I have fantasized over this shot for years, but was never able to put it together on my own. Then I find The Photographer’s Ephemeris, I look it up, the next opportunity is in a couple of days, that was a couple of days ago, and here’s the shot.
Ignore the dark shadows; the photo was taken at noon on a bright sunny day. I had to goose the contrast so you could see the moon at all, and that darkened the foreground. The day moon can be reasonably bright high in the sky, but on the horizon it’s a different story. The good news is that this situation happens potentially twice a month, and it won’t always be a bright sunny day. (Sometimes it will be dark night, and you won’t see the tower at all except in silhouette, if yu get the time and place exactly right.)
Nikon Coolpix P900 at 83x zoom. Contrast enhanced.
This gallery contains 3 photos.
Outside my home office window is horizontal tree branch, just the right size for a squirrel to hang out on, but it was always just a little too busy, a little too much traffic for them to be comfortable there … Continue reading
This is a response to an article from brainpickings, about how our internal critic holds us back from realizing our full potential, and becoming our true selves.
This article was first published in the spring of 2016. It resonates with me. It is similar to what my therapist has been saying all these years. It seems intuitively true. But in the winter of 2020, it seems to be advocating that everyone become more like Donald Trump, a man with no functioning internal critic at all. It seems like the reviewer is on a cold mountain slope, looking toward the happy valley from one side, and sees clearly the dangers on her own mountain. But she doesn’t recognize the dangers of the other mountain, of too little self-criticism.
To be fair, she does come back, at the end, to the idea that you need a balance, and that too little self-criticism is bad too. So does the author she is reviewing. But the whole emotional thrust of the review and the article that inspired it is that we criticize ourselves too much. After that, the nod to balance feels like lip service. It feels like the superego taking back control after letting them go on their little rant about how the superego is so bad. Despite railing against it, they are still in its powerful grip. Because if they were not, then they would be advocating that we be more like Donald Trump.
It may say something about Trump’s appeal, though. People recognize the danger of too much self-criticism—or they just get tired of it—but they don’t know how to stop, or it takes too much emotional work to stop. It’s much easier to latch on to a leader who exhibits the qualities we want, than to work to develop those qualities in ourselves.
So, an interesting article, whose unbalanced nature has been revealed by the march of time. But it is unsatisfying, and unbalanced, in another way too.
The internal critic resembles what in eastern religions is called the monkey mind. And yet it is not the same thing. That part of Donald Trump which tells him to do and say outrageous things is also part of the monkey mind, but is different from the internal critic; in fact the opposite of the internal critic. And there are more. The internal frat boy. The internal supplicant, hat in hand. The internal bon vivant. The internal miser. The internal saint. The internal asshole. All of them are part of the monkey mind.
The problem with the internal critic is not that it is a critic, but that it is internal. We need the critic, hence the half-hearted call for balance at the end. But we don’t need the constant cacophony of internal voices pulling us this way and that, burying us in our own heads, isolating us from the real world around us.
The review, and presumably the article it is based on, does not mention the solution to the problem they raise: meditation. Rather than strive for a delicate balance along one dimension, reduce or eliminate all the voices.
4 minutes before sunrise
https://dailycaller.com/2014/03/04/top-5-failed-snow-free-and-ice-free-predictions/
In a Facebook discussion, I was recently provided this article as evidence that scientists have made failed predictions about climate change, therefore they are not to be trusted. Here is my response.
Thanks for the link. But it doesn’t convince me. First of all, climate science, like all science, is inexact at any given time, but our knowledge is constantly growing. So failed predictions from 10 or 20 years ago are not very relevant to what scientists are saying now. Also, when scientists make estimates, some are going to be high, some are going to be low, some are going to be close to the mark. To cherry-pick one side, while ignoring what the bulk of scientists say, is a dishonest argument. Thirdly, weather is not climate. Short term weather conditions have a lot of randomness in them. Longer-term, larger-scale predictions are more reliable. Climate change is a well-established theory.
That said, let’s look at that article’s 5 points.
1. First link broken, perhaps because it is almost 20 years old. See my first point above. Second link: yes meteorologists are notoriously wrong. Except, we keep demanding predictions from them, because they are less wrong than random guessing.
Also, a prediction like “kids will grow up without snow” is obviously a long-term prediction, so we don’t even know yet if this prediction is wrong.
2. It’s been 10 years since scientists predicted … See my first point.
“‘Adam Watson, from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, believes the industry has no more than 20 years left,’ the Guardian reported.” This prediction has not yet been falsified.
3. (On this point I specifically reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline.) Note that this article was published 5 years ago. Sea ice in the arctic has been declining since since 2015, after your article was pubished.
Also, Al Gore is not a scientist, and Dr. Maslowski disagrees with Gore’s interpretion of Maslowski’s work: “Dr Wieslav Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, whom Gore apparently used as source, disagreed with Gore’s forecast and told The Times: ‘It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,’ and instead clarified his forecast called for ‘a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.'”
Further, the bulk of scientists predict this further away than Maslowski does: “Models that best match historical trends project a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer by the 2030s. However, these models do tend to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss since 2007. Based on the outcomes of several different models, Overland and Wang (2013) put the early limit for a sea ice free summer Arctic near 2040.”
4. “Environmentalists predicted the end of spring snowfall. In March 2013, the Union of Concerned Scientists predicted that warmer springs would mean declines in snow cover.” These two sentences are contradictory. (“end” is not “declines”) Also, the next paragraph also belies the lead sentence, because it doesn’t contain a prediction at all. So this one is totally dishonest.
5. “There’s going to be good years and there’s going to be god-awful years,” said Terry Root, senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “The globe is warming so rapidly, and variability is increasing so much – both of those things together, I’m glad I don’t have stock in ski areas.”
This is not a time-based prediction, so you cannot say it is false. In fact, it is not false. Some years are good, some years are not. This is a truism for those who live near skiing country, as I do.
The Facebook conversation, for what it’s worth, is at https://www.facebook.com/niall.johnson326/posts/2638687919478711?comment_id=2639359926078177¬if_id=1558783793758159¬if_t=comment_mention.
