Dandelion seeds with their attached pappus that allows them to float with the wind for dispersal. Why do so many people dislike the dandelions that cover our yards in the spring? They're beautiful to me.
I took this photo in my studio. It's a composite of fifteen images, each with a slightly different focus point. The images are then "stacked" in photoshop to create a picture that has a deeper depth of field (in focus from front to back).
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I like the dandelions that fill up my yard in the spring and the birds, like this house finch, they attract.
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Richard Feynman, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, wrote an essay a long time ago entitled "The Beauty of a Flower". In it he relates a conversation he had with an artist friend who held the position that science obscures the beauty of things with its process of analysis and critical thinking. Feynman, as a scientist, makes a wonderful counter argument.
I asked a friend of mine, Jon Goldman (www.goldmanarts.com), who is also an artist, to share his thoughts on the relationship between art and science and the nature and appreciation of beauty.
The art in the video is by Jon.
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Planting flower seeds in the second half of April has become a tradition for me. By early summer I'll have zinnias and sunflowers to attract bees, butterflies, and birds to my garden. It's great fun.
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It was snowing/raining all day today, which made it bad for photography. I did manage to take some photos of a pair of Northern Flicker woodpeckers (Colaptes auratus according to the Audubon website) looking for insects to eat in the snow-sprinkled grass of my backyard. Spring is coming, but winter always puts up a fight at the end.
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I've been reading about the nature of Cape Cod and was especially interested in the impact of the ice age on our local geology. The landscape where I live is filled with big rocks, called erratic boulders by geologists, that were deposited by a huge glacier 15,000 years ago. I went to a beach near my home and did some time lapse of the clouds over the rocky shoreline and shot some video of seagulls and birds that I think are called cormorants - could be wrong about that.
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I've been out at some local beaches timelapsing clouds and sunsets and thinking about a book by Carlo Rovelli entitled Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
This video is my second attempt at a vlog-style video and I think I'm going to persist in trying to learn how to make vlogs (video-blogs). It's a lot of fun to do and I like the idea of using visual imagery to help tell the story of what I'm doing with my life.
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Spent a few days going out to the Nobska Lighthouse to make time lapse videos of the clouds. In the process of shooting the videos I met a lot of nice people who were curious about what I was doing.
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These videos, posted on YouTube and Vimeo, are my attempt to tell a rough story of what I'm doing, or at least what I am watching in the world around me. This past week, as the title suggests, I was paying close attention to the beaches in my town as well as the crows that visit my backyard, and the full moon on February 22, 2016.
I especially enjoy working with the kite surfers because they are so driven by their enthusiasm for their sport; it's an energizing experience just to be around them. In this video Ben, Ryan, and Peter talk briefly about how "kiting" fits into their lives. It's a wonderful story about a group of people who've found a way to love life. We should all seek to be kite surfers, at least in spirit.
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I've been using a long-lens to photograph people at the beach near my home in winter. It's fun getting out there and watching the action.
Morning is my favorite part of the day. Each morning, while making my coffee, I have the sense of being at the start of something big - a new day in which I'll start fresh on the rest of my life. I like mornings to be quiet, unhurried, and spent alone with just my thoughts for company.
Sometimes I get up before sunrise and take my cameras to the beach to photograph the ocean and the creatures living on its shore. On lucky days the sun and clouds collaborate to make vivid light shows with quickly shifting hues of orange, red and pink painting the sky above the water.
When I'm out there taking pictures I don't feel "connected" to that world on the beach; I feel like a visitor in danger of overstaying his invitation, but wanting to stay just a little while longer.
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This image was created from a photograph I took of the base of the mailbox in front of my house on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. I noticed it this morning while taking Bevo out for his walk. I used a Photoshop plugin from Topaz Labs to give it the appearance of a colored pencil drawing.
Most people would not consider this a very interesting picture. If they paid attention to it at all they would probably ask - why?
This morning was a quiet, sunny morning and when I saw the uncut grass framing the base of the post holding up my mailbox I remembered sunny mornings on my grandfather's farm in a rural part of South Texas. I loved the scenes on his farm, including fences with grass growing around the posts, and fields with cows and scattered wildflowers in the spring. I was standing in the street in front of my house while Bevo sniffed a pile of crinkled dead leaves; and I was staring at this beat-up post with its unruly grass garnish and remembering how I used to feel safe and happy walking around the farm feeling the sun warming my body and listening to the soft staccato melodies of chirping birds accompanied by distant rumblings of a tractor on another farm somewhere out-of-sight. Time drifted slowly for me then. I never imagined anything would change, and I didn't want anything to change.
Those days are decades in the past and more than a thousand miles away. My grandfather died when I was sixteen and the small farm where he lived was sold. I never saw it again. This simple image took me back across time and distance and made me feel happy, so I took a photograph of it. Isn't it so interesting how our brain can make so much out of something so apparently meaningless?
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My good friend Ben kite surfing at Chapoquoit beach. He uses a rig that has a surf board with no straps, which requires a hefty amount of skill.
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The gun violence issue in The USA is complicated and I readily concede that it will not likely be solved anytime soon, if ever. There is no easy way to fix the problem, especially if we can’t agree that there is a problem or what exactly the problem is.
The United States has 5% of the world’s population and between 35 – 50% of all the civilian-owned guns in the world. Reference this article from the Atlantic Magazine:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/americas-top-killing-machine/384440/
There are more guns here than most anywhere else, and that’s important because there is a clear connection with the number of guns and the number of violent crimes, and this is related to legally obtained guns. This relationship is true across affluent nations and also true between states in the United States – where there are more guns there are more murders committed with guns. Reference this research from the Harvard School of Public Health:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/
Interestingly, the number of gun murders in the USA declined sharply between 1993 and 2001, dropping by 49%. Reference this research by the Pew Research Center :
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/firearms_final_05-2013.pdf
However, the decline in gun murders stopped in 2001 and has remained around 3 gun murders per 100,000 people in the USA, which is still the highest in the world and more than 3 times higher than the next western country on the list, Switzerland, at just under 1 gun murder per 100,000 people. Great Britain, where there are strong gun control laws and far fewer guns, has something like 0.1 gun murders per 100,000 people. Reference this article in the Washington Post, which has a nice graphic display of the data for gun-related murders in wealthy nations:
Gun murders in the USA in 1993 were around 7 per 100,000 population compared to a steady 3.6 – 3.8 per 100,000 every year since 2001. In 2010 the total number of gun-related deaths in America was 31,672, and most of these were from suicide at 19,392 deaths leaving 12,280 gun-related deaths as murders. Most of the gun murders in our country do not occur in the attention-getting disasters of mass shootings in public places, which account for less than 1% of all homicides. (See the same citation for the Pew Research Center above).
The same PEW research paper mentions a few possible explanations for the substantial, but stalled, decline in gun murders; But the reality is that there are multiple possible factors driving this decline and no single reason will suffice. Some experts have suggested better police efforts, but this has been hard to substantiate. The PEW research paper points out that the biggest group of gun-murder victims, and presumably gun-murder perpetrators, is young men, and over the past several decades the population of young American men has fluctuated up and down, possibly influencing gun violence rates.
There are some unexpected explanations offered for the decline in gun violence, like the impact of abortion. This idea makes the case that there have been fewer young men in the peak age range for gun violence after 1993 because abortion was legalized in 1973 thus fewer unwanted babies were born into the bad socioeconomic conditions that foster criminal behavior. Likewise, another suggestion is that our higher rates of incarceration are keeping more potentially violent young men in jail and thus unable to commit violent crimes. Another intriguing idea is that environmental laws passed in the early 1970’s that reduced the amount of lead in gasoline resulted in lower lead levels in children and consequently lower rates of brain damage that could have led to mental illnesses predisposing these kids to violent behavior later in life. All of this is covered in the PEW research article I referenced above.
The assertion was made to me that the gun violence problem was ultimately related to the fall in religious commitment among Americans, which is a shocking suggestion since we are easily the most religious nation in the western world and, as already confirmed, we have, by far, the highest gun-murder rate of all the wealthy nations in the world. But I felt obliged to look into the claim that if we just started forcing children to pray to a Christian God in public schools without regard for their freedom to believe in a different God, or no God at all, all our problems would be solved. In the United States the most violent region with the highest number of assault-related deaths is the South. The least violent region with the fewest assault-related deaths is the Northeast. See the same Washington Post article as above at this link:
The data for religiosity, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, are exactly the reverse. The Southern United States blows the rest of us away in its religious fervor and the less violent, less deadly Northeast (especially New England) is much less religious and practically crawling with nasty nonbelievers. See this data from Gallup:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/167267/mississippi-religious-vermont-least-religious-state.aspx
Lack of religion is almost certainly not what drives our gun-murder rate. And I’ll resist the temptation to connect these dots and claim that religion is a driver of violent behavior – because that would not be a scientific conclusion with the limited data I have presented. But more research on this relationship would be welcome.
I don’t have the answer to our gun violence problem, and neither does anybody else. Gun laws won’t eliminate gun deaths, but they do help. States with stricter gun laws have fewer gun-related deaths – see the same Washington Post article at this link:
Another less discussed issue that President Obama mentioned in his speech yesterday is that there has been an active suppression of research on gun violence. The kind of research from the CDC that would inform the construction of rational gun control laws is being actively suppressed by, of course, the NRA (and other gun advocacy groups, I’m sure). See these two links:
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx
Actively suppressing scientific research that is bad for business is nothing new in the United States. The tobacco industry did it with the link between smoking and cancer. The fossil fuel industry does it with the link between their product and climate change, and the gun industry, via their champion the NRA, does it with gun violence. No matter which side of any issue you are on as a citizen of this great nation you are being wronged when efforts are made to suppress knowledge that you can use to make informed decisions.
Citizens fighting with each other about the most important issues facing our country, and dividing themselves into opposing groups that develop a deeply held hatred for each other, is the consequence of carefully crafted political strategy funded by unscrupulous industries that care about nothing but their profits. The only weapon we have to fight back is untainted information, which we can use to have rational conversations with each other and build working plans to achieve solutions. And this, I fear, is way more difficult than it should be. But let’s try anyway.
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Monte
Today, October 1, 2015, there was another school shooting in the USA, this time at a community college in Oregon. I read in one news report that this makes 40 school shootings in 2015 alone and 142 school shootings since Sandy Hook in 2012. Do my friends on Facebook think, as I do, that the only acceptable number of school shootings per year is zero?
We all know how the news coverage of this shooting is going to play out: A flurry of angry arguments from both sides of the gun control issue and then, all-too-quickly, the incident will fade from the public dialogue to be replaced with some other hot topic – like a celebrity drug or sex scandal.
In the coming days we will be hearing the suggestion from a lot of people that the answer to public massacres is to have students and teachers, and movie goers, and grocery shoppers, and joggers, and golfers, and basically everybody carry a gun in the classroom, or wherever they go, so they can shoot back when a maladjusted jerk with a gun shows up. I want to go on record as saying that when our political leaders talk about ideas like this as if they really make sense, we are all just f—king screwed.
In spite of all the catchy slogans about people, guns, and who or what is responsible for the killing, one truth is clear: Nobody can shoot anybody unless they have a gun.
See the chart of gun-related homicides (this data does not include gun-related suicides and accidental gun deaths) in the USA versus terrorism deaths in the attached article.
Consider that of these 10,000 – 13,000 gun homicides occurring every year in the USA the victims are usually, if not always, innocent people – not bad guys. Guns kill.
Read this article which contains an excellent graphic comparing annual gun homicide deaths in the USA to annual terrorism deaths in the USA.
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About thirty minutes after the sun had set I was packing up my cameras and tripods getting ready to go, but I didn't want to leave. I was the only person on the beach and the restful voices of nightfall at the seashore were hard to walk away from. Sometimes we hear the whisper of Earth’s rhythms and we get a sense of how big and how old and how unique this place is. So I set up for one more picture, a long exposure across the water to the clouds and the fading light of another day.
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Thirty-two years ago today Jenny and I waited in line until someone called our number and we got married at the county courthouse in San Antonio, Texas. The years have blown by and our kids are all grown-up and doing well. Now it's back to being just the two of us and it still feels like we're just a couple of kids having fun together.
I took this picture of a group of people on a beach a few minutes from my home. I'm not posting the picture to be critical of them ... because I have no idea what they are doing. The scene made me wonder, in general terms, about the role of "believing" in the development of human culture.
Our human nature is such that we are quick, maybe even desperate, to believe in things that are sometimes truly unbelievable. But it seems to me that this is not an evolutionary flaw - merely a trait that can work for or against us that must have had real selective advantages for our ancestors because it is still with us today.
Shared common beliefs allow large groups of people to collaborate on big projects like building functional communities. A central component of our modern global economy is our collective willingness to believe in the concept of money. You have two chickens and you are willing to give them to me in exchange for a few pieces of colorful paper with pictures and numbers drawn on them. This kind of transaction has not always been a workable idea in human societies.
But shared common beliefs can also be used as a tool to get otherwise good people to do terrible things. How do we distinguish between what makes sense to believe in and what doesn't? It is a question that leads to a clash between advocates of critical thinking and those people inclined to simply take a leap of faith because it "feels right". A clash that too often turns violent.
The debate will only end when there are no people left to argue about it.
And so it goes.
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Scenes of summer from my Cape Cod town on the beach.
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