The significance of being significant

Al Denelsbeck

It’s not a topic that pops up too often on this blog, but I still toy with the whole UFO/alien visitation issue from time to time. It’s halfhearted anymore, because there really isn’t anything new to say about it. Despite the fantastic increases not only in our abilities to capture civilian photos and video, but our air traffic control and military capabilities as well, UFO reports remain as steadfastly vague and ephemeral as they were fifty years ago. And in fact, the majority of cases considered most compelling (of what, there seems to be little agreement) are about that age themselves.

Bad UFOs is a skeptical website run by Robert Sheaffer, who writes fairly regularly about both current and older UFO cases. He recently featured a lengthy paper by Tim Printy, who has taken a prominent report from 1957, investigated by the University of Colorado’s ‘Condon’ Report and a few independent investigators, and re-examined all of the details available in what can only be described as a meticulous manner. The results are published in his e-zine and are freely available (just to warn you, this is an 8 Mb, 40 page PDF download.)

The case involved a US Air Force RB-47 electronic surveillance aircraft that had recorded several radar traces as well as visual phenomena (what most people call “lights”) during a flight across several states. I was passingly familiar with the case, having seen synopses of it in both the Condon Report and the rebuttal to this, a report to the American Association for the Advancement of Science titled “Science in Default” from independent UFO proponent Dr. James E. McDonald – it was McDonald’s report that I’d seen first, and even though he was supposedly demonstrating the astounding evidence of this case, the distance between his own accounts of the evidence and the conclusions that he drew did not convince me that he was even remotely impartial. So it was with some surprise to hear that this case has been called among the most convincing examples of “airborne intelligence.”

Suffice to say, Printy pretty effectively demonstrates otherwise. From the fact that there was never any official report filed, through the aspect that not only were most of the details related years afterwards, the aircrew could not even agree on what the purpose of the flight was, to the overriding lack of specifics throughout (much less actual written notes,) a decent lawyer could have had this ‘astounding case’ thrown out of any criminal court in the country. Printy waded through the morass of conflicting details and did his best in making some sense of them, referring as often as possible to information that would corroborate any particular aspect, and ended up with very little that would make this case more than a curiosity. At no time did he offer any firm conclusions, but he did support every question that could be raised regarding the explanations of “intelligence” from other investigations. Long story short: not only is there the distinct possibility that what the crew related were pings of distant radar stations and completely unrelated lights (that are not even clear were in the sky,) only two aspects gave any indication of odd behavior in the slightest, and both of these are so badly documented that they have weight only if one ignores all of the other contradictions and vague measurements throughout the case.

This is what is most interesting about reviewing UFO cases, in my opinion. Proponents very frequently seize on individual details and promote these as devastating facts, without feeling any need to establish accuracy, even when the accounts from the case are wildly contradictory. Much is made of the dependability of trained military (or police, or pilot) witnesses, but when two disagree, the investigator is left with the inescapable logical conclusion that at least one is wrong, not only trashing the value of ‘trained military’ witnesses, but obligating the investigator to try and determine which (if any) was actually right. Printy makes this very clear, as he examines the conclusions of UFO proponents and finds that little confirmation was sought for specifics, nor even a caveat for reasonable doubt (which was present in abundance.) Most remarkable is the idea that this mysterious object (or perhaps more than one – this is actually not clear at all,) that supposedly chased an Air Force plane with precision maneuvers, was using a radar wavelength commonly used by ground-based stations surrounding the flight path. Also interesting is that, despite the claims that ground-based stations actually tracked an object with great precision, not only was there no additional response when the RB-47 abandoned the chase – no fighter aircraft sent up nor any attempt to obtain other radar station traces – nobody involved seemed compelled to even write the details down, much less file a report. Note that this is a military electronic countermeasures surveillance aircraft during the height of the Cold War reporting, supposedly, an unknown pursuing aircraft over heavily industrialized US airspace… and no one gave a shit? This is what serves as astounding evidence of UFO activity? But that’s the whole point, really: The crew was not actually tracking another craft of any kind, but only relating stray radar emissions (not positive contacts from their own radar, but passive signals from somewhere else) and a bright light that did not jibe with any known sources.

Now we step back a little and attempt some perspective. The crew, to all appearances, noticed several curious aspects of this flight – odd radar traces, a bright light that didn’t resemble typical sources, and the report from a ground station that some radar return was matching their own flight path about ten miles distant – and recounted these long afterwards. Indications are, from interviews and the casual aspect of their reporting process, that they did not conflate these together in any way, and were only filing details about the flight that seemed out of the ordinary, certainly not unheard of with military operations, most especially in the earlier days of radar as the various issues with the technology were being ironed out. Because some of those details could indicate something airborne, the case could be considered to fit the definition of “unidentified flying object” and was thus sent on to the Condon report. Accounts of anomalies are made in the military, and in any decently run organization, all the time.

But because “UFO” means “aliens” to the vast majority of those interested in the subject, this case began to be viewed with an eye towards the mysterious, and the details were unnecessarily run together into one phenomenon. The light seen by the pilots became the source of the mysterious radar signals, even though they were not in the same direction at any point in time and did not occur at the same times. And of course, when reported in popular UFO media, even more conclusions are drawn than were ever present in the reports, and this is easy to see for oneself. Simply search for “RB-47 UFO” and look at the myriad ways the event is described.

Printy was fairly circumspect in his paper, too, when addressing the descriptions given by UFO proponent Brad Sparks, considering them “hyperbole” rather than what I consider a far more appropriate term, “credulous bullshit.” Sparks’ claims of “scientific evidence” would perhaps have been more justified if he understood just what the phrase meant, but even more convincing if he had better indicated of what. “Airborne intelligence” is a rather vague term to have established “proof” of, especially if we haven’t defined what “intelligence” is. We have countless forms of airborne intelligence around us all of the time – we call them, “pilots,” and perhaps even, “birds.” Even if one has established a high likelihood of it being an aircraft (this was not even remotely close to being proven,) it is rational to ask what manner of aircraft: Civilian? Military? Rooskies? Jet? Propeller? Hot air? Large? Small? Maneuverable? Clumsy? Noisy? Quiet? Seriously, just what the fuck have you actually found?

And therein lies the problem: all we have is a few radar traces and a light (or perhaps more than one), and it is only through wild guesses that these are considered related, much less “intelligent.” Proponents would certainly like to bring up the contradictory accounts of a radar signal traveling “up-scope,” meaning moving faster than the aircraft rather than passing behind as a fixed station’s signal would have, but this is based on a single comment from interviews long after the fact. I want to point out that no source of S-band radar was in use on aircraft at the time, so a military jet being overtaken by an unknown aircraft actively pinging them almost certainly would have been of remarkable interest to the operator, worthy of more than a passing comment and the subsequent ignoring of the signal.

Also noteworthy is that, in the 54 years since this occurred, not a damn thing has come of it all. This account did not establish a pattern, nor reveal anything in particular. No one since has reported anything similar (much less better evidence of aliens or even “intelligence.”) Proponents may want to seize onto the missing recordings from the flight, according to the account of the pilot. But one must reasonably ask, if the government wanted to cover something up by disappearing the recordings, why did they not plug the biggest leak of all, the six crewmembers who have been interviewed multiple times by civilians over the years?

I suspect that Printy’s exhaustive efforts, if they receive much notice at all, will garner more derision than acclaim, which would be a shame. UFO proponents are notoriously bad about enjoining people to “look at the evidence” but, it appears, only if it supports their own conclusions. Decent investigators are few and far between, largely because too few people will actually pay for a comprehensive investigation that may reveal no aliens at all, but errors in perception instead. Like ghosts and religious miracles, the money lies in credulity, not accuracy. This is largely the reason why I examine the motivations behind belief in the first place.

As with any report of mysterious phenomena, the constant repetition of the same credulous accounts, with details conflated, exaggerated, or even just created from thin air, creates an atmosphere of significance – “why do I keep hearing about these?” But we keep hearing about these because too many people want to believe in aliens (and government conspiracies, and all of the related hoohah,) and this desire affects not only how they view the details of the case, but how they relate them as well. Virtually no one hears the raw data from the source; they hear the accounts from proponents, who have reasons to make them sound significant, whether these reasons be financial, emotional, egotistical, or even malicious. But significance should be determined by how such info can affect us, like with knowledge of alien behavior or advanced technology, not by whether someone merely wants to call it significant.

I used to spend no small amount of time in forums for UFOs and paranormal encounters, and most striking was how often critical examination was greeted with outright hostility. Mind you, I’m not talking about responding to derisive comments from nonbelievers; these did occur, but far less often than was claimed. Instead, what I mean is exactly what Printy has done here: examine the related details with an eye towards accuracy and potential explanations. It was abundantly clear that calling anything into doubt engendered defensiveness, regardless of how unwarranted it might actually be. When a prominent UFO ‘investigator’ was totally punked by a simple photo of an optical mouse, it wasn’t the investigator’s completely bogus interpretation of the photo as a “True UFO” that earned the derision, but the hoaxer’s efforts in revealing the investigator as a bullshit artist. In all seriousness, too many of the forum responses defended the investigator because the hoaxer lied to him. Because, you know, all UFO reports involve people speaking in good faith. It stands to reason that this would make the investigator completely superfluous, of course…

The important question for any individual is, “Do you want trustworthy conclusions, or mere emotional supplication regardless of its accuracy?” I suspect too few people actually ask themselves any such thing, or simply believe that what they seek is trustworthy. Yet, as we recognize that UFO investigations over the decades have resulted in no useful information in the slightest, one must reasonably ask, “What is trustworthy about them?” If every last UFO report simply disappeared from history, in what way would our lives right now be different (aside from, you know, a few hundred sketchy publishers having to sell romance novels instead)?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m actually in favor of investigating anything anomalous, and in doing so with vigor. But such investigations should be done without foregone conclusions or unnecessary correlation and conflation. The RB-47 case remains yet “unexplained,” which says nothing more than “unexplained” – this does not open the door for aliens, government conspiracies, secret technology, time travel, witchcraft, or anything else anyone can imagine. In fact, this actually means that its usefulness is nonexistent. Our bar should remain higher than that.

But it’s not Snow White

Al Denelsbeck

It’s not particularly hard to find news stories where the excesses of religious belief have led to something objectionable, damaging, and even fatal. Actually, this can be done almost daily, and quite often doesn’t even have to extend outside of our own country – this is what the New/Gnu/Nv/Nouveaux Atheists refer to when pointing out why religion really isn’t a good thing. As evidence, it’s really hard to argue against, since just about the only other facet of societal ill that shows as prevalently is handgun deaths. Whenever this is pointed out, however, the invariable response is that such examples are “not my religion!”

Such distinctions escape me. I have repeatedly asked (never receiving an answer) in what way someone’s own religion differs from the particular splinter sect named in the news. Now, in all fairness, it’s important not to over-generalize, lumping things into broad categories specifically to avoid the distinctions that make significant differences, something that people are far too prone to doing in the first place. Yet, it’s not enough to draw a line in an arbitrary location and say, “but this happened on that side of the line.” Such a thing can be done ad nauseum, as Zeno demonstrated pointlessly, but does this actually address the cause in the first place?

If we ask, “Why did the haredim abuse little girls?“, the answer is, “Because their books told them that this was right.” If we then ask, “What makes them think their book is right?”, we receive a lot of vague answers about personal revelation, tautological referrals back to the book itself, or demands to respect a belief system. The kicker is, we can apply this to any religion named throughout the world, making distinctions among faiths, sects, and facets rather pointless, wouldn’t you think?

Lest anyone goes off on me for broadening the field unnecessarily, I’m going to point out that one of the most frequent arguments I hear in favor of religion is, “So many millions of people around the world can’t be wrong.” It seems that broadening the field is just ducky when it’s used in favor of one’s own practices, and that the distinctions between religious sects aren’t significant enough to warrant a more accurate count when it comes to supporting numbers.

Before I continue, I also want to highlight another interesting aspect of belief. I have yet to come across any particular religion not supported by claims of personal revelation, miracles, and the authenticity of their holy book and artifacts; however, the only ones that seem to count for religious folk are those that support their own religion. All others are roundly ignored – because they’re false idols? Because everyone else in the world is now delusional? Again, I’ve asked, but somehow this question falls on deaf ears. Of special note is the whole ‘respect’ angle, where religious folk decry how their beliefs are not being respected, beliefs that almost invariably involve not respecting others in one way or another. It’s very hard to see this as anything other than egocentric special rules, and frankly I’ve given up on trying – I realized that, in considering such arguments for more than a second, I was pursuing a concept of ‘fairness’ that actually involved being grossly unfair to everyone else who fell outside the argument. Religion, with too few exceptions to bother bending over backwards to highlight, involves little more than selfishness to an astounding degree. Even those who ‘selflessly’ limit themselves to “spreading the good word” do so from the standpoint that they’re doing something good, without in any way establishing support for this belief in their own special position.

Returning more to the original point, we can attempt to see excessive behavior (of any kind) in terms not of arbitrary distinctions, but of measurable ones. When it comes to abuse, what comes up with significant frequency is the underlying idea that the abuser holds a higher position than the abused; a privilege, as it were. [The alternate motivation of abuse is that the abuser feels threatened by the abused, which bears its own separate examination.] While our competitive minds latch onto anything supporting privilege far too easily, it results in little more than petty bullying until there is a greater cultural emphasis on such privileges – in other words, until there is more support from greater numbers of people, reinforcing the idea that this must be ‘right.’ As numerous examples throughout history demonstrate inarguably, rational support of such ideas isn’t really necessary; more often, some weak justification is accepted quickly on the sole basis that it serves to support the emotional concept of privilege.

Now, we turn to considering what happens when a few factors are established in a culture, such as:
a) considering personal revelations and older texts as reasonable ‘evidence’;
b) respect for belief systems and spirituality;
c) the idea of a greater authority that lacks demonstrable evidence or value.

What this establishes is a situation ripe for abuse, since little more is needed to generate a sense of ‘privilege’ than calling it a religion. The values that are claimed for religion are immeasurable, and subjectivity rules. Objective values to distinguish one from another are specifically avoided.

Worse, a special situation is created, where actually asking for something measurable, some distinctive benefit (much less reason for privilege in the first place,) is frowned upon, sometimes to the point of crying “persecution!” The very concept of value, that not only our society, but our whole social structure is based upon, gets discarded in lieu of some ‘diplomatic immunity’ called religion. A frequent defense of supernatural authority is, astoundingly, that we can’t prove it doesn’t exist. We also get to see, with alarming frequency, the abuse of others not on the basis of strengthening a community or even ‘saving’ people, but as demonstrations only of personal piety.

Thus, when someone tries to claim, “It’s not my religion!”, I have no issues with saying, “Yes, it is. The very rules that you depend on are the ones that provide for abuse, and your own belief structure enables every other.” Like the post title implies, does anyone really need to differentiate one fairy tale from another to make the argument that following fairy tales isn’t really beneficial to us?

The inevitable response to this accusation, naturally, is that some good comes from religion. I could be nasty and ask how one could tell it isn’t some good coming despite religion, but that’s not even necessary. It’s much simpler than that: if you’ve got some good bits, then you actually know how to find them. Perfect – you have a working brain! Keep the good bits, and get rid of the bad ones. If there are important distinctions to be made, I would certainly think that one qualifies above all others.

Most especially, while privilege is a nice thing to have, perhaps it should actually come from hard work and the efforts to improve society as a whole, rather than self-indulgence. You know, status granted by others, not by professing a personal belief system. Just a thought.

Two seminars coming up!

Al Denelsbeck

Just thought you should know that I’m offering two new seminars in March 2012, in partnership with North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill, NC. Since I know you’ve been dying to meet me in person, this is the best opportunity to do so since my handlers will be absent…

The first is Saturday March 10, from 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM, called Nature Photography: Within Your Grasp. I like the timing of this one, since it falls right at the start of National Wildlife Week. Aimed at all ages and skill levels, this seminar is about approaches, goals, and what to expect from nature and wildlife photography. No, two hours isn’t going to gain you mastery, but it does serve to give the right perspective, plus you have the chance to pick my brain if you like. Indoors, no materials necessary, but I’ll send you home with some handouts and reference materials.

The next is Saturday March 24, from 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM, called Spring Garden Photography Workshop. This one starts off in the classroom, providing tips on approaches, lighting, framing, making the most of conditions, and working with small subjects. Then we move out into the garden itself to try out our techniques, and I’ll be available for questions and guidance. I do a lot of shooting at NCBG (like the image at left,) and it’s full of opportunities, so this should be a productive seminar.

Both of these are held at North Carolina Botanical Gardens and registration is handled through them – click here for details (on the sidebar.) They are not appearing on the website yet, but I have been told they’re coming out with the next newsletter – in the meantime, you can refer to their PDF linked here (I’m on the second page, third column.) They also have a lot of other offerings, so be sure to check out everything for more interesting things to do. It’s a highly recommended stop when in Chapel Hill. You can also click on the ‘North Carolina Botanical Gardens’ tag below for more posts regarding the garden.

Just in case you’re in the Triangle area of NC and haven’t noticed this, I offer individual photo instruction as well.

Hope to see you there! And there’s more in the works, so watch for further updates as they get pinned down!

I guess I can cope

Al Denelsbeck

Taken just minutes ago. Yes, there are actually flowers in the yard on January 7th, and right now it’s pretty damn nice out there. Granted, these are teeny tiny little things that you can barely see when standing upright, and probably a more cold-weather variety than daffodils (I think I’ve said before, I don’t know my plants worth crap,) but still, it’s nice to see something besides brown grass and empty trees.

I’m not a cold weather kind of person, and this time of year I tend to get pretty grumpy, not helped at all by a lack of anything decent to pursue photographically. The winter storms are usually few and far between here in NC, and that style of photo subject lends itself better to more dramatic landscapes than farmland. Situated between the mountains and the beach might mean you’re convenient to both, but not able to reach either when the roads get treacherous. We have yet to see any snow here anyway, which I’m really not going to complain about myself – I just felt obligated to head off those that might want to champion winter photography. I’ll leave that genre to crazy people, and darkly mutter out the wait until spring myself.

But how? Part five: Life!

Al Denelsbeck

Walkabout podcast – But how? Part 5

Having taken a break longer than I should’ve, we now return to the “But how?” series of posts that examine how things might work if we stop using religion as a default explanation. Our topic for this evening is “life.”

It is admittedly hard to believe that such a thing could come about on its own, dictated only by the simple processes of physics – until, at least, one examines it closely. In fact, even defining it is actually a tricky thing to do. Like many of our concepts that we established in the days before scientific accuracy (‘species’ is another,) life has become less obvious and more difficult to pin down as we attempt to define it unambiguously. In essence, it is a cycle of chemical and energy interactions in a collection of molecules that can replicate itself. We have to be careful, though, because we don’t want to consider ‘fire’ alive, and there still remains arguments as to whether viruses should count. Being mere strands of DNA, they do not replicate without a host cell, but given an appropriate host they both thrive and evolve.

As an exercise, let’s compare life to other properties around us, maybe something as simple and unassuming as rocks. While they don’t reproduce, they do change, quite significantly actually, and last a hell of a lot longer than any life while doing so. Able to travel down into the molten depths of the planet and back up again, simple minerals change their nature constantly, if slowly, and range from basic organic residues that we generally call ‘soil’ to gemstones and radioactive elements. The ratios of these within the crust of the planet actually allow life to exist in the first place, providing the necessary support for vegetation, a convenient and key part of the whole food chain. There’s also the interesting processes where minerals exchange places over a long period of time, producing remarkable casts of once-living creatures (in the right conditions) that we can examine as fossils, millions of years after they stopped moving about on their own.

And if you want remarkable chemical and energy interactions, it’s hard to hold a candle to the stars (sorry,) which use just four basic forces to not only concentrate energy into a form that even permits life in the first place, but creates the special elements that are ripe for energy exchange itself, through the fusion within their cores. Life just has atoms and molecules trading energy, all of which it has to get from stars; stars have atoms rearranging their structure to create entirely different elements. This process also takes a lot of time, not only to produce such elements, but to shed them when the star ends its own ‘life’ cycle and blows them away into the depths of space. Everything that we generally consider life lasts such a brief fraction of time compared to stellar processes, or even geologic ones, that it seems nothing more than a flicker.

Was there perhaps some magical moment that started it all, with the first living cell billions of years ago? And more often asked (usually without wanting to hear an answer,) is this an event that defies scientific explanation? That really depends on what is considered “defying.” At present, how this actually occurred isn’t known – yes, it has been admitted. Yet, this doesn’t mean that we have no clue, or that the process is so mysterious that it seems magical. We have evidence that amino acids, the heart of DNA, can spontaneously form in conditions similar to what early Earth must have been like, and we can see simple mechanisms to form cellular bodies; the few missing parts, such as whether proteins or DNA came first, are still being pursued experimentally. These are not considered farfetched occurrences in the slightest, but even if someone really wants to insist this is where the magic occurred, they’re parlor tricks, not exactly awe-inspiring events. We have a stack of known, or in some cases just highly plausible, chemical binding processes that explain reproductive cells, with some individual steps in the middle where our knowledge is sketchy; making some claim that ‘this little step’ is where god must’ve jumped in can only be considered grasping at straws. Bearing in mind how far in our past all of this occurred (supported by multiple lines of evidence,) it should be more amazing that we have as much information as we do.

Do we instead find animation and direction to be marvelous, the ability to function in broad ranges and exercise ‘free will’? Aside from the silliness of free will as a concept, animation isn’t something particularly unique or compelling. Plants are animated, as anyone who has battled kudzu and crabgrass can tell you, and viruses aren’t animated at all, but reproduce like crazy across entire continents by riding on coattails. Our weather systems produce motion that makes human beings look feeble, the oceans never stop moving, and as mentioned, even the planet’s crust gets around a bit. All of these come back to the simple exchanges of energy explained in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

So, perhaps it isn’t life itself that we find so magical, but the concept usually called a soul. Though this is tricky too, since we have special rules for souls; in most cases, they have to be bestowed by a creator, and may be imbued with pre-existing qualities (like original sin.) Or they may be recycled among a populace, like in hinduism. The soul is the special part of life, motivating and distinguishing us as individuals; it can be molded, so it seems, only by our actions, yet most religions have proscriptions against taking life, even when this shouldn’t affect the key bit that merely departs the mortal vessel upon death. And of course, we have no good definition of soul in the first place, and certainly cannot show its existence. Perhaps the best support for the idea is that, while we replicate our bodies by reproducing, every person starts with a clean slate, bearing nothing that their parents learned despite how inordinately useful this might be. We’ll go into this a little further on.

The soul also seems to be regarded as the seat of emotions, as I mentioned earlier, and carries our personality out of (and sometimes into) the living shell of the physical body. Yet it also carries our memories and experiences, a curious attribute since during the period of its occupation within a body, memories and personalities can be altered or outright destroyed by mere physical damage to the brain, often by something so trivial as alcohol. This leads to the idea that the soul is controlled and beholden to the physical structure, rather than the other way around. And since virtually all emotions revolve around survival as mortals, we have little use for the soul to retain these after departing the living vessel. There are more than a few problems with the concept overall.

So not the soul, but perhaps the particular nature of human minds themselves? We actually have multiple levels of mental awareness; there’s consciousness, and sentience, and sapience, allowing us to consider bacteria as not worth very much because it has none of these, even though it does have life. And in fact, sapience is what allows us to lord it over the other animals, since we generally consider humans as the only species that has it. Except that, in terms of cognitive ability, it’s a really hard thing to pin down, and those that study animal behavior keep finding aspects of thought in other species that we used to believe only we possessed. It also bears considering that many of our older ideas were born from human conceit, especially when, not all that long ago as our species goes, we used to think the ‘savages’ from continents other than Europe failed to possess such traits.

Perspective may be important here. While we might think whales don’t possess higher cognitive abilities because they can’t use cell phones, whales may just have their own standards of intelligence, and find humans don’t count because we spend too much time killing one another, or mucking with the ecological balance. We’re pretty impressed with our own brains, but when one considers how much of our time is devoted to thinking about celebrities or getting emotional over sports, we have to face the fact that a lot of mental activity is spent trivially, and the vaunted properties of our wondrous intellect starts to unravel. The function of higher cognition certainly seems pretty useful at times, allowing us to piece out what stars are made of for instance, but much more mental effort is engaged in actually dodging such activities in favor of emotional supplication, making it hard for us to feel superior. Not one other species on the planet, to our knowledge, has ever tortured or killed large numbers of the same species to consolidate a power structure through fear, yet we do it all the time.

Lots of things on this planet have life, including rabbits, trees, slime molds, and bacteria, so considering it something special requires accepting that the planet is crawling with it. Yet despite the abundance, the effect can barely be seen even from a short distance into space, and at best, examining the Earth with a powerful telescope on Mars would only reveal a curious color to find (green) to give any indication of life in the first place. While the billions of us here on the planet have the ability to use vast amounts of resources important to us, such as petroleum and vegetation, the chances of this affecting the planet itself, much less any other part of the solar system (a tiny speck in comparison to the rest of the galaxy, much less universe,) is infinitesimal. What we affect is only life itself, including our own, but the processes that the planet goes through will continue long after we are gone, and will probably wipe away every trace of our lives in relatively short order. We can wonder whether we might find indications of life on Mars precisely because it’s so minor that it may only leave faint vestiges behind.

The energy exchanges among the elements within our bodies take place only in certain conditions of temperature, where water can be a liquid. While this seems very specific, in fact all elements undergo phase changes at different temperatures and pressures – more of them take place at extremely high temperatures, actually. That’s the nature of energy. Life is a curious thing to get fired up over, since it is strictly a brief affair, and once ended, almost none of the involved elements have changed in any way. Like ripples on a pond, a pattern of behavior and reaction may form briefly, but the water remains the same.

Even when recognizing all of this, there are very good reasons why we find life pretty cool, if not extremely important. We look at the behaviors that other species engage in and call them ‘survival traits,’ but this is misleading. The urge to see life as important (or to fear death if you prefer,) as well as the function to reproduce, are both very likely what we call emergent properties. Countless species in the early history of life on Earth may have had no such things; those that developed these had a specific advantage over those that did not, and it’s easy to see that both avoiding death and passing along the genes are key steps in maintaining an advantage, and would likely crowd out other life forms that lacked them. Upon reflection, the point where the ‘magic’ happened isn’t the beginning of energy exchange within a group of cells, but the point where such a collection of cells could replicate their properties, starting a lineage of traits. Which might have been there from the start, because of the incorporation of DNA into the cellular structure.

Believe it or not, the trend of seeing life as amazing may simply be because, ingrained deep within our systems, cherishing life is the best way to avoid death – the stronger this urge, the faster we run from predators. If we have a hard time defining what is so special about life, and why we humans hold a unique place among all other animals, the inquisitive must consider that the properties of life itself didn’t instill such feelings. When we think about it, self-preservation is by nature conceited. Many of our other traits are exactly the same way, and duplicated to various extents in other species as well. Our social instincts, sex drive, sense of fairness, reactions to threat, attractions to certain foods, and many many more, are all subconscious and evolved functions that provided benefit and thus were favored by natural selection.

But because of the method of reproduction, what we pass on to our offspring is the instruction sheet for building a human, which remains the same throughout our lives (with perhaps some very small exceptions, as has recently been discovered.) Nothing that we do throughout our lives alters the DNA that we were born with, so our offspring benefit only insofar that we actually reproduce at all, and did not die beforehand or fail to find a mate. We do not pass on what we have learned or what happens to us, only some basic properties – the structure of the brain, but not its contents. So each individual builds their own matrix of experience, their own memories and impressions, allowing us to think that we’re unique while at the very same time recognizing the similarities fostered by those duplicated instructions. We may find one hair color more attractive than another, for instance, but have the same desire to seek physical attractiveness in a mate.

In a worldview that believed in a higher purpose, the reduction of life to traits derived from natural selection may seem depressing or pointless. Except, what was that higher purpose supposed to be? In most cases, it’s to enact a plan that we’re not privy to, and thus we’re relegated to following simple instructions anyway, such as the ten commandments or some such. Or one may consider getting into heaven to be the goal, where we experience a life devoid of conflict and pain – somehow, this is not supposed to be boring or pointless itself, perhaps because too few people actually think about what life is like in the first place. To get to this paradise, we are required to be good to one another, which amazingly enough works just dandy in the evolved life form as well. I’ll leave pondering the “chicken or egg” argument as an exercise…

But can we live a fulfilled life without the grander purpose in the universe, motivated only by the good feelings we get when we provoke the proper stimuli? When it comes down to it, that’s all that we’ve ever done. We get good feelings from lots of simple functions, everything from helping someone else in need to solving a puzzle, from racing down a hill on a sled to eating a damn good pizza – our pleasures and fears are immediate and self-centered, not transcendent. Yet we still want an overriding goal, which is fine, really, but we already have one ready-built into the living system: to help the species survive and thrive. Is this really such a bad purpose?

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a much better one than any religion offers, since it doesn’t involve drawing the lines between groups of people, such as ‘sinners’ and ‘saved,’ that turn life into a competition within our own species. It reduces the conflicts by taking away arbitrary distinctions. It changes our focus from selfishness to community. And it makes us abundantly aware that life is fragile and brief, and should not be spent in pursuit of what comes after, but what we have now. It even emphasizes our position within the ecosystem of the planet, and helps us realize that, in order to achieve our goal, we have to have much greater foresight than our own individual deaths.

The answer to the question, “To what end?” then becomes very simple: “To no end!”

That’s what it’s about

Al Denelsbeck


Whatever holiday you celebrate in defiance of self-important nitwits, there is always one thing to remember: make the cats happy. However, I’m not going to participate in the whole “Caturday” or phonetic spelling nonsense, as my gift to you.

Two of the aforementioned kittens ended up staying with us, despite intentions to find them all homes, and while this still may not be a permanent situation, that didn’t mean we could neglect them come christmastime. One of them is named “Kaylee,” for a couple of reasons. She is a calitabby-point Siamese (or Snowshoe) mix, and in the beginning we simply referred to her as “Cali” to differentiate her from the others. Later on as her adult coat came in, she developed numerous random blotches of pale brown in her coat, making her look as if she’d been wrestling in the garage, so the name morphed to “Kaylee” since we’re Firefly fans here. If you don’t get it, just begone with you.

Anyway, a few days back at a thrift store we spied the pile of stuffed animals and wondered if the girls would like something like that for christmas, and since 69 cents wasn’t a serious risk, we went ahead and got a choice one for them and presented it this morning. After some curious hesitation, Kaylee realized what such things are best used for. No, that’s not an adorable hug at top; she’s kicking the ever-loving shit out of the toy, which was just what we intended. Kaylee does kind of lose her mind when the playful mood kicks in…

What we didn’t foresee was her turning jaguar and carrying the toy around the house like it was fresh kill, at times running selfishly down the hall with it to protect her food from opportunistic scavengers. Because of the size of it, this usually required straddling, lending her gait a hilarious waddle. The other kitten, unoriginally named “Little Girl” until we find something better, showed distinct interest in the toy too, but soon got outclassed by Kaylee’s vicious enthusiasm. They still have plenty of other things to share, as well as treating one another as stuffed animals most evenings. And whenever that fails, the tables (that they seem to keep forgetting they’re not allowed upon) serve as handy sources of pens and fiddly bits.

One of my presents to The Girlfriend was a (personally) hand-carved manatee with calf, which I wanted some pics of. While I was setting the lighting levels to get the best detail, Little Girl decided it was time for attention, and when I wouldn’t pet her she hopped onto the table to see just what was demanding all of my attention. She thus provides a little scale to the piece.

By the way, this (and another figure) were my first attempts at working with soapstone, and my third at carving anything. I’m kind of a stickler for accuracy, so the end results aren’t exactly to my liking since the proportions are a bit off, making the figures a bit… ‘stylized,’ I guess you could say. The Girlfriend’s happy with them, so I’m cool with it, but like just about any project I tackle (or any image I’ve shot,) I can find ways to improve them, and will be aiming for that in subsequent pieces. The positive side of being critical of your own work is that you’re always seeking to improve, which can never hurt, but the negative side is that you can be pretty hard on yourself too. Though it’s still not art.

Anyway, here’s to hoping your own celebrations are entertaining, and that you’re remembering that “mellow” is a pretty good thing to aim for too. Cheers!

Too cool, part 12: Won’t fit in the bag

Al Denelsbeck

LRG 3-757
Courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, I present one of the most interesting examples of unintuitive physics: the curvature of spacetime to produce a gravitational lens. The ring that you see here is not the shock wave from a supernova affecting the surrounding gases, as I first thought, but actually a blue galaxy far beyond the yellow one in the center, whose image has been distorted into a surrounding ring because of the dense gravity of the central galaxy.

Here’s how it works. A normal lens, as almost anyone can tell you, “bends light,” but what this actually means is not as well understood, and often poorly illustrated. Let’s say you have a star, which only looks like a point of light from our distance (I added the twinkle for artistic statement.) It’s emitting light in all directions, so we can take a few paces to the left and still see it, or across the continent, or (should we be able to travel that far) all the way on the other side of it. The light from it is actually a spreading globe of photons, and we see just the one stream that meets our eyes (yes, that’s an eye in the upper part of the illustration.) A lens, however, catches all of the streams that meet its surface, essentially a cone, and bends the light to make all of these streams converge back down into the ‘dot’ of the star – provided that you’re the right distance for that particular lens, called the focal length.

Gravity can be strong enough to bend light. This is not entirely true, since what it does is curve spacetime, which is what the light travels through – you can draw a straight line on a piece of paper and then curl the paper, curving the line. Close enough. With very large galaxies, or more often a whole cluster of tightly-packed galaxies, the gravity can be dense enough that the light from a distant star or another galaxy, out of our sight behind the first, is bent away from its original path that would normally have not even come near us, going instead to Proxima Centauri or someplace. If the alignment is just right, we can see multiple distant objects in several mirror positions around the lensing galaxy, as the light path is bent according to the strength of the gravity at certain points around the lensing galaxy. Placed exactly right, and with fairly high uniformity in gravity around the galaxy, and the distant hidden subject gets distorted into a surrounding ring, which is what we see here with yellow galaxy LRG 3-757. It obscures our direct line of sight to the distant blue galaxy, but we get a nearly spherical path from around the edges, as it were.

What’s interesting about gravitational lensing is, if we were along the line of one of those original paths from the distant star or galaxy, continuing an imaginary path unbent past the gravitational lens (see point A in the illustration,) we would have a perfectly clear line of sight to the distant subject and never see it, since the light was redirected. And in fact, we can only speculate how often this actually happens, since we have no way of knowing. Gravity distorts the path of all light, but usually in such small increments that it doesn’t matter much.

When Einstein proposed General Relativity, which indicated that gravity wasn’t an attractive property but rather an effect of spacetime itself, we didn’t have the ability to test it out in any way, but plenty of astrophysicists hashed out the details looking for errors or implications. One Fritz Zwicky extrapolated it to mean that areas of very high gravity, such as close-packed galaxy clusters, could bend the light paths from more distant objects. It’s simply fascinating to see theories of such a bizarre nature be proven with remarkable images such as this. Another curious implication of General Relativity is the collapsed neutron star usually called a black hole, which would also lens light that passed a certain distance away, but completely capture light that passed too close. We should be able to see lensing from such as well, except that, to our knowledge, black holes have only occurred in the centers of galaxies, and might even be necessary for galaxy formation. Thus it is entirely possible that the lensing galaxy you see in this image is home to a black hole deep in the center, but we do not see a ‘hole’ because it is surrounded by stars well outside of its event horizon, the imaginary sphere around it where light cannot escape. There is even a very very faint chance that some of the light in that central smudge is from stars on the opposite side of a central black hole, bent towards us by the gravity.

As lenses go, by the way, LRG 3-757 is a whopper. About 4.6 billion light years away at the time the light left, it’s one hell of a focal length. It’s also a tad heavy to carry around, as you might imagine, so not really useful to look at anything else. And as seen, its field curvature is kind of egregious.

Here’s another cool thing. The universe is expanding, and the light reaching us now is from objects that have long since left those positions. The distances between LRG 3-757 and the warped galaxy forming the ring are changing, and this curious optical affect will vanish after a while – probably well outside of our lifetimes. At the same time, others that we cannot see now may appear later on as the cosmic focal length changes.

Be sure to check the original APOD page and click on the image to see the high resolution version, which shows much more surrounding detail and is a nice starfield image on its own. And reduces the resemblance to HAL 9000. Once again, we have these images thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is Photographer of the Decade (twice in a row) as far as I’m concerned. I’m gonna be frustrated when it’s decommissioned…

*

My thanks to Chris L. Peterson at Cloudbait Observatory for supplying a pertinent detail regarding LRG 3-757 on the Starship Asterisk forums, a great place to ask questions.

Counting down

Al Denelsbeck

All right, gang, the clock has started. Exactly one year from now, the ancient alien Mayans will return to Earth on their doomsday asteroid and wipe us all out, unless we steal their reverse-engineered technology from the secret government organizations that have hidden it to prevent panic, and escape to the dark side moonbase. Once there, we will only have to overpower the Illuminati and Bilderberg to blow up the water fluoridation plant, but this shouldn’t be a problem, because we’ll no longer be brainwashed by chemtrails. Freed from imprisonment, JFK will lead us to a glorious new world order, and there will no longer be spider eggs in our Bubble Yum.

Let’s roll.

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Oh, shit. I just noticed that my calendar ends in ten days. What does Hallmark know that we don’t?!

On composition, part 11: Nullhue

Al Denelsbeck


Or, if you’re less hip, you might know this as black & white, or monochrome, or greyscale (grayscale, what-evah,) or einfarbig. There are a lot of ways to accomplish it, but the first thing to consider is what you’re after. In times past, all photography courses required not only shooting in B&W, but developing it as well. I won’t knock this in the slightest – there’s something very cool about developing and printing your own images, and darkrooms are easier to set up than you might think – but it isn’t really a staple of either mastering photography, or of doing it ‘artistically.’ Yet, there are circumstances where it works very well, and knowing how to use it is another aspect of composition.

I am not a master of monochrome by any stretch, so this won’t be a definitive guide, but I can still provide some pointers. The first is that, more than with other approaches, your key factor is contrast. Actually, contrasting light levels, since colors can provide contrast too. Note that it doesn’t have to be high contrast, and in some cases, the gradual shading from light to dark, otherwise known as gradient tones, can look pretty good in monochrome.

This means that you’re on the lookout for two conditions: first, where the light is harsh, most especially from one direction, and producing distinct highlight and shadow areas. Bright lights at night are a favorite, if a bit overdone. Second, conditions where the shadows drop off gradually, sometimes where the light fades around a curved or textured surface, or changing tones in the sky. In some cases contrasting colors will actually work, but this is tricky, because when the color hues are removed, the contrast is reduced and sometimes eliminated completely. While blue and yellow contrast wonderfully, when converted to greyscale they might even match in brightness and lose much of their distinction. However, a little further on I’ll talk about some tricks to use for color contrast.

By the way, there are multiple reasons why B&W is used for night scenes. Mostly it’s because that’s what we expect to see, since our color vision disappears in low-light conditions, so much of our night vision is in grey tones anyway. Another reason is that the film noir style of photography and cinematography exploited these traits of monochrome films, so we’re culturally conditioned to see such as art. There’s even an evolutionary aspect, believe it or not, in that we see shadows as hiding something, perhaps dangerous, so dark patches are viewed as mysterious and spooky, and thus this mood becomes an integral part of such images.

Achieving monochromatic shots is easy, even digitally, but making them look good requires a little more attention. While not every image needs hard contrast with distinct areas that are completely black, and completely white, there are plenty of times when you want to accomplish this, more than the conditions warrant. Simply converting to greyscale, or shooting on B&W film, often isn’t enough – you’ll need to help things out a bit. In the film world, this may be choosing certain films, pushing film (shooting and developing at a higher ISO than rated, which increases contrast,) printing with filters, and even tweaking both chemicals and developing temperatures. Digitally, this could mean increasing the contrast settings of the camera, which I don’t recommend because you have little control over what details may be cut off. The better way is in digital editing, and my preferred technique is by using the ‘curves’ function.


With curves, you are provided with an X-Y graph that plots all of the brightness tones in the image from full black (bottom left) to full white (top right,) and can change these tones as you see fit. Sliding a corner point in either direction controls where the detail drops into pure black (or white,) while changing the line in the middle controls the brightness of any particular tone in between. Shown here, I made the overall image darker – notice how the line departs from the diagonal that would cut straight across the middle – but made the darkest tones even darker (lowest dot on the curve) while bringing the brightest points back up a little from the initial curve (higher dot, creating a slight S-curve.) This increased the contrast a bit as well, but allowed the shaded eye of the cat to remain faintly visible, my primary goal. In some cases, you may not have your shadows dropping all the way into blackness, so you would slide the lower left corner point more towards the right side, causing the darker portions to drop off faster and produce those nice black areas you’re after. It takes some practice, but this gives the most control as far as I’m concerned.

A quick side note: You can adjust curves in color images too, for the whole image (in which case it adjusts the brightness levels like we’ve just done) or for each individual channel, which renders that color with different brightness and contrast as desired. When your image has a distinct color cast to it, this is the best way to correct it. I do this very frequently with digital images, because no camera that I’ve ever handled renders accurate colors every time, and white-balance functions are fairly haphazard as well. But, adjust your monitor to get accurate color first!

Another fun trick is channel clipping. Any digital color image is rendered into a channel for each color, in most cases Red, Green, and Blue (where those “RGB” references keep coming from) – or maybe even Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK – “B” was already taken by Blue who got there first.) You can open the Channels window in your editing program and click on each channel to see what the contrast levels are in that color register alone – sometimes this produces a much more interesting tonal shift than simply converting the image to greyscale. If you find one that you like, simply delete the other channels and keep the one, though you might have to convert this single channel alone into greyscale depending on your program. The right side of this image is each channel rendered into monochrome, illustrating how different each appears for the same photo. It might even help to convert into CMYK (if the original is RGB of course) and try channel clipping there to see if the effect is more to your liking. And of course, you can adjust the curves in the remaining channel as well.

When using monochromatic film, there’s a ‘curves’ style trick too. Many people are confused to know that there are color lens filters specifically for black and white film – what possible use would these be? But as that image illustrates to some extent, when you use a green filter, everything green remains pretty bright, while other colors get darker because they’re largely filtered out. In this way, you can enhance the contrast between colors. A blue filter on a blue sky will make the sky lightest while darkening the clouds slightly, and may cause the clouds to just about disappear against the blue sky, while using a yellow filter will make the blue sky very dark (there is little yellow to let through) while keeping the clouds pretty bright, and really makes the clouds stand out.

When doing your own lighting, like in studio work, you can control the rendition of highlights and shadows as you see fit, at least to some extent – it helps to do a few test shots to see what kind of tonal range you’re capturing from your film or digital settings (and by no means trust that damn LCD on the back of the camera.) This way, like in the image at top, you can set the light angles and intensity to achieve the shadows and tones desired. Most people would say that the light is coming solely from the right of the image, but this isn’t entirely true; a fill flash was used off to the left to control the details in the shadows. Note the details and even highlights visible on the “shadowed” side of the camera. Without the fill lighting, the contrast would actually have been too high and produced a much different effect.

That image, by the way, was something I did as an illustrated photography term. In days of photojournalistic yore, there was a bit of advice on getting results: “F8 and be there.” What it meant was, don’t worry a hell of a lot about camera settings; it’s more important to be ready for the action. Using what I had on hand at the time, I tried to illustrate this with an old classic camera and a globetrotter’s pocket contents – and yes, the camera is set at f8, even if it is a little hard to see. I also feel the need to point out that one of those foreign coins in the top image is actually a game token – look for the face of Sylvester the cat ;-)

But it’s not art…

Bankrupt an atheist!

Al Denelsbeck

How often would you get this kind of opportunity?

A year ago, I reposted a comic from Calamities of Nature, created by Tony Piro, one that achieved a certain amount of notoriety (not due to my efforts by any stretch.) This wasn’t a humorous comic, nor did it involve exaggeration, misstatement, caricaturization, or many of the other things that people could take offense at if they, you know, had too many hangups to take humor as humor. Instead, it was an observation listing simple facts that was satirical in the usage of a pious scene from a well-known christmas special. Bringing facts into the matter always pisses off a lot of people – something to remember, by the way.

Anyway, the comic went around a lot, without proper attribution, with changes to the words, and so on. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, copyright violation, and intentional too – the proper attributions are embedded in the image, so they would have to be removed willingly for it to appear without them, not to mention that changing the words is simply stealing the artwork. As Tony points out:

My use of the Peanuts characters, in a comic that I drew and wrote myself, is allowed as a parody. But when people grab my art, change a few words, and label it as their own, it amounts to theft.

Quite simply, if anyone wanted to do their own parody, they could draw their own artwork. I’ll leave it to you to contemplate how many good religious folk were the ones stealing the image for other purposes. I’m sure it wasn’t many…

This year, in response to the various uses of the comic, Tony has a simple deal: Link to the original comic directly on his site, and he’ll donate $1 for every 500 page views to Doctors Without Borders.

So here’s the original, which is still quite appropriate and will remain so indefinitely.

If you’re one of them good christians, this is also my gift to you. Get enough of your friends together, and you can drive Tony into the poorhouse! It’s really okay, since it’s not about you being nasty, it’s god acting through you, and giving that heretic exactly what he deserves! [Did I nail those internal rationalizations down? Should I have used a different term than “nail”?]

Or draw your own comic, and give $2 per page view to Whining About Respect or some other. I’m sure there’s some organization that helps support the self-righteous when the real world intrudes into their fantasy. I mean, besides churches.

Otherwise, celebrate the holidays as you see fit, and have fun!

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