We have just returned from a brief trip, where I produced more photos than I have for the past two months – I just don’t have time to do a lot with them right at the moment. So we have this teaser, and the promise that within a day or two, more will be forthcoming. Don’t you fret.
Half again
Yes, today is that very special day, but only right here in this imaginary, electron-supported environment known as the blogoblob, because it’s the 15th anniversary of the first post on Walkabout. Imagine that! And this is the 2,750th post therein, which is why this past month or so has been overtaken by dross. I regret nothing (well, except that one post – you know which one,) because at the very least it provided some content in what would otherwise have been a very quiet month. I can hear you blathering your ill-informed opinion in the background and I am pointedly ignoring you…
It would be nice to say that I had something special and captivating to put up here, but that’s a lie – instead, we have a podcast, I believe the first in exactly a year, which was for the 2,500th post. This one is about a more scientific, critical-thinking topic however, sparked by several posts over on Universe Today, but most specifically, “Why Don’t We See Robotic Civilizations Rapidly Expanding Across the Universe?” by Matt Williams. It’s not a short one, so get comfy before hitting ‘Play’ – you’ll be too captivated to even pause it for a bathroom break.
Walkabout podcast – Alien Artificial Intelligence
[By the way, I tried a new ‘noise gate’ setting to cut out the intakes of breath and so on, which did a fine job and eliminated a lot of work, but was perhaps too aggressive and truncated the ends of some sentences as well, especially ‘S’ sounds, so I apologize – next time (a year from now?) should be better.]
Once again, I urge you to check out the originating post, because they referenced several publications where a lot of this has been addressed; mostly, I was responding to the artificial intelligence aspect, but also the robotic explorer idea. I will openly admit that this all is 95% speculation, and not only on my part, because we really cannot judge what any extra-terrestrial species might be like, what motivates them, and so on. Feel free to point out the flaws that I missed, however – I’m game.
Other posts that examine artificial intelligence:
The road’s longer than it looks
Other select posts regarding extra-terrestrial intelligence:
I feel I should let you know, by the way, that 15 years is a Blog Mitzvah, and while I know most of you can’t be here in person to celebrate, there’s that Tip Jar over there on the sidebar to show your appreciation for all this astounding content and insightful prose. It’s so much easier than sending a card.
Cheers!
Free to good home
I’ve been meaning to do more cleaning of the blog folder, which is where I stash images prepped for posts before they’re actually uploaded, and on occasion I decide against them, for one reason or another; I end up not writing the post, or the narrative (such a grandiose word for this shit, isn’t it?) goes in another direction, or something along those lines. I often leave them in the folder with the idea that they might come in useful further down the road, and occasionally this happens, but not often, and I finally decided to clear out the junk drawer, as it were, and simply deleted a lot of them.
A handful of them, however, were still interesting enough to post (says I,) though a few had been sized for the olden days, when vertical compositions were often ‘less than column width’ as seen here. I largely stopped doing this because a) it made the images seem too small in the layout, and b) it requires having enough text alongside not to introduce big gaps into the pages, and I would often end up trying, nay, endeavoring to creatively lengthen, expand, or elucidate to maintain balance – not like I need any help at all being wordy. Anyway, I called this one “Chiaroscuro” after the artistic concept, which means, “bright darkness” – I know, what’s a peasant like me doing trying to use or even understand fancy cultural terms? Beats me, which is probably why it sat there unused for so long…
There’s also the idea, with half-column images, that they should face ‘properly’ with the text – this one leans leftish, so it should be to the right, while the one above is the opposite. This could also make for juggling the posts a bit, because at times I’d end up with vertical images that all leaned right and I couldn’t alternate like this. Does it make the slightest difference to anyone? Probably only me, but at least it shows that some thought goes into these posts, even if, again, we’re using far too elaborate a word to describe the guttering candle within my brain.
I’m not absolutely sure and I’m not going to go searching right now, but I think this one dates from before the blog was actually started and is on slide film. We had a wicked blizzard for this latitude and I was effectively snowed in, so this came from traipsing around in the woods adjacent to where I lived. It had been a heavy, thick, wet snow that adhered to everything, piling up as much as a few centimeters even on thin branches, a real winter wonderland kind of thing – but of course I couldn’t get to anything more photogenic than this.
Has this been enough space?
How about now?
I ended up using the monochrome version of this some time back, so the color version just sat around. It does illustrate something that I often struggle with, which is/are botanical subjects with less-than-perfect petals or leaves, little ugly spots that distract attention away from both the subject and the overall mood – and which disappeared when converted to monochrome. But the colors remain nice, and those antennae were damn sharp…
There was a thematic purpose to this image, but I’ve long since forgotten what it was. I like the symmetry – look at that lovely pattern right in the center of the image – but there are a few too many distractions, like that pole thingy in front. Maybe I’ll crop the original tighter, make things bigger, and revisit this later on…
Just a nicely-shaped ginger lily from the botanical garden, even if there are some old petals down near the bottom. I was trying for some misdirection, though, and I don’t think it carried as well as intended. Here’s the follow-up anyway:
Imagine, though, that the flower was viewed as normal, so a handful of centimeters across nestled in among the cluster of leaves. The green lynx spider here was certainly very subtle unless you were paying close attention to the things that ‘didn’t ring true,’ like those little threadlike legs dangling over the top, and then you realize she’s there.
I’m not exactly sure what the little hairs/spikes/daggers on the legs accomplish, save for making them look badass. I don’t think natural selection really works that way but, you know, maybe…
This is in infra-red, from back in 2007 when I was on that kick. While I liked the way the tree rendered here, the rest of it seems a little… discordant, maybe? Just not quite cutting it, and thus decided against for the various B&W posts that have come since.
I was busy with other subjects when I ran across this little guy, and did a quick shot with the intention of coming back when I wasn’t busy and tackling it in earnest, but it was gone on my return. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since (this dates from 2021,) and this tight view from low enough allowed a hint of the legs to come through – I’m pretty sure it’s a larva, and I suspect a caterpillar of some kind, but I haven’t tried searching it out either. The blue comes courtesy of the rain barrel, of course, and the water drop gives some indication of size.
Much as I liked this image, I think I used something very similar for the thumbnail display of the accompanying video when I posted about the beavers last year, so this was an unnecessary duplicate, and no thematic reason has occurred since.
And finally,
I threatened to do this a couple of weeks back when I posted the color version, and you have now discovered this was no idle bluff – if you were caught unawares, you have no one to blame but yourself, though the Republican party can be used too because they never get tired of whining about persecution. Not just converted to monochrome, but through selective color channels – this is the Green and Blue channels in a specific ratio (I think 40% opacity in Green, but don’t quote me on that.) This allowed for the best balance of contrast in the wings while making the head and thorax bright.
So, that cleared out a few, while you know what tomorrow is, right? Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out…
Living in the past XXIIX or XXVIII
We’re into 2016 now. The Girlfriend loves calla lilies and we’ve had them a couple of times, but they never seem to last more than a year or two. Still, while this one was blossoming, I got extraordinarily lucky in that a newborn Chinese mantis scampered around the bloom while I was there, and I got several frames. This one in particular became an art print and was displayed in the one gallery showing that I’ve had (so far, anyway – more are planned, because I intend to get into this more conscientiously.) I was attempting not to be too “buggy” in my choices, but figured this one was acceptable. And based on some of the feedback that I received, I could probably get away with more, though it certainly depends on the venue. Is it feasible to do an entire line of arthropod fine art prints? Will photographers one day arrange their own galleries of insect art because of the trend started by Denelsbeck? Do I even know what fine art is? You can come up with your own answers to these, which likely won’t agree with mine and yet will prove to be far more accurate…
Enjoy the day
So I have determined that the biggest disconnect between theory and practice, a disturbingly vast gulf, is my ability to wrap presents. You just do this, and this, and then this, right? Yeah, and then I end up with something that looks like the faux presents that have been under the tree in a run-down mall for the past thirteen years…
Anyway, it’s about 1:30 AM right now, and I think this is as close as I’m gonna get to being ‘ready’ – it should be more, but it’s not. Still, we will have good food and family over (just a handful) and we’re all pretty mellow anyway. It’ll be fine.
[Did you hear that, Fate? I said fine. That’s not a challenge.]
Right now, I’ll feature George Hrab, a musician and critical-thinker, the host of the Geologic Podcast (that has nothing to do with geology, but you’ll figure it out) over on the sidebar there. Or right here, if you prefer. This is his holiday song, written quite some time back I think, but the sentiments are solid and inarguable.
While I should add more, I’m too scatterbrained to tackle it at the moment. So I will wish you all a Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, and Be Mellow and Imperturbable. Enjoy the day, regardless of how you view it.
Cheers!
Tripod holes 52
N 26°20’19.30″ W 81°48’17.66″ Google Earth location
This one isn’t so much to show you a great place for photos, though it may work in that regard; most of the appeal is the sky though, which can occur anywhere. More, this was another of those self-challenges that I get up to, seeing if I can pinpoint a location that I visited just once in passing.
I’m pretty sure that this was on my birthday in 1999, during a tour of Florida while I still lived in NC. The common evening thunderstorm had rolled in while I was eating dinner at a Perkins Restaurant, and initial memory told me that it was in Fort Myers, but as I thought about it I recalled it was in Bonita Springs, the city a little south of Fort Myers where I was staying, because it was much cheaper while still being relatively convenient to Sanibel Island. The rain hammered, the thunder crashed, and I stalled over dinner, not wanting to go out in it, but it soon passed (as it usually does,) and I hopped into the car to head north. Immediately, the sky cleared into a moody collection of scattered clouds lit by the setting sun, and I figured I’d have to do something about it. The city wasn’t a good place, and I was hoping for a nice natural-looking area between Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, when I saw the bridge ahead and a turnoff almost immediately on my right, possibly marked with signs for a boat launch. I swung the car quickly into the parking lot, hopped out at the ramps, and hastily set up some frames.
I’m still unsure how I feel about this one. I like the colors, and how the cloud line matches the tree line, and even how the gentle ripples accentuate rather than disturb the reflection. But I also feel that it could have been stronger, had more of a focal point of something. No birds saw fit to pass through and give me something to work with, and the light was changing and fading rapidly, so this is what I had to work with. But I have indeed done better, by any objective measure.
Years (decades, really) later, I endeavored to pin the location down. I knew I was sticking to Rt 41 instead of the faster but far more boring I-75, and I knew the orientation of the river and ramp. It didn’t take long. Moreover, I even located the restaurant, not a kilometer due south at the major crossroads there – it’s now an Aqua Seafood Steaks and Raw Bar, but go into Street View and it’s still a Perkins. And if there remained any doubt in my mind, looking at one of the other frames that I took then settled it just ducky.
These were taken only minutes apart, but you can see how the sunlight has left the clouds now. More to the point, that L-shaped fishing dock is more than distinctive enough – with a few measurements and perhaps a little math, I could pin down to within a meter where I was standing on the other, straight dock.
But I can’t recall what table I was at for dinner. Getting old…
Tripod holes reject
As the title says, this one was in consideration for a Tripod holes entry, because I could almost pin down right where it was taken – just, not quite. And I had other images that worked better anyway. But here’s the scoop.
It was November 2003 and I was returning to Florida on a flight from North Carolina, and we were on final approach to Melbourne International Airport, so these are the city lights of Melbourne. I knew which approach we were taking, and that blank rectangle in the middle there is pretty distinctive, so I thought I should be able to use that (and the line of the major road that stretches diagonally on the right side, almost certainly South Wickham Road,) to pin down a precise location. A rectangle without lights would likely be either an unlit parking lot, an empty field or lot, or a very large building. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t pin it down; other areas should have been either just as blank or had more lights, things like that. So it’s only a curious abstract image not helped at all by the motion blur during the longer exposure needed to even capture the lights. It’s on slide film, by the way, so no EXIF info to check and see what the shutter speed actually was.
Less than ten minutes before this, however, I knew we were on descent though I had no idea what our altitude was, because there was nothing to be seen below us at all and it was a distinctly clear night. This had me convinced that we were approaching the airport from the east, because that would be from out over the Atlantic Ocean; Melbourne International only has east-west runways, with approach direction determined by the prevailing winds, so an approach from the west would be over the center of the state which should have provided plenty to see below. And then confusingly, I saw a small cluster of lights in the midst of total darkness, wondering if it was a fishing fleet before realizing that it was a crossroads – we were over central Florida after all (this might actually have been Deer Park.) I can’t emphasize enough how few lights there were to be seen, which really drove home the fact that much of central Florida is swampland and farms, too wet to consider making even small towns within. Sure, the coastal cities, and even most of the coastal small towns, are pretty urbanized and crowded – but get outside of them and almost immediately you’re all by yourself.
Human-wise, anyway – there are always reptiles of some kind close at hand.
Living in the past XXVII
An abstract from 2015, one that came out very well – this is not bragging (well, much,) but recognition that the odds played out in my favor. The reflections are all from the sun on rippling water, so each of those sparkles was only there for a millisecond in time – it would be easy to have too many clustered together, or too few, but the line meandering up the frame works well, and the two on the tips of the leaf are a great touch. Meanwhile, since the exposure was set automatically and was compensating for that reflected light, the darkness of the water and the leaf itself could have been distinctly different, but here it provides a ghostly quality. I’ll take credit for knowing that a smaller aperture would produce the starbursts better, but I’ve known that for decades – it’s not exactly an advanced trick. But all that said, it deserved to be seen again.
Nowhere to go but up
As of now – like, right now, as this posts (which is 10:27 PM local, or 03:27 UTC tomorrow) – we have passed the December solstice, and the days are getting longer again, for those of us in the northern hemisphere. The daylight hours, anyway – we’ve been through all this before. But that gives me something else to post about, and knowing this was coming, I took pictures, even.
Not that there’s a lot out there to take pictures of, and it’s even worse than normal because it’s been pretty cold for this time of year and this latitude. But I saw this and pondered it briefly:
I’m not sure where a leaf that green came from at this time of year, especially since everything but the evergreens have shed their leaves long ago (they’re like half a meter deep in the backyard.) I’m in charge of the stuff that we maintain through the winter, mostly in the greenhouse, and it’s not from any of them. I’ll take the opportunity to mention that the avocado tree that we started from a pit has been enormously pleased with the greenhouse and has grown at least 20cm since it got in there two months ago, and two more have sprouted indoors and have grown a similar amount, and will be joining their companion out in the greenhouse soon. But you noticed the molted exoskeleton of the cicada in there too, of course – that’s just a leftover from the summer, since this is right at the base of the cherry tree.
And another for fart’s sake.
These are the flowers or the oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia,) and they’ve been like this for months – well, not quite this threadbare, but they hang on longer than any other flower around, and will mostly be here in the spring when the new batch starts.
But we have a little discovery from today too. While working outside, I glanced up at a passing aircraft and noticed something that I’ve only seen once before.
The sun is out of the bottom of the frame, so this is not the correct position for a rainbow or a sundog – this is instead a circumzenithal arc, formed by high-altitude ice crystals. This is the original image as captured, but I tweaked it a little, thusly:
I had to run to get the camera, and so it had faded a little by the time I got the first images, and it shifted back and forth fairly quickly as I observed it. Thankfully, the one contrail cutting across dissipated quickly.
I never got a good display of it, though, and it faded as I stood there, then reappeared a little later on, but not as strongly. Still, something to keep an eye out for on sunny days, because these are the right conditions, and as the name implies, you’re going to see it just south of straight up.
I also did a couple quick frames of the moon while out there.
There was a point to this, and part of it was because I wasn’t sure that I’d have good conditions later on, so this was my safety image. But as we came closer to the exact time of the solstice, the sky was once again clear, and I was able to get the shots as planned.
Now, this isn’t right at the solstice, because I had to write the post – it’s about 90 minutes early. But this is damn close to as low as it can get for as high as it is – make sense? Good – I don’t want to have to explain it again. Oh, all right: the solstices are when the Earth’s axis is angled the farthest from the sun, either the northern axis (right now) or the southern, which happens in June. This means the arc of the sun and moon drop the lowest towards the horizon on those days, even though a) we hadn’t quite hit the solstice yet for this image, and b) this was after the moon had passed the southernmost point of its path. It was very high in the sky, making photographing it awkward from having to be beneath the camera, but for the next six months, it will be higher when viewed at this same point in its orbit. Yeah, it’s all semantics and orbital mechanics and other mythologies, but it’s a topic to post about, so chill.
I’ll note that the conditions for the circumzenithal arc had possibly not passed, either, because at times the haze around the moon was plainly visible, though harder to capture in a photograph.
It’s not like you’re likely to see a circumzenithal arc at night, by the light of the moon, because look how faint it is during the day. But it’s possible, I suppose, especially if you use a long exposure. Though if I’d even tried looking for that, this post would be late, and that’s simply unacceptable – I have an obligation, that I created myself, that even if I had readers, no one would care about. Man, that’s pathetic, isn’t it?
Living in the past XXVI
For a couple of years, I was on a quest to obtain detailed pics, and video, of a peculiar optical trait visible in one particular species of spider; many spiders likely have the same trait, but it’s only visible in the magnolia green. The anterior median (front middle) pair of eyes is used to accurately judge the distances for jumping, and as such are complex eyes, rather than the simple compound eyes that we associate with arthropods like house flies: they can focus and aim like our own, and when I say “like,” I mean quite a bit unlike our own. Since their cornea is part of their exoskeleton and is periodically shed with the rest, it’s fixed in place, so the eyes move internally instead, and because that same exoskeleton is largely translucent for the species, enough light gets through that this can actually be seen. Which is what we’re seeing here – the black circle in that right eye is actually the spider’s retina. Yes, they can aim their eyes independently – can’t you?
This image, and an accompanying video, is the result of planning/staging that went far, far better than expected, or even than it should have. I housed a pair of spiders in a small terrarium and provided a variety of ideal insects as food, and eventually witnessed one of the spiders immediately after a capture – only it wasn’t in a very good position for macro photos, and certainly not for the little USB microscope that I had at the time to do video. Somehow, the spider allowed me to not only lift the plant (that I’d provided as habitat) out of the terrarium without fleeing, but rode along complacently from the porch all the way into my office because the microscope could only attach to the computer. The results are a little disconcerting but very illustrative, so full credit to this spider for its patience. Or, because I’d already worked quite a bit with the species and knew they were as hyperactive and uncooperative as any jumper, giving them food is the secret to having them hold still.