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.

*     *     *     *     *

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.

To thine own creepy self…

Al Denelsbeck

DuckweedDragon
“So, Al,” you begin, (“you” meaning someone who reads this blog regularly, possibly an entirely fictitious character, and not necessarily you yourself, but thank you if it applies,) “are you trying to tell us that you spent all that time in Savannah, the edge of the subtropics, and did almost no insect photography? Seriously?” And to that I reply, “Well, my own area is such crap for landscapes and even sunset images, so I was wisely using the opportunity to fill out my stock in other areas.” So there. But I did indeed chase a couple of arthropodal subjects, including some detail shots of one I’ve had on my list for a short while now.

SpindlyLong-jawed orb weavers (genus Tetragnatha) are a curious spider found most often – in my experience, anyway – on trees and reeds alongside water sources, but they also can be very fond of docks and boathouses. They have two outward appearances that are fairly distinctive, which is the pose at right when they’re out in their web over the water (you’re seeing a reflection of the sky in the water, since I’m aiming downwards,) or when threatened, they go to one of their web anchors and draw their legs into a straight line with their narrow bodies, blending into the thin leaves they live near. There are grassland varieties as well, but the aquatic-oriented species are the ones you’re most likely to see, and of course the one I captured here. There is a distinctive feature that they have, their namesake actually, which is only visible when you go in for close examination, and that’s the only warning that you get after the snarky way you opened the topic.

LongJawdBelly
Here’s a slightly better look from the underside. The widest part of the body is their chelicerae, or fangs if you prefer, but it’s more than just the pointy bits that they stab poor unsuspecting mayflies with, since they’re jointed, manipulating digits. The thin little arms between the front legs are the pedipalps, their girth marking this specimen as a female. But of course I had to go closer, and in doing so, the spider spooked and ran up to the anchoring tree, positioning itself against the bark in camouflage mode.

LongJawdBody
Here’s the body shot, and no, night did not fall abruptly. I switched to full-on macro mode, which meant diffused flash unit, small aperture, and high shutter speed, and so the background was no longer bright enough to create its own exposure – especially in the early morning when I was doing these shots. Even as spiders go, Tetragnathas are not pretty examples, but you have to admit their abdominal coloration is interesting. And now you can start to get the impression of how disproportionate their chelicerae are – and also that their eye pattern, two rows of four each, is somewhat unnerving. It gives an idea of just how evolution has shaped us to react to certain details, because the eyes are way out of our comfort zone, preventing us from having the least little sympathy with such species.

LongJawz
LongJawz2Here’s a better look at those chelicerae, the best I managed – my model was shot in situ with only some nudges to try and achieve a better angle, so conditions were a bit limiting. They’re still sufficient to see that the chelicerae are these studded war clubs of appendages, two big cans of whupass with easy-open tops (no, I did not learn my writing style from Shakespeare or Dickens, why do you ask?) While I would like to offer some insight into why Tetragnathas require such huge canines, I’m afraid I’m at a total loss, since their food consists of flimsy slow water flies that certainly don’t seem hard to subdue – perhaps their venom is especially weak so they have to beat their prey to death. As you ponder this, take note of the coloration on the chelicerae and lower ‘face,’ in the image above, continuing the theme from the abdomen and indicating that the carpet does match the drapes (yeah, I’m in one of those moods.)

I feel obligated to offer a little perspective, since these closeups may be provoking the wrong impression. Despite the daunting appearance of this species, my models were incredibly shy, as many spiders are, and getting this close took a fair amount of playing around since all the arachnid wanted was to hide. Even as I gently nudged her with a blade of grass, she timidly dodged aside, and eventually scampered off across the bark for a tighter crevice – I don’t think I could have induced a bite if I tried. Sound effects technicians, faced with having to try and find something appropriate for the menacing giant spider in any given horror sequence, resort to chittering, hisses, or even clattering (of the limb joints I guess,) but a more accurate expression would probably be a puppy whining.

I mentioned above something about how we react to eyes, and species like the one below (photographed at the side of the same pond) generate more sympathetic responses from people. Jumping spiders, however, are often fearless little cusses, rarely hesitating to walk across one’s hand or even jump onto the camera, and the easiest to get a portrait perspective on because they’ll actually turn to face whatever approaches. We find the other eyes easy to ignore and focus on those big two, and create a personality for them even when they have no more, and no less, that the Tetragnathas. Humans are weird.
BandedJumper

Buried at the crossroads

Al Denelsbeck

I wish I could draw political-style cartoons, because then I’d open this with an illustration of an unkillable zombie, or maybe Jason from the Friday the 13th franchise, with the label “Free Will” on it…

This time around it’s an article in Slate from Roy F. Baumeister entitled, “Do You Really Have Free Will?” Baumeister is an ’eminent social psychologist,’ which may explain why he only approached the concept from the psychological angle. Unfortunately, that’s not really where the issue lies in the slightest, and in a way, this makes me glad I never got edumacated since now I can consider topics from angles other than my own narrow specialty.

It’s almost a rule that, when the title of an article asks a question, the answer the article will come to is, “no.” Baumeister, perhaps consciously, thwarts this by maintaining that yes, indeed you do have free will – but then again, it’s there in the subtitle: “Of course. Here’s how it evolved.” To support this, however, he chooses to define free will in his own way, and ignore all of the other points raised ad nauseum over the years. It’s a shame, because the article starts off promising enough:

It has become fashionable to say that people have no free will. Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will. Others note that people are unaware of some causes of their behavior, such as unconscious cues or genetic predispositions, and extrapolate to suggest that all behavior may be caused that way, so that conscious choosing is an illusion.

Good – at least he’s aware of the many points raised, and the original article has links throughout this paragraph to send the reader in search of more info.

Yet, he addresses none of these, treating them as he hints at in the above paragraph as being from a narrow perspective, which he then perpetuates. He says,

Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom,

but then,

These arguments leave untouched the meaning of free will that most people understand, which is consciously making choices about what to do in the absence of external coercion, and accepting responsibility for one’s actions.

Well, yes, that’s the conventional wisdom. The point is, physics operates in very predictable ways, and we are physical beings – the rather obvious conclusion is, we should be able (in theory) to predict what our decisions would be, and that means everything we do is determinable, and thus determined since the start of the universe. The “in theory” part is there because the amount of information necessary to do this is so vast we don’t have words to describe it, and it does recognize that there are probably laws of physics we don’t even know yet. Doesn’t matter – what we do know is working pretty damn well.

Naturally, this leads to the concept of determinism, or predestination if you prefer, and the simple extrapolation from there that we didn’t make the decisions, they were just a byproduct of the physics involved. Which then trashes Baumeister’s simple definition above. The coercion isn’t external, though, it’s internal. Is that what Baumeister is talking about, or isn’t it? Doesn’t matter – it’s what nearly everyone else is talking about, so if he is purposefully avoiding the subject in this manner, he isn’t actually addressing the topic.

Which is funny, because at times, he makes very pertinent points:

There is no need to insist that free will is some kind of magical violation of causality. Free will is just another kind of cause. The causal process by which a person decides whether to marry is simply different from the processes that cause balls to roll downhill, ice to melt in the hot sun, a magnet to attract nails, or a stock price to rise and fall.

Excellent! Yes, our brains are made up of physical matter, and what they do is based in physics. But then,

Different sciences discover different kinds of causes. Phillip Anderson, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, explained this beautifully several decades ago in a brief article titled “More is different.” Physics may be the most fundamental of the sciences, but as one moves up the ladder to chemistry, then biology, then physiology, then psychology, and on to economics and sociology—at each level, new kinds of causes enter the picture.

No. Wrong. In fact, horseshit. There are no different causes. What anyone is using in such cases are what are sometimes called emergent properties, or to be less pedantic, a collective process that just makes conversation easier. Stuff that we eat performs the same chemical energy exchanges as everything else in the universe, but because it occurs in a specific manner common to many species, we call it “digestion.” It is not a different cause – it is simply an easier and more specific term than, “exothermic reaction,” or even, “entropy.”

And therein lies much of the problem, because it is the very idea that there is another ’cause’ that sets off so much of the debate, from those trying desperately to support their idea of a soul or those who like the dualistic mind concept. Does Baumeister address these? No.

As Anderson explained, the things each science studies cannot be fully reduced to the lower levels, but they also cannot violate the lower levels. Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization. Even if you could write a history of the Civil War purely in terms of muscle movements or nerve cell firings, that (very long and dull) book would completely miss the point of the war. Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them.

One of the many benefits of the scientific approach in the past century has been crossover – biology tying in firmly with chemistry, astronomy tying in irrefutably with atomic physics, and even psychology meshing in surprising ways with genetics (please don’t take that to imply, in any way, that psycho-social disorders are all genetic.) What we have found is that physics, deep down, combines them all. Baumeister implies above, perhaps only as misdirection, that physics applies only on the active level, muscles and nerves, and that the mind is something else. Like everyone that takes this stance, he never bothers to explain how this might be and where it occurs.

No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life,

Well, yes, they can – mostly they tell us that our common definition of “life” doesn’t really apply very distinctly, and needs to be fudged for every application. An atomic chain reaction performs many of the same functions of life, in energy release and sustained reactions, as does fire. If we want it to mean replication of genetic material, viruses do that, but perform no energy exchanges on their own (they co-opt a host cell to for that function.) So, what definition of “life” is he referring to here?

…let alone the meaning of your life.

… annnd so casually, almost negligently, Baumeister introduces a philosophical angle without the faintest provocation. I’m game – what is the meaning of life, from free will, or the psychological angle, or indeed, any goddamn perspective you care to name? Baumeister doesn’t have it either – no one has given it a solid go, honestly – but apparently we are to believe it is a failing of all those vermin who deny free will when they cannot produce it. Tactics like this annoy the piss out of me, and it’s much worse from someone who isn’t grasping his topic very well.

As for physics explaining how the Civil War came about? You’d be surprised at how much it truly can tell us. DNA is a string of molecules bound by and replicated with mutual properties of attraction, the energy exchange of chemical bonds dictated by valences. These strings of molecules guide cells in protein development, which determines what kind of body traits develop, including ‘instinctual’ traits of the brain. Natural selection is a numbers game – whatever organism survives/reproduces best is able to spread its genetic heritage throughout a population faster than others. This gives rise to traits that tend to help the organism (and by extension species) survive. Among the traits that humans developed over their long history are fairness, cooperation, and functions that support tribal cohesion and produce negative reactions to being taken advantage of. At the same time, humans compete for limited resources, and preferred mating status, and optimal social standing. That pretty much describes economics in its entirety, not from a definition standpoint, but from an evolved behavior one – and economics (and fairness, and competition, and so on) pretty much explains the Civil War – in fact, most wars. The path might be very convoluted, and be broken up into distinctions such as ‘cell division’ or ‘proxy-based trade system,’ but it’s not as if physics isn’t involved on every level.

Baumeister is outright saying here that the path isn’t this clear, instead involving some special step therein that thwarts physics and gives rise to the special property of free will – even when admitting earlier that free will is part of the causality of physics. This seems to indicate that he hasn’t really thought the matter through all the way.

The evolution of free will began when living things began to make choices. The difference between plants and animals illustrates an important early step. Plants don’t change their location and don’t need brains to help them decide where to go. Animals do. Free will is an advanced form of the simple process of controlling oneself, called agency.

So, does the sunflower choose to follow the sun? Does the oak tree choose to split and lift the rock? If not, what are they using, and how does it differ from agency and free will? Biologists know that they do not, and that all such distinctions are merely arbitrary divisions in the spectra of living functions. We often create divisions for convenience, but this does not mean such divisions are truly distinctive and separable.

Decision-making is just the same. Faced with two or more choices, we have functions that compare the consequences to select what choice is most to our benefit, for whatever criteria seems to apply – and to assign importance to this choice, making us motivated to consider carefully rather than flippantly (most times, anyway.) This is the realm of emotions, the positive/negative feedback functions we have that we even see in other species to varying degrees (those that want to argue that dogs or mice, for instance, do not have emotions have to define what exactly emotions are first.) But are these different than the functions within a seed that make it sit dormant, in an envelope perhaps, until surrounded by water and nitrogen-rich soils? How does a seed ‘decide’ to sprout?

It doesn’t – ‘decide’ is misdirection. When the conditions are right it occurs. And much the same can be said for free will, which in most uses is the importance we feel in making a good decision. This importance is what makes us react when we’re told we don’t have it, but this is misunderstanding. The deterministic traits of physics also dictates the presence, and activity, of this importance within us. And Baumeister largely says this, but in tortured, ridiculously misleading ways.

Living things everywhere face two problems: survival and reproduction. All species have to solve those basic problems or else go extinct. Humankind has an unusual strategy for solving them: culture. We communicate, develop complex social systems, engage in trade, accumulate knowledge collectively, create giant social institutions (governments, hospitals, universities, corporations). These help us survive and reproduce, increasingly in comfortable and safe ways. These large systems have worked very well for us, if you measure success in the biological terms of survival and reproduction.

If culture is so successful, why don’t other species use it? They can’t — because they lack the psychological innate capabilities it requires. Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there — it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.

Well, no – all that crap is simply anthropocentrism, the idea that humans are special. There are countless ‘cultures’ throughout the animal kingdom, if you bother to define it as common behavioral traits – canids have packs, birds have flocks, whales have pods, bees have hives, meerkats have communal child care, chimps practice adoption, and nothing destroys its environment like we do. Let’s not lose perspective.

All of that is evolved behavior. We can assign any portion thereof a fancy name if we like, but doing so doesn’t make it free from physical laws; we seem able to accept this easily when it comes to other species, just not for us. We’re different.

No, we’re not. Whether we like or dislike some fact of the universe doesn’t make it right or wrong, and the sooner we recognize this, the better. Right and wrong are also survival traits, in fact, part of that decision-making process. But they are also badly abused by misapplication. Decisions can be beneficial or detrimental; people are not right or wrong, and most especially, bare facts never are. They simply exist. However, the ill-feelings that people get when they believe that physics denies something that they consider to be important is responsible for all sorts of semantic jousting.

If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting. It’s what a creature might need in order to adjust its behavior to novel situations, to get what it wants while still following the complicated rules of the society.

This is all just utter nonsense. The complicated rules of society are just the desires within us to act cooperatively rather than individually – just like hyenas and sardines. We’re getting so far off base now it’s frightening. From a cognitive psychology standpoint, this is a hopeless jumble of motivations. We have social tendencies because we worked better in groups than as individuals. We view decisions as important to accommodate the nature of choice – automatic reactions do not leave room for individual variation or changing conditions, so the ability to weigh consequences evolved. Many of our decisions are badly biased by group influences, as can be seen everywhere, while ‘free will’ is, as Baumeister describes it at least, a fiercely independent trait. But in reality they’re indistinguishable – our desire to ‘go with the flow’ will be treated internally just as important as our desire to think independently, because free will is the desire.

The vast majority of species that reproduce sexually select their mate from among many choices. Is this free will? You can call it that if you like, because we define such things arbitrarily just to make communication easier, but this in no way implies that it is a special property. Does the ability to select mates, or nest locations, or foods, make physics stop working as we know it? It’s a ludicrous question, isn’t it? Yet everyone who maintains that free will is a separate, special property is making exactly this argument. Regardless of how you might want to define it, there’s still an underlying set of laws, and these laws tell us, very distinctly and dependably, that energy behaves like this, all of the time, and matter will do this with the application of this much energy, all of the time. No linguistic two-step changes this in the slightest, regardless of how much anyone wants to draw imaginary lines around their favored domain.

But all of that is ignored in toto by Baumeister, which is a shame, because that’s where the debate lies. While he touches briefly on humans operating within physical laws without special properties, he somehow manages to avoid the consequences of this on the asinine concept of free will. And while touching lightly on evolutionary psychology, he nevertheless approaches the topic more from the dualistic brain/mind separation favored by too many philosophers and routinely dismissed by the majority of biologists.

And so, I’ll say it again. Determinism is highly probable – in fact, the only thing we have evidence of, like it or not (and if you don’t like it, at least try to find a good reason to deny it, rather than sophistry-laden philosophical arguments or the grave misunderstanding of quantum indeterminacy.) The functions within us, as determinable as they might be, also work to see that we are pleased with the act, or illusion if you prefer, of decision-making, and whether people eventually stop using the idiotic concept of free will or not will not ever change this. The universe might have a specific outcome, which we could see if we were omniscient, but we’re not, and we can treat life as a journey into the unknown as much as we do any coin toss (also, quite easily, determinable by physics,) any sports game, any movie we haven’t seen or person we haven’t met. While we dance among everything else in the rules dictated by atomic forces, what we experience and enjoy are the interactions we have and the bare fact that we don’t know what is to come. And that hasn’t changed.

Odd memories, part 11

Al Denelsbeck

Okay, this one’s just stupid, but that’s its charm.

Many years ago I worked at an extension of a humane society, a facility dedicated to dog training, wildlife rehab, and activities over and above the basic shelter services we provided – I was onsite caretaker and septic maintenance person (the Director felt it was easier and cheaper to train someone than to pay for monthly visits to examine the septic system – North Carolina has some righteous rules about wastewater.) One of the things added to the property was a small barn and corral, since we occasionally saw livestock and they’re kind of hard to house in a dog kennel.

Something that people never bothered to research, during their popularity in the nineties, was that Vietnamese potbellied pigs don’t stay small and cute, but get quite large as they get older. Come to think of it, they might not have been true Vietnamese potbellied pigs, just some breed bearing a resemblance when they were young that opportunistic breeders started selling, but whatever. The point is, we ended up with several over the course of a few years that ranged between 35 and 100 Kg (80-220 lbs.) As large adults, they were swaybacked, portly, bristly creatures whose eyes were sunk in the folds of the face, making them look like a political caricature of themselves. One in particular carried his dominance of the corral with a regal arrogance, accepting no lapse in obeisance from the others.

Then, we got a medium-small goat, and wanted to see if they would get along housed together, which would negate having to let them out in shifts. So one afternoon I set them loose simultaneously in the corral, with a hose and a pole ready, but remaining outside the fence to let them determine their own dynamic without my presence (this is more important than you might think – even domesticated animals behave differently when humans are about.)

The goat was completely cool with it all, as goats generally are – they’re mellow until things don’t go their way. The big pig, however, was very curious about this new resident, and wanted to ensure that it knew who ran the roost. He began puttering around the field in the general direction of the goat, making a string of little “buh” grunts as if playing with a toy boat – nothing overt, but conspicuously intruding on the goat’s space. The goat, accommodatingly, simply stepped aside to let the pig pass, which the pig took as encouragement – “it fears me!” Subtly increasing the volume and the speed of its grunts, the pig kept turning towards the goat every time it stepped aside, creating a humorous parody of a bullfight scored with asthmatic air compressor: “buh buh buh buh ¡olé! buh buh buh buh…”

The goat, having made the efforts to be Britishly polite, soon realized that this was not simply the blind meanderings of a self-absorbed porker, but an attempt to actually push the goat around, which was a perfidy that could not be allowed to continue. Almost negligently, the goat turned towards the pig, dropped his nose, and delivered a solid butt right smack in the center of the pigs broad, carunculated forehead.

“BUH!” exclaimed the pig, actually popping gently in the air backwards in utter shock. There’s a good chance he never saw it coming, with his eyes buried in flesh, but right there in front of him sat the goat, a mere one-third his own stately mass, svelte and dainty. Where else could it have originated? The goat, for his own part, watched for just a moment, satisfied that his message had been communicated, and dismissed the incident as inconsequential.

The pig pondered this. Obviously something had happened, but c’mon, he was pig! He ruled his land with an iron trotter. And the goat was this anorexic little thing, belly far from the ground and with eyes you could even tell the color of. Surely this was a mistake. So as the goat meandered off to look for vegetation or tin cans, the pig fired up the boiler again and started in the goat’s direction.

The goat, however, was no longer inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. As the grunts drew closer, he turned quickly and dropped his head again, but was still far from making contact.

“BUH!” repeated the pig with an even more frantic note, flinching from the threat yet untouched. No, there was no mistake; the goat was not going to brook any shenanigans from the pig, and had ways to make this memorable. Right there, the pig appeared to come to a decision: it would continue to rule the corral as Supreme Leader and Commander, but curiously it would never find any reason to have to enforce this with the goat.

And they remained that way, the goat doing as it pleased, and the pig pretending that the goat didn’t actually exist as it shouldered its way among the other pigs with great privilege. No worries.

Spectres and splattered bugs

Al Denelsbeck

ColonialCemetery
We had plans to do the whole downtown Savannah thing again this trip, and spent one day and one evening down there. The Girlfriend wanted to do a walking ghost tour again, taking The Younger Sprog with her, but I decided to skip that and do a self-guided tour, starting with Colonial Park Cemetery.

I’m not going to go into the whole history of the cemetery here – there are more than enough places to find it online – but I will say it’s a fairly classic old graveyard, nicely peppered with aged tombstones and twisted trees dressed in rags of moss, but it’s just a little too well-kept to fit the bill for really spooky images. Sunset was at seven-thirty and the gates closed at eight, so I had a small window of time to work with nice moody light, but it was limited. And there was no way I was going to chance getting locked into the most haunted place in America!

Okay, if you’ve read much else on this blog, you know I’m not too affected by that, and even if you want to get those feelings, the cemetery is in the center of town and far too busy for creepy chills. Most noticeable is that it seems, as the top image conveys, too empty to be very old. This is part of the history, since during the Civil War, occupying Union soldiers knocked down (and altered) countless headstones, so while the cemetery is full to capacity, a large percentage of the graves remain unmarked. Some of the markers were gathered up afterwards and affixed to the east wall, where they remain today.

WallofFame
I aimed for some artsy compositions and select vantages, playing with the conditions a bit, slightly hampered by my decision not to lug the tripod around – I just didn’t want the weight, and was glad I did so, because the evening was hot and humid and just the camera bag was taxing enough. But it did mean some of the things I attempted could have been much better with a firm support for the camera.

As the gates closed, I went to the darkest corner of the cemetery and purposely overrode the exposure meter to produce a dim, moody effect, bracing the camera against the bars of the iron fence. Regrettably, the lights therein were not the classic gas lamps visible in many other parts of the city, which would have done so much more for the effect, but I’m guessing the police want to see who’s trespassing in the cemetery after dark (I imagine it’s a common activity.)

BetterMood
After leaving Colonial Park, I wandered the streets a bit, looking for opportunities. A property posted with a “Consideration of Appropriateness” poster caught my eye, in too dim light to photograph. Since Savannah depends on its historic sections, any alterations to buildings within these areas is subject to committee approval – buildings must look as they did in colonial times, or as close as possible. As we found out on a later trolley tour, homeowners just outside of the border sometimes go for more flamboyant exterior colors, just because they can – an almost teenage defiance, though I imagine trying to operate a business in the historic district can be frustrating at times.

I eventually got down to the riverfront, the big draw of Savannah – classic buildings overlooking the slow river and usually forming the barricade along the two-story drop between city streets and docks.

SavannahRiverfront
I have to say I’m not too concerned with how a city looks, whether it’s historic or not, or whether the style is fashionable or whatever – it’s a city, and thus not very attractive to me. I did a few obligatory images, as much for the practice, braced against lampposts and atop walls – usually a few attempts, hoping to get at least one usable image without twitching the camera during exposures lasting as long as three seconds. I will say, at least, that Savannah has kept the tourist-trap, unbelievably schlocky stuff to a minimum – if you really need a sand dollar painted with glitter as a memento of your visit, it can be found, but you have to look for it. Restaurants, however, you can find easily.

RiverStreet
VoodooHouseEventually I met up with The Girlfriend and The Younger Sprog, who’d enjoyed the ghost tour – a different one than last time (there are perhaps dozens of ghost tours available in Savannah.) Their guide was quite good, very animated, and they had decided I needed to see a couple of the buildings they’d gone past. Seen here, the Voodoo House, or its companion (I was getting the info secondhand and websearches on haunted houses in Savannah have given me a headache from facepalming) is one of many with its own sordid history, and of course during a ghost tour at night there’s plenty of atmosphere (that’s a joke, but you have to wait for it to develop.) The house sits back from the street and is completely shaded from streetlamps, rendering it almost totally invisible at night. Some of the people on the tour, taking flashlit images of the house with their digital cameras, had produced the “orb” effect so dear to the ghost chaser, and the guide had imparted some wisdom regarding what the details meant – The Girlfriend couldn’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like, dust would produce solid orbs, uniform throughout, but those with more halo or edged effects were “something else.” Since The Girlfriend was using a DSLR, both with and without a shoe-mounted flash, I felt sure she wouldn’t be seeing any orbs through her camera, though it occurs to me as I type this that I never saw The Younger Sprog’s pics, taken with a little point-n-shoot – she may have been luckier. Glancing down, I saw the loose dirt in the crevices of the sidewalk was fairly laden with mica, so I scooped up a handful and instructed The Girlfriend to trip the shutter exactly when I told her, making sure the camera was using its little popup flash this time. I counted down and hurled the dust into the air in front of her camera just as she tripped the shutter…

TheyreEverywhereIf you wanted proof that Savannah is the most haunted city in America, there you have it – the little spooks inhabit every grain of sand. I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find whatever kind of shape or face you want – I myself see an owl monkey, and a Tusken Raider (it’s subtle, but the joke is in there.) This is, of course, a simple optical effect, the flash’s light bouncing from reflective objects too close to be in focus, made more distinctive by a dark background – in optical terms, these are ‘circles of confusion.’ I’ve personally done it with mist, corn starch, soap bubbles, and now with glittery sand, and it’s more pronounced when the camera flash is very close to the lens (when the flash is further out, the sand/dust/whatever directly in front of the lens doesn’t get any light, since it passes above, and by the time they’re far enough away to be in the strobe beam, they’re in focus enough to be a tiny speck that’s usually ignored.) Focusing further out helps the effect, too, since close objects are further out of focus. Those that captured orbs on the tour might have caught dust, humidity, and possibly even something the guide provided. So yeah, “atmosphere…”

Our trip coincided with the appearance of the lovebugs – no, not sassy little anthropomorphic VW Beetles, but a species of insect all too well known in the southeast, Plecia nearctica. A little smaller than fireflies, black with red ‘heads’ (actually their thorax,) at times of the year they swarm in vast numbers, mating while in flight, and one ends up driving through clouds of them. It was my duty to clean the windshield, which was necessary every time we refueled. At one point during the daylight tour of downtown, they were so thick they were clustered on the building walls, and we had them walking on us. They’re harmless, and clean off easier than many bugs, but the numbers have to be seen to be believed. As we started down the road one day, a mating pair on the windshield made a valiant effort to stay put; the female was eventually clinging desperately by one leg and vibrating madly in the wind, while the male, facing backwards, was nothing but a blur anchored by his genitalia. Impressive, but I walked gingerly in sympathy for a while after that.

I didn’t do many photos downtown during the day – been done to death, really. Meanwhile, where else are you going to go for images of slug sex? That’s right. Anyway, I’ll leave you with a big version of one of my favorites from the cemetery tour. There’s an instrumental from the Simple Minds album Street Fighting Years called, “When Spirits Rise,” and that’s what came to mind even as I was framing this. It’s faintly spookier in grayscale with the contrast boosted (isn’t everything?) but I like the color version best.

SpiritsRise
And if you look hard, you might see the ghost of Cousin It…

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