I went to Woods Hole last night to fly my drone at twilight and take pictures of the buildings and the sky beyond them. My drone (DJI Air 2S) was outfitted with a Lume Cube anti-collision light for night flying.
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old ladies against underwater garbage
There is a group of inspiring women in my town that are doing incredible work to protect our local ponds. I followed them with my camera for some of their outings to collect garbage and test for cyanobacteria overgrowth.
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polarized light
Miles at Chapoquoit - 2021-10-02
Polarized Light
2021-10-04
This image of my friend Miles at Chapoquoit is from two days ago. I don’t use a polarizing light filter because the filter requires adjustment for a particular frame. When I’m photographing the kiteboarders, I’m rapidly and continuously swinging the camera back and forth across the glaring backlight of the western sky at Chapoquoit, trying to follow them as they rip across the waves. I’ve never had any luck with a polarizing filter in that setting.
An article on the Scientific American magazine website by Connie Chang from October 1, 2021, reminded me of my struggles with polarizing filters. Ms. Chang wrote about a recent study by astrobiologists developing an astonishing technology that measures light reflected off Earth’s surface from a helicopter flying far overhead. The scientific instrument they are testing is called “FlyPol,” which analyzes reflected light to study plant life on the ground.
Living things and nonliving things consist of atoms and molecules that have three-dimensional structures. Molecules can exist in two forms that are mirror-images of each other; these are called either right-handed or left-handed. In nonliving objects, according to this article, molecules of a particular type exist as a mixture of right and left-handed forms. But in living things, there is a preference for one or the other state for each kind of molecule. For example, Ms. Chang writes that DNA molecules, which make our genes, are always right-handed, and the amino acids that build our proteins are always left-handed.
These brilliant scientists worked from an understanding that some of the light reflecting off a collection of molecules with the same “handedness” becomes circularly polarized. They designed and built FlyPol to detect the presence of this polarized light when looking at a large patch of ground. By analyzing reflected light from a forest or a grassy Savana, they can assess the health of the plants and identify problems such as drought or infection.
But the same technology, the scientists believe, may ultimately become another tool in the search for extraterrestrial life. Scientists have already learned an enormous amount about other stars and planets by examining light waves that have traveled immense distances across space. The FlyPol technology may one day become a method of scanning for life on distant worlds using a telescope to look trillions of miles out into space.
If we find life on a far-away planet, what kind of life will it be? Will it be something more complex than thick bacterial slime? Will it include intelligent creatures? Will there be kiteboarders?
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ben, jamie, and gustav
Ben at Chapoquoit - 2021-10-02
Jamie at Chapoquoit - 2021-10-02
Gustav at Chapoquoit - 2021-10-02
It was a nice day at Chapoquoit yesterday. I got a lot of pictures I like.
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on farting
Chapoquoit 2021-10-02
On Farting
2021-10-03
Farting is not a topic that commonly comes up in polite conversations, but it has been the subject of intellectual curiosity for a long time. Recent scientific research and the centuries-old musings of an American Founding Father provide reasons to reconsider our unwillingness to talk about farting.
In an article dated September 6, 2021, in New Scientist Magazine, the writer Alice Klein discusses a scientific study that looked at the well-known link between eating a plant-based diet and generally better health at the expense of increased farting. A high-fiber plant diet promotes the growth of gut bacteria associated with improved health for different reasons. For example, these “good” bacteria produce “short-chain” fatty acids that protect against bowel cancer. The increased farting caused by a plant-based diet is an indication that the good gut bacteria are fermenting fiber and flourishing.
The details of how scientist Claudia Barber in Barcelona, Spain, did her study are intriguing. Study subjects (all men) recorded how many times a day they farted using a hand counter and found that they farted seven times more often while eating a plant-based diet than a “western diet.” And each fart contained 50% more gas than farts generated by western diets as measured by balloons attached to the men’s rectums. I struggled to get past the image of the pitiful research assistant assigned the task of placing these balloons.
It turns out that plant-based farts smell less offensive than meat-based farts because bacterial fermentation of plant fiber produces mostly odorless hydrogen and methane gas. In contrast, the fermentation of animal protein produces more smelly hydrogen sulfide gas.
Benjamin Franklin was also thinking about the relationship between diet and farting 240 years ago. As reported in the book Fart Proudly edited by Carl Japikse (copyright 1990), Franklin sent a satirical letter to the Royal Academy of Brusselles dated 1781 regarding research into bowel gas. In the letter, he urged the “Learned Physicians, Chemists, etc. of this enlightened age” to endeavor to discover a drug that when “mixed with our common food or sauces, shall render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive but as agreeable as perfumes.” Franklin even suggested how their research could be guided by what people already knew about how different foods affected the smell of farts. “He that dines on stale flesh, especially with much addition of onions, shall be able to afford a stink that no company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some time on vegetables only shall have that breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate noses.” Franklin explained that the relief brought by passing gas instead of suppressing it out of politeness was of such importance that their efforts to make it possible would be worth the time spent doing it.
These are the sort of things I think about when I’m just farting around taking pictures at the beach.
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david at chapoquoit
David, a scientist at WHOI, kiteboarding at Chapoquoit October 2, 2021.
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Luis at Chapoquoit
Luis at Chapoquoit - 2021-09-27
Beautiful day at the beach yesterday. This is my friend, Luis.
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tommy at sunset
Tommy at Chapoquoit - 2021-09-27
I frequently get discouraged about human beings, but a late afternoon session photographing the kiteboarders at Chapoquoit makes me feel a bit more hopeful about us.
Monte
2021-09-27
people at chapoquoit
I was at Chapoquoit near sunset photographing the kiteboarders when a young woman named Jennifer asked me to take a picture of her with her two dogs, Charlie (the small one in front) and the other one whose name I can’t spell.
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a wedding at little island
Tommy, one of the kiteboarders, asked me to get some drone footage of his wedding to Hannah at Little Island beach. Here’s the video I made.
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dogs chasing balls at little island beach
Luka, September 17, 2021
I was at Little Island beach this weekend to get drone shots of a friend’s wedding. I filled up the time waiting for the people to show up for the rehearsal session by photographing Luka chasing balls. Thanks to Tara, Luka’s owner, for agreeing to let me take the photographs.
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and we are back
Hanu at Chapoquoit, September 8, 2021
Labor Day was September 6. The tourists are mostly gone so I can safely return to the beach. Yay.
The wind was good yesterday. I grabbed my camera and went to Chapoquoit where I found a few kiteboarders. This image is Hanu and his kite against a spectacular sky. It’s good to be back.
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existence
I’ve posted the transcript for this video here:
Existence
2021-06-26
In 1963 a prominent and well-regarded American astronomer, Harlow Shapley, published a book titled The View from a Distant Star. The book’s first sentence reads: “Mankind is made of star-stuff, ruled by universal laws.” The second sentence continues: “The thread of cosmic evolution runs through his history, as through all phases of the universe….”
Stellar nucleosynthesis, the production of all atoms larger than hydrogen within stars, was first proposed in 1946 – long before I started taking chemistry in school. I took chemistry classes for eight years during my education without ever asking the obvious question: “Where did all these atoms come from?” I just accepted their presence and didn’t wonder about their origin. How incurious!
Nonetheless, I think the scientific discovery of stellar nucleosynthesis is one of the most fantastic and most intriguing human accomplishments of all time. It connects me, and you, boats and birds, and everything else, to each other and the whole universe.
In 2021 Alan Lightman, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bestselling author, explored our existence in his book of essays: Probable Impossibilities. In a chapter titled Immortality, he marvels at the generation of consciousness by the transmission of signals passed through trillions of connections between a hundred billion nerve cells in our brain. It is the flow of atoms and molecules between nerve cells doing the signaling and generating our sense of self and our thoughts.
Dr. Lightman breaks down our bodies into their atomic components as follows: “…the average human being consists of about seven thousand trillion trillion atoms –– 65% oxygen, 18% carbon, 10% hydrogen, 3% nitrogen, 1.4% calcium, 1.1% phosphorous, and a smattering of 54 other chemical elements.” This atomic recipe adds considerable detail to Dr. Shapley’s assertion that “we are made of star-stuff.” And recognize that the nerve cells in our brain signaling each other with atomic messengers are themselves made of atoms. Human beings are a highly organized collection of atoms made in stars billions of years ago; when we die, these atoms disperse and become part of other things, including other people. A potassium atom that once shuttled back and forth across a nerve cell membrane sending messages –– thoughts –– through our brains will become part of something else, maybe a rock or a butterfly, without any ability to understand, to know, that it was once part of us. Dr. Lightman expresses the feeling of some comfort in knowing that his atoms will persist after he is gone, thereby granting him a kind of immortality.
I accept my transient nature. I am grateful for the unlikely chance I’ve got to live a conscious life in which I am aware of my existence, and I can learn about things like stellar nucleosynthesis and my connection to the whole universe across the immensity of time.
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the ordinariness of perfect
Inspired by the poetry of Billy Collins, this video muses about the nature of perfect moments in our lives.
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Swimming with Turtles
Susan Baur, an 81-year old clinical psychologist, swims with turtles in ponds across Cape Cod. She has been doing that for 17 years and in the process she has become active in promoting the cause of environmental protection for the ponds and the creatures that live in them.
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my days at the beach
Another compilation of images and video from Chapoquoit. I like spending time there.
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surf shorts - hanu
In this short video I highlight my friend, Hanumant Singh, a brilliant scientist and kiteboarder at Chapoquoit.
the painter
My friend, Ben, doing some painting in our kitchen.
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beauty and anger
I took this picture three days ago at Chapoquoit beach. It makes me think of the headlines I read every day in the newspapers: people killing each other all over the world because of disagreements about politics or religion (there isn’t a clear distinction between the two, in my opinion). It appears that this has always been the case.
It is a tragic reality for our species that we are simultaneously surrounded by beauty and consumed by anger.
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mother's day
Bike path, Falmouth 2021-05-09
Jenny and I went out for a bike ride on mother’s day.
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