this old bike

I spotted this bicycle outside the West Falmouth market while coming home from the beach just after sunset a few weeks ago. At first, I went past it but almost immediately I recognized that it was a picture full of stories and so I turned around and went back to take the shot.  I had to hurry because the day was over and the light was almost gone.

Riding on the bike path through the Sippewissett marshes on summer evenings is fantastic.  When the sun is near the edge of the sky and casting its fading glow over the marsh the crowds retreat to the restaurants and bars in town leaving a quiet that is only broken by birdsong.  The air is cooler and riding a bicycle causes it to flow around my face like a soft caress and it whispers "everything is just the way it should be."  There is a delusion of a wonderful world.  A perfect world.

How many riders, I wondered, were caught up in the same lovely delusion while riding this old bike?  It seemed a shame to throw it out - to give away those memories for free.

I took the picture but left the bike.  Maybe it will take somebody else through the marsh and let them feel the summer breeze on their face and hear it whisper, “everything is just the way it should be.”

Monte

nuclear winter

For a long time I’ve been interested in reading about the origin of the universe and the origin of life on Earth.  My reading about the origin questions led me to read about the evolution of life on Earth and to think about the possibility of life elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy and the universe at large. The scientific story of us is a fabulously interesting subject.

It seems to me that relatively simple single-cell life forms might be all over the universe, but complex multicellular life like we have on Earth may be harder to find.  Intelligent creatures capable of building nuclear bombs may be even more uncommon.  But the universe is a big place and there must be at least some other habitable planets, including some with intelligent creatures something like us humans. What happened to them? Are they still around?  Would creatures achieving human-like technology elsewhere in the universe inevitably face the risk of self-destruction unless they instituted a substantial reshaping of their culture and society to save themselves from themselves?

A lot of smart people here on Earth are talking about exactly this sort of thing confronting human beings right now.  We’ve created several pathways to our self-destruction, like climate change and the possibility of nuclear war.

So-called “Existential Riskography” is a gloomy subject, but it is eerily fascinating.  We are intelligent enough to create the technology with which to build a thriving civilization.  The same technology can also destroy us.  Are we smart enough not to do it?

I want to explore this topic in more depth over this next year.

There are two articles I found today that are worth reading:

1. Nuclear Winter
2. William Perry and the Nuclear Brink

Monte

dancing with waves

The beach is great for people watching.  This girl was there with her mother.  She was running back and forth with the waves, just like we all do when we go to the beach no matter how old we are.   The back-and-forth rhythm is irresistible to people and even to the dogs I watch playing at the water's edge. We automatically fall in with it.  Why?

Something about the way our brains work that recognizes patterns and rhythms and we just go with them.  There must be an evolutionary advantage to this, but I can't imagine what it would be in the case of our love for dancing with waves.  It must be a beneficial behavioral trait to be able to find joy in playfulness and just being silly.

Our existence is so puzzling, so simultaneously tragic and just plain funny.  Can we ever really know ourselves?

Monte

philadelphia marathon

This is my daughter, Lindsay, just past the 26-mile point with less than 0.2 miles to go in the Philadelphia Marathon this past weekend. In this photograph she has just found her mother in the crowd of people cheering the runners and she is veering off course to exchange a "high-five" with mom.

It was cold and windy, which made being outside pretty uncomfortable, but Jenny was not about to miss watching Lindsay run, and I was doing my best to take pictures of the two of them.

I like this one because it's such a perfect representation of who she is - happy, optimistic and determined.

Go Lindsay!

Monte

lottie

I met this woman and her dog, Lottie, yesterday evening on the beach. Doesn't she have a wonderful smile? As she walked toward me I couldn't resist asking if I could take a photograph of her and her dog. I wanted to get an audio recording of her voice, but the wind was so loud and the tide had come in so far that the water was lapping at the feet of my tripod - the noise was just too much to even try recording audio. I did manage to hear her tell me the name of her dog - Lottie.

Sometimes I meet people who just exude happiness and it makes me feel good just seeing them. And, more and more, I am finding the courage to ask if I can take their picture.

Monte

a kiss

I missed focus on this picture and back home at my computer my finger was hovering over the delete key while I mourned the lost shot.  But then I started to feel like the image still had a story in it.

The man had been sitting alone on the steps of the closed beach house before two people and their dogs came walking up the beach.  I was setting up to photograph the walkers when the dogs bolted up the beach toward the man.  His downward gaze lifted and he reached out his arms toward them.  He rubbed their heads and scratched their backs and then they all three shared a kiss.

I was frantically pressing the shutter button of my camera trying to get the picture.  The dogs ran back to their owners and the man watched them leave and then he stared out across the water and then back at the sand in front of his feet.

What’s the story?  Who was he?  Why was he at the beach on this evening?  I don’t know the answers because I don’t know the man, but I can wonder.  Was he there to contemplate something that happened in his life?  Was it something sad or something happy?  Was he there just to feel the ocean and the warmth of the fading light of another day and to marvel at the very idea of being alive?  Was he reflecting on decades of living and feeling just a little bit beat-up and in need of something comforting?

His countenance seemed sad to me until the dogs showed up and he brightened with their embrace.

In this photograph the man and the dogs are captured sharing love with each other - something all sentient creatures want to do.  That’s easy to forget from inside the emptiness I feel after being assaulted by the hate and anger filling the daily news.

In this out-of-focus picture I see a story about something good in us, something worth holding on to.

Monte

taking pictures

Out at the beach in the late afternoon today doing a time lapse of the clouds and photographing people.  I live in a place with more beaches than streets and so beach photography is my version of street photography.

I liked the image of this family  saving a happy moment with a photograph.  It's a classic beach scene with  bare feet, rolled up jeans and adoring parents posing their kids for a picture that will live for decades in a family photo album.

Monte

looking for something

When these two women walked past me at the beach I made the assumption that they were a mother-daughter combination and I thought they might be a picture worth taking. I didn’t photograph them right away.  I was there to photograph the surfers but the acrobatics going on across the waves were not enough to keep me from watching the two of them as they walked away from me.  The older woman struck a classic image of a cape cod beachcomber with her flowing, untucked, white shirt and her cotton pants rolled up to reveal bare feet.  This wasn’t her first walk on the beach.

Something out in the water caught their attention and they stopped to look at it.  The figure of the woman, arm raised and finger pointing, with a warm glow of late afternoon sun lighting her face and reflecting off her silver hair, reminded me of something I’d recently read.

Vincent Van Gogh talked about walking on a beach in a letter to his brother, Theo, in 1882.

“How good it is to walk along an empty beach and look at the gray-green sea with its long, white streaks of waves, when you are feeling depressed.”

Van Gogh found something at the beach that lifted his spirits and he wanted to share it with his brother.  People everywhere, and for all time, have found the same solace at the ocean.

The moment the woman raised her arm and made me remember Van Gogh’s letter I saw her image as a metaphor and it became the picture I wanted to take.  We walk on the beach because we are looking for something.

Monte

after labor day

The tourists have left and the locals are reclaiming the beach. The off-season is my favorite part of the year (except for the really cold part of winter). But, even in the cold of winter the beaches, by their emptiness, have a special feel that I prefer to the crowds of summer.

Monte

33 years

Anniversary picture (selfie) at Chapoquoit beach on our 33rd anniversary.

beach people-erica

Out at Chapoquoit beach this afternoon doing a time-lapse.  When I set up a lot of camera gear on the beach people wonder what I'm doing.  It's sort of fun to not immediately let on that I'm not an accomplished photographer working on an assignment for some popular publication.  Fairly quickly, however, I have to reveal that I'm just a guy with a camera taking photographs for the fun of it.

For a long time, I've wanted to have another camera with me to take a portrait of people that talk to me and an audio recorder to record their voices.  Today I was equipped in exactly this way.  

Erica walked out onto the beach soon after I started my time-lapse and started talking to me.  After a while I told her about my idea for starting a portrait gallery of people I meet while taking pictures and she agreed to be the first subject.  It was probably a lot easier to convince Erica to be photographed because she’s involved with documentary filmmaking and so a project like mine seems like an obvious thing to do.  I suspect other people I meet on the beach will be less enthusiastic.

Monte

reflected boat

It's Cape Cod and everybody takes pictures of the boats in the harbors. This picture was taken about 20-minutes before sunset at Quisett harbor in Falmouth.

I used my Olympus EM-1 with a 40-150 mm lens.  Camera settings were: 1/1250th of a second, f2.8 and ISO 0f 250.

Monte

getting closer

Today I moved closer to the flowers.  The first time the bird came to the garden she was unsure about me and left quickly.  I waited until she came back and stayed long enough for me to get some shots.

This was taken with a Nikon 200-500 mm lens at 500 mm (750 mm equivalent) at f6.3, 1/2500th of a second, and ISO at 1600.  The camera was a Nikon D7200.  I was standing about six feet away from the flower and the camera was on a tripod with a gimbal head.

Monte

a regular guest

This little guy visits my garden every afternoon just after 4:00 PM.  I have to work fast to capture his (her?) image because he/she doesn't linger.  Occasionally I've seen another hummingbird at the same time.

Busy humans seldom notice how abundant and varied life is on Earth.  There is no place else in our solar system that has the variety of life we have here.  There are some candidates among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that may have life in giant oceans underneath a thick layer of ice, but what kind of life and how many different forms might there be?  Mars may have once had life and maybe still does in the form of single-celled organisms. But there is no place like Earth, at least not anywhere close.

What would it feel like to see a digital image of a hummingbird buzzing past a flower sent to us from a space probe exploring another world?  I can imagine it would be so overwhelming that we would choke on the lump in our throats; be blinded by the tears in our eyes, and unable to find the words to express the wonder in the image before us.

Monte

house finch

I like the dandelions that fill up my yard in the spring and the birds, like this house finch, they attract.

Monte

northern flicker

It was snowing/raining all day today, which made it bad for photography.  I did manage to take some photos of a pair of Northern Flicker woodpeckers (Colaptes auratus according to the Audubon website) looking for insects to eat in the snow-sprinkled grass of my backyard.  Spring is coming, but winter always puts up a fight at the end.

Monte

the meaning in an image

This image was created from a photograph I took of the base of the mailbox in front of my house on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.  I noticed it this morning while taking Bevo out for his walk.  I used a Photoshop plugin from Topaz Labs to give it the appearance of a colored pencil drawing.

Most people would not consider this a very interesting picture.  If they paid attention to it at all they would probably ask - why?

This morning was a quiet, sunny morning and when I saw the uncut grass framing the base of the post holding up my mailbox I remembered sunny mornings on my grandfather's farm in a rural part of South Texas.  I loved the scenes on his farm, including fences with grass growing around the posts, and fields with cows and scattered wildflowers in the spring.  I was standing in the street in front of my house while Bevo sniffed a pile of crinkled dead leaves; and I was staring at this beat-up post with its unruly grass garnish and remembering how I used to feel safe and happy walking around the farm feeling the sun warming my body and listening to the soft staccato melodies of chirping birds accompanied by distant rumblings of a tractor on another farm somewhere out-of-sight.  Time drifted slowly for me then.  I never imagined anything would change, and I didn't want anything to change.

Those days are decades in the past and more than a thousand miles away.  My grandfather died when I was sixteen and the small farm where he lived was sold. I never saw it again. This simple image took me back across time and distance and made me feel happy, so I took a photograph of it.  Isn't it so interesting how our brain can make so much out of something so apparently meaningless?

Monte

my buddy ben

My good friend Ben kite surfing at Chapoquoit beach.  He uses a rig that has a surf board with no straps, which requires a hefty amount of skill.

Monte

some facts about gun violence

The gun violence issue in The USA is complicated and I readily concede that it will not likely be solved anytime soon, if ever. There is no easy way to fix the problem, especially if we can’t agree that there is a problem or what exactly the problem is.

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and between 35 – 50% of all the civilian-owned guns in the world. Reference this article from the Atlantic Magazine:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/americas-top-killing-machine/384440/

There are more guns here than most anywhere else, and that’s important because there is a clear connection with the number of guns and the number of violent crimes, and this is related to legally obtained guns. This relationship is true across affluent nations and also true between states in the United States – where there are more guns there are more murders committed with guns. Reference this research from the Harvard School of Public Health:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/

Interestingly, the number of gun murders in the USA declined sharply between 1993 and 2001, dropping by 49%. Reference this research by the Pew Research Center :

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/firearms_final_05-2013.pdf

However, the decline in gun murders stopped in 2001 and has remained around 3 gun murders per 100,000 people in the USA, which is still the highest in the world and more than 3 times higher than the next western country on the list, Switzerland, at just under 1 gun murder per 100,000 people. Great Britain, where there are strong gun control laws and far fewer guns, has something like 0.1 gun murders per 100,000 people. Reference this article in the Washington Post, which has a nice graphic display of the data for gun-related murders in wealthy nations:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/18/you-have-to-see-how-many-more-people-are-killed-by-guns-in-america-to-really-believe-it/

Gun murders in the USA in 1993 were around 7 per 100,000 population compared to a steady 3.6 – 3.8 per 100,000 every year since 2001. In 2010 the total number of gun-related deaths in America was 31,672, and most of these were from suicide at 19,392 deaths leaving 12,280 gun-related deaths as murders. Most of the gun murders in our country do not occur in the attention-getting disasters of mass shootings in public places, which account for less than 1% of all homicides. (See the same citation for the Pew Research Center above).

The same PEW research paper mentions a few possible explanations for the substantial, but stalled, decline in gun murders; But the reality is that there are multiple possible factors driving this decline and no single reason will suffice. Some experts have suggested better police efforts, but this has been hard to substantiate. The PEW research paper points out that the biggest group of gun-murder victims, and presumably gun-murder perpetrators, is young men, and over the past several decades the population of young American men has fluctuated up and down, possibly influencing gun violence rates.

There are some unexpected explanations offered for the decline in gun violence, like the impact of abortion. This idea makes the case that there have been fewer young men in the peak age range for gun violence after 1993 because abortion was legalized in 1973 thus fewer unwanted babies were born into the bad socioeconomic conditions that foster criminal behavior. Likewise, another suggestion is that our higher rates of incarceration are keeping more potentially violent young men in jail and thus unable to commit violent crimes. Another intriguing idea is that environmental laws passed in the early 1970’s that reduced the amount of lead in gasoline resulted in lower lead levels in children and consequently lower rates of brain damage that could have led to mental illnesses predisposing these kids to violent behavior later in life. All of this is covered in the PEW research article I referenced above.

The assertion was made to me that the gun violence problem was ultimately related to the fall in religious commitment among Americans, which is a shocking suggestion since we are easily the most religious nation in the western world and, as already confirmed, we have, by far, the highest gun-murder rate of all the wealthy nations in the world. But I felt obliged to look into the claim that if we just started forcing children to pray to a Christian God in public schools without regard for their freedom to believe in a different God, or no God at all, all our problems would be solved. In the United States the most violent region with the highest number of assault-related deaths is the South. The least violent region with the fewest assault-related deaths is the Northeast. See the same Washington Post article as above at this link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/18/11-essential-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states/?tid=pm_business_pop_b

The data for religiosity, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, are exactly the reverse. The Southern United States blows the rest of us away in its religious fervor and the less violent, less deadly Northeast (especially New England) is much less religious and practically crawling with nasty nonbelievers. See this data from Gallup:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/167267/mississippi-religious-vermont-least-religious-state.aspx

Lack of religion is almost certainly not what drives our gun-murder rate. And I’ll resist the temptation to connect these dots and claim that religion is a driver of violent behavior – because that would not be a scientific conclusion with the limited data I have presented. But more research on this relationship would be welcome.

I don’t have the answer to our gun violence problem, and neither does anybody else. Gun laws won’t eliminate gun deaths, but they do help. States with stricter gun laws have fewer gun-related deaths – see the same Washington Post article at this link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/18/11-essential-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states/?tid=pm_business_pop_b

Another less discussed issue that President Obama mentioned in his speech yesterday is that there has been an active suppression of research on gun violence. The kind of research from the CDC that would inform the construction of rational gun control laws is being actively suppressed by, of course, the NRA (and other gun advocacy groups, I’m sure). See these two links:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/why-the-cdc-still-isnt-researching-gun-violence-despite-the-ban-being-lifted-two-years-ago/

http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx

Actively suppressing scientific research that is bad for business is nothing new in the United States. The tobacco industry did it with the link between smoking and cancer. The fossil fuel industry does it with the link between their product and climate change, and the gun industry, via their champion the NRA, does it with gun violence.   No matter which side of any issue you are on as a citizen of this great nation you are being wronged when efforts are made to suppress knowledge that you can use to make informed decisions.

Citizens fighting with each other about the most important issues facing our country, and dividing themselves into opposing groups that develop a deeply held hatred for each other, is the consequence of carefully crafted political strategy funded by unscrupulous industries that care about nothing but their profits. The only weapon we have to fight back is untainted information, which we can use to have rational conversations with each other and build working plans to achieve solutions. And this, I fear, is way more difficult than it should be. But let’s try anyway.

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Monte

guns

Today, October 1, 2015, there was another school shooting in the USA, this time at a community college in Oregon. I read in one news report that this makes 40 school shootings in 2015 alone and 142 school shootings since Sandy Hook in 2012. Do my friends on Facebook think, as I do, that the only acceptable number of school shootings per year is zero?

We all know how the news coverage of this shooting is going to play out: A flurry of angry arguments from both sides of the gun control issue and then, all-too-quickly, the incident will fade from the public dialogue to be replaced with some other hot topic – like a celebrity drug or sex scandal.

In the coming days we will be hearing the suggestion from a lot of people that the answer to public massacres is to have students and teachers, and movie goers, and grocery shoppers, and joggers, and golfers, and basically everybody carry a gun in the classroom, or wherever they go, so they can shoot back when a maladjusted jerk with a gun shows up. I want to go on record as saying that when our political leaders talk about ideas like this as if they really make sense, we are all just f—king screwed.

In spite of all the catchy slogans about people, guns, and who or what is responsible for the killing, one truth is clear: Nobody can shoot anybody unless they have a gun.

See the chart of gun-related homicides (this data does not include gun-related suicides and accidental gun deaths) in the USA versus terrorism deaths in the attached article.

Consider that of these 10,000 – 13,000 gun homicides occurring every year in the USA the victims are usually, if not always, innocent people – not bad guys. Guns kill.

Read this article which contains an excellent graphic comparing annual gun homicide deaths in the USA to annual terrorism deaths in the USA.

Monte