Perhaps a definition of good photography is taking the common and making it look uncommon. I grabbed this shot off the shelves of my wife’s 2nd grade classroom. The repetition and the focus of a single book, really made the photograph. I also love how the tack looks real, as if it were actually stuck into the book.
Believe me or not, one of the hardest things about running a website (or more specifically in my case a multi-faceted blog / photo gallery) is not learning how to use the software that creates the content but rather deciding how to organize that content.
The blog has taken care of itself. WordPress is a sufficiently awesome tool to organize everything into categories. I was feeling a bit stifled however by the photo gallery. It wasn’t the software’s fault though, I just needed a place to put increasingly different types of pictures, and I wanted to better highlight certain pictures without having them buried deep within an album.
So, I’ve now taken to organizing content into the following main albums.
Finally, because of its design, the photo album can hold pictures that are slightly wider than the blog. So any time you see a picture I’ve taken on the blog, you can click on it and get taken through to the album to see a bigger version. (The only exception would be portrait pictures, which may sometimes appear in the same size in both the blog and the album).
I hope you enjoy these changes. You can definitely expect to see a few more pictures on Ocellated.
There’s a funny scene in Braveheart, one of my all-time favorite movies. William Wallace and two of his companions are planning their battle strategy.
Wallace: “We’ll make spears. Hundreds of them, long spears. Twice as long as a man.”
Hamish: “Some men are longer than others.”
Campbell: “Your mother been telling you stories about me again, eh?”
The quote seemed well suited for The Bruce this week. He was recently caught grasping at a red straw my wife was playing with. He is shockingly long, reaching up to her waist with his arms extended.
Even when she stopped enticing him with the straw, he still chased after something imaginary. For incredibly bizarre reasons, The Bruce will occasionally “attack” the side of the wall, or act as if he’s trying to climb up it. Notice that he’s reaching up past the door knob.
It wasn’t long after I got The Bruce that I noticed just how long he was. He could come up to the table, and from the floor, stand up to see over the edge. Indeed, some men are longer than others.
I have a friend (I won’t say who) that recently came across a serious problem. Their workplace wouldn’t allow them to install Firefox. According to IT, Firefox would make the computer more vulnerable to viruses. Yeah, and engaging in abstinence is a risk of AIDS transmission.
Well, as it turns out, this friend could install other programs on the computer. They just couldn’t download certain things due to a filter. So we put Firefox on a flash drive, it installed just fine, and then I got a little creative so that Firefox wouldn’t stand out on the desktop… 
It’s Saturday (Sunday now that I’ve published it), but I feel like doing a little Friday Cat Blogging. I didn’t get to yesterday, though not for a lack of something to say.
I’m taking a graduate level genetics course this semester and low and behold what did we study Thursday night but the genetics of domestic cats… A whole evening spent talking about alleles, incomplete dominance, and epistasis. And looking at dozens of cat pictures.
Now I’ve mentioned before that The Bruce’s unique characteristics come in part from his Scottish Fold looks, namely a mutation which made his ears fold. I tend to talk less about his being half Siamese, since of course everybody knows what a Siamese looks like.
What I didn’t know until last night is that Siamese get their distinctive color because of mutations of their own. The dark areas of their fur are caused by a mutation in the gene that makes an enzyme necessary in the production of melanin. Melanin as you probably know serves as a dark pigment. (It’s the complete lack of it for example that results in albinism).
Here’s what’s so cool about this mutated Siamese enzyme. It’s temperature specific. The reason the extremities (legs, tail, and muzzle) are darker in Siamese is that they’re cooler than the trunk of the body. Were you to take a Siamese and put him in a refrigerator at 33 degrees for 6 months, you’d come back to find a black cat. If you left him outside the entire summer, his extremities would become much paler.
Interestingly, this same phenomenon occurs in other animals, like the Himalayan rabbit. Studies on this animal were what determined the temperature specific nature of this trait. You can fit the animals with a long term ice pack and get a black spot of fur underneath.
Pretty cool stuff.
Several years ago while rambling along the potholed roads of Mexico, my compradres and I began a discussion on the etymology of the word avocado. We all thought that it sounded Spanish but knew it wasn’t since the Spanish word for avocado is not avocado.
I’ve been reading a wonderful book lately that my sister gave me. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer by Michael Preston. Sailing around the world in the late 1600s to early 1700s, Dampier wrote a book that popularized the travel narrative in England. His work was very influential for people like Jonathon Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, and Charles Darwin’s The Origin.
Anyway, while reading the other night, I discovered that he gave the first English account of avocados[1]. They were reported by the Spanish to have aphrodisiac qualities (what didn’t the Spanish report having aphrodisiac qualities?), and the book had this footnote:
The word avocado originates from a Nahuatl Indian (Aztec) word meaning “testicle,” a reference either to its shape or to its aphrodisiac qualities.
There you have it. A little something to make you laugh the next time you have avocados or guacamole (the etymology of the latter is Spanish I believe).
There’s an article up on Fox News by John Gibson that’s just striking for it’s tone. It’s not the kind of ignorance that one just stumbles across in life. No, it’s the kind of ignorance that one must work really hard to cultivate, waking up each morning to seek out opportunities to display this level of stupidity. His grasp of ignorance is almost masterful.
Now scientists say Pluto isn’t a planet. It isn’t big enough. It’s something, but not a planet exactly.
My attitude is: Who says?
It’s been a planet my entire life. I learned that in the third grade. Might be the only thing I remember from the third grade.
It’s the cold one, the farthest from the sun and, yes, it’s the small one.
But no, you can’t unmake Pluto as a planet.
Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I? [emphasis mine]
Somebody somewhere, some mysterious person who answers to no one and seems to have dictatorial power sets new standards for planets and all of a sudden one of the original nine is dropped?
Now as a disclaimer, I don’t particularly care how the solar system is classified. I would like scientists to be consistent, and use all the information at hand (which naturally changes as the years go by). I trust that they do nothing less, though no doubt it’s a contentious process. (See here on why that’s a good thing). In short, I won’t get my undies in a twist if we’ve got 8, 12, or 30 planets.
But John Gibson’s point of not having to unlearn something just because he’s learned it is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Where would that line of thinking take us? We would have ignored bacteria as the cause of ulcers. Reducing stress and staying away from spicy foods would still be the way doctors handled it. After all, that’s what many of them learned in school. Why should they unlearn it just because some stupid scientists come up with a different idea?
How about marriage. Anybody “learn” how to do something that just didn’t seem to work? Why should you have to unlearn it just because a different approach works better?
Religion. I learned some cool stuff as a kid. I think I’ll put the good book away and forgo church. I already know what I need to. Why should I revisit it again?
His attack on scientists (answering to no one with dictatorial power) is also breathtaking for it’s gross mischaracterization and slander. Whatever the politics and contention of planetary classification, I’m quite sure there’s no planetary physicist in an underground bunker stroking a white cat and smoking a pipe, deciding one day to use his unbounded power to blight Pluto.
Is there any area in life where we shouldn’t learn with a touch of humility, with the acknowledgment that we might be wrong and that new information might change the way we understand something?
Oops. I just thought of one… Apparently being a journalist for Fox News.
(Hat tip to John Hawks on the quote)
I went birding a couple of weekends ago in my old stomping grounds of Abilene, TX where I grew up. It was fun, and I managed to get a number of pictures of birds (and the ever present summer dragonflies of course). While none of them are spectacular, it was nice to get shots of feathered friends, since before owning a telephoto lens they were simply out of reach. You can, as always, find them in the gallery.
I did manage to get three interesting pictures of a Franklin’s Gull (here, here, and here). For birder’s, the reason these pictures are interesting is because of this species similarity to Laughing Gull. Normally, Franklin’s Gulls can be separated by large white tips to the flight feathers (primaries). However, during this time of year, the birds largely lack these, and one could get the identification wrong. These picture show a number of characteristics which separate the two. Note that the white eye crescents are much bolder, the underwing coverts are in flight are largely white (they would have strong brown markings if it were a Laughing Gull), the black on the underside of the primaries is less extensive than Laughing Gull, and the black band on the top of the tail does not go all the way to the edges. This bird shows the necessity of caution in relying on one mark (white to the tips of the primaries) in identifying a bird like Franklin’s Gull.
Ah, the subtleties are what keep it fun!
I was so proud of myself recently. If you’re a reader of the blog, you’ll recall that I got some sweet bobcat pictures recently. People said nice things about me, and I basically felt good about myself.
But some people just have to go and ruin the fun, doing whatever it takes to crush the competition. My mother’s been a contractor at the local air force base in her town, helping with various bird related surveys. And low and behold, it seems a mother bobcat got a little too used to people and decided to take up residence near the hospital. Naturally this produced some good opportunities for pictures, and she even got an entire photo gallery of bobcat kittens in the trees! She also has video of the kittens being captured by a wildlife rehabilitator. The sweet cute little kittens become roaring lions as they’re being moved to the cage. If she ever posts it, I’ll be sure to link to it.
How, I ask you, am I supposed to compete with that? Nobody can compete with multiple bobcat kittens.
As great a cat as a he is, he’s still a cat. And he occasionally gets that cat look. You know, the one where your presence annoys him, and he expects you to worship him as a deity again, harking back to the good old days of cat worship in Egypt.
The Bruce, looking very Sphinx-like
Sorry Bruce. Get over yourself. While you are indeed the coolest cat in the world, you’re still just my pet.
