Harken back

Al Denelsbeck

This is a revisit of a post from a few years ago, partially because I always wanted to tackle the images better, and partially because this is the season for it. But at the same time, this post is aimed in part at the people with a fear of spiders, because it just might be a factor in getting over this phobia.

If you go outside in the early evening, just as it’s gotten fully dark, and hold a strong flashlight up as close to your eyes as you can while aiming it around the yard, you stand a pretty good chance of seeing something like this, a bright star in your lawn:

FallenStar2
This pic doesn’t even do it justice, because the color is a distinctive blue-green. If you’ve waited too long and the dew has formed, you can differentiate it because dew will go through a color shift with a slight change in position, often producing an orange reflection, while your target does not change color (but may disappear with the shift.) Keep your eyes and light on it as you get closer.

GettingCloser
Eventually, it will disappear, but not before you’re close enough to know the position where you lost sight of it. Keep going. What you’re seeing, if you’ve gotten the right subject, are the peculiar properties of spider eyes, which are remarkably reflective. But they require a very narrow angle between light source and your eye, so your flashlight (bright LED lights do this the best) needs to be as close to your eye as possible, and the headlamps that shine from your forehead work very well.

StillCloserI didn’t quite have focus nailed for this one, so I’m not showing it any larger, and typically by this distance you would have stopped seeing the reflection. The various species of wolf spiders are the easiest to find, because they tend to be very active at night and their eyes possess this characteristic the strongest that I’ve found, able to be seen from several meters away, but I’ve produced the effect from many other species as well, including black widows. It’s just the structure of their eyes. If you’re creeped out by spiders, this can be a bit sobering, as you realize how many might be found in your lawn; at the same time, it’s always been like this, and no harm came to you, right? Most spiders are actually very shy and avoid any kind of contact – I often have to be cautious in my approach for photos because many species try to hide. Wolf spiders are more mellow, and often don’t care how close you get, nor are they the least aggressive. This little exercise is actually a great way to start getting over a fear of spiders, since you can see for yourself (at whatever distance you like) how little they affect anything. Then, if by chance they run across you, you can shrug it off as easily as you might a bird flying through the yard.

TelltaleHeart
Even this close, the lighting method I used produced a faint vestige of the reflection from one eye – I think, anyway. I’ve seen this in my images numerous times before, but have never determined if it’s an artifact of my lighting angle or an actual physical trait of the spider subjects, like how snake eyes turn cloudy and bluish when they’re coming due for a molt. And yes, I’d recently mowed an overgrown lawn, so grass clippings were everywhere, but this reduced the dew and made the spiders easier to find.

Now once again, here’s why ringflashes aren’t the best lighting method for macro photography:

RingflashSurprise
You have to appreciate the expression it seemed to create, especially since there’s even a suggestion of raised eyebrows, but overall, it’s not an ideal image because of that effect. I was using the ringflash specifically to produce the eye reflection photos, though, because it’s the easiest way to get a light source as close to the lens as possible. One of these days I’ll experiment with an angled piece of glass in front of the lens, reflecting a light source perpendicular to the lens axis. The light will be able to go almost straight to the subject from the lens center, bouncing back and through the glass to the lens and shutter – look at the diagrams of a teleprompter to get the idea. I do know this will reduce contrast a bit and I’d have to be meticulous about preventing stray reflections, so it’s one of those projects that will likely wait for a serious demand.

Now, I mentioned above about conditioning oneself to get over a fear of spiders, and I can imagine the scoffing. But I offer myself as an example, because I grew up with a fear of spiders, seriously creeped out by them, and in fact there’s still a vestige of it hiding just under the surface. Over time, I got more used to arachnids, and let the rational part of my thinking processes overcome the part conditioned somewhere in my childhood – you know, where I developed emotional responses based on wildly misleading information within an impressionable, naïve mind. And yes, it helps to remind yourself that this is how it happened, rather than trying to justify a phobia. Children in certain areas of Central and South America hunt tarantulas for food, demonstrating pretty distinctly that we’re not born with a fear of spiders (or snakes, or dogs, or commitment… wait; not sure about that last bit.) It can be overcome, with less effort than you might imagine, and seeing how innocuous they are helps a lot.

Blends in nicely, doesn't it?
Blends in nicely, doesn’t it?
I have to relate another story. Orb weavers are a type of spider that often appears at night to spin a ‘wheel’ web in likely areas for insect meals, dismantling them in the morning and finding a hiding place nearby. Some of them are quite large, hairy or warty or spiky, and none-too-cuddly. But if you actually go in and watch them, you’ll find they’re usually very shy and easily spooked, running up an anchor line and hiding in a handy corner until the big scary human goes away. However, our encounters with them most often involve blundering through their webs, convincing us that they’re now crawling on us and heading for our jugulars. Sometimes the first part of that really is true, but not the latter – they’re just trying to get to safety.

While biking down a sidewalk under the trees late one summer night, I rode through a very large orb web, feeling the strands distinctly from my wrists all the way to my chin. Had I been inclined to panic I would have crashed the bike and had a long walk back with whatever injuries, but I’d overcome the phobia by this time and merely cursed, continuing to ride until I got under a streetlight. There, I brushed away the copious webbing and the occupant of the web, the diameter of a dime, who had crouched fearfully on my shoulder with no way to find safety. I wasn’t bitten, and in fact am not sure I’ve ever been bitten – even a suspected black widow bite has now been thrown into serious doubt. I’ve walked through more webs than you can imagine (my guess is over a hundred a year, from doing nature photography out in the woods,) plus I’m always poking around in ideal habitats. There’s just no reason to be afraid of spiders. Even the strongly venomous ones present far less risk than driving on a road daily, because the chances of encountering one are minuscule, and of getting bitten smaller still.

So if it’s necessary, tell your emotions that the rational mind now has control, grab the flashlight, and go see if you can spot the phenomenon, the next night that permits it. It’s really a pretty cool thing to see.

Advice on advice

Al Denelsbeck

If you came to this post by following one of the links under “composition,” I’m going to apologize up front, because this isn’t exactly about how to compose photos. Yet, it does have some relation, so stick with me for a second as I explain.

Last week was a busier one for me due to photography students (which is just fine,) but it repeatedly raised something I’ve noticed before, worth a little attention. Some of the students brought up some definitive bit of advice they’d been given earlier, in a photography class or from retail store staff or read in an article, and asked if this was correct; in two of the cases, it was in direct contradiction to something I’d just said myself. So let me get this right out in front: there is no “professional” way of doing things, and almost no advice at all that should be treated as a hard-and-fast rule.

snowswingPhotography is an art form, not in that it’s pretentious and spiritual (necessarily, anyway,) but in that it reflects the approach of the person behind the camera – it’s expression, and the rules are strictly your own. Sure, there are a few physical traits that apply to everyone, mostly in how light behaves, but that’s it really. Everything else remains just preference. Even the term “professional photographer” has no real meaning, except that someone is making the bulk of their income from taking photos – it reflects no level of education or certification, and believe it or not, no particular level of skill; I worked with one photographer who did not actually know how aperture applied to depth-of-field, despite routinely hiring himself out for weddings.

(Since you’re too polite to ask but dying to know anyway, no, I do not consider myself a professional; do with that what you will.)

All of this might be frustrating to the beginner who desires firm guidelines in learning photography, but it’s far better than believing that “every part of the frame should be filled” or “your first lens should be 35mm focal length” – I’d actually received the latter chestnut more than three decades ago from a wedding photographer, and while I may have found this more useful than a 50mm (the old standard lens before zooms took over,) I’d have been gravely misled if I’d been interested in doing portraiture. There’s no shortage of people who like to impart advice (ahem,) but this should always be regarded as opinion, not fact. Perhaps my interest in critical thinking has made me aware of things like confirmation bias and conditional results, so I’m sensitive to inappropriately definitive statements, and there are a lot of them out there.

Also note that it can be easy to misinterpret advice, sometimes from translating it mistakenly, but just as often through the adviser not explaining things adequately – something I occasionally run into myself. I personally tell people to “be aware of every part of the frame, and try to make it all work for your image,” but that’s not the same as, “every part of the frame should be filled” – sometimes, it’s the empty space that conveys the idea you’re after. Succinct advice is a nice thing to strive for, but it occasionally comes at the cost of greater understanding.

I’ve been on forums where several very successful photographers gave their critiques of submitted images, and they were all over the map; rarely was there complete agreement over the strengths of the photo or the ‘proper’ approach. I’ve seen multiple photographers tackle the same subject, displaying a wide variety of styles and techniques. It’s all opinion, so never be afraid to let your own direct you.

UnhelpfulYesterday I briefly tried out a new piece of editing software, and noticed that the ‘crop’ function handily provided real-time guidance lines for the rule of thirds. It’s this kind of jazz that gives entirely the wrong impressions, because there’s nothing mathematical about composing images, and inducing someone to meticulously hew to the guides rather than obeying their “eye” is only likely to make them more clinical and less able to use the elements within the frame to good advantage. Don’t overthink it – much of photography is about mood, subtle influences, and immediate impressions, so let the subconscious have its say.

When it comes to composition, the most I ever provide are various elements, what they do and how to use them. Any of them may provide benefit to someone’s particular style, or they may have no application at all; tastes vary. And remember that it takes no skill or education whatsoever to know what you like in an image – appreciation is accessible by everybody. What anyone learns is how to express themselves more effectively, how to provoke a desired response, and how to manage the conditions and camera traits. Only the last part is definitive; high contrast is high contrast, for instance, and you either use various methods to combat it or learn to live with it. But deciding how and when to incorporate it is all your own.

Perhaps the best advice I can offer someone about following advice is to avoid blindly accepting something, instead openly asking why? What’s the reasoning behind this, why this and not that? It stands a greater chance of providing meaning and context, and can help us to understand when not to follow the advice, or why it doesn’t apply to our own style of photography. Just never believe that anyone at all can tell you the right way to pursue photography.

Extreme HDR

Al Denelsbeck

MoonSpica
“HDR” stands for “high dynamic range,” a photo editing technique used to combat the increased contrast that all standard photo methods are prone to – see a greater explanation here. Sometimes it’s used to produce unrealistic images with light levels that really can’t exist naturally, but other times it’s an effort to present more what we see with our highly adaptable vision. This is one of the latter cases – for the moment, anyway.

Tonight, a first-quarter moon (or “half,” don’t ask me why astronomers have this thing about “quarters”) was accompanied by a very close companion, easily visible even with the humidity of the evening. The brilliant blue star Spica was overcoming the typical glare that makes it hard to see stars close to a bright moon – this is because it’s one of the brighter stars in the sky, and among the brightest along the path that the moon takes in its orbit. Out of curiosity, I checked with Stellarium to see just how close they would pass (or if I’d missed it already) and found that they would appear within the moon’s diameter of one another – if I was a few time zones further west. The moon would be well set here in North Carolina as it occurred.

That image above is a composite. Even as bright as Spica is (magnitude .9 or so,) there really isn’t any useful way of capturing the wide disparity of light between it and the moon. The exposure to capture Spica was 1/2 second; the moon’s was 1/20 second. In the world of photographic exposures, that translates to the Spica exposure being 3 1/3 stops greater than the moon’s, or about ten times the light level (it progresses exponentially, halving or doubling every stop, so increasing one stop doubles the light, two stops is four times, three is eight.) In the original image that provided the bright Spica used here, the moon was blown out into a featureless white semi-circle. As I said long ago, even getting clouds in the image requires special conditions.

What’s also difficult is finding a way to identify the features you see in moon images such as this. Partially lit moons are more interesting than full in many ways, because the lower light angles throw shadows from the terrain and enhance the geography. [Momentary side note: I paused just now to wonder if “geography” was a technically appropriate word to use for the moon, and realized that it was probably okay, while “terrain” wasn’t.] But the distinct craters visible here along the terminator (the border between light and shadow) are much harder to make out when lit directly from above, as is the case with a full moon and virtually every method of displaying the moon’s features that can be found. I was trying to determine if I’d captured the prominent crater Tycho, right on the shadow line near the bottom, and this took a lot more effort than you might have thought. The crater, by the way, isn’t Tycho; it’s close neighbor Maginus. To find this out more distinctly, I resorted to a sneaky trick that produced the following image.

Earthshine2
While, in certain conditions, it is possible to see something vaguely like this, it’s rather shamelessly a Photoshop job. The shadowed portion of the moon really does get some illumination from sunlight bouncing off of the daylight portions of the Earth, known as earthshine, but it’s nowhere near this distinct. I did, in fact, try to capture it tonight, but it took exposures so long that the ambient light from the sunlit side was scattering through the lens, like fog, and the moon was showing visible movement anyway. So this is actually a portion of a full moon image from years ago, patched into the shadow area and tweaked to look a little more realistic. It also shows that Tycho was receiving just the first contact of sunlight with its eastern rim – you can just make out the rays pointing to the dark circle in near-contact with Maginus on the border. In another few hours Tycho would be seeing sunrise, and this would take a while, too, since days on the moon are two weeks long. It’s all part of that “tidal orbit” thing which keeps the same side of the moon facing us all the time. We see the moon rise and set each night, because the Earth rotates, but the moon goes through phases because of its own orbit, which is also its rotation – one orbit every 27 days, always facing Earth. That means a day/night cycle on the moon is the same amount of time. Luckily the astronauts did not have to adapt to this schedule while there…

If you think that the editing job wasn’t perfect and the moon seems a bit oblong or football-shaped, you’re right. This is because the tidal orbit is not perfect and the face of the moon wobbles as seen from Earth, over the period of its orbit. Since the pics were taken at different phases, the moon was actually facing different directions, and matching the terminator required shifting things a bit.

The full moon image I used is actually the same one appearing here, which has another connection to all of this. That post mentions how it was believed that Tycho and the dinosaur-extincting impact here on Earth might have been caused by the same source, an asteroid called Baptistina that broke up 160 million years ago. A few months after posting that (but which I did not find myself until just tonight,) NASA nixed this theory, since their Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission determined that the remnants of the Baptistina asteroid are too young to fit the bill; the chances of it breaking up and making it from the asteroid belt to Earth/Moon orbit in that brief time are minuscule. “Brief time,” in this case, means only a few million years – stuff does not fly around the solar system the way that we might imagine. While it remains possible that both Tycho and Chicxulub have a common origin, it is probably not Baptistina. Two craters once again in search of their parents…

Just for complete confusion, I have to mention that there’s still some question about the Chicxulub impact being solely responsible for the KT extinction event. “KT” used to stand for “Cretaceous/Tertiary,” the two periods separated by the event, but is now being referred to as the “Cretaceous/Paleogene,” or K-Pg. I’ll go into all of this in another post someday, but if you can’t wait, search on those terms and throw in “Deccan Traps” too.

Just because, part 10

Al Denelsbeck

JuneInMoonArrived early to meet with a student, spent some time investigating what the park had to offer. I just happened to like this one, largely because of the focal plane capturing two separate subjects so well. And there’s something about the marvelous shape of the buds.

If someone’s not familiar with any of the species herein, they could be drastically mistaken about the scale – everything seen here is jumbo-size, in relation to what’s usually visible in North America. The beetle is roughly 30mm long; the blossom, over 150 across. Which means this whole frame spans the length of your hand…

Frustrations, part 11

Al Denelsbeck

DewNot
The dog fennel plants that provided so many photo subjects last year, visible in the wide image for my last ‘Frustrations’ post, are now taller than I am, and routinely examined for interesting subjects. This evening I noticed some suspicious dewdrops, suspicious because they were not uniform throughout the plants, and because they had more volume than dew normally does. Since I’d spent no small part of the day trying to capture a particular behavior, I started looking carefully, and soon confirmed my guess.

BreadcrumbsThe culprit is a type of leafhopper known as a sharpshooter, in this case a broad-headed sharpshooter (Oncometopia orbona.) Colorful and rather large for a leafhopper at over 10mm for an adult, they get their ‘sharpshooter’ appellation from their habit, which has been a source of frustration to me for a few years now. Like most of the Cicadoidea superfamily to which they belong, they feed on plant saps obtained through a needlelike proboscis, and process it in large volumes. That which is not needed is expelled from t’other end with the exuberance of a suddenly-diaper-free infant, leaving copious amounts of sticky/oily residue everywhere that the arc reaches. I have to admit to some jealousy, since with an extra glass of iced tea I can spell my entire name, but I’ve never been called a sharpshooter. Broad-headed or otherwise…

BroadHeadedSharpshooter
Here’s a better look, which not only gives the barest peek at the proboscis (which appears to be projecting from the chin area between the elbows,) but the habit that’s been the source of frustration to me, compounded again today – well, yesterday now, as I type this past midnight and feel some stupid reason to honor the date technicality. Visible at the hind end of my subject is a bright spot, a globule of exudate immediately prior to its launch into the air. One might get the impression that this droplet would be recognizable for a fraction of a second before release, and one would be very wrong – the action is fast enough that, in the right light conditions, the only thing seen is a momentary reflection, so brief that the sharpshooter appears to have a flashing taillight like an aircraft. Seriously, the effect is very distinctive, even when you know what you’re looking at – so much so that I just went out a few minutes ago to do a lighting test to see if the composition of the sharpshooter wee made it more reflective/refractive that normal water. Results: not that can be seen in my photos. There goes my honorary doctorate…

sharpshooter1A few years back I’d seen the same thing, only this time with a glassy-winged sharpshooter (one gets the impression that whoever was naming these was tired and not trying for originality anymore, but anyway, the scientific name is Homalodisca vitripennis.) Even in open shade without direct sunlight, the flash is plainly visible, and I spent a lot of time in the botanical garden where I’d spotted it, trying to get an image of the effect. Let’s put it this way: the effect lasts less that 1/15th of a second, probably closer to 1/100th if I’m any judge. Shutter speed is 1/200th, strobe duration less than 1/1,000th. Human response time is way too slow to trigger the shutter upon seeing the effect, so it’s all up to timing (of a semi-sporadic behavior) and dumb luck. That’s all I’m going to credit for this image, which actually caught a droplet in midair, albeit with a bit of distortion. For a while I didn’t even realize that I had, since I was skimming through a stack of images looking for the flash itself.

Today/yesterday/Monday/whatever, I figured I was on top of it enough that, when I found a collection of sharpshooters on the vine climbing the front porch, I could set up shop and capture the effect in detail. With the right angle I could actually see the wee arc, so capturing this in an image should have been within the realm of possibility (that’s called, “foreshadowing.”) Yet none of the techniques I tried worked out even remotely decently, save for one. I tried just timing, like above, to capture it by luck, and the multiple-burst strobing effect of the Metz flash, 10 blinks per second for two seconds, and using a black background, and even reducing the ambient light for a long exposure with a neutral-density filter (basically a tinted lens to prevent overexposure with slow shutter speeds.) In one frame I did actually catch a sequence of droplets, but they virtually disappear against the minimal reflected light from the backdrop I used – I really need to find a surface with as low reflectivity as possible. Maybe a piece of scrapped stealth aircraft…

The only thing that produced something noticeable, without getting up to an image to be proud of, was a 1/6 second ambient light exposure, with an LED flashlight to provide a little additional reflective quality…

weearc
… and for that, I had to boost contrast a bit because a long exposure of shadowed subjects doesn’t get any better with time. You’ll notice that, even in a mere 1/6 second, both insects produced multiple drops that traveled completely out of the frame, demonstrating the momentary nature of the effect. I finally decided I’d try to capture this at night, when no ambient light had to be compensated for and I could use only strobes; the light wouldn’t reach to the lawn in the background and the droplets should have shown very well against the darkness. This does, of course, require that the sharpshooters are actually feeding at night, so you can figure out how this failed.

I have no useful way of doing video, and believe me, this has entered my thoughts before. What’s stopped me, besides the expense, has been that much of the work I do here is with strong flash assistance, very often freehand because setting up a tripod is out of the question (I’ll go into this in greater detail in another post.) And the focus range is very, very narrow. So not only would I need a set of powerful constant-output lights, I’d need to run power cords since no batteries can handle that kind of wattage for very long. And then, what would likely result is nausea-inducing clips wandering in and out of focus as I attempted to hold tight on the subject while leaning awkwardly over the plant it’s sitting on. I reckon I have enough frustrations as it is.

Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure

Al Denelsbeck2 Comments

Despite the fact that, just this past weekend (as I type the first draft anyway,) friends of mine have made disparaging comments about debates that take place on the Intersnarl, I return once again to the fabled Fountain of Free Will, a topic sure never to die because philosophy has taught us nothing if not how to continually fail to “get it.”

This time around it’s a post on Why Evolution Is True regarding a mathematical approach to free will. Right off the bat I’m rolling my eyes, since math is entirely, and undeniably, an abstract – it is nothing but how any value relates to another, and does not “prove” anything physical in the slightest. The very best that we can expect is that, if we have a firm and unquestionable set of values for any given physical object/property, we can predict a certain result with math. The problem, as can be seen, is how rarely we have a firm and unquestionable set of values for anything physical, most especially when down at the subatomic level, things start to get very dicey (a ha ha, that was an Einstein joke, oh you can’t hope to compete.)

John Horton Conway, the mathematician with the Free Will Theorem, hasn’t established much of anything, if the interview linked from Why Evolution Is True is any indication at all (pdf download.) Conway starts from a premise that remains unsupportable, in fact forms the very basis of free will arguments, and uses this to postulate his proof. It’s philosophy at its worst.

If we make reasonable assumptions, including the assumption of free will, this one thing tells us that the little elementary particles are doing their own thing all over the universe.

And that right there demonstrates that everything relies on his ‘reasonable assumption,’ which is far from reasonable and has yet to be demonstrated in any way. He goes from here to pointing out that, since the quantum superposition of subatomic particles remains undetermined until observed (by humans possessing free will,) then particles possess free will too!

Suppose there is only a very tiny amount of free will in humans: you can press either button A or button B in a manner that is not predetermined. That is a very tiny part of what we normally consider free will for humans. And if we have that tiny amount of free will, so do the elementary particles, in a sense that a particle in response to some experiment can choose which path, C or D, that it follows. It has free action. It chooses C or D in a manner that is not a predetermined function of all the information in the past history of the universe.

Unless, of course, the very part he assumes, the free will of humans, doesn’t exist either and remains a predetermined function, whereupon his entire case only supports determinism. Feel free to look over the entire interview, because he repeatedly and unashamedly brings up that we believe we have free will, so this supports the assumption that his entire theory rests upon. Sheesh.

[Side track to explain, skip this if you already know what quantum superposition is. At the hard-to-observe subatomic level, any particle like a photon or electron is said to exist in all of its possible states until something interferes that forces a particular state – generally, this is any interaction at all outside of quietly hanging with an atom. Trying to see this in effect, however, requires interfering, so the superposition (sometimes called the probability curve) disappears and we can make a distinct measurement of property. Yes, this begs the question of how we could possibly know about superposition when trying to find it makes it go away, and I’ll explain in a later post when I’ve been able to understand it myself. The other part that Conway misses is that interference does not need to come from any living thing and usually doesn’t, so the idea that this has any connection to free will implies that free will is all of physics. I guess it’s okay if, like in religious apologetics, you change the definitions to suit your conclusion…]

Moving on, there’s a (perhaps common) misconception, one that I’ve had far-too-long discussions about before. One of the main arguments against free will is that, in a universe of deterministic physics, there is no place for will to exist or spring up; given enough information (the proper scientific term for it is, “a goddamn fuckload more than we’ll ever be able to grasp in a billion years,”) the position and reaction of any atom could be predicted, and with it, everything that relies on atoms, which is everything in the universe, including our minds and where my recently-charged camera batteries have gotten to this time. Thus, deterministic physics means that the eventual fate of everything is set and always has been.

The argument against a deterministic universe is the ‘observed’ weirdness of subatomic particles, and things like vacuum energy, quantum tunneling, and entangled particles – shit gets freaky when outside the nucleic classroom. And, to be perfectly honest, I have no argument with this. Except… there’s no actual way of determining whether something truly is random and chaotic, or if we simply haven’t puzzled out what physical laws are at work at the subatomic level. There are three major problems with the claims that things can be completely random: first, that physics corrects randomness above this level very quickly, becoming very predictable again; second, that we see no evidence of such randomness propagating upwards in a “butterfly effect” or “chain reaction,” even when supposedly, every subatomic particle is inherently unpredictable; and third, that if this were true, half-lives couldn’t actually be different (or do not demonstrate the random property they are often claimed to possess.)

[Side track to explain, skip if you already know what a half-life is: radioactive decay, or ionizing radiation, the stuff that makes nuclear power and weapons and all that, takes place in an almost unpredictable manner. For any given amount of material like plutonium, half of the atoms within will have decayed into a stable state in a given period of time – this period of time is a half-life. In the following half-life, half of the remaining has decayed, and on and on. It means any particular atom may decay within a millisecond, or not for a few million years – but in a large group, there is an average that is so dependable that we can run atomic clocks and age ancient materials and all that jazz. Yet, half-lives are different for every element, which means something is governing its behavior physically – it cannot just be random decay, because then all radioactive elements would behave the same and there would be just one half-life for them all.]

Now, with all that said, the bit that a few too many people keep missing: while deterministic physics trashes free will, it is not the lack of determinism that allows it (some have even gone so far as to believe proves it.) Randomness does not fit the description of free will any more than rigid predictability does. As I’ve said before, imagine if we performed some random action while driving down the freeway. Would we feel great about that kind of freedom? No, we’d be even less in control, (and more pissed off) than at the idea of being inherently predictable. It’s kind of startling that I’ve had to argue this with anyone, really.

So now, what does this leave us? We have Option One, which is Physics Is A Law – that doesn’t leave room for free will. We have Option Two, which is Physics Can Be Random (in whole or in part, doesn’t matter) – that’s not free will either. The only other option is Option Three, which is Our Evolved Minds Made Up Of Simple Proteins Able To Be Found Everywhere On The Planet Can Somehow Defeat Common Traits To Alter Physics As We Please – if you like, use the term “Magic” here as shorthand if you really don’t like OEMMUOSPATBFEOTPCSDCTTAPAWP. Because not only is that the only other option that could be present, it’s exactly the case that anyone arguing for the inane concept of free will is making. We are not beholden to physics, but able to transcend it to decide on a Big Mac or a Three-Piece Combo for lunch. Seriously.

But, what if it’s not us doing the magic, but a supernatural being? Nope, that’s what free will was created to counteract, to make us responsible for sin and not mere puppets in the creator’s game.

But what if it’s just an ability to put quantum indeterminacy to use? That would mean either going with the random option again, or selecting a state when it occurs (acting only when the collapsed superposition is what we desire,) in which case why would we need any quantum input at all?

But, what if it’s a special, as-yet-undiscovered property of our minds (from whatever source) that produces such an effect? The first part of the answer is, “What effect?” We can’t even demonstrate where or how it departs from common physics. The second part is, how and why should our brains, so ridiculously similar to other species on the planet, suddenly get a new property? When did it occur, why us and not goannas, are there levels of free will, and can we break this down to the subatomic level where it takes place?

Or, are we just ridiculously mistaken over a concept without a decent definition or measurable effect? Call me crazy, I’m going with the evidence that it’s just an ego trip because we evolved to desire control.

*     *     *     *

Okay, now on to part two, because that last statement begs its own question. If it’s true that we evolved a desire for control, but there really is no such thing because everything is deterministic, how would the process of natural selection produce such a trait? Wouldn’t it be pointless?

The answer is simple: there is no ‘point’ to natural selection – it is an emergent property, a basic algorithm of what works best. If it worked better for humans to possess a desire to make reasoned decisions (to a certain extent anyway,) then we got the trait, regardless of whether we actually had the ability to make decisions or not. As I’ve said before, it’s not the freedom that we really get all worked up over, but whether or not we’re happy with the process. By our nature, we’ll be happy if we believe we’re at the helm (or if we realize the decision-making process involves results that might ultimately be predictable, but only with information far beyond our grasp, so we’re still able to enjoy the experience of life itself.)

There’s a hidden kicker in here. The evidence really is against free will, in that our brains are simple matter and run on known physical properties, demonstrating nothing that’s transcendent – at least, to those unafraid of facing the facts. Yet, the debate over free will demonstrates that the desire for control, for the decision-making ability, remains a very important part of our thoughts, so much so that it often overrides what evidence tells us. This, all by itself, is an interesting avenue of both research and philosophical consideration. How necessary is it for cognitive function, how many other species have it and to what extent, how does it evolve? And even, how far astray does it lead us when we’re unaware of the bias it produces?

Going back to the physics end of it, let’s not mistake what determinism really is. It’s not that there is an ultimate goal involved, a particular end result that is intended or fated or whatever, but an artifact of the rules of matter and energy: given this set of operating parameters, stuff is only going to behave the way the parameters allow. It is the ultimate manifestation of dependability.

(You can have a lot of fun with the religious folk who proclaim a major benefit of faith is that god has it all under control, by pointing out that physics does too – moreover, in a way we can actually see. The old “plan we mortals cannot comprehend” is present too, in the bare fact that we could never grasp all of the information needed to fathom the ultimate fate of the universe, or even just tomorrow’s fate. Presumably, this would meet with no argument, but that won’t ever be the case, because it’s not the dependability or even the mystery they treasure, but the personal state of specialness that they’re assured they have.)

I feel the need to point out that I am not completely sold on determinism being accurate, precisely because of the aforementioned shenanigans of subatomic matter – it remains possible that there are truly random influences within physics, ones that largely cancel out to give us the laws we use every day, but occasionally produce something odd. Yet as I said above, the difference between “truly random” and “as-yet-unknown cause” is academic, not demonstrable in any way – so we’d never really know. Which also makes determinism an abstract idea unable to be proven without omniscience, to be honest.

But there’s also the idea that most manifestations of this randomness are within very narrow parameters. Radioactive decay is a toss-up between two states: temporarily unstable (retaining energy and particles,) and stable (having released them.) There’s nothing else; no regaining them, no changing them, no increasing or decreasing their energy – just two states. It seems a bit odd to call something so rigidly defined “random” solely on the basis of when the state changes.

And finally, it should also be noted that the concept of free will existed long before any vestige of quantum mechanics was even suspected; unlike DNA and heritability, QM didn’t serve to explain an effect we’d been observing, but has been used to try and salvage the inherent problems with the entire concept, some of which are presented by physics itself. Cute, isn’t it?

Lost in your eyes

Al Denelsbeck

LostInYourEyes
ParsleyScaleOn Saturday, I was chasing bug pics when I got an expected call to meet with friends, and snagged one frame of some amorous flies on the parsley flowers before I had to put down the camera (sacrilege I know) and head off. I couldn’t see these eyes in the viewfinder (for the reason illustrated at right,) so the surprise came much later when I unloaded the memory card.

Now, the big question: why do the eyes look like that? What function could this possibly serve? And the big answer: I DON’T KNOW. (Sorry, that was the only way I could make such a wimpy answer “big.”) No source that I’ve uncovered yet has the faintest explanation for why Orthonevra nitida should have such a pattern.

So the amateur naturalist in me starts to speculate ignorantly and wildly in lieu of contacting as many entomologists as I can find in the hopes of uncovering something reputable (that’s the kind of mood I’m in right now.) And so, three things come to mind:

  • It has a camouflage function;
  • It is a sexual display;
  • It provides some specific function to sight, unique to this species.

The first seems a bit suspect, insofar as finding any pattern like that elsewhere strikes me as unlikely, plus the idea that the eyes depart radically in appearance from the rest of the body. The second is also questionable, since this is not a sexually dimorphic species – males and females appear the same. It might, however, serve a purpose in differentiating a compatible mate from similar species, such as O. bellula and O. flukei, both of which have patterns but not this pattern. The biggest problem with this is it supposes the species diverged enough to create distinctive genetic variations that were beneficial (such as favoring plants indigenous to the different geographical areas where they had spread) but not enough to prevent intermingling of the separate species that had developed. Those are mutually exclusive.

The third option, so far, is the one showing the greatest evidence. In a paper by H.L. Leertouwer and D.G. Stavenga, it’s been demonstrated that pigmentation in the upper layers of the eyes affects what wavelengths of light are reaching the optical sensors below – in essence, color filters for portions of the compound eyes. No particular surprise, yet what this would mean is that portions of the compound eyes would have different functions – basically, vision in certain directions would be different from others. Vision straight up might be adapted to avoiding predators, while that nearer the mouthparts could be dedicated to identifying food.

Which doesn’t help much with this funky pattern. Horizontal lines, for instance, may help with horizon sensing for flight, while a radiative/starburst pattern might assist in helping an insect “zero in” on a target. About the only thing I’ve come up with, so far, is that the pattern presents numerous areas of near-equal spacing, which might provide some kind of measuring function. Compound eyes are peculiar things, essentially a collection of tubes radiating out from a common point. They have fixed lenses at the top and each tube can see only a tiny portion or the surroundings, so the optical nerves at the base of each tube give “object in precisely this direction” information to the insect’s brain. Lateral motion is easy for them to differentiate, but something moving directly towards their eyes only becomes obvious when its increasing size impinges on more of the tubes. So for a “measuring” function to be valid, it would have to be in a situation where the proximity to the subject was known, alighting on a flower head for example, and then the fly could determine which stamen or whatever was the ideal size to provide food. All of this assumes that the pigmentation really does provide a specific difference in optical transmission, which it may not. Mysteries of the ages…

Arachnids, on the other hand, have eyes with moving lenses that are much more similar to our own than compound eyes are, so the subject below was likely quite well aware of how close I was looming, but the slow advance wasn’t right to trigger her instincts to seek cover – I’ve seen the difference between hasty movements while much further away and the gradual increase in proximity I used for this image. Then again, maybe she just preferred a full-face shot or liked the ominous effect. Either way, I have to be careful when picking the spearmint…
MyMint

Odd memories, part 10: Shattered childhood

Al Denelsbeck

The year is 1970, or maybe ’71. I am in kindergarten, embarking on a field trip in New Jersey to one of the many Revolutionary War sites in the area. Like all other boys in class, I have my colonial tricorn hat made of three pieces of blue construction paper stapled together. The bus ride isn’t long, and I remember turning off at the hospital (where I had not long before had my head stitched up, but that’s another post that may explain a lot) and traveling not far down that road. It ended at the edge of the Delaware River, across from Philadelphia, and a small park there. We were visiting the former site of Fort Mercer, and the current site of the Whitall House.

The house, maintained since that time and long doing duty as a museum, had served as a hospital during the war. I vividly remember our kindergarten teacher pointing repeatedly to the bloodstains preserved under the floor varnish, getting quite frustrated with us because we had no grasp of the color blood turns over time and she hadn’t bothered to explain it to us (she really shouldn’t have been a teacher, certainly not of young children – this also may explain a lot about me.) All we saw were variations of the floor stain that bespoke the same bad shellacking job visible in the school gym…

It was the exterior of the house, however, that fostered the most indelible memory. On one blank wall of the house, embedded in the concrete, were several cannonballs, small to my cartoon-fed mind and leaving rust stains down the old surface. They had been fired by ships on the river, we were told, and had been left there ever since. Aside from the impression that they seemed too small to be of much use, perhaps fifteen centimeters (six inches) across, there was the undeniable fact that they couldn’t effectively penetrate someone’s house.

Many years later, I started wondering about my recollections – was there really a Revolutionary War site that convenient to where I grew up? Was the river as close as I recalled? None of this was too strange – my hometown featured an ancient (and of course haunted) house formerly belonging to a war surgeon, that my sister and I timidly explored, if by “explore” you mean my venturing a short ways into the front door in broad daylight, and my sister actually getting partway up the stairs until spooked by a falling wedding photo. And only a few blocks away, workers doing renovations on another old house discovered a hidden narrow stairwell running from the attic down to a basement tunnel, later discovered to be part of the Underground Railway that transported escaped slaves. Listen, folks: names that accurately describe the situation will undoubtedly help kids understand history much better. It wasn’t a goddamn train and it didn’t go underground (except, at times, like it did in this situation.) It was a network of sympathetic people who found creative ways of getting slaves to free states. But anyway, it wasn’t too farfetched to have a war site in the area, though I wondered just how accurate my memory really was.

Doing some poking around on Google Earth, I discovered it was surprisingly accurate. Despite no one else that I spoke with seeming to know the least little bit about it, the Whitall House sits right where I remembered, and it can be reached with only one turn off of the road past the hospital. Yet searching through the various images I could find online failed to turn up those cannonballs, surely a major attention-getter. I was starting to doubt my memory again when I came across a short passage, in an article relating a bit of folklore that I did not recall in the slightest:

But the story is a popular one, and in the 1930s, when, as part of a Works Progress Administration project, the building’s brick north wall was covered with stucco, about a dozen ornamental cannonballs were nailed through the stucco to commemorate the battering that the wall supposedly took during the battle.

Today [the story was published almost exactly 25 years ago], a $200,000 renovation of the building’s exterior, which includes the removal of both the stucco and the ornamental cannonballs, is nearing completion.

They… were… FAKES! No wonder every image I could find of the brick north face of the house failed to match my memory of a concrete wall! No wonder all of the webpages that detailed the house and its history failed to mention the most striking feature! (Yes, another pun, I’m going to hell, we know that already.) Worse, they belied the real story (perhaps) of the cannonball that hurtled through the wall and came to rest at the feet of Ann Whitall. This at least gave a little more credit to the guns of the time not being so damn wussy…

The funny part of all this is, I really had no intention of doing something ‘appropriate’ for Independence Day, since I get tired of seeing the efforts of everybody and their brother who feels obligated to honor every holiday that comes along. Seriously. I was spending the evening chasing down various items in Google Earth and revisited this (along with the taco place in Georgia that had a superhero out front urging new patrons inside.) When I found the blatant misrepresentation foisted on my malleable little mind I just wanted to share, and didn’t realize the coincidence until I caught the publication date of the linked article. No, I don’t expect you to believe that, but there it is anyway.

But what if it is broke?

Al Denelsbeck

I’m very fond of pushing different perspectives, because I believe it helps us to understand many things better, and changes our predefined views of our world. Some perspectives, however, are heavily ingrained, and perhaps even self-perpetuating, so introducing something ‘new’ is complicated.

With the lead-in out of the way, let’s take consciousness, and to do so, we’ll begin with the official definitions. Merriam Webster says it’s

1 a : the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
   b : the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact
   c : AWARENESS; especially : concern for some social or political cause
2 : the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought : MIND
3 : the totality of conscious states of an individual
4 : the normal state of conscious life <regained consciousness>
5 : the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes

While Wikipedia starts with

Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

…and in true Wikipedia fashion, goes on for paragraphs. What becomes clear, in both cases and all other sources as well, is that one can follow explanatory links almost indefinitely, seeking to define awareness and will and so on.

Mostly, what is being referred to here is simply sensory input – perceiving physical surroundings to some level, and this level isn’t always very distinct; we have subconscious awareness, and unconscious responses, and even the ability to drive to work and remember almost nothing of the details of the roads. Then there are states of consciousness, such as differentiating between being asleep and awake, but mostly this refers to the body ignoring various levels of sensory input – the alarm usually gets through, while the TV may not. We understand that we may ‘tune out’ certain accepted sounds, but to do so, the brain has to perceive them and filter them according to acceptability, so it is conscious of them to a significant extent, even when it does not activate any kind of response from ‘us’ by interrupting our dreams. Or such sounds may incorporate into dreams and influence our imaginations therein. The dividing line is not distinct at all, making consciousness rather hard to interpret in any given usage.

Then comes all the fun bits, such as the distinction of mind from our mushy brains, creating a duality that opens up loads of philosophical debate. This mind even persists, according to a large number of religions, after the physical body ceases functioning, and in many cases yet perceives sensory input, though for what purpose remains to be determined. There are also the special properties we supposedly possess that all other species lack, but what exactly these are is unclear as well.

In some cases, the mind is considered the sum total of our experiences, the matrix of sensory input and personal emphasis on such, a unique property. The brain is considered the storage medium or even the computer running the program, analogies that do more harm than promoting understanding. The mind is damaged by any damage to the brain, sometimes in seemingly disproportionate ways, such as the case of Phineas Gage. The mind may not function as well if the brain’s development has been hampered in some way, the same way that interfering with any other part of our body may affect our abilities – it even falters with minor changes to the chemicals supplied to the brain (such as narcotics) or serious breaks in routine (such as lack of sleep.) The differentiation of mind and brain is more a convention, a tradition if you like, than a supportable concept.

So many of these concepts were established long before we had the faintest understanding of our biology – in fact, defined, redefined, debated, and treatised for centuries without the barest clue what went on in our brains. To say that consciousness is culturally supported is extreme understatement. So it’s very hard to do a simple little thing and ignore it entirely, wipe every last vestige of its definition and implications from our minds, and see if we arrive at it by examining only what we have evidence of.

Biologically, we are organisms with external sensing functions, able to perceive our environment primarily in ways that are important to our survival. The most extraordinary development that we’re aware of is the ability to form abstracts, imagining someone’s reaction to our requests for a date or picturing how this painting will look on our walls. While it’s safe to say that we have developed this in excess of any other species, we cannot rule in the slightest on how much other species still possess this ability – it is, when you think about it, pattern recognition. This person smiles at me every time I speak to them, so I extrapolate that to mean they will be receptive to my overtures (usually incorrectly, but that could be just me.) How different is this from the chimp that uses twigs to fish for termites, or for that matter any learned behavior?

What about the function of sensory input itself? There are countless things we remain unaware of, and certain kinds of input that register far more strongly than others, such as recognizing particular voices even if they’re quieter than the babble that surrounds us. We can also miss something blindingly obvious (completely changing our perception of obvious) while we’re concentrating on a particular task – the importance of our sensory input is subjective depending on the circumstances, giving no delineation of something we could call consciousness.

Descartes’ famous quote, “I think, therefore I am,” is considered rather profound, basically an admission that the only thing we can actually be sure of is our own consciousness; instead, it’s an excellent example of philosophy carried to pointless extremes. While questioning whether some sensory input has been interpreted correctly is an integral part of critical thinking, doubting all of it obviously cannot go anywhere, and produces no beneficial effect in any way. At the same time, there are vast areas of neural function that take place with only the barest nod towards what we consider cognition, the ‘thinking’ part of the brain. We’re able to recognize this in many other species, confident that the honeybee does not think about its mortality when it stings, and the caracal does not wonder what it’s like to be a hyrax – we believe such species simply follow instinct, while we alone are sapient, willed, and above all capable of directing our lives. The problem is, we have no way of establishing this difference quantifiably, and there’s a good chance this is simply self-absorption; ego relates directly to survival, since the organism that does not place importance on itself does not compare, or compete, well against another that does. Emotionally favoring ourselves is not any different biologically from seeking sexual partners or avoiding pain.

ThinkingFrogAh, but we are aware that we’re thinking! This is the self-awareness, sentience, supercool bit! So, let’s try an exercise: what are we unaware of? Take your time. Self-awareness is the same kind of nonsense as the Weak Anthropic Principle, which says that we exist in a universe that has the conditions for our existence; we will not see a universe in which we cannot exist, and we have no awareness of how much we’re unaware. Another species observing us might find it amusing how unaware we are, such as our inability to see infra-red, or why we’re entertained by skateboards, or why we feel better about ourselves when someone else demonstrates that they’re lesser in some way (as if this was an accomplishment for us.) And as near as we can tell, all of our decisions are biased by unconscious traits, past experiences, personal preferences, and even physical condition of the body – we may not even be able to fulfill the idea of ‘rational‘ that we extoll. The abstracts that we consider part of higher cognition could be entirely imaginary, subjective constructs of an organism with certain survival demands – not a special level of awareness, but a structure to our perception that we cannot escape. For example, most reptiles likely have no concept of ‘evil’ since they have no social structure, and thus no use for it. So does this make us more aware, or just different?

The biggest failure of consciousness is that it doesn’t actually fulfill any function – it gives us nothing specific or unique, and doesn’t explain any physiological state of even abstract idea firmly. In fact, the only thing it really seems to accomplish is reinforcing the idea that we’re special as a species – with the distinct possibility that this is a common trait among living organisms. The curious thing to consider is how much worthless concepts like consciousness actually affect us negatively, by wasting our time with misdirection and functionless debates where we could instead be more aware of our development as a species. Perhaps it’s only because such things are not too deadly that we haven’t simply evolved away from them yet.

So, what happens when we discard consciousness as a concept? We’ll keep the meaning that translates as attentive, like being conscious of what someone said, and the one that means alert/awake. But get rid of anything resembling consciousness as a trait of the mind, and stuff like conscious decisions. What’s the result?

Well, first, the recognition that there is no dividing line, but a spectrum of mental activity ranging from mere reflex to formulating the phrasing within a blog post, and the underlying ideas to communicate. [Do you like how I did that? I hinted that blogging is the highest level of mental activity available. Did I do that intentionally, or prompted by egotistic influences within?] We stop thinking of our mental processes as ‘special,’ and start thinking in terms of evolved beings with lots of behavioral traits, not entirely unlike the bear that protects her cubs. Perhaps we even realize that a complete understanding of our own brains is highly improbable, because they simply don’t have the structure to fully self-comprehend, even if we’re pretty sure we’re higher on that scale than a starfish.

The mind disappears of course, and that pretty much trashes the soul as well. So transcendence and various spiritual ‘connections’ go away too (don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.) But wait! What does that say for all those mystical experiences people keep reporting that they’ve had? Is this dismissing a wealth of human experience rather capriciously? That all depends; we’re a species with a history of being dead wrong about a lot of things, from witch hunts to the geometric perfection of matter to freeing demons by drilling holes in our skulls. It’s ludicrous to think that sometime between our very recent past and now we crossed some threshold where we can no longer fool ourselves (one of those great ironies; believing we’re free from self-delusion is self-delusion – gotta love it.) But, but… if they were wrong, then there must be other ways to explain their experiences, right? (Don’t worry – I’m halting the Clint Eastwood tactics here.)

GullSunriseFLThis process is better approached from the other side, which is to view any such experience critically from the start, and try to see if it can clear the “fake/hoax/wishful thinking” bar, but either way requires the same methodology. The tests are simple, even though they might have a wide variety among them: recounting solid information not available through any other means (such as words or objects hidden someplace,) retention of all aspects of the mind/soul after brain damage, even a religious experience with a high degree of ‘accuracy’ from someone who has no interest in that religion. It seems reasonable to expect that transcendent experiences should demonstrate something not just miraculous, but with evidence on a greater scale than personal emotions, yet even the rather mundane experiences don’t hold up to examination, and often the only thing we can use for judgment is whether or not we should take someone at their word. And we must realize that having such an experience makes someone special, which is more than enough motivation to misinterpret some sensory input, much less perpetrate a hoax, so the standards to judge such things should always take this into account.

We’ll leave behind spirituality to switch to the medical aspect of it. Someone in what is called a ‘persistent vegetative state,’ or perhaps a coma they’re considered unlikely to come out of, has a level of awareness that is unknown; they may respond to certain kinds of sensory input, such as a family member’s voice, and not to others. They may display spikes of brainwave activity (measured by EEG) that correspond with normal averages, yet these are isolated and, above all, lack the kind of response that makes someone functional. So how conscious can we say they are?

Stop right there, because that’s where the stupid reliance on this concept introduces its unwarranted assumptions. There is no line to be crossed, no ‘black/white’ situation to be found. Decisions on whether or not to continue life support often revolve around the belief that the comatose person could maintain a will to live, and might in essence be a fully functioning brain trapped in an unresponsive body. Yet we already know it’s not fully functioning, but more to the point, why would brainwave activity be the crucial factor? Imagine actually having a fully-functioning brain, in a body with full external sensory input but no motive functionality – no moving around, no talking, no signaling, no responses to anything in any manner. Some people – I am not one of them – do not have to imagine this, because they’ve already experienced it in the form of sleep paralysis, where the motor functions are disabled, including even the ability to respond to adrenaline, while a certain percentage of external awareness persists (though the line between real awareness and imaginary dream scenarios, such as the approaching alien or rapist, gets blurred frequently.) There are occasional case studies of people who remained resistant to the dissociative properties of anesthetic and were aware of everything going on during surgery, in some cases fully capable of feeling pain as well, but unable to do anything about it. It’s easy to see that brain activity isn’t really beneficial in these cases, and can easily be said to be far less beneficial than none at all.

I can only confidently introduce my own perspective here, but I imagine it’s shared by a large percentage of people: my brain activity is meaningless without the external bits, and if there’s no chance that I will regain the external bits, the brain is completely and utterly useless. I could have the most astounding insight in the world, simultaneously unifying physics and explaining why hetero women always become infatuated with gay men, but it means nothing if it remains solely inside my head. And it’s safe to say that this scenario effectively denies the free will definition that so many people cling to, if that perspective illustrates the situation better. What if we are simply a brain in a jar, and we know it? We should also consider the idea of incomplete consciousness, mere moments of lucidity or fragmentary awareness, like barely waking enough to hear voices in the next room but having no context for them. Add to this the bare fact we have no way of actually telling how conscious someone is; EEGs measure microcharges in the brain, not thoughts. Not only is this simply a electrochemical artifact, it’s not even limited to neurons, as the infamous Jell-O experiment demonstrated.

The philosophical conundrum of consciousness, and the ridiculous amount of time wasted trying to find a distinctive definition for it, really has no practical application. And I’m sorry to go through all that jazz above before introducing something that should be at the very beginning, but it probably wouldn’t have had the same impact had it come first. So here’s the little rule that has served me well, one I wish more people used as a starting guideline: if we are spending any time at all trying to pin down a definition, we have absolutely no reason to be using the word or concept in the first place. Yet its frequent use in our culture, dating back a very long time, has convinced us of its importance even as the meaning vacillates wildly. Sometimes we have to consider that a long provenance doesn’t mean it still works – or, in fact, ever did.

Moon of steel

Al Denelsbeck

SupermoonHaze
Yeah, it was a non-event, even in areas that had good visibility – mass media really can’t handle astronomical events very well, but much worse is the social-media-fueled rumor mill. “Mars will be so close it will appear to be the size of Jupiter in the sky!” yeah, yeah…

Now, a curiosity. The haze is from the moon shining through scattered thin clouds, but the stepped rings in the haze are not artifacts of overcompressing the jpeg – they’re present in the original file. There’s a chance this is from storing images in-camera as jpegs rather than RAW, but if so, this is the first I’ve ever seen any such artifacts, and cannot find them in any other examples of gradient tones. Right now, I’m inclined to think they’re either a) lens artifacts from aiming at a bright subject centered in the viewfinder, or b) an actual effect of light shining through the clouds. This isn’t as odd as it might sound; rainbows are obvious ring effects from reflecting from, and refracting through, raindrops (we get an arc only because the rain stops when it hits the ground,) and several different surrounding effects can be found in the right conditions: sundogs, moonbows, circumhelial arcs, and so on. Yet, I’ve never seen or heard tell of exactly this effect.

MoonGifSmallBut while I was at it, I did a few sequences that showed the movement of the clouds, and combined these into an animated gif (pronounced “jiggawatt.”) The shots also showed the movement of the moon across the frame, as well as some tripod wiggle since I wasn’t shooting with a remote release, but I re-centered the moon in editing. Mostly, anyway – if you watch close you can see a twitch where I didn’t do the best job.

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