Owners of images

If you get down to it, nothing we do is truly original. I take influence (with due respect and deference) from every photographer whose work I have ever seen. I also could possibly credit my photography professor in 1999, Dr. (whose name escapes me). Every artist I know takes can take credit for the establishment of conventions from former artists- from how to cut the matte board to taking advantage of known aesthetic preferences such as the 2/3 rule to using burn-and-dodge.

However, reading several random blogs lately has caused me to collect another pet peeve (it seems so un-me to have pet-peeves) [another aside- my other pet- peeve is having to say goodnight to random restaurant hostesses as I leave a restaurant even though I have never met them in my life]. Getting to the point, several that I have read lately have used OTHER PEOPLE'S PHOTOGRAPHS in some sort of pseudo-hip montage of images that they like. One of them had some really neat new-age music playing to "his" photos of urban Tokyo that I was really enjoying. These two blogs that I'm thinking of mentioned only later on or in another post ("again, these are not my images"...) that these images were not their own. How much was I suddenly disappointed with my fellow human being, as fast as I was impressed by him, when I saw that statement?

I find no fault with homage, or with illustrating a point using a stock image or illustration, but I think these cases cross the line from art appreciation to plagarism.

The blogosphere unfolds as it will, and the essence of this space is that there are no rules and people can express whatever they want. Build whatever persona they want. However, it seems to be with the intention of advancing one-self by creating this larger, more chic, more edgy and more artistic self do these people post art that is not theirs...

Needless to say, all images here (with the exception of the pen-and-graph graphic) are my own.

Speaking of budburst

A few weeks after the rains and I'm a little late checking out the flowers. A trip to the desert helping out another student convinced me it was the last chance to see the spring wildflowers here in Southern California.

So I headed out to Joshua Tree with a friend, to the northern part, but ended up seeing more as we headed home through the southern part.

Here are just a few of the highlights.

Tracing the ebbs and flows of ecosystems

I was looking for data at the USGS site when I came across a link to a new National Phenology Network.It's about time that we started tracing the so-called "Pulses of our Planet." This will be a massive amount of information.

Like many newer technologies being used in natural sciences and land management, this type of information has been collected by amateurs (Maine Nature News) and professionals alike over the past few centuries (going back to Franklin, Thoreau and Leopold) and perhaps millenia. Just as tools in GIS technology developed to automate tasks like overlaying maps over a light-table or a window, this is hopefully the start of a large dataset that we can all use to look at the changes in our natural world.

A citizen-input site started last year out of the project's working group, Project Budburst. This year they hope to expand this.

So, this spring, watch the buds burst along with scientists!

In news from across the universe

I just read an article on CNN entitled sensationally "Star explodes halfway across universe."

Two lines down, they mention that this star is 7.5 billion light years away. They mention that this was able to be seen from earth. What is wrong with this headline?

It hit me right away-- if we are seeing on EARTH something that is billions of light years away, that's OLD NEWS for sure!!! "Explodes" in the current tense implies a current event... certainly this a case where this is unquestionably NOT current news.

Truly it is amazing to see something that happened 7.5 billion years ago. Before our earth was a twinkle in the eye of the universe!!

Hail!!

I was heading home from a birthday party when it was thunder, lightening and hail! We knew it was coming, especially on the dog walk when the wind got really chilly suddenly and huge dark clouds moved in.

It wasn't until 11pm that the storm hit- just in time for me to be driving home. I had the good luck (?) of hitting the same storm twice-- I outran it driving home and then it hit once I got home!

I've never had that experience. I'm fairly sure that it was the same storm because each time it had the same characteristic two one-minute-long "pulses" of hail associated with it. I'm pretty terrified of lightening storms and I'm glad that we don't get them too often.

Another California harvest

Another batch of goodies for helping other people out. A lab-mate does research on artichoke thistle and I headed out today to help her measure her plants. On the edge of her plots, she has planted border rows, which are normally to ensure that there are no "edge effects" on the growth of the study plants. Since her artichoke thistles are related, and may be partially descended from feral crop, she has planted border rows of horticultural varieties all of the same species. These include globe artichoke, and cardoon. Lucky for us, some of the flowers are early!

She said that it's rare to have artichoke and asparagus at the same time.

We're just about to steam them. Mmmm.

The avocados and star fruit were just a random bonus from other projects. Often folks need to plant a large amount to take only a few samples, and have way too many to use, but too few to sell.

Cheers to that!

One picture to get us all by...

A bloom in an unlikely place is always uplifting.
Like this flower I saw in Death Valley (Geraea canescens).

I think I need this flower to get me through this week. Such power!

On a lighter note

Fractals in flowers and fields

Consider what this picture has in common with the next two.

"The term ‘fractal’ (from the Latin fractus, meaning ‘broken’), introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot about
25 years ago, is used to characterize spatial and/or temporal phenomena that are continuous but not
differentiable. Geometrically, a fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided
into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole...
"Fractal properties include self-similarity or affinity, scale symmetry, scale independence or invariance,
heterogeneity, complexity, and infinite length or detail...
"Fractal theory offers methods for describing the inherent irregularity of natural objects. In fractal analysis, the Euclidean concept of ‘length’ is viewed as a process. This process is characterized by a constant parameter D known as the fractal (or fractional) dimension."

Li, Bai-Lian. 2002. "Fractal dimensions"in Encyclopedia of Environmetrics. Abdel H. El-Shaarawi and Walter W. Piegorsch, eds. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester,Volume 2, pp 821–825

These are concepts that I'm learning and just beginning to understand. Heterogeneity here appears somewhat self-similar, although ecological patterns are often actually scale co-variant. For your consideration.

Next post will not include more flowers, I promise!