couldn’t have possibly spotted it in the viewfinder, but even if I had, I doubt I could have done much about it. It was bad enough getting the focus on the bobbing head of the millipede, without trying to catch the mite in its own perambulations…

DifficultMimic2
DifficultMimic1A few days ago, I’d managed to capture another specimen I’ve been wanting more images of, an ant mimic jumping spider. Only about 5mm long, they really do appear like ants unless you know what to look for. For instance, they only have two body segments – spiders have a fused head and thorax, called a cephalothorax, while ants do not – but to me, it’s easier to spot them from their habits; spiders just move differently from ants. Especially this species, which is highly active for a spider and very difficult to capture in the tiny focus range of macro photography. These images were from my second attempt, the first yielding nothing worth keeping. And these are admittedly studio shots, using a sprig of grape buds held in an alligator clamp, with a little petroleum jelly on the base of the sprig to prevent the spider from escaping (on foot, anyway – there were a few tries at rappelling down on a web strand.) The background is a photo print, close enough to be lit by the same flash and softbox. While I could try to photograph this species in the wild, I know I would achieve nothing except drastically shortening my lifespan through stress and frustration. Police investigators now know, if they find someone dead in a field with a camera nearby, to check and see if a macro lens is attached. If so, the ruling is simply “natural causes” for nature photographers. And you thought the biggest hazards were bears and hippos…

EvilMimicAll of my attempts to pin down this species have failed so far, but I’m leaning towards a member of the genus Synemosyna. Anyone who can help out is invited to comment, or contact me directly – I may end up submitting them to BugGuide.net to see what their crew has to say. Meanwhile, this image remains my favorite, not because of any professional reason, but because the secondary strobe I was using for fill lighting provided a great sinister effect when the spider peered down in that direction – I suspect this is aided by the creepy position of the forelegs. What’s really happening, I believe, is the arachnid is collecting strands of its own silk and consuming it – this is a recycling trick of spiders (one of these days I’ll branch into video, but I don’t imagine that reducing stress in any way at all.) You can also see evidence of this same lighting technique in the first spider pic above, but I wasn’t using it for the second. Note the different reflections in the eyes, between the overhead softbox that illuminates the body chitin smoothly and the sharp reflections from the mini-strobe placed well below. While this subject might have benefited from the white box technique, I’ve had a lot of issues using that with reversed lenses, which pick up too much glare (lens coatings and structure are designed for using a lens the right way around…)

ThirstyAssassinMy final subject is another specimen provided by The Girlfriend, who spotted it on her car and quickly captured it within a film can that she carries for expressly that purpose (yeah, I know, I’m a lucky little shit.) There is a chance this is actually the same species that she caught last year, just a much-younger nymph stage – still working on that bit. I initially considered it an assassin or wheel bug, judging from the body shape and proboscis; suffice to say it’s an Hemipteran (True Bug) who took advantage of some dew while I was set up to get the shots – every once in a while you get some nice cooperation. The spot in the eye is not evidence of my lighting technique, even though I just taught you how to look for this, but a pollen grain instead – another clue is that there are no other sharp highlights on the front surface of the legs, proboscis, or dewdrops.

I’ll close with a scale shot, purposefully done this way because it communicates the size so much better than giving length in millimeters – and because this was the only specimen that cooperated enough for an easy shot. The spider was many times smaller than this, while the click beetle and millipede were both about the length of my little finger. It provides an idea of the range of magnifications possible when pursuing arthropod images – which also indicates how much can be missed without looking closely.
AssassinScale

Is “natural” a good thing?

Al Denelsbeck

This is another of those ponderous, philosophical posts – I’ll try to follow up with pics and fewer words soon, I promise…

Given that we understand that evolution by natural selection is effective, in sometimes astounding ways, but also a bit haphazard and imprecise, questions sometimes arise about whether conscious decisions might be able to accomplish better results more directly. This subject has been tackled many times before, very early on actually, and one of the most loathed methods was the process of eugenics, practically a curse word in today’s culture. Yet the fundamental problems with the eugenics program(s) weren’t the goals, it was the huge misunderstanding of what genes can produce (as opposed to the post-genetic factors of upbringing and culture) and the methodology involved, which at times violated human rights and common decency. The movement also encouraged the common idea of being superior and privileged solely by existing, or to be more specific, solely because one was better genetic ‘stock’ than someone else, making it easy to be abused by our fragile egos.

The thing is, this concept of genetic superiority is actually quite valid, if one is careful to define their criteria and fully understands how the process works. Certain genetic variations do indeed produce organisms better suited to their environment than others, and the advantages incurred translate into better survival/reproduction and thus greater spread of those genes – this is entirely what natural selection is. And yes, we can take a hand in this; virtually all of our food plants and animals, even domesticated pet species and ornamental plants, have been “unnaturally” or “artificially” selected (both of those terms imply a lot of baggage not deserved) to be the species we’re familiar with – in most cases, to our benefit, though there are notable exceptions. Overall, however, the “wild” versions of our food grains were nowhere near as hardy nor produced as much usable product; the “natural” species of livestock were leaner and far less docile, quite inefficient as food sources or even labor elements. We’ve been up to this for a long time, and the beneficial results can only be argued with abject denial (which will still occur anyway…)

So what about humans, as a species? Is it possible, ethical, and effective to consider selective reproduction for ourselves? Ah, such a loaded question! There’s a lot to consider here.

First off, we already do – our choices of spouse (or even just sexual partners) really is self-selection, though we often remain unaware of the extent, or the subtle influences that inherent traits have on the process. So the question is more about how conscious we can/should be about the process, and whether we should have more direct goals than the basic urges – a dividing line between “natural” and “artificial” that’s really hard to define (you see what I mean about baggage?)

Second, we would really need to understand what factors are actually affected by genetic heritage. Marrying a highly intelligent person is unlikely, by itself, to produce a highly intelligent child (unless you have sex) because intelligence is produced by culture and upbringing, not genes to any significant extent. It would be nice to say we humans have moved away from decrepit ideas of other ‘races’ possessing traits of laziness or overeating or whatever, but this hasn’t really been demonstrated too well. So selective breeding isn’t likely to be functional in any way whenever it’s based on false premises and gross misunderstandings.

Despite all that, there are already rudimentary functions of this nature going on, from an effective basis as well. Genetic tests and even family history can give an indication of high risks for problematic children, letting the parents decide whether it’s a good idea to bear a child that is likely to struggle with problems or illnesses, such as cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs disease. Sometimes such considerations get bogged down in vapid, misdirected discussions such as “denying a child life” by not getting pregnant, as if there’s a stockpile of aware, pre-mortal lives waiting to be born someplace, or if genetic decisions are some method of trying to second-guess god, whose decisions are far more predictable through genetics than any method the devout have tried.

Given the myriad assumptions and misconceptions tied up in the topic, discussions of this nature become very difficult – either someone feels that the process shouldn’t be tampered with, or that it involves factors that really don’t apply (or both,) so things get bogged down very quickly. One can add in lots of other sidetracks like the fear of mutants or the belief that all scientific research results in terrible consequences – because, apparently, enough people get their knowledge of science from B-movies – and produce lively yet ridiculously pointless arguments.

Speaking of that, what are the ethical views of genetically engineering humans, occasionally referred to as “designer people”? Throw this question out in any gathering to watch the reaction; for fun, change up and insert the word “fetus” in another discussion. Take a stopwatch and see how long before the word “tamper” comes up in response (the watch had best be able to display hundredths of seconds.) A moment’s thought will demonstrate that this is absolutely no different from the breeding we’ve been doing on dogs and roses for centuries, but the idea that humans are in some way a special circumstance repeatedly rears its head; this goes doubly so for fetuses (feti?), though any genetic modifications would take place at the single-cell stage long before cell division, since genes affect development. But our sense of protection over infants, which is admittedly pretty important for survival, kicks in where it really doesn’t apply. People begin trying to draw an arbitrary line of where “life” begins to define where it’s improper to mess about – the same people who take painkillers and antibiotics and undergo laser surgery on their vision and all that jazz. Seriously, if you’re quick on the draw, you can while away many evenings by challenging other peoples’ perspectives. Granted, your group of friends may dwindle a bit…

And I have to add, any discussion of genetics in this manner assumes by the very topic that humans are just as evolved as everything else on earth – no pedestal for us. A lot more fun can be produced if you start challenging someone to define how we, as natural beings on this planet with naturally evolved brains, could possibly do something “unnatural” or “artificial,” any more than a spider that selects a mate.

It’s been asked quite often whether humans have actually stopped evolving; our advances in medicine, living conditions, and general knowledge of hazards has compensated for many of the conditions that killed us off, death being one of those tools of selection. The most prominent contributor to this idea is the burgeoning population of the planet, with the birth (survival) rate overtaking the death rate significantly. If human evolution really has stopped or slowed, even partially, it might make sense that we should take a hand in selectivity ourselves. Yet, this is applying the idea of evolution to a much briefer scale than it really operates. Evolution takes place in populations, which for us now is worldwide (a fun thought we’ll come back to,) over very long periods of time. Our population issues are quite capable of demonstrating that evolution has not stopped for humans, should we reach the point of starving ourselves, and what is likely to happen is that we develop far less desire to reproduce. This will take a long time; parents (genetic lines) that have lots of babies will spread their genes faster than those who have fewer, which is exactly the opposite of what we would want to happen, but in crucial areas with limited resources all of those children may starve (or have developmental issues through poor nutrition, and so on.) But if a prolific couple has just one of their many children live to reach reproductive age, this is exactly the same effect as the couple that desired and raised only one child – the genes that contributed to the urge for many children or one child are on an equal footing and pass along in this circumstance. Plus, there’s the idea that we are not geographically isolated anymore, so a newly-arising “limited children” gene may go anyplace on the planet, decreasing the likelihood of reinforcing itself within a small population; it stands a much greater chance of losing out to a more dominant gene and failing to be carried through to offspring. This makes the process much slower overall.

Yet, the necessary genes to limit populations may already be in effect – it’s easy to believe most parents would be wrecked with seeing their children die off and would tend not to reproduce quite so enthusiastically in situations where survival was highly questionable. Meanwhile, viruses that spread easily in crowded conditions only have to surpass a certain threshold of both immune resistance and host mortality to thwart our medical advantages; a pandemic is only less likely with our knowledge, not impossible. Plus zombies.

So the issue isn’t really that natural selection is no longer working, or even hampered; it’s that we would prefer to avoid the way it actually works, for instance, by replacing infant mortality with voluntary childbirth limits.

Now here’s another problem with conscious selection: few people would select against themselves. We already have traits to promote ourselves in numerous ways – put simply, ‘ego’ is the importance of the organism. Hell, we cannot even dispense with alcohol, tobacco, and handguns throughout our populations, despite the complete pointlessness of them, and I can predict that a large percentage of people reading that statement will formulate countless defenses of any or all of them, mostly based on imagined scenarios and in denial of the real-world evidence that proves the point. Such responses aren’t the product of rational consideration, but the internal prods towards a perceived beneficial outcome; “This gun makes me more competitive than my neighbor, thus I am a better mate.” As a species, we struggle with the objectivity that would be necessary to perform efficient selection. If we examine our recreational activities, it’s plain that we’re infatuated with indulgence rather than functionality (nature photography being a notable exception, but that goes without saying…)

These tendencies towards indulgences, from the “right to raise as many kids as I want” to our eating habits to altering our minds with substances for recreation, are all evolved traits, as is just about everything the defines us as a species. Most (perhaps not all) we possess because, at one time anyway, they were beneficial; the caveat is in there because occasionally a neutral trait comes through, something not directly beneficial but not detrimental enough to be selected out. Yet. Even harmful traits can manage to survive through recessive genes, ones that can pass along largely without effect until the right sexual combination causes them to become active. Overall, though, much of our ‘instinctual’ behavior is bred into us – it’s what we want to do, so conscious selection may have to fight against subconscious directives. As indicated above, this might be a really hard thing to accomplish.

Sidetrack for an interesting thought. If a tendency towards alcoholism is genetic, it may eventually get selected out by the host dying before reproduction, especially through driving, swimming, and extreme-duding while intoxicated. Raising the legal drinking age, however, actively works against this; the chances of producing offspring before the selective fatal event become much higher, and the genes, however detrimental, pass on. What this means is that we could potentially eradicate alcoholism much faster by doing away with age restrictions on drinking ;-)

Leaving beside the attempts at humor that can be quote-mined to show that atheists are immoral savages (quote-mining being such an ethical activity in itself,) we can consider what kind of mindset it would take to actually induce conscious selection. Since there isn’t a significant separation of human populations, such a mindset would have to be worldwide. It would have to incorporate a much better understanding of genetics than average right now, in order to make the slightest progress. It would have to have agreed-upon goals, unfettered by culture and religion and differing conditions among the continents. And it would have to remain important in our minds for a long time – longer than any language has existed on this planet. Basic answer: it ain’t happening. From the standpoint of how we might cope with overpopulation issues, this isn’t heartening, and it’s even less heartening when we examine the significant possibility that we could drive ourselves to extinction with our poor use of resources – nature might demonstrate that a tendency towards self-indulgence is not a survival trait.

It’s not all bleak, however. As noted, we already get bad feelings from infant deaths, and from watching others starve – it’s not that we’re oblivious to our own mortality, it’s simply that we don’t often make the connection. Once made, the cause-and-effect pattern recognition that we possess is potentially enough to override the “make babies” instinct – we’ve already demonstrated that this works by the numerous forms of birth control we have available. And there are other ways of affecting our survival, short of trying to breed a new human. The eradication of polio, in a very short period of time, shows that sometimes we can change our environment, rather than ourselves. Obviously there are limits, but it’s not like we’re trapped by evolution’s rules or powerless to change – we just have to select the changes that are most likely to succeed.

I’m going to depart from this line of thought to approach another, distantly related one. One of the basic factors of speciation, the ‘branching’ of family trees that eventually leads to separate species, is geographic isolation – not the only contributor, but a major one. One population of organisms gets separated from another and they go through unconnected genetic paths; continue this long enough and they diverge far enough genetically to lose the ability to reproduce with each other, and voila, someone has to change their Latin name. As mentioned above, human progress has significantly lessened this likelihood for us anymore, since we can travel across the planet. Granted, we still tend to stay at least on the same continents, but enough mingling takes place that, on an evolutionary scale, there really aren’t isolated populations anymore. I certainly am not Native American, though I live on that continent, and this applies to the majority of the population here. Humans are highly unlikely, given the conditions now, to branch off into two or more species, despite the numerous variants in the hominid line from the last ten million years.

There’s one major exception to this, touched on by a few science-fiction writers over the years: space colonization. It’s hard to imagine a more uncrossable divide than open space, not to mention the likelihood of wildly different environments. I’m not referring here to the ‘Star Trek’ planets with similar atmospheres and gravity, useful for fantasy writing yet ridiculously implausible, but instead to the difference between the micro-ecosystems of encapsulated colonies and the conditions here on Earth. Recycled water and scrubbed air and monitored levels of UV, necessary for a self-sustaining colony or ship, could begin to lead the species off onto a different path.

Yet there’s more than a few things wrong with this as well. The first is, we probably only see space colonies as an option because we have a drive to explore. From a practical standpoint it’s ludicrous, because the conditions of our planet aren’t duplicated too much anywhere else (as in, “at all,”) and the efforts to create conditions that are hospitable, especially for either long distance colony ships or creating a sizable colony on the moon, far exceed what it would take to simply stabilize our populations and resource usage here on Earth.

Then there’s the idea that we would maintain a colony elsewhere long enough to see speciation take place. Bear in mind that lions and tigers are distinctly different species, to all appearances, yet can interbreed to produce offspring – this is an example of how difficult it is to define separate species, but more to the point, their geographic separation hasn’t gone on long enough. Splitting of the Homo sapiens line would take thousands of years of isolation. There is, to be blunt, a far greater chance that either population would be wiped out by a cataclysmic event than both developing to the point of species divergence. Right now it’s still debatable whether we’ll be able to solve the problem of a major asteroid strike before it actually occurs (I’m quite confident in saying, if it occurs within the next decade, the answer is “no” – we’re toast, pure and simple.) There are even indications that our current existence owes much to no major extinction event having occurred for a while – a piece of luck providing a false sense of security.

Is there a conclusion to all this? Not at all – just food for thought. The best I can offer is, better to think of it now (and in a rational manner) than when it’s too late to be of use.

TL;DR

Al Denelsbeck

Those letters are internet shorthand, not for, “Transgender lifestyles; Dominican Republic” as you might expect, but for, “Too long; didn’t read.” It’s the battle cry of the short-attention span, the post comment meant to be critical, but instead illustrating the missing depth of the commenter. “Reading is hard,” it says, “You’re expecting too much of me!”

A recent article in Slate talks about this at length, albeit with no small amount of self-aware irony. Chartbeat is a service that analyzes internet-traffic, and they produced several graphs that show just what kind of behavior people had when visiting sites. Long story short: the graphs show a lot of immediately lost interest, and a lot of people who never read to the end of an article. Frequently, the response to such info is that web content should be short, and from the standpoint of someone who frequently crosses the 2,000 word mark, I should be scared.

I’m not; I know a little more about data analysis than that, not to mention perspective. Think of it in terms of TV; how often does anyone turn it on, select one channel immediately, and watch the program until the end? Even if we go for the archaic idea of reading books, how many people do you know that start and finish a book in one sitting? Does this tell us that humans overall are unfocused and scatterbrained? Or simply that we have unrealistic expectations of attention-span and information absorption, not to mention priorities such as eating and stopping the kids from shellacking the cat? (No, that’s not internet slang for anything. I don’t think.)

There are some significantly wrong assumptions to be found as well. As writer Farhad Manjoo says:

The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page.

Manjoo has fallen for the average fallacy, as if there is anyone, much less everyone, who can be considered average. “You” are tuning out, and “people” rarely make it to the end of a page. Utter unmitigated horseshit. Everyone is different, and no purpose is served by lumping every visitor to a site into one single amorphous entity. You have your own interests, as do I, and they don’t agree on every point, so simply taking an average of the two of us on any given page, we might make it 50% through – that doesn’t mean we both gave up halfway. I stayed to the end, and you flittered off like you usually do…

One must consider that content is not often structured for long-term visits. Let’s look at Slate’s own page featuring the article itself, color-coded to make it more eye-catching to separate the content according to focus. This is what the page initially looks like in my native screen resolution (which may not be typical anymore,) emsmallened to fit the blog format:
SlateWindow
The stuff highlighted in blue is direct article content – what anyone has come to see, based on any outside link. Green denotes the illustration, connected but not really content – a lead image can be a teaser or visual aid to the content, but most often (like here) it’s simply intended as eye-candy to help promote interest. Red is completely unrelated junk, stuff that leads the viewer away from the content. All of this is, naturally, without scrolling, one of the factors mentioned in the surveys – a certain percentage of people leave without ever getting beyond the info seen here. So that’s less than 10% solid content, just the title for shit’s sake, and a photo competing with all the crap on the side. This might be better if a compelling photo was chosen, instead of this lame stock agency placeholder to fulfill the editorial idea that there must be a photo. If you found the article unable to hold your attention, this is no surprise, because the page is obviously designed to to emphasize everything but…

Worse is that Manjoo really hasn’t written a profound article – basically, the title is supported and little else. Sites that base their content on a minimum number of articles (especially in certain categories) and some misperceived need to produce new content end up with a percentage of uninteresting dross. Manjoo injected a little humor within, but never got to an insight or hook, despite the clear possibilities of the topic. To be fair, Slate’s editors had some hand in this, and for a site this size that’s not insignificant – Manjoo may not even write like this on his own. Regardless, it means too many articles that don’t go anywhere – which means that anyone staying until the end is more wasting time than demonstrating their exemplary focus.

No site is going to grab and hold everyone’s attention, and this says nothing useful in the least about either content or human tendencies – if you’re like me, at times you’re interested in one kind of content, but other times you couldn’t care less. You might, hard as this may be to believe, treat most web content as passing time, falling below many other of life’s pursuits in importance, which means you’re willing to interrupt perusing a website for just about anything else. And you may be loathe to admit it, but you might just not give the slightest damn about celebrity gossip, despite the bare fact that we’re supposed to enraptured by such as a species. You’re wrecking the curve by doing so, and you bear this on your own conscience…

That hints at an assumption made too often, the idea of selective sampling. The “TL;DR” commenter might stick in our head, partially because it’s such a shallow response to any article, but also because it’s an exception – which belies the statistical significance. We might also see, perhaps much more frequently, the long measured responses, the political diatribes, and the related personal recollections, but these aren’t half as much fun to talk about, even when they overwhelm the short-attention-span nitwits by a factor of five or more. Anyone can opine that YouTube comments are a sign of de-evolution in our species, but this must be weighed against sites where the discussions are lengthy, reasoned, and civil.

As for me? I… write what I want to, and feature what I want to – it is a blog, after all, which translates as thinly veiled narcissism. If anyone else likes it, great! – kindred spirits and all that. I may not hold the attention of anyone who watches reality shows, and I would be proud of this. The result might be low hits or high ‘bounces’ or whatever, but the point was never to be one of the crowd, vapidly (and vainly) aiming for some average ideal – variety is generally a nice thing, no? Anyone can chase statistics all they want, especially if they believe web content is supposed to make money, and true, a lot of content could be vastly improved. But doing so with a solid perspective is probably much better than misinterpreting survey results to believe that humans are turning into twitchy neurotics or something.

Damn. Failed to bring it in under a thousand words…

A peek at the process

Al Denelsbeck

HappyWet
We had gone through a longish period with no rain, and the azalea bushes were started to suffer from it. So I pulled out the hose and gave them a good soaking, with a heavy stream directed at the base to reach the roots, then a light misting over the top to make the insects happy. Almost immediately, the one brown resident mantis scampered excitedly into the water. I really can’t interpret this any other way; it was not trying to escape the soaking, nor did it appear to have been ‘flushed out,’ and had not been visible above the leaves before I started. It simply appeared right in the midst of the mist and came fully out into the open. Of course, I had to get a pic that attempted to communicate this behavior.

Now, it comes as no surprise, I imagine, that blogs are self-edited, which means that not only do you get to see the sentence structure and subject matter that I consider worthwhile (for better or worse,) but also the images that I feel illustrate them best. Until now. I took several images of my friend enjoying the soaking, and decided on the one above. So here are the other choices, all full frame, followed by the reasons why I ruled them out.

MantisEdit1
Not quite. While it showed the body color and the moisture, and even the sorry state of the formerly-vibrant blooms, the lighting is uneven and the perspective too impersonal. While I might have been misinterpreting the mantis as enjoying the water, this doesn’t show the behavior anyway; more the opposite.

MantisEdit2
More of a portrait than an illustration of behavior, and the wetness of the entire bush doesn’t come through too well.

MantisEdit3
Same thing, even more so. The droplet on the antenna is eye-catching, but so is the reflection from the drop on the abdomen, unfocused as it is, and the forelegs almost look like they belong to something else. Plus that stamen to the right is distractingly sharp, though that could have been cropped out easily…

MantisEdit5
Now, I really like this image, with the focus on the forelegs and the drops, but it’s admittedly a rather menacing impression. And again, it’s a portrait, not a display of the behavior I was describing. Hopefully, you agree that the first was the one to use for the topic. There are times when I’ve gone out to reshoot something specifically to illustrate a post better, and this says nothing of the effort put into the images for book reviews (that one is indeed ‘shopped, since I couldn’t locate a goat when I needed one, so I used an archive goat pic and photographed the book in the position and lighting to match.)

There are a couple of messages here. The first is, take enough images to provide a choice, a selection of conditions, behaviors, angles, and so on. Sometimes, one of them will stand out as expressing an idea much better than the others. Secondly, you’ll have plenty of flexibility when it comes to end usage, which may not be what you originally had in mind when getting the shots. In cases where there’s a different editor than yourself, you have to meet with their expectations.

Also worth considering, especially with macro work and its tight margins, is that focus might not be bang on, or minor movement may have destroyed sharpness – something that the preview image in the LCD on the camera will not tell you. Multiple shots are greater insurance that you have something usable. And when using flash for lighting, varying angles usually give differing results with reflections and shadows, something not at all visible in the viewfinder.

Obviously this is where digital shines, but even when shooting film, multiple images are a good idea – it would be nice to think that every shot is sacred and shouldn’t be wasted, but quite unrealistic. If you get one image that significantly surpasses the others, especially if it makes the sale, then throwing away a few slides isn’t any great loss.

StillLynxAfter dousing the bush, naturally, the rain started later in the evening – yes, the weather report had indicated the possibility, but this is North Carolina, where that’s perhaps even more questionable than other areas of the country. I’ve learned my lesson before by almost killing plants in the garden, waiting for the promised rains that never came, and now water as needed regardless of the threats. The mantises appear quite happy with the rain, sitting well out into the open, and so is another resident. Just yesterday (as I type this draft; probably several days ago now that this post is published,) I was thinking that I hadn’t seen the tiny green lynx spider after that first day, and figured that it had fallen prey to the mantises. Just to prove me wrong, it reappeared on the same bush, still only centimeters away from the (now much bigger) mantids. Somehow it appears to be coping with less aplomb than my model above, though that’s just an impression; both species are probably equally capable of dealing with rain. But it does seem that the mantises are finding more to eat.

Palming my face, I am

Al Denelsbeck

I’m not counting on anyone remembering this, but that blogroll on the sidebar used to contain a link for the Richard Dawkins’ Foundation forum, which for years had been a pretty good message board. After their site changes, the commenting system went to hell, plus they (for reasons unknown, unexplained, and unmentioned in their site anywhere) removed links both in a username and in any comments, if they were to a personal site. Links to obviously creationist or pseudoscience sites? No problem. Just don’t link to your own site, no matter how pertinent something you’ve already posted might be.

I contacted them, trying to find the problems with half of my comments disappearing, and registering my displeasure with their pointless link rule, back in January. I got a “we don’t know what’s happening” response to the posting issue, and “we aren’t going to explain the reasoning” response to the link bit. What this told me is that the webmasters believed the site should be structured for their convenience, not the use of its visitors, and I simply removed the site from the blogroll and stopped visiting.

Am I getting miffed about being blocked from promoting myself? Perhaps, though this is a curious issue. Links in a username (aside from primarily attracting spambots,) are an extremely passive means of promotion; someone has to be impressed enough with your comments to want to see what your site is like. And if I link to something I’ve posted before, it’s kind of this crazy thing, using the web exactly how it’s intended, rather than retyping or pasting a block of content. Again, someone has to be motivated to click. I’d be fine if all links were blocked, even though it just means the webmaster is lazy, but being bigoted over personal links means the webmaster has to examine the link anyway, which means even less time saved than implementing some overreaching rule. In other words, someone’s an idiot.

Why do I bring this up now, when it happened in January? Because I just got two auto-replies to my original e-mails, identical and pointless (“Please only use this address to contact the moderators about commenting issues.”)

Get your fucking shit together, guys.

Therapy

Al Denelsbeck

SumbitchI’m making this post because I have to face up to my problems if I want to defeat them.

“Hi, my name is Al and my powers of observation suck.”

[Chorus] “Hi, Al.”

I took this image a week ago at the local botanical garden, when the light was less than optimal – just noodling around. And while I’m pleased with the effect, it was literally only a few minutes ago that I found the frog in the frame. Missed it entirely while I was hovering immediately overhead, and didn’t spot it during the initial proofing while unloading the memory, either.

I mean, I was looking right at that little reddish blossom, making it the pivot point of the image. How did I miss wildlife staring at me not 10cm away from it?

Yes, it’s subtle. I just always thought I was better at spotting things than this. I know there are always frogs in the ponds at that location, and approach slowly to try not to spook them off.

I’m just going to be touchy for a while…

Too cool, part 19

Al Denelsbeck

HeronSnake1
This past Tuesday I met with a student down by the river, and afterward poked around to see what items of interest could be found. In the distance I espied a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) that appeared to be hunting, but a closer look revealed that it had been successful. I hadn’t brought the tripod and thus should not have been shooting with a long lens handheld, but I braced against every available tree as I crept closer, while the light changed rapidly because of passing clouds (note the contrast and the light on the water.)

HeronSnake2
Herons and snakes have one distinctive similarity: they swallow their prey whole, headfirst, often alive. This is problematic with a meal such as this, because maneuvering a snake around to start it down the esophagus headfirst can be difficult enough with hands, much less by simply flipping and catching it in a different position with one’s beak. On occasion, the heron dropped the snake to take a new grip, but it isn’t as simple as just getting a hold of the head, since the weight of the dangling (and thrashing) body will pull it out of the beak as soon as the grip is loosened rather than letting it start down the gullet, unless the position and inertia is just right.

HeronSnake3
Once things get started, it all goes smoother, and the heron removed the snake from sight faster than the camera was saving the images. The bird appeared quite irritated by the writhing tail, which to all appearances was the snake’s valiant effort to go down fighting (sorry.)

HeronSnake4
HeronSnake5With a little stretching and internal adjustment, the snake was gone, and if you’re looking at the peculiar shape of the neck and wondering, yeah, so am I; I wish I could tell you more, but I’d only be speculating. Immediately afterward the heron took a couple of drinks of water, possibly because snakes are drier than fish and herons have minimal salivary glands – they just go down better with a chaser. There’s also the possibility that the heron was picking up a few river stones to aid in digestion, but I have not determined yet if they actually do this. Without teeth, most birds have to break up the tougher foods somehow, and this usually occurs in the crop, a kind of pre-stomach at the base of the neck. A few stones or, in the case of smaller birds, some coarse grit added to the crop serves as grinding surfaces to break down their meals for better digestion.

Admittedly, teeth would have been better, at least in the case of avians like herons and raptors which tackle larger, tougher foods. The interesting part is, their distant ancestors the theropod dinosaurs had teeth, and lost them on the way to becoming birds. Obviously they weren’t needed for quite a while, probably because their food sources didn’t require them, being either soft or small enough to be swallowed whole. There’s even an interesting line of speculation that losing teeth lightened the body further to assist in the development of controlled flight. But as food sources changed again, the teeth didn’t return; instead, birds developed different ways of handling coarser meals. Birds of prey like hawks and owls developed very sharp edges to their beaks and talons, to tear their meals apart, while herons developed serrated edges to the beaks, not to break up their meals, but to keep slippery fish from escaping easily. Some seed-eaters have thick bills to crack seeds, and others will simply gobble grains hole and break them up internally; it’s for this reason that lead birdshot and fishing sinkers have been discouraged in many areas, since birds will collect these from streambeds and retain them in the crop, poisoning themselves by absorbing the heavy metal.

HeronSnake6While it might seem ‘easier’ for birds like herons and hawks to simply re-evolve teeth, that’s not how evolution works – even though it might only require a very simple genetic change, since the gene to develop teeth likely remains but is inactive. Genetic change is haphazard, initially random changes, and if it proves to be beneficial to the species it’s more likely to be passed on to the offspring. It could be that a change similar to teeth just didn’t occur again; it could also be that it did occur, but at that point in time it wasn’t useful, since the herons’ ancestor then was not eating snakes and crayfish and such (modern great blue herons will eat about anything – I’ve watched one eat a vole.) Bear in mind that even now, a meal like this serves as only a small percentage of their dietary intake, most of it still being fish, so the advantage of teeth is minimal. The adaptation of different structures at different times in a species’ development, like teeth and talons in the ancestry of a hawk, serves as yet another nail in the coffin of intelligent design; nature is too jury-rigged to be considered planned.

At the end, my model gave a marvelous full-body fluff and shake, though probably not (as some might think) over the idea that it had just choked down a snake. By this time I was eight or nine meters away and it likely decided that was too close, so it calmly launched into the air, flying away gracefully around a bend in the river. I certainly can’t complain.

Another photo essay of a heron’s meal can be found here.

Bigger stakes than that

Al Denelsbeck

Walkabout podcast – Bigger stakes than that

Pascal’s Wager is a well-known argument among atheists, and for that matter among evangelists too, even though it appears a lower percentage of those know it by name. It’s a line of superficial reasoning that makes an attempt to logically support theism. In essence, if you believe in a god (most especially one that wields perpetual punishment) but are wrong, and no such being exists, then being wrong has no consequences. But if you don’t believe in such a being and it does exist, you’re screwed six ways from Sunday (especially if such a being frowns on terrible word games.) So, you might as well believe.

This has been torn to shreds before, including my own take, but I now see something that I regrettably missed. And so we return to the argument, and with it even get to see how changing decisions into abstract equations doesn’t give us the functionality we might have been led to believe.

The second biggest flaw in the reasoning (the first being that it assumes a factor that has no support) is that religion is being treated solely as a personal matter; the only person who suffers the consequences is the individual. This kind of two-faced bullshit is wielded all the time, mostly by religious folk whining that their personal rights are being violated every time they’re denied the ability to legislate or control others. There’s little personal about religion; from the simple idea that the devout are urged to “spread the word of god” to the extensive efforts to produce new laws or eradicate old ones, religious motivations likely outnumber all other forms of activism combined, at least in this country, and most assuredly in theocratic regimes like half of the middle east. So the consequences of being wrong do not revolve solely around personal salvation, but the effect on everyone who has ever been influenced by religious concepts.

So, I ask the faithful, what if you’re wrong? What exactly does this mean?

1. That you have spent some (probably large) portion of your life judging actions on a meaningless concept, including all stress over what god might disapprove of and how to conduct yourself in any given situation;

2. That all confidence in divine authority and even mankind’s exalted status was entirely misplaced, a huge delusion. Any and all preaching and advice and suggestions and even disapproving looks stemmed only from ego, as did all beliefs in human importance in the cosmos;

3. That the pressures placed upon everyone who engaged in behavior not approved by faith were all pointless. This includes everyone from the masturbating youth to the unwed pregnant teen to the family of a suicide victim, who not only had to consider that their loved one was in perpetual torment, but that their own failures may have contributed;

4. That every instance of gay beatings, and verbal assaults outside abortion clinics, and even every last guilt trip over the right people to marry and the right way to raise kids, was all stupid;

5. That a significant portion of the money donated to churches went to self-perpetuating scams rather than anyplace it might have made a real difference; you know, achieving good results;

6. That every politician who garnered support by playing the religious card was only trolling the rubes, when they could have been concentrating on campaign efforts that would produce positive change;

7. That everyone who died from AIDS and STDs and unplanned pregnancies, solely because they were told condoms were bad, never had to die;

8. That everyone who has died in a holy war, or witch hunt, or religious suicide attack, or even over medical restrictions and withheld care due to “faith,” also died for no reason whatsoever. Life being so sacred to religious folk, you know…;

9. That every terrorist cell and fanatical regime which recruited followers based on ideas of destiny and ultimate rewards would have had to find another way of convincing the pawns. Speculation over the relative usefulness of other motivations is left as an exercise.

I’ll be kind and stop here, but I suspect it’s effectively demonstrated that this could go on for pages. Reducing the entire concept down to the idea of a single point of consequence shows that Pascal (and everyone who resorts to the wager) didn’t understand how flawed it is to try and apply binary decisions to real world consequences. Though it’s possible that he actually did, and formed the conditions of his wager because it produced the answer he wanted to arrive at…

There are undoubtedly those who would argue that their faith really is private, and that they engage in a “live and let live” attitude towards others, avoiding preaching and advising and even internal judging – that gets one off the hook for the worst of it, but not the personal consequences of spending one’s life in pursuit of unfulfillable goals. Not to mention that this probably accounts for less than 0.5% of religious folk. Yet, even this fails to establish innocence, since it remains a self-centered defense; claiming that I did not commit any crimes doesn’t absolve me of criminal negligence when I witness crime and do nothing about it. Simply by admitting to some form of faith, anyone has given their tacit support of that faith, lending a legitimacy to the entire ideology, and this is worsened when they fail to correct any of the bad practices by others. The christian who favors loving everyone as brothers and the christian who gives money to legislate against homosexuality are basing their decisions not just on the same book, but the same concept; that their authority is both beyond evidence and completely rational, the curious double-standard of religious devotion (actually, it’s more likely just opportunistic indulgence of personal desires, but that’s another post…) While there is never a shortage of muslims who claim islam is not about violence, every time there’s a violent act in the name of islam, somehow the violence goes on – we don’t see any corrective actions, just protests of innocence. I can tell you, if I find myself bleeding my life out from an attack by a religious fanatic, knowing that my attacker wasn’t truly religious will make it all much better, I’m sure.

Now, can we effectively weigh the two original potentials of the wager against one another? We have the religious view, which promises eternal torment if one is wrong, and the secular view, which produces a variable (yet vast) collection of social ills. Did you catch the subtle change in wording there? I hope so, because the idea of god’s retribution comes solely from scripture that is wildly inaccurate about known facts, repeatedly self-contradictory, and doesn’t even make sense by any logical process – eternal punishment is a threat, not a practice that could achieve a damn thing at all (thank you, I’m here all week.) Confidence in any claims made by scripture doesn’t come from the accuracy demonstrated – it’s entirely wishful. While the consequences of acting on religious authority are plainly visible and easily measured – literally, infinitely more demonstrated than any metaphysical claim. And they remain detrimental regardless of whether any god exists or not. Trying to compare these as if they had an equal standing is dishonest to a pathological level.

Worse, the truly ugly aspect of all this is that religion is widely, repeatedly claimed to be a force for good, yet that list up there doesn’t really demonstrate it at all, does it? In fact, more good would have been accomplished without the interference of religion in most of those cases – I’m weird this way, but I find it hard to look favorably on anyone pursuing their personal salvation at the expense of others. So we can see that “right or wrong” is not really a productive strategy, when one could substitute “good or bad” and receive real, useful guidance on how to make worthwhile decisions and contributions – ones that anyone would have every right to feel proud of as well. This does, of course, mean that someone would have to know a functional method of determining good, such as the incredibly difficult task of equating it with benefit.

I can’t ignore the argument that faith is solely about belief, and with faith comes salvation – this means that good acts don’t really matter because it’s not about how one acts, just how they think. Yes, this really is claimed, surprisingly often, apparently by people who have somehow failed to notice that scripture is brimming with long lists of proscribed actions, as well as the often-bloodthirsty consequences of violating them. Ignoring for the moment the neurosis of an omnipotent being who demands ego-stroking on penalty of torture, the implication is that even the most heinous crimes don’t count if one’s heart is in the right place, which takes religion very distinctly out of the discussion whenever morality is brought up, since morality deals solely with how one treats others. And even if we accept this pathetic argument, it would mean that the faithful have no purpose nor provocation to try and affect others in any way – their efforts to promote their beliefs and authority have nothing whatsoever to do with personal faith as a goal. Obviously, not a whole lot of religious folk are devoted to that argument even when promoting it.

It’s hard to argue that we as a species do not need a little more clarity in purpose, some method of reducing the selfish, defensive tendencies we are prone to – in other words, some stronger moral guidance. I have little doubt that not only was this the intention of every last person who resorted to the “ultimate authority” angle that eventually became every religion on earth, it’s the underlying goal of many who use it now (I was going to say “nearly everyone” before I realized that no small percentage of people use religion entirely for manipulation.) But as was just demonstrated above, good intentions don’t justify harmful actions in anyone’s sense of community, and the ridiculous machinations of religion open the door for countless forms of abuse and self-indulgent selectivity – producing exactly the opposite effect in too many cases. This becomes absolutely astounding when one realizes that morality is not a hard concept to grasp, certainly in no need of idiotic stories about original sin and following false idols. Even in those few circumstances where determining the best action is hard or subjective, one can easily realize that inaction is much better than any kind of detrimental undertaking. And this demonstrates far more logical thought than any hackneyed “wager,” which serves only to justify a pre-existing standpoint. So why wager when we already have a sure thing to pursue?

Frustrations, part 10

Al Denelsbeck

We’ve had a couple of bluebird nest boxes in the yard for the past two years, attracting occupants each spring, and of course this means I’m attempting to get some decent images. What I’m most after are the newly emerged fledglings, the young whippersnappers just leaving the nest, but while waiting I try for feeding shots as well.

The folks are a tad shy about me looming over their shoulder when feeding – according to a biologist, this is something about not revealing where their young are, but that’s nonsense, since I was the one who put up the nest box, and I’ve told the bluebirds that. But because they’re still neurotic about it, I resort to remote camera work, as seen here.

BluebirdRig
The camera doesn’t have to be very far away, and my focal length was only 230mm for the following images. You can see the flash for supplemental light (mostly trying to throw some into the box,) and the reflector on the ground which was contributing only when the sun dodged from behind the clouds, which wasn’t often (held against the gusting wind by the water jug.) I had a remote shutter release on a long cord and sat six meters away behind another patch of pampas grass out of sight to the right. The fuzzy bunch of weeds to the right of the nest box, by the way, is a new patch of dog fennel, which provided so many photo subjects last year that it’s being encouraged again this year.

OpenWideI had the flash unit dialed up a little too high for the first shots, like that seen here, and eventually changed the camera angle to see if I could get the adults and young framed better. There’s a bit of folklore that animals are scared of a camera flash going off, and I’m happy to tell you that in my experience this is total nonsense. If you think about it, most animals have seen thunderstorms in their lives, and a brief flash of light doesn’t appear on their list of mortal dangers. I’ve seen some give a quick start in surprise, only on the first flash, but none that have ever appeared negatively affected – I’m even skeptical that species which are sensitive to light, such as sea turtles and cephalopods, could possibly be affected by a brief flash, because sunlight (which is sustained and many times brighter) would permanently blind them. The bluebirds paid more attention to the shutter noise, and that wasn’t much, since I have 36 images of feeding in a little over an hour – they weren’t exactly spooked. And with most songbirds, the feeding instinct is so high that there’s little that makes them hesitate too long, though it still isn’t worth harassing them to find out what their limits are.

FindMyOwnFoodI knew we were getting close to fledging time, since I’d peeked in on the young every few days to see their development. Last year I had missed it when it occurred, and I was determined to try and get it this year. The young were also giving some strong indicators, including fairly regular peeks from the box, giving the impression of an elderly woman noting that the new neighbors have small children. In conditions like this the flash angle is important, because the depth of the box can throw shadows across the sprogs within, so I’d repositioned the flash to be high above the camera but in the same line – note how the shadow of the roof just misses the box opening (the sun actually sits behind the north-facing box, which I believe makes the adults happier but isn’t exactly a bonus to photography.)

Alas, I had a photo student yesterday morning and left to meet with them for a couple of hours. On my return, I sat out and observed the nest box for a while to gauge the activity, which was suspiciously nonexistent; eventually I opened it to check, and yes, it was quite empty. While I was away the fledglings had bailed not just the box, but the entire yard, and were nowhere to be seen, though I spotted the male on the overhead wires twice. My attempts to see where he might have led the offspring were in vain. So much for that photographic resolve.

ImpatientLast year we’d witnessed two different broods in the boxes, so it’s possible I’ll get another chance this year – I’ll just have to keep my eye on them (and keep encouraging the insects in the yard.) In the meantime, I’ll close with the first image I got, while I was still setting up the equipment. I glanced up from focusing the camera to find the female waiting impatiently for me to finish so she could stuff the kids – she was on the stump just to the right of the box. I twitched the camera around and fired off a frame before she could bolt, not even sure if the settings were solid, but I can’t complain about the image at all. And just FYI, we didn’t do that butcher job on the stump, which had been a thick variety of cedar bush. Inexperienced help which misinterpreted the landlord’s instructions had treated it like the pampas grass, which really does need cutting back to practically nothing each winter; the grass grows back, the bush was a goner. If I was more ambitious, I’d try to carve something creative out of it, but right now it serves as a nest box support just fine.

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