Just because, part 15

Al Denelsbeck

red nandina leavesIn abject denial of the actual readership of this blog, I must apologize for being away as long as I have. What with the Grammys, and the Superbowl, and Groundhog’s Day, and then all the celebrity activity, well, you know how it goes. The up side of all this is, of course, that I have so much to post about now!

Yeah right. When you see me posting about anything of the sort, that’s the time to assume crash positions or go deeply into debt buying that new helicopter, because the end times have arrived. Or perhaps that I’ve suffered some kind of traumatic head injury – I wear a medical alert bracelet that advises everyone, in the event that I give the slightest shit about sports or current music, to immediately unsuscitate. Spellcheck doesn’t believe that’s a word…

Even so, a couple of major posts (at least I think so) are coming up – in the meantime, I’ll fill in with a few photos and some light music. Say, shouldn’t pretty photos be called, “light music”?

Both of these were taken while out with students – this one, in fact, is the same type of plant as seen in the previous post, only a few meters away though not the same actual organism. I missed the narrow window of capturing it while snow was present, but that would not have been ideal in conditions like this – the light is too bright to handle the high-contrast subject of colors and pure white snow well, and something likely would have suffered. You can be excused if you think the background greenery is a different species; nandina really can get this diverse in color on the same plant, though I suspect it takes a hard shock of cold weather to pull it off.

The other is just an interesting effect of heavy bubbles throughout thick ice, exaggerated by a wide-angle lens. I could have done without the pine needles, which ground it from being completely abstract, but they were frozen into the ice and not going anywhere soon. Don’t get the impression it got that cold here – this was a small raised pond in the botanical garden, able to get far colder than any typical body of water. But yeah, I found it pretty cool either way.

ice bubble hyperspeed

Even for North Carolina

Al Denelsbeck

branches and thin ice
turkey vulture trioLike most of the country, we’ve been having some longer spells of cold weather, a bit lower temperatures than normal for this time of year, but Monday popped up clear, sunny, and shockingly warm, hitting about 20°c (68°f) – a new student who had been aiming for a day with good conditions to meet contacted me at the last minute, and I headed out. We met near a pond, where the last vestiges of ice lent a curious texture to the water, while we wandered around without even jackets. A few turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) wheeled overhead, seeking thermals, as we talked about composition, framing, and contrast. I typically don’t take a lot of images while working with students, partially because I prefer to concentrate when shooting, but mostly because this is their time, not mine. There’s also a balance point, because when someone is after an image, they’re usually tuned out to anything being said and not absorbing too much; it’s better to sit down and talk theory for a bit before going out to apply it in practice. Some, however, tend to take their cue from me, and will seek out more shots if I’m doing my own, perhaps because it reduces the idea that I’m watching them and judging their approach. I’m pretty easygoing about it all; I’ll talk about what makes a subject stand out and how to use the surroundings to good effect, but not how they should approach their photography. Tastes and styles differ; I encourage students to embrace their own, and just help them achieve it.

Nandina berries from belowI will talk about creative approaches, however, such as going in behind these nandina (Nandina domestica) berries for an uncommon perspective. Aside from the curious view, there’s a sneaky little advantage to doing this: the conditions were bright and contrasty, and brilliant red subjects often go oversaturated in digital images with such light. When there’s no chance of a handy cloud or haze, you can find the shady side and prevent the color from becoming too vivid, giving a hidden, secretive air to the image at the same time.

Though the day was lovely, there was the promise of change, since a winter storm was due to roll in within the next two days, perhaps dumping ten centimeters of snow on us. That’s an abrupt change even for this state; I listen with but half an ear to weather reports, since they’re notoriously unreliable in the area, and have been on the phone with people only a few kilometers away, comparing radically different conditions. A few years back a coworker questioned me as to why I was late for work, since the office had received a bare dusting of snow; I had to take her out and show her the 12 cm of accumulation in the back of the pickup bed, indicating the conditions found in the northern part of the county (I was polite, and did not tattle on another coworker, who had called this transplanted New Yorker for a ride since she couldn’t drive in the white stuff, but way later than she should’ve called me – we would have been late regardless.)

Yet, this time the report was pretty accurate. In the early evening (yesterday, now,) the snow started, fitfully, then getting into its stride, and a few centimeters have already coated everything. The nandina would be very fetching with a nice layer of snow, but we’ll have to wait and see if the roads are going to be acceptable – I’m not into risking my neck for a shot, no matter how scenic. This didn’t mean I couldn’t start off with some local shots, and I’ve been after decent snowflake images for a while now. What’s necessary are nice low temperatures, for one – the surfaces that the flakes gather on have to have gotten cold enough not to melt them on contact. And it also takes a few flakes that have settled distinctly separate and at a useful angle, especially one where the lighting can be managed.

The temperature we’ve got – it’s -5°c (22°f) as I type this, and potentially dropping even lower. And the rosemary bush provided some nice support, especially with the help of some web strands courtesy of the green lynx spiderlings (Peucetia viridans) that still inhabit the bush. The spiders were nowhere to be seen, unsurprisingly, but the evidence of their presence was highlighted by the snow.

Snow and webstrands
If you look close, you can just seen the web line coming in from the top of the image, supporting the snow in a curious sculpture. The vast majority of the accumulation were these linear ice crystals, often called ice needles or columns, with just a few flakes peeking out here and there, making it even harder to find a decent subject. At this magnification, depth-of-field is minuscule, only a few millimeters at best, so you choose your focal point judiciously; naturally I went for the classic flake hiding back there, which (solely by chance) captured the web strand as well. But it’s the next one that I’m most pleased with.

snowflakes and snow needles
Sure, I would have liked a nice, singular snowflake to make a distinctive composition, but you know what? I’ll take this for the time being, since it’s the best I’ve done so far. The web line is also just barely visible in this image, center top, but whether you can see it or not, you have to admit it helped display the snowflakes quite well. If I can keep raising the bar on my winter pics in this manner, I might even be able to stand the snow for a few days.

A few. Then get out of here. Did the long-term snow cover thing when I lived in New York for 17 years – that was quite enough.

Photos without sight

Al Denelsbeck

The other day I began thinking about a subject that has been in the back of my mind for a long time: blindness. My eyes aren’t all that great, needing strong corrective lenses, and they’re gradually getting worse – one day, at some point in the future, the photography will halt, though this is likely to be far enough away that I’ll have retired from everything else as well.

But there have been plenty of times, long before I was serious about photography, that I’ve wondered about blindness, and how it affects certain perceptions of the world. Some time back, I ran across the challenge to describe color to a blind person, which I like to think I could manage, but the real test isn’t what I think of it, it’s whether a blind person seems to understand the concept, which isn’t an opportunity that has arisen. But I often walk around the place in the dark or with my eyes closed, comfortable with where things are and, if I’m any judge, with a pretty solid concept of spatial relations – I can put my hand directly on most doorknobs, know how many steps it is between the bathroom and bedroom, and so on.

I haven’t made a huge effort to make the site disabled-friendly, partially because I really don’t know what’s optimum, but largely because, as a photography-related site, much of the content is lost without the visual. I have toyed with the idea of images produced as etchings or bas-reliefs, but I suspect this really wouldn’t be much good; a scenic shot represents a visual field, subjects at varying distances that are entirely outside of the experience a sightless person would have.

Which led, herewith, to an exercise. I randomly selected an image from my ‘Scenic/Abstract’ stock folder to attempt to describe in the terms that a blind person might experience. Since you have never seen the image, you can play along.

It’s outdoors. The air is exceptionally still and quiet – no bird noise or barking dogs, no lawnmowers or yard noises, few traffic sounds. The air is also slightly chilly, with a faint hint of humidity, like immediately after a rain. The grass underfoot, however, feels dry and solid, not sodden.

A car approaches, from behind and to the left. It’s going slower than normal, clearly traveling on asphalt. It passes by on the left, but as it recedes into the distance it crosses over towards the right. The sound seems slightly muted – less echo than has been experienced elsewhere. After it passes, the faint turbulence of its passage follows behind, weak enough to indicate, along with the sound, being a small distance from the road. The sound of the car disappears into the distance without distinctive changes in pitch; the car did not turn or stop within hearing distance. No other car passes.

There is no warmth from the sun, and only the faintest of breezes. Close to the right, tiny rustles from both near your feet and high above indicate close trees, and occasionally one creaks slightly in the middle distance – there seems to be a treeline alongside. Identical sounds, fewer and fainter, come from the opposite direction – the trees are either fewer there, or farther away. Given the road sound and the turbulence from the car, they are likely on the far side of the road.

What this highlights, hopefully, is that the non-visual representation has to produce the same ‘sense of place’ that our visual cues provide – but some of the things that strike us visually will not produce the same reaction when described. The interplay of light on the snow of the distant mountain peak, a classic scenic image, has no effect on the blind; the awe that they feel comes from other senses. This is not to say that they cannot get the full effect from being in certain locales; aside from the impossibility to know just what anyone else feels, those with sight have a tendency to rely on it strongly, while those without get more information from their other senses. A blind person on a mountain overlook can feel the cool wind coming out of the valley below, hear the air tearing through the trees in the distance coming from very atypical angles (both above and below,) smell the incredible mix of scents produced by thousands of plants and snow, might even get a sense of unease from the rough rock surfaces underfoot. All of these can be rare or unique, and thus provoke a strong response when encountered.

Shall we try another? Remember, this is just as much an exercise for me as for anyone reading.

The air is cool but not cold, noticeably humid, largely still. No sunlight can be felt. The sound of running, splashing water comes from directly ahead, at least twenty paces off; more sounds of water, these very minor, comes from just off to the right at your feet. There is the sound of the wind in the trees, but it’s moderately distant, well above your head, in marked contrast to the stillness of the surrounding air. There is a faint smell of vegetation, but a sharper smell of wet rocks, with a hint of lichen or fungi. The ground underfoot is rock, mostly smooth, but not finished in any way, faintly uneven and studded with the occasional pebble.

The sound from the splashing water has an echo to it, coming most strongly from the left side, extending almost overhead; the effect is perhaps slightly noticeable to the right, but without distinctive direction. The sound of the wind and the echos do not overlap in the slightest. The occasional birdsong can be heard, but always to the right.

Crouching to feel around your feet, you quickly find water lapping against the rock you’re standing on, in the direction of the splashing sound, but the water itself is smooth and undisturbed, a pool. It becomes clear this is the source of the trickling sound to the right. Behind you, the wind noise is more distinct, no longer over your head but even extending down below your level; birdsong can be heard in all directions that way.

Behind you, above and to the left, voices can be heard approaching, and the odd scuffs of feet on uneven surfaces – perhaps ten or so paces away. The sounds descend as they come closer and the people pass behind, giving you some space; the scuffing continues and the position varies in height, sometimes lower than you are, sometimes higher. Their unevenly spaced footfalls and the widely varying time between steps makes it clear that the surroundings are very uneven. The echo from the left and above is very pronounced with the voices, becoming sharp every time someone speaks a bit louder. They never pass in front of you, and barely even get alongside, moving away to the right.

Now, I cheated a little bit here, perhaps – I didn’t stick with what was immediately apparent in the image, but extended it to the surroundings not visible, trying to replicate the entire sense of place that someone without sight would have. They also would have had more of an idea of terrain from having to get to that location, but now we’re going outside of the immediate impact of the ‘scene’ and into the entire experience of the trip. Should that count?

I’m not going to come this far without including the images for comparison, but I’m not going to insert them in the post to be seen easily; instead, I’ll provide a link. Go ahead and revisit the descriptions again to fix the ideas in your mind, then click here for the image from the first description, and here for the second. Or don’t, if you want the full experience, some of the mystery that remains for those without sight. [I’ll note that I actually rejected one of my random selections from the folder, because it was an abstract of a very close subject and could easily have been determined by feel.]

How close was your impression? Was time of day evident from the cues in the description? Did you notice how much of certain portions were never described, because they would have produced no impact to someone without sight?

And of course, how much did I actually miss? I wasn’t paying particular attention to all of the aspects when taking either of these images, so I attempted to reconstruct what I believe I could have sensed when there. Fog and snow mute sounds in curious ways, but the lack of wind noises during fog is actually indicative of the conditions, since it’s rare otherwise. The cue about the echoes I have indeed experienced, as has nearly everyone; we can tell when a recording is made in a small room with hard walls or floor, and can often tell when someone we’re speaking with on the phone walks into a bathroom or outdoors.

[I have a distinctive memory of horsing around with friends in our barn when I was younger, at night without lights – this was a place I knew intimately, but not quite well enough to know exact distances to certain features. I stepped back, and abruptly my voice echoed directly into my ear on one side; I was only centimeters away from a wooden support column, just shy of smacking my head against it. It was a great reminder that we can pick up more of our surroundings without vision than we often realize.

Now something else I’ll note, while on the subject. Sound travels at roughly 340 meters per second, meaning it takes 0.002938 seconds to travel a meter. When we hear the echo from a small room, it is the sound repeating perhaps just 0.01 seconds after the origin; when I heard the echo from the column, it was an echo well less than 0.0014 seconds later – we can actually distinguish time frames this short by ear. The old style monitors with cathode ray tubes (the bulky ones) and non-flat TVs would redraw their images 60 times a second, with black areas in between. This meant each individual image would last roughly 0.01 seconds (counting black redraw buffers) and few people would notice any flicker or delay at all – our ears are better at timing small delays than our eyes.]

But anyway, all of this is simply an exercise in perspective and assumptions. I will never know what being blind from birth is like – even if I lose my sight entirely, I will always build a visual representation in my mind. And a sightless person will never know what vision is like, and what is drawn from it. This isn’t about limitations, however – it’s about changing a frame of reference, and contemplating how much all of our senses contribute to our perception of environment. There are dramatic landscapes for all of us, but some are very different in nature.

Tim Minchin’s Storm

Al Denelsbeck

Tim Minchin is an Australian née British musician/composer/songwriter/comedian, particularly known for his outspoken skepticism. All the best humor can be found overseas; here we think Saturday Night Live is humorous, apparently since not very many people learned in school what “humor” actually means. It’s not fair.

Anyway, one of his most popular works is the beat-poem, Storm, later animated. I usually can’t stand beat-poetry, but this isn’t a bad example at all, and of course, I’m easily swayed by the subject matter. The scenario is all-too-familiar to those who promote critical thinking: some flaming nitwit drones on in public from a state of self-impressed ignorance, but it’s considered impolite to inject an empirical perspective. We have weird standards in our cultures, and Tim, among others, would prefer to see these become a bit different. That’s enough setup; watch the video.

It’s not just the act of contradicting someone publicly – skepticism itself is often considered to be mean, taking cherished beliefs away from people who, it seems, are emotionally delicate. The argument that such beliefs “don’t harm anyone” is heard pretty often, as if that’s the only standard that matters.

Or as if it’s even been established in the first place. Actually, many forms of ‘cherished beliefs’ have been demonstrated to be harmful in numerous ways – we cannot hide behind the shield of ‘opinion,’ since opinion informs our decisions. There’s a difference between what color we might paint our walls, and what we decide to do when our child is sick. It’s not opinion that’s the key factor, but consequence.

Here’s a portion of the difference between an outspoken skeptic and the hypothetical ‘polite’ person. Not speaking up, not correcting misapprehensions, not daring to create the cracks of doubt in the façade of self-assurance, has consequences too. The potential for real harm weighs rather heavily against the possibility, or even guarantee, that someone might get upset. What kind of person places the pleasant nature of their dinner party higher in importance than effectively treating a future illness, or guiding legislature towards useful purposes, or even just the hint that expecting some ‘spiritual purpose’ to guide one’s life is a waste of both time and intelligence? At best, it’s someone who pretends the correction, the better information, will occur someplace down the road before harm can be done. Mostly, however, it’s cowards – afraid of confrontation and believing that if no one gets upset, everything is just fine.

But, here’s an important bit: the skeptic does not have to be confrontational when providing their input, and this is where Storm is seriously misleading. Minchin goes off on a rant, clearly frustrated over seeing too much of this, and openly derogatory. But this is self-indulgent itself, alleviating frustration in a way virtually guaranteed not to have much of an effect; he even notes this himself in the poem yet, to all appearances, credits this to the intransigence of Storm rather than his own approach. While his overall points have plenty of well-grounded facts behind them, the delivery is as emotional as those who revel in ‘spiritual’ and ‘holistic,’ and such an approach is more a contest of wills than a discussion of relative merits. In most cases, a matter-of-fact approach is incredibly disarming; non-confrontational, non-judgmental, non-emotional – just, “this is how it is,” with supporting details as needed. This won’t work for everybody, but imagine those others at the party, listening to the discussion between a calm, lucid person and a dramatic, emotional one – who do you think they’re likely to pay more attention to? Who will provoke the consideration that perhaps there’s more to be learned? Who, to be blunt, seems to be working from solid info rather than a dogged commitment to what they want to believe?

Let’s not forget that no one ever concedes defeat in an argument, except dismissively or sarcastically. The goal cannot be to win, only to start the process of examination – the change will take time. Make your point and let it go.

The title of the poem has a secondary meaning – not just the name of the antagonist, but Minchin’s own thunderhead building to a climax. Storms often make people cower, however – the goal is to slide in under their umbrella, like a… damn, I can’t close this metaphor thematically. But you know what I mean anyway.

Goes down smooth

Al Denelsbeck

I just happened to glance out the back door today to find a visitor to the yard, about as close to the door as she could get. After a couple of quick and low-quality shots through two panes of glass on the doors, I slipped out the front door to circle around and approach as unobtrusively as I could, which was sufficient.

Red-shouldered hawk
She pretty clearly knew I was there, but I was in shadow and shooting along the edge of the house, so this red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) wasn’t too concerned with my presence, about 20 meters away. I took whatever opportunity she gave me (I’m fairly certain this is a female, and in fact, the same one seen here,) to creep closer, at times using a hoe as a makeshift monopod because I hadn’t grabbed one, or the tripod, figuring they were more likely to spook the bird. She switched position, and as I moved slowly to stay with her, she spotted something down by the fence and popped down there for just a moment.

SnakeHunter2I’ve seen before the kind of dancing she did while grounded, and knew as she returned to another branch that she’d caught something. In this case it was a small brown snake (Storeria dekayi,) about the diameter of a pencil and not a whole lot longer, which provides a little bit of scale – the hawk probably stands about 30cm (12″) tall. Since I’d already alerted The Girlfriend to the presence of the hawk, she got to see the whole show through the window, easily noting that the snake seemed none too happy. Hawks only worry about immobilizing their food; it can be alive as they eat it, if necessary, so the snake was writhing in an attempt to get away.

I was shooting lots of frames as she perched with the snake, looking around curiously to see if everyone noticed her remarkable feat; she was, after all, totally unscathed, hard as that may be to believe. Actually, I’ve seen this behavior before too, and I don’t know what the purpose is; I would think that hawks would want to get their meals down as quickly as possible, to prevent escapes, attracting attention, or even losing the meal to a rival. But instead they pause for no apparent reason, without doing anything useful, and my only speculation is that they ensure that their perch is safe before getting involved in consuming the meal.

SnakeHunter3
Now, this makes sense for the larger meals that have to be reduced into bits that can be swallowed easily, since hawks aren’t going to be chewing anything. But not exactly for something like this, which doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. Still, it might just be habit. Unfortunately, digital cameras have a small handicap in that they have to process the images as they go, able to handle ‘bursts’ of several frames but requiring pauses in between, and it was during one of these pauses that the hawk chose to hork her capture down, taking all of two seconds to do so. Thus I only got one frame of this taking place.

SnakeHunter4
Notice the nictitating third eyelid, often closed as birds swallow, presumably to protect the eye from the flailing that might take place from their food. It’s semi-transparent, so the hawk can still see danger approaching.

I can’t complain about the conditions – I couldn’t have asked for either a better light angle, or a better position from the hawk. We’re so used to seeing wildlife images of this nature that we often don’t realize how difficult it is to accomplish; the hawk could easily have been elsewhere, facing differently, or this could have taken place under overcast skies. But I still could have done without that tiny twig right there.

SnakeHunter5
She loitered around for a bit, clearly looking for more of a meal than that, the glutton. She still wasn’t very worried about my presence, even though she had flown away not two weeks previously when I was three times farther off and far below her. I’m guessing the prospect of more snakes on this warm day made her tolerate creepy little nature photographers a little better.

Fair’s fair

Al Denelsbeck

In a recent discussion about religion, someone told me that I had to be fair and consider all the good that religion does along with the bad, far from the first time I’ve heard this directive. It sounds innocent, and in fact, praiseworthy on the face of it, but it’s almost offensive in its nature; it all depends on the circumstances, and is a great example of the kind of manipulation that often takes place in such discussions.

If my doctor cures me of an illness, that’s good, right? If my auto mechanic fixes my car, that’s a point in his favor, correct? Well, yes and no – this is what they’re both supposed to do, and in fact, carefully certified and charging money to accomplish, so it’s not exactly a moral thing, but a contractual exchange, and an expression of competence in a chosen field. One must ask what a minimum standard is in such circumstances, and if someone should be considered noteworthy for simply meeting this.

But okay. Let’s say my doctor gives a great deal of money to charity, and donates a lot of her services to underdeveloped countries. That’s good, I think we can agree. But then it’s discovered that she has been dismembering orphans in her basement, without even a permit, and selling the bones for voodoo rituals. That’s… not so good. So if she is nominated for the Humanitarian of the Year award, it’s predictable that a lot of people are going to get upset. The distinctive difference, one that many people cannot grasp, is that actions can be beneficial or detrimental by themselves, but if we want to pass judgment on an individual, organization, or ideology, we consider the collected actions as a whole.

Now, ostensibly, this is exactly what I was asked to do – but again, the context comes into play, and the context was not for the objective evaluation of religion, but that religion was actually a beneficial thing, a force for good. If the Red Cross was found to be setting puppies on fire during each meeting, it would pretty much cease to exist; their donations would dry up overnight, even if the puppy ritual did not negatively impact their aid services in the slightest. People would reason that their donations were, even peripherally, lending some kind of support or approval to the barbecue, and that they could certainly find some method of providing aid that did not involve animal abuse. They see the value in supporting the beneficial actions, not the organization, recognizing that it is trivially easy to have the good stuff without any bad stuff.

Every country has laws, and to the best of my knowledge, not one has any form of law that requires considering how many good things a person does to determine whether a law was actually broken. When a drunk driver kills a child, the judge does not ask if the driver is a dog-lover, or used to be in the Peace Corps. Priests do not get one free murder. While it’s true that, on occasion, the sentence reflects some effort on the part of the convicted to offset their crime (e.g., community service or ‘good behavior,’) this is, by and large, an aspect of appropriate punishment, not an admission that what they did was not bad. In the true sense of the ‘scales of justice,’ the crime and the sentence are intended to balance out, leaving a neutral result. Anyone can argue that juries may be swayed by the good actions of the accused, and this is true – they’re also swayed by the bad actions such as criminal history, and typically use the information to determine not the nature of the crime, but the intent and/or social fitness of the accused. It is also worth noting that very few people think so much of our legal system that they actually consider former criminals to be ‘neutral’ after the sentence is completed; the laws regarding registered sex offenders make this starkly clear. Life sentences and the death penalty assume by their nature that there is no method that the accused can possibly balance back to neutral.

But even if one were to believe that religion should be judged on how the scales actually tip, we’re faced with the question of how, exactly, one should measure this. Let’s take a simple thing like the catholic church’s disinformation campaign against condoms, provoking an AIDS epidemic in several African countries. What is an effective offset to this, just to bring the scales back to zero (much less gain a positive weight)? Day care centers? Food drives? Couples counseling? Ignoring that all of these are often cheap ploys to preach to a captive and vulnerable audience, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that killing people in the name of arbitrary interpretations of scripture is going to require more than all of those combined.

Even this is misdirection, however. The direct answer to this whole fairness issue is, don’t fucking do the bad shit in the first place. It’s really that simple, and it’s incredible that I would have to point this out. The vast majority of nonprofit organizations devoted to providing assistance are hugely ahead of any religion because they follow this minor dictum, having nothing that needs to be offset in the first place. If you want to be fair.

And then there’s some of the considerations that spring up with just a little more objective examination. The bare fact that ideologies which routinely promote the ‘life is sacred’ concept have so frequently been found causing death is nothing short of enormous hypocrisy. It is well known that the Spanish Inquisitors tortured their victims with bludgeoning, crushing, and burning because they were forbidden to draw blood. Instead of guidance by the moral compass of the church, we see the avoidance of damnation with loopholes – god should have thought that one through better…

[It does not matter whether any proposed god accepts the dodge or not – religion is what people do in the name of god, its entire point of existence, and the priests themselves obviously weren’t too motivated towards charity and upstanding character.]

Let’s consider the argument that most of the actions to be weighed were undertaken with the belief that they were good in the first place – regardless of who was killed, tortured, beaten, robbed, banished, vanquished, persecuted, or otherwise disadvantaged. I’m silly; I tend to define ‘good’ as being beneficial to all involved, and not just a new way of describing self-importance and arrogance, so I’m not going to allow this defense in the slightest – ignorance of basic moral standards is no excuse from anyone, but especially not to specifically qualify religion as ‘good.’ It’s worth noting that every person who demanded that I consider the good with the bad had to have understood this perspective as well, otherwise the demand makes no sense, so using this argument to excuse those actions is self-contradictory.

Authority is not synonymous with good – there are millions of events throughout history that attest to this. This distinction is lost far too often, however, as people believe that following the strictures of their chosen authority is good, solely because not following them is bad – a peculiar binary approach ignorant of the idea that this is a minimum standard; if anyone was good for obeying traffic laws, that’s setting the bar rather low on judging value, isn’t it? It becomes even lower when someone chooses their own authority, not just from the religion they prefer to follow from among several to hundreds, but also in the selectivity of what scripture they have decided to embrace. While millions of people in this country crusade for adherence to god’s proclamations regarding homosexuality, campaigning for laws restricting marriage, they remain blissfully unconcerned about the proclamations against trimming hair, tattoos, coveting, and so on. What we see is not concern over actions of benefit, or even the bare recognition that laws are for protection and not discrimination, but just going with the flow; someone told them this was good and important, and away they are swept. The scripture serves only to justify it, not providing any real guidance. This is, in fact, the primary way that religion has been practiced throughout the vast majority of its recorded existence.

What results is the exact opposite of a moral compass, the abdication of any standard or even definition of ‘good’ in lieu of wielding divine authority, or just listening to the majority, which appears in abundance outside of religion as well. Unfortunately, the fact that western cultures no longer participate in witch hunts is probably not because we determined that witchcraft was never demonstrated; it is likely only because no religious authority has insisted recently that it needs to be done. The bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of doctors working therein does not come from any scriptural guidance, since the only relevant passages prohibit such actions (not to mention the underlying penance structure would make such actions pointless anyway.) People can easily be provoked towards extreme actions, however, when they abandon their own judgment in the belief that they shouldn’t be using it in the first place.

And finally, there’s the idea that without religion, we would all be horribly bad anyway. While this idea is promoted by religions the world over in such a modest and self-effacing way (imagine that,) it is incredibly naïve, bordering on the irredeemably ignorant. We hardly need religions to tell us what’s bad, any more than we need someone telling us not to eat decayed animals, or that we should take care of our babies. I have yet to come across any scriptural prohibitions against pouring acid in my eyes, so that’s okay, right? Seriously, how fucking stupid are humans assumed to be with this idea? But even without the conclusion that can be reached through twelve whole seconds of thought, we still have extensive studies in sociology, psychology, and even biology that show not only the inherent nature of our moral drive, they demonstrate that several other species possess their own versions of these, despite the fact that scripture has yet to be translated into chimpanzee or rat. You’ll pardon me if, every time someone tells me we can’t be good without religion, I strongly recommend that they be safely housed in a padded cell, solely on the basis of terminal gullibility. Naturally, their access to infomercials should be completely restricted…

I like to think that I make the effort to be fair. I don’t judge people as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ knowing that everyone is capable of both kinds of actions; by extension, this means that violence is far better linked to human nature than any one underlying cause. But religions are widely, repeatedly claimed to temper this – it is, in fact, the most prominent trait named for any of them, the biggest reason why everyone is supposed to hold faith in esteem. Yet the religious, by a vast margin, cannot recognize nor account for the countless reprehensible acts fostered solely by their faiths throughout history; I would have thought fairness would involve that as well, rather than perpetually trumpeting their piety to one and all.

But if religion really is a force for good, then there should be little, if anything, to weigh against this, much less a laundry list of persecution and murder. And if a supreme beneficent being really is the inspiration or guiding force, then bad acts just simply should not ever be able to happen, period. Any and every excuse wielded to try and explain why these still occur only serves to reinforce how little religion really is tied to any superior power, despite the vast philosophical efforts that have been expended to try and rescue this paradox. The most common answer to this is, “We can’t know the mind of god,” which logically means that no actions can or should be taken in service to such. No religious person ever manages to get that out of it, however. Isn’t that odd.

More to the point, it’s ridiculous to weigh good against bad to try and salvage a belief system, or to force it into a binary good/bad state – that’s doing a huge disservice to our intelligence in the first place. There is no reason to bring religion into it at all. Do good; don’t do bad. No other baggage is necessary. Anyone that is concerned about how their religion is viewed is trying to gain a ‘good’ status without actually bothering to do anything good… and what should we conclude from that?

You’re doing that deliberately!

Al Denelsbeck

There’s a method of presenting information that I see way too much of, from writers and educators that really should know better, and I can’t help but believe it’s doing more harm than good. I’ve probably used it a few too many times myself, but now I’m going to be aware of it and try never to use it, at least in circumstances where it is misleading. I refer to “language of intent or deliberation,” which is kind of a vague way of putting it that makes academics happy but doesn’t really explain anything. To put it more casually, it’s assigning thinking processes to things that do not possess them.

Blameless red wolfRichard Dawkins used it extensively in The Selfish Gene, and now I see Steven Pinker doing it, both of them in relation to evolution, one of the most misunderstood concepts in science. Sure, quantum physics rates higher on the nonplussed scale, but quantum physics really is complicated and counter-intuitive; natural selection is far simpler – this simplicity is what makes it work, and what should be assisting the understanding of it.

One common example is seen often, even though this is a minor example compared to some. We are frequently told that wolves weed out the old and the sick members of a herd of deer or elk, thereby increasing the strength of the herd overall. Bluntly, this is nonsense; wolves capture whatever they can, and quite often it’s the young members of the herd, the ones that serve as the genetic future. One could as easily say that the herd on average outruns the wolves, and this is slightly more accurate, though still misleading if it is presented in the way that either species chooses to make certain actions. Wolves eat; deer/elk try not to be eaten – even the young, the old, and the sick. There’s nothing more to it than that, and none of them think about what would work best.

People might say that this is where natural selection works, that the wolves serve as ‘selectors’ for the prime members of the herds – the ones that survive are the ones that are better. This is true to a small extent, but far less than is implied by the example. If we take it at face value, the wolves would be preventing genes that allowed deer to get old or sick – and also allowed them to be young and helpless. Obviously this is nonsense; every species starts young, every species has the ability to get sick, every species dies. Wolves do not act on these factors any more than any other survival hurdle does. We could just as easily say that hard winters ‘act’ to strengthen the herd. In such a case it’s considered poetic license, since we don’t believe climate does anything intentionally. But we do believe animals act with consideration, so the deliberate action language can serve to muddy the waters. More on this in a moment.

The biggest issue is that genes are propagated only by reproduction; whatever genes the species was born with, it passes on to its offspring. In truth, slightly less than 50% of the genes from either parent get passed on, for all two-parent systems – roughly half of the genes lose the lottery of random selection between the two parents as their contributions combine into the fertilized egg, while a tiny percentage of others spontaneously mutate into something else. But what this means is that wolves ‘weeding out’ the old or the sick are doing nothing at all genetically. The older members of the herd have already passed along their genes if they were going to – the wolves are too late. And any sick ones of reproductive age are only affected if the sickness occurred because of a genetic trait, and was not sufficient to prevent reproduction on its own. The newborns that fall prey are a facet of selection – they are caught before they reach reproductive age, so their genetic legacy is interrupted by predation – but the impact on genes is fairly low; some gene may appear that encourages faster development, so they’re not as helpless when the wolves appear, but there’s a limit as to how much this could accomplish. They’re already born with the ability to stand and walk within hours of birth, and this certainly was an aspect of selection. They’re not, however, going to develop in the mother’s womb to the point of being able to outrun all predators before the amniotic fluid dries. If they could get that big and developed, the mother would start seeing the disadvantage of carting around that loaf in the oven, and lose the selection process in that manner. Note that this option also requires more than one trait: the tendency to develop longer in the womb, and the mother’s change in physiology to accommodate this. This involves at least two genes to accomplish, but probably dozens more, so it would take a lot longer to occur.

InnocentElkProtective herds are, of course, a behavior that has been selected for, as are the protective instincts of the parents – these evolved right alongside all other traits, and each one has an impact. What this means is that survival of the genes relies on many points of convergence, so any one selective factor – predators, food sources, climate, etc. – has only a partial effect on the process. What selection produces is not an ideal organism, but one that balances both environmental influences and the random genetic changes that occur into something that, on average, works better than before. It’s actually pretty haphazard and slow, which is what’s fascinating about it, because the species we see now had to be shaped by millions of causes over long periods of time.

Mind you, the wolves are not only selectors themselves – they are also selectees, guided by the development of deer and elk to run faster and hunt more efficiently. It would serve in their best interests not to get the inadequate sources of protein, but to get the prime examples from the herd; nailing the biggest, healthiest member is a far more efficient use of their effort than getting some stringy old cancer victim. The deliberate language so often used seems to present wolves as a fixed trait, while the ungulates can be shaped; naturally, both can change according to the traits of the other, and many more traits besides. It’s much more like some of our competitive sports, where manufacturers try to come up with clothing, for instance, that allows a tiny bit more freedom of movement, that provides a tiny advantage over other competitors that lack it – which lasts only until the others either get the same clothes, or obtain another tiny advantage of their own. Gradually these advantages accumulate and shape the way the sport is played.

In the middle of all this sits the environmental factor. Conditions change, often much more rapidly than a species can adapt to them. Every species not only copes with the other species around it than may prey upon it, or provide food, or simply eat the same food, it also deals with how the climate has changed, or if a food source becomes scarcer, or if a river or land bridge has changed the area they live within. They cannot choose what changes are made by natural selection, or decide that going north is a good idea – they are all beholden to whether a beneficial trait may arise in time. Often enough it doesn’t, and extinction occurs. But this also means that perfect adaptation is next to impossible – each advantage over conditions lasts only so long, and new ones must appear in the gene pool and be selected for all of the time. The language may not be to blame for this, but often the impression is that natural selection has led up to the current state and stopped, as if this is an end result, when in reality it is ongoing – it’s just slow enough that we can rarely see examples of selection taking place. Any species may have traits that don’t work very well in current conditions, and eventually these may change for the better.

But the deliberate language does work in another way that’s extremely detrimental. The idea that wolves are purposefully picking out the old and the sick implies a long-abandoned selection concept known as Lamarckism: that what the species does in their life affects the nature or effect of the genes that are passed along, as if these can be altered during the lifespan of the animal. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of evolution, still extant after all these years, and I really do believe this is helped along by such language. With a few tiny exceptions that have recently been discovered (and are not very well researched yet,) the genes that a species is born with are the ones passed along to the offspring. The only way that they have an effect as a selective trait is if a) they provide a change in behavior or ability, and b) this change is sufficient to affect the reproductive chances of the possessor. A wolf, deer, elk, or even human that reasons out something cannot pass this onto its offspring in any way, unless the ability to make such mental connections was provided by genes in the first place. No matter how much anyone learns, or how physically fit they’ve become, they’re not passing this on to their kids genetically; the offspring can only obtain it through their own efforts after birth. The only thing that someone might be passing on is a genetic tendency to believe that education in this manner is a good idea, or a faint trend towards tougher muscles, that they were born with – a gene mutation that produced these effects. Herd animals are not inclined to protect the elderly or the infirm, because that behavior is a liability to the entire herd; some members may trend towards this behavior through the genetic lottery at any time, but since it doesn’t provide any survival or reproductive advantage to those still capable of passing along their genes, it doesn’t propagate more than any other behavioral variation that may arise.

Clover sprouting within discarded bottleWhich brings us to the gene level, where deliberate language is a major factor of confusion. Genes do not do anything except spark the development of proteins under certain conditions; they are far less active than a grass seed that germinates when surrounded by adequate moisture and nutrition, and are much more like an alarm clock that rings at certain times. Their propagation in any species relies on the survival of the individual that possesses them, and the lottery that may just drop them out in favor of the gene from the other parent, or the rare mutation that occurs. When a new gene mutation provides some slight advantage in survival or reproduction, it stands a better chance of getting to offspring, and in multiple generations of this process, it can become more prevalent in the gene pool of the species, first in a local group, and eventually in time throughout the entire population. The gene does not try to survive; it does not survive at the expense of others; it does not compete. Natural selection sees that tiny advantages can add up over time – again, on average. Note that it is not just the singular gene that propagates from any advantage it might provide to an organism – every gene that the organism possesses at that time, including the detrimental ones, gets selected and is along for the ride. The detrimental ones may also prevent the beneficial ones from propagating as well; it all depends on what the nature of each trait is, and whether it has a significant effect on the reproduction of the individual.

As a species, we have a lot of traits that spring up in old age – drying and discolored skin, grey and thinning hair, lots of organ failures, and so on. These are obviously not advantages, and should have been selected out – and likely were, every time they occurred within the reproductive timeframe. But the tendency to appear after reproductive age never gets any chance to be selected; those genes have already been passed on before they have a detrimental effect. If we were to try and interpret a message from nature, it’s that we have no purpose beyond reproductive age (I personally have never had a purpose, since my genes went nowhere.) But there’s no message, and no purpose (whew!) – this is just the way that the conditions available on this planet produce a pattern. We might think it could be better or worse, but that’s just our tendency to see things with intent, a survival trait that, on average, worked for us. Nature, however, just is.

Counterpoint

Al Denelsbeck

Snow-dusted holly leaves

Bluebird house in snowI think it snowed early this morning just to offer a counterpoint to the pics from yesterday morn. This is the first of the season here, and no, I don’t really count this as snow; not from having grown up in central New York, and not in comparison to many other parts of the country right now. We have often had much heavier snowfalls than this by this time of year, so it just reflects how lucky we’ve been here. I’m not gloating, even though it’s true that I moved south largely to escape winter weather. While I’m not fond of cold, I can hack it reasonably well. It was the expectation that inclement weather was supposed to have no effect on school or work that was most disagreeable, and after several years, multiple minor vehicle damages and one major one, and having to pull a faulty pump from our well in arctic conditions, I figured it was time to get out.

Below, one of the last remnants of the spiderling colony on the butterfly bush, which has finally given up its green leaves. I can no longer find any of the green lynx spiders that hatched therein, which doesn’t mean they’re not there. I can still find a few on the rosemary bush though, and at least two were unfazed by the snow this morning (they don’t have to drive in it.) But here, a few resilient strands of web anchor what appears to be snowflakes transitioning to water; the shapes in the background that ‘cradle’ the drop were wholly unseen and unplanned, unless you want to give my subconscious credit. I could be wrong about the material, though – it might just be a holiday decoration that the spiders have been too lazy to take down. I will leave you to contemplate what a spider holiday would be like.

Semi-melted snow on web

All up in yo’ face

Al Denelsbeck

After yesterday’s monsoon (which was hard enough for us to be watching for the signs of tornados,) there remains a fair amount of standing water in various places, and the yard is nothing more than a sponge right now. In a shallow pan this morning, I spotted a couple of spiders hanging out, one obviously a species of fishing spider. I pointed the largest out to The Girlfriend.

“Can he get out?” she asked.

“He should have thought of that before he got in, shouldn’t he?” was my reply. I’m very Darwinian.

Nonetheless, I put a leaf in the pan, propped up on the side, while I went in to fetch the camera (no, this doesn’t mean I carry it in my mouth. Don’t ask me why we use these terms.) When I came back out, I thought I spotted motion on the leaf but there was nothing to see, including any sign of the fishing spider. My suspicions were confirmed when I turned the leaf over and found the spider clinging to the underside, submerged well under the surface.

submerged fishing spider
I’ve written about these before, but you likely forgot all that info, so I’m posting this refresher – remember to thank me when it comes in handy later on in saving a busload of children. Some species of fishing spider are equally at home under the water’s surface as they are on land, since air clings to their bodies courtesy of both water tension and the little hairs they have that makes them so adorable. Most arthropods breathe through openings on their abdomens called spiracles, so the bodysuit of air is ideally located.

My subject here kindly stayed put as I transferred the leaf into the macro tank, and of course I’m accommodating enough to my readers to go in for the extreme portrait shots, allowing you to get lost in those eyes. The effect with the light angle and the magnification was especially potent – I’m betting these pics provoke a strong emotional response.

submerged fishing spider closeup
This specimen, at full leg spread, would not quite cover the pad of my index finger, and this image lets you to see how the surface tension of the water allows for a fair amount of air to be trapped, spanning across small gaps, while the larger hairs poke right through the surface. Remember that this is inverted from expectation – you’re looking through the water, and the silvery membrane is the air pocket. But I noticed something that I never had before: the air specifically does not cover the eyes at all, instead going right to their very edges and stopping. This makes sense biologically, because it prevents the distortion that the air/water interface would produce and thus the spider can see better, but how it occurs was the question.

I wondered if the spider actually cleared its eyes with a foreleg or pedipalp upon submersion, so I did a few experiments with drawing the leaf in and out of the water as the spider clung to it. Nope – the effect is immediate. Then I pondered if the hairs right alongside the eyes grew finer or disappeared altogether, preventing the water from standing off away from the body, and so I went for the same closeup while the spider was out of the water.

dry fishing spider
Uhhherrrmmm, maybe – obviously the hairs don’t stop, but they might be a bit shorter, and they do seem to lay flatter around the eyes. Still, the demarcation is so distinct that I’m inclined to believe the surface of the eyes is especially friendly to water, actually reducing the surface tension like the ‘sheeting’ treatments you can put on windshields, or the wetting agents used in film developing (I know, I’m talking gibberish now.) While getting this image, the spider lent a small amount of evidential support for this idea by quickly wiping its eyes with its dainty feminine pedipalps, exactly the behavior I was looking for when it submerged, not when it surfaced. That’ll show me.

I thought I had some images showing dewdrops actually sitting on the surface of a fishing spider’s eye, which would put the lie to the surface tension theory, but going back and looking at the one I remembered, the dew was on the cephalothorax near the eye, not on it. One of these days I’m going to have to capture a larger specimen and experiment with the misting bottle to see if this idea holds water (a ha ha) – or I could just ask someone educated. But that’s not as much fun.

While I have read that fishing spiders actually hunt aquatic critters underwater, I have never seen evidence of this myself, and it might not apply to this species. The only thing I’ve seen has been hunting while skating across the surface, but I’ve also never convinced a spider to stay in the tank while it was occupied with likely subsurface meals either, so this lack isn’t indicative of much. But since you were about to ask, here’s one from last year showing off the jesus thing while munching on a spittlebug.

floating fishing spider with two-lined spittlebug
Playing around with the light angles eventually produced good definition around the feet, showing how they bend the water surface down without breaking through, yet when the spider wants to go under, it can do so effortlessly – I’m guessing it depends on the angle of the foot. Or it could be telekinetic I guess. I’m constantly reminded by UFO proponents and the religious to keep an open mind, so let’s not rule out hyperdimensionality either…

While I was out today, I did a couple more tight portraits of arachnids. This one was found on the pampas grass the other day as I was cutting it back for the winter, and is perhaps 50% larger than the fishing spider from today.

Slender crab spider portrait
After some searching, I’m fairly certain this is a slender crab spider (Tibellus maritimus,) – I never would have placed it as a crab spider myself because, you know, I figured they would look like a crab and not a twig, but what do I know? It illustrates the difference between common and scientific names, however, because the species I typically associate with “crab spider” are from the family Thomisidae, while this one is of the family Philodromidae – they’re only distantly related. The eyes can reveal all.

And to make up for my pathetically low numbers of spider images in the past year, I add in another taken today, a bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax,) who is certainly more scared of you than you are of it, as demonstrated by the hair and the wide-open eyes. Poor little guy…

bold jumping spider portrait

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