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About Butterflies

Last week I went to the St. Louis Science Center to view the IMAX movie "Flight of the Butterflies." I learned many of the details of the 2,000 mile migration of monarch butterflies. It was a superb story, beautifully filmed. Today, I went to the "Insectarium" at the St. Louis Zoo seeking to mingle with butterflies and take some macro photos. The butterflies were quite trusting, allowing me to often get within a few inches of them. These are amazing animals, stunningly beautiful. IMG_6786 Portraits - zoo ape butterflies IMG_6731 Portraits - zoo ape butterflies [More photos]

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Meet the rat-sized common ancestor of mammals

It lived 66 million years ago, and it might be your ancestor:

Humankind’s common ancestor with other mammals may have been a roughly rat-size animal that weighed no more than a half a pound, had a long furry tail and lived on insects. In a comprehensive six-year study of the mammalian family tree, scientists have identified and reconstructed what they say is the most likely common ancestor of the many species on the most abundant and diverse branch of that tree — the branch of creatures that nourish their young in utero through a placenta. The work appears to support the view that in the global extinctions some 66 million years ago, all non-avian dinosaurs had to die for mammals to flourish.

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Another reason I know that I’m an animal

Goose Bumps. What are they? Radiolab informs us:

1. It traps heat! The air your body heats up gets trapped more effectively when all those hairs are erect, so you've got yourself a nice warm layer of air to prevent against the advancing cold. Mmmm. Cozy town. 2. It makes you look bigger to predators. Poof. I'm giant. I swear. Rowr.
But there's more to the story. Why would an emotional passage in a piece of music cause goose-bumps? Maybe (Radiolab suggests) because the awesomeness of the passage makes us feel small, maybe a little too small, which gets us feeling a big defensive and helpless, making us bring out the goose bumps for reasons #2 above.

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Having more fun with photos using Lightroom 4

Yesterday, my 14 year old daughter JuJu and I spent the entire day at Studio 314 in Midtown St. Louis learning Adobe Lightroom 4. I'd been using Picasa for organizing my photos, and Picasa/Photoshop for processing. Lightroom is an incredible package --it allows you to quickly sort through your photos and also to "develop" them using sophisticated controls that allow for individual tweaks and batch processing. It's a professional tool, and even after a day of studying it and most of a day (today) continuing to study it and use it on my own, I only think I've tapped into 50% of what the program can do. Not that knowing the controls is being proficient at using the program either. I'm sure that I'll be picking up lots of tips and efficiencies over the next six months or so (there are tons of Youtubes and other videos offering instruction in Lightroom). What I've already noticed is that I'm turned some mediocre shots into decent shots and I've turned many decent shots into impressive images. Lightroom offers far more flexibility than the free photo organizing and processing programs out there, such as Picasa and iPhoto. Lightroom 4 is only about $100, so it's well in range of amateur photographers like me. Today I spent a couple hours at the St. Louis Zoo capturing images, so that I could have something interesting to process in Lightroom 4. I'll paste a couple of my photos below, but also offer a gallery (you can get to the gallery by clicking on the title of this post if you don't see it). I invite you to click on the photos below to see them in much better detail. So far, so good. I'm definitely going to incorporate Lightroom into my workflow. [These images were taken a Canon S95 and a Sony HX10V, two modest priced cameras, nothing fancy].

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Plain Broun Wrapper (or, What’s Really In That Bag?)

I thought I might write about something other than politics this morning, but some things are just too there to ignore.  But perhaps this isn’t strictly about politics. Representative Paul Broun of Georgia recently said the following.  I’m pulling the quote from news sources so I don’t get it wrong. “God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. [More . . . ]

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