I have a list of topics to address in posts someday, and within them is one about the difference between bullying and criticism. I was reminded of it with a recent interchange between Jerry Coyne and Deepak Chopra, and so…
Deepak Chopra is the shining god of the pseudoscience, new age, mystical reality, mushrooms-lead-to-higher-consciousness crowd, a guy who trades on his MD to try and convince anyone that he actually knows what he’s talking about, regardless of the fact that he no longer practices anything he learned while obtaining the degree. Chopra has discovered one simple mantra, and it is repeated every time he opens his mouth: there are things we don’t know, therefore magic. Seriously, this is what it boils down to every time.
Unsurprisingly, he gets called on this a lot, and he responds the same way as so many other peddlers of bullshit: they cry that they’re being bullied, or attacked, or mistreated, or disrespected, and so on. This actually deserves being examined in detail.
First and foremost, it’s a blatant attempt at emotional manipulation. We all know what bullies are – they’re the insecure assholes in school who believe tearing others down makes themselves look better in comparison, and they seek whatever angle they can find to exploit. However, the teachers in the same schools aren’t being bullies when they mark answers wrong on a test, because they have a goal with criteria, primarily that the student obtains a certain level of knowledge. One is driven by insecurity, the other by functionality.
Which brings us to the distinction of criticism. Nobody likes hearing that they’re wrong, but it’s still the most valuable information we can receive – without it, we’d never try to find out what’s right, and in many cases, we’d continue to do something stupid, or damaging, or dangerous, or even fatal. Criticism is a social activity that not only shares information, it continually raises the standards of our species as a whole. Science as a pursuit runs on criticism, or to be more specific, the careful examination of where any hypothesis or conclusion might be wrong, because that’s the only way to find out what’s right. The whole process involves others nitpicking the hell out of any new ideas, and of course, the requirement to produce plentiful evidence that whatever is being proposed is solid. That means anyone even suggesting something new to science is being fatuous if they expect not to receive critical examination, and that’s putting it mildly.
True enough, in many other cases criticism is only an opinion, e.g., movie critics, but this bears a certain level of recognition as well, because movies are put out there for public entertainment, so the public is free to express whether or not they actually were entertained. And that brings us to the ‘free speech’ and opinion angles. Very frequently, you’ll find the woo-meisters whining that they’re entitled to their opinion, and people can believe what they want, as if this means no one is allowed to criticize them. Naturally, anyone else may express their opinion that the woo-meister is a sack of runny green infant diarrhea, and people can believe that if they want, too. It’s disturbing how many people seem to feel that their right to an opinion somehow disallows anyone else’s right to disagree. Not to mention that it’s not actually a right in any legal sense, and even free speech is limited by things that can cause direct harm.
But even more along these lines, we’re rarely ever talking about something as simple as opinion. The moment that anyone seeks money for their opinion, or their books, or their specialized treatments, or their magic rocks, we’ve gone beyond opinion to selling a product, or at least an idea, and to the greater public as well. Nobody doing so has any reason to believe they should be free from scrutiny, or that there’s some right to sell whatever the hell they want without someone else examining not just the claims, but the potential for damage as well, or even simply fraud. This is another place where the manipulative angle comes into play, because the targeted quack cries about being picked on, as if they are the only one who might come to harm, while most of the time, those doing the criticizing are motivated by the public welfare. Someone selling poison can blubber all they want, but the person who points out that it’s poison is hardly being a bully. And of course, who’s performing the best public service in that case? Does free speech and free enterprise really enter into it at all here?
Often, one can even see the conspiracy card getting played, where the snake-oil salesman is the lone hero crusading against the concerted forces of large corporations, the medical establishment, or the scientific hegemony, as if that’s the only reason why someone could possibly find fault with their grandiose claims. Long a favorite of the UFO crowd, the idea of the secret cabal that’s working to suppress information somehow works with too many people, apparently already inclined to believe in such things. Martyr complexes are incredibly popular. Less so, of course, is the con man, so the motivation to throw a different spin on it is pretty strong.
Anyone may point out that not only have I failed to prove their favorite folk hero is a fraud, all I’ve done here is name-calling, and the first thing I’ll do is direct them to a post on recognizing pseudoscience. And the second thing I’ll do is remind them that it’s not up to me to prove anyone’s wild claims wrong, it’s up to the claimant to prove that they’re right. While it’s somehow imperative that a skeptic should point out the myriad ways that pseudoscience claims fail, it’s much easier to have the simple requirement that they pass instead, rather than hiding behind possibilities and mysteries and, most frequently, the blatant misuse of scientific terminology.
But, let’s turn the tables a little bit. If you confront a child about why the dog is covered with doodles in permanent marker, and the child dodges the question, changes the subject, or screams about being hated, are they heroic, much less innocent? If you ask your auto mechanic why some expensive repair is necessary, and they shoot back that you can’t prove it’s not, do they deserve your business or respect? If you give a student a failing grade because they cannot calculate dewpoint accurately, and they claim they don’t deserve it because science doesn’t know everything, should you change their grade?
Answer carefully, because nobody wants to be a bully, now…
The followup: I found one on eBay, would have been just over five bucks with shipping if I didn’t get into a stupid bidding war. The item is worth about two bucks, and six is the maximum I would pay for the damn thing (which, as I would come to find out, is less than half what Michaels wanted for it.) So while waiting for the bid close date to come along, I just made my own, from a brass pipe I had and a plastic cap. Works perfectly.
Now, let me introduce a few points. I am, among other things, a spider photographer, which means not only do I have close contact with them very frequently, I also seek them out, and look closely at any I might stumble across, and that’s nearly daily. There is not any experience of mine that I can point to as definitely a spider bite, though I am chewed up routinely by mosquitoes and other various parasites, not to mention encounters with bees, 
Anyway, I still think the frost image above could be better, and if I get out tomorrow morning early enough we’ll see if I can improve on it. I feel the same way about the picture at left, even though this was a re-shoot; I’d taken one the same time as the frost pic (well, not exactly the same time, a talent I haven’t yet mastered, but a few minutes later,) but the flower was in full sunlight and that was making the contrast too high to get the best results from. The petals were blown out to pure white in ‘normal’ exposures, and the rest became too dark when that was controlled for, so I did it again while using the softboxed flash. I’m pleased with the leaves in foreground and background – the flower really was poking up through the leaf litter – but the petals seem off. They’re not only a little too symmetrical, they’re closely matched with the green leaves behind, seeming more, I dunno, geometric than we’d expect. Maybe it’s just me. I do like the prominence of the curled petal, which is why I chose this position and angle.
This is what’s so hard about teaching composition, because countless different factors come into play for any image, and that’s just considering one style of shooting, of which everyone has their own. It’s easy to overwhelm new photographers with loads of compositional elements, and no way to define which should be used for any particular image or approach. Here, some dried pokeberries (genus Phytolacca) had produced an interesting effect with the shiny black seeds poking through the decrepit remains of the berries – somehow, the mockingbirds did not discover them this year. But, just using the posts on composition that I’ve made so far, how many different elements were actually used here?
It’s not just one image, either – I shot the same subject under a diffusing cloth to simulate light shade, in hazy conditions on another day (seen here,) and at night in completely controlled lighting. I used other portions of the plant or the lawn as backgrounds and even hung a few leaves from a wire close behind for the night shot (because the flash wasn’t going to 
In recognition (or defense) of the previous post, I’m much more used to expressing myself in this manner, letting nature take most of the credit. Anyone is free to ascribe their own words, feelings, or impressions to the images. Granted, it’s strictly visual, which might be considered lacking if someone didn’t have their own experiences with autumn, but in all other cases, our associative minds can take the visual input and conjure up the sounds, smells, and even temperatures that are cataloged right alongside.
Yet, nature has a pretty good grasp on things, and the mother who deposited these eggs was following a behavioral plan dictated by thousands of years of selection – unless, of course, something went wrong. Of 138 eggs (yes I counted them, but in the image where I could Photoshop a colored dot to hold my place,) four are visibly non-viable, and who knows how many more genetic defects might be present, or were present in the previous generation? It remains possible that the mother who laid these was a bit funny in the head. However, I’m betting that this is business as usual and these little wrigglies are well-equipped to deal with the conditions. The newborn is visible in this pic too, just right of center, so as you can imagine from that, following their progress once they leave the distinctive surrounds of the egg cluster would be next to impossible. While I might find larger caterpillars later on, there would be little chance of determining if they were these hatchlings or not, and even keeping a few in a terrarium would require finding the right food for them, which would be only a wild guess on my part. I’ll assume nature’s got a handle on it.
Crepuscular rays are the beams of light, typically from the sun, that emerge from a break in the clouds to throw a spotlight effect someplace – we can generally make them out because of the humidity and dust in the air being illuminated. My example seen here is almost the opposite, being a shadow thrown by the cloud blocking the sunlight, but essentially the same effect. Taken at sunrise, there needed to be several conditions in place to see this. The first is a high-altitude layer of clouds forming a screen across the sky. The second is the lower cumulus cloud, the puffy one in the image, which is hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters lower that the screen layer. And of course the sun had to be very low on the horizon so that its light would not only be thrown upwards against the underside of the screen layer, but also blocked by the puffy cloud.
