So here I am, up way too late, trying to dig up some political truth.

Politics is tough. I know it was a fiction show, but I have a lot more respect for the process after watching the entire run of West Wing. (Fantastic show, but you have to watch from the very beginning.) There is a lot more to politics than the generalization spewed by pundits, or people who get all their information solely from said pundits. When people add 300 page amendments to 700 page bills, there is no black and white truth when someone votes for or against a bill.

Here's an example of the mess: Jumpstart our Business Strength (JOBS) Act, 05/11/2004. Tons of energy tax breaks that McCain argues against. That's bad right? Read that whole speach.

I hear tons about how McCain votes against renewable energy. But he and Lieberman actually introduced The Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2005. Republicans weren't for it; but he introduced and fought for it. Obama co-sponsored. McCain was a little more verbose and detailed in his introduction.

So whose the climate bad-guy and whose the good-guy? Neither.

These are just a couple examples, of course. But I'm coming to the idea that Dawn may be right (as she often is) that no matter who wins this year, things will be fine, albeit in their own way.

I'm not quite that optimistic; I think there are chances for massive failure on both sides.

Giuliani said, "Change is not a destination, and hope is not a strategy." But both candidates seem to want to change. And probably there is a little hope for each.

I might rename the blog, "OMG we're going to die." Or I might just stop reading articles titled "Another Ice Shelf Collapses."

"The most important thing to note about it in the big picture, these patches of unusual shelf ice have been there for 4,500 years, and they are choosing this year to break up and drift away," said Ted Scambos, an ice shelf scientist with the National Snow and Data Center who was not directly involved with Mueller's research. "That tells us that the events going on in the arctic are very unusual, at least in the space of the last few thousand years."

Seriously though, I told myself I was going to stop reading articles like this when I found an page on Wikipedia titled "Holocene extinction event" some years ago. --Basically it suggests that we're in the midst of the largest mass extinction event to date. Hooray.

A more credible article states, "As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year — which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. (See "The Sixth Extinction", Niles Eldredge> and "How Will the Sixth Extinction Affect Evolution of Species," Norman Myers and Andrew Knoll.)

This seems to have been a topic several years ago. I haven't read much more on it recently. But really, you shouldn't measure extinction in species-per-hour. Of course, maybe they just have no idea what they're talking about. But here are the credentials of one scientist:

"Norman Myers is a Fellow at Green College, Oxford University, and has acted as scientific consultant and policy adviser to the White House, U.S. Departments of State and Defense, NASA, the World Bank, seven United Nations agencies, and the European Commission. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Art and Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Arts. Dr. Myers is the originator of the biodiversity “hotspots” strategy, which has generated over $300 million for conservation activities."

Anyway, I told myself I wasn't going to read any more -- and that includes the wave of articles that comes out from the BBC about global warming. Every day it's something new. Ah heck. Let's journey over to the "Science" section and take a look tonight...

Not too bad tonight:

The Good
Sea level rise by 2100 'below 2m'
Germany leads 'clean coal' pilot

The Bad
Warming boosts strongest storms [[I think we knew this one.]]
More fish off the 'green' menu
Major ice-shelf loss for Canada

But anyway, you get the picture. I wasn't going to read any more, but I did. It's just hard to tune out some of those catchier headlines.

You know, I really don't like Palin. I know why McCain brought her on, but she's kind of a poop, and it is making it much hard for me to vote for him. That being said, she had some good things say about Alaska's place in an national energy policy:

"Alaska should be a leader in this plan because we have the conventional, the non-renewable supplies, the petroleum. We have them up here. Again, the hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean natural gas, the buildings of barrels of oil. We have the renewables also. We have the largest tides on the continent, we have the geothermal, we have the winds. We have all these alternative renewable source that all can be tapped into as we work collectively and comprehensively on an energy pan. We need to be doing everything, and people need to be realistic also."

I don't know how far you can send electricity without losing it all to attenuation, but Alaksa could be a powerhouse for alternative energy production.

But never mind all that, I need to read more Gizmodo and less, er, science news. Gizmodo makes me happy.

It's all good.

This weekend has been pretty low key for us. Dawn had a lot of homework, and her renter's moved in this weekend -- so we haven't had much in the way of adventure. However, today we snuck out to Selby Garens.

Last October we bought an annual pass to Sunken Gardens that included free admission to a litney of other gardens as well. And sadly, we haven't been using it. But today we put that to rest and adventured out to a new place.

I have to say it's not as big as I thought it would be. But there were plenty of neat flowers and plants, and of course we brought a camera and some lenses.

I'm coming to the conclusion that natural light photography for plants isn't the way to go if you want commercial quality results. To get a good depth of field, you need a small aperture. But with the small aperture comes a longer shutter speed, and even if you use a tripod, you still content with wind moving the plants. Of course, you could try to clamp them down, but I think that would be a bridge too far for most places -- never mind that you could damage the plants, and I don't think it would be 100% effective.

So, that leaves us with bringing plants into a studio setting, or setting up several strobes outside. And both options are no-go's for touring various gardens, unless you've been hired or purchased a permit.

Still, I think there is value and aesthetic in "natural light" botanical photography. NLB Photography. I totally just made that up.

I've found that I've been desaturating my flower pictures. If you wait for nice light, or have a trusty photo-assistant block out as much ambient light as possible, you really get some crazy highly saturated pictures. I'd leave em as is but people are so keen nowadays on artificially adding saturation that I'm afraid they won't seem real or natural.








This guy was awesome. In the full-size picture, the details and moss are really neat. I wasn't sure I'd like the picture with the blown out background, but I think it works quite well.



I would like to have shot this next plant with some off-camera flash. This is the only one that I used flash on in this post. You can really tell with the hard shadows, but I think it actually gives it a little something too. Regardless, she was hanging out in the bright sunlight and needed the extra light. I took a 2nd shot with the background blown out, but it didn't look good at all.



I'm afraid something was wrong with this poor squirrel. I've never seen one lay down like this. He wasn't on his belly the whole time, in fact had hopped over the bridge and onto this rail, but he seemed to prefer being on his belly and sometimes crawling along. Dawn and I decided to head back the way we came after grabbing a shot.




Also in photography, my 17-55 lens is cracked. That would be the one I dropped on the cement and then briefly into a pool at my last wedding. --Just noticed it today. Admirably, it still takes pictures, and they seem to be fine. (I can't tell if may there is a bit more chromatic aberration than before.) Still, I'll have to send it in for repair this week.

And last but not least, in photos, things that trouble me: The weather.



Though, I do love the smell and feel of hurricane winds -- especially small, relatively harmless storms, class 1 or 2 hurricanes, or ones that just aren't going to hit me. Something about the temperature or humidity that reminds me of growing up, something that makes Florida home. (The big summer clouds and thunderstorms are like that for me too.)

Also troubling, from an article that I found while reading up on Gutav earlier: Blackwater. One part of me thinks this is just economics in action. And maybe my imagination is just running away from me, but the other part of me thinks that having a highly trained, well armed, private army for hire is a really bad idea -- and bad enough that it should be illegal.

I have a wicked bad headache from earlier today. I made the mistake of letting myself get a little dehydrated during the trip to the gardens, so it could be because of that. But man! It's 1am and it still hurts, though less so after some Advil and then aspirin. Hopefully it will be gone in the morning.

Brookings writes, based on information from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades."

Here's the watered down Washington Post article.

Too late to go back to school for engineering. Maybe I can become a lobbyist or something. :-/

Well, it was too good to be true. A couple quiet years for hurricanes and then "blam!" I knew we were in trouble about a month ago when Dawn and I took a trip to the beach and the water was like a sauna. Maybe I'm making things up, and maybe I just tend to stay indoors during the summer, but I really don't remember feeling water like that.

I was just talking to Dawn on the phone and telling her that I feel about global warming the way I felt about nuclear war growing up. It scares the hell out of me.

And there isn't a whole lot I can do about it except be a single-issue voter this year for the candidate I think will have the strongest energy policy as president. And right now I think that's McCain. Obama didn't even have anything on his election site about energy until McCain started running his big ad on the subject. The Obama camp followed quickly with a 30 minute clip on their website of a (pretty lame) speech Obama had made on the campaign trail. It took 'em just under a week to get their own ad together.

I really, really, really want to like Obama. And I think we might make some headway with same-sex marriage and "don't ask, don't tell." But I think the country is being spoon-fed everything they want to hear after 8 horrendous years with Bush in office.

Dawn and I were talking about the race a couple days ago. "Is McCain too hawkish on Iran?" And what about his personality? I saw a video clip of McCain meeting the Dalai Lama where it looked like he wanted to gnaw off his own arm to get away. And if you can't make nice with the Dalai Lama who can you get along with? On the other hand, will Obama have the balls to stand up to countries like an aggressive Russia, or to Iran if they turn out to be the problem McCain thinks they are? And we've already seen Obama flip-flop on offshore drilling. --Funny how the game changes once you have to start getting things done (i.e. playing politics) instead of telling everyone what they want to hear.

Still, it's going to all come down to energy policy for me this year. McCain apparently wants to develop alternative energy and then sell the technology overseas. That's smart: One, we need the tech ourselves. Two, a new export would help our economy. Three, we need to keep the developing countries from repeating our own mistakes. I'd like to read or find out more about that.

Ironically however, it may be the big oil-producing countries that save us. They've already seen the writing on the wall (unlike our own oil companies, damn them all), and are developing alternative energy sources for the day when we need or are ready to move away from oil. We're all certain that we want to end our dependence on foreign oil. What about a new dependence on foreign alternative energy technologies?

I find it oddly reassuring. God knows the world has thrown enough money their way. If anyone has the funding to develop something, they do.

In the meantime, I'll just keep driving the Prius around, using the good light bulbs, and let Dawn turn out all the lights at night to save power. But I wish I could figure out a more active role to play in the fight against global warming.