A Little Dash of Color…

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Photo #341: Purple Alpine FlowerLocation Taken: Powder River Pass, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010

My social phobia is acting up today. I’m as shy as a tiny purple flower in an alpine meadow.

Wait, those flowers are actually pretty bold. They have lots of color and give it their best to shine in the short time they have to grow before the mountains are again covered with snow.

Um, um… I’m as timid as a blade of grass in a lawn, hiding by being the same as everyone else. No, wait, that doesn’t describe me at all.

I know! I’m as reclusive as a bat deep in a cave!

Except bats are social creatures and live in family groups up to millions of bats strong.

Hmmm…

I’m as hidden as a ROCK in a deep dark cave!

That works!

*goes back to hiding in my cave*

  

And Over Here You Can See a Beautiful… back of a car.

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Photo #340: National Park TrafficLocation Taken: Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010

There are some parts of the world that get very… popular in the summer.

The area just south of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks is one of them. We just drove through the area, didn’t even consider stopping at Yellowstone, and we still hit heavy traffic.

We did stop briefly at Grand Teton’s main visitor center. Partly to hit the restroom, partly to see how much it would cost us to just drive through the pretty parts of the park. The answer? Far too much. They only offered a multi-day pass, priced accordingly, and you had to buy it to get in the gates, even if you were going to leave the park in an hour or two.

So we left on the main highway through that area, which was still full of traffic. At least they can’t block off the view of the mountains behind a paywall. And I did find a really good geology book and a really good CD of mixed traditional Native American folk and modern musical sounds (We the People by Brulé, here’s a sample, my favorite from the album), so it wasn’t a complete wash.

Still, visiting places of natural beauty at the same time as thousands of other people somehow strips away half of the natural part of the beauty. Sure, it’s still pretty, but you miss out on the feeling of connecting with the natural world that you get from being alone in the wilderness.

I think it gets lost somewhere between the gas fumes from sitting in traffic and the constant chatter of teens around a fireplace the next campsite over as you try to sleep.

  

Is it Bumpy? Is it Flat? Do the two flavors taste excellent together?

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Photo #339: Bumpy Flat BadlandsLocation Taken: Badlands National Park, South Dakota
Time Taken: June 2010

There are some parts of the world that are very flat.

There are some parts of the world that are very bumpy.

And then there’s the parts of the world that are both at once.

Badlands National Park is in South Dakota, one of the states with vast swaths of grasslands going on for miles. And as you drive in, that’s what you see, flat grasslands.

And then, you slowly realize that the horizon is closer than it used to be.

The land falls off into the complex erosional patterns that make the Badlands into a National Park without a hint of warning. Which isn’t too surprising, since all the Badlands are is the edge of one layer of material eroding away in complex patterns, revealing the layer below.

The tops of both layers are quite nice and flat. Once you look past the carved edifices, the land quickly returns to grasslands stretching to the horizon.

But, for that brief span of land, things are not at all flat.

The place earned its name because it was a bad land to travel through, much less live in. The drop-offs are sudden, the hills are too steep for anything but ankle-breaking, and the soil isn’t that great for farming even. All it was was an irritating bit of land that you’d have to go miles out of your way to get around.

But then the environmental movements that spawned the National Park system cropped up, and all of a sudden the Badlands became a good land for tourism. People came long distances, by train and horse wagon at first, then by airplane and car, just to see this piece of worthless land that just happened to be rather beautiful and unique.

Not that I’m that fond of Badlands National Park, mind you. You need very specific lighting to get enough contrast in this pale rock to really show off the features in a photo. And looking at it from above, which is where a lot of the viewing places are located, is a rather poor angle for the feature. Plus it suffers from the lack of a sense of scale that photography enforces on land features this large.

It is possible to get excellent photos of this place, I’m sure. But you have to get down into the twists and turns to get a good angle, and then either wait for the right light or manipulate it some with some artificial lights. Which, alas, is not what someone just stopping in for a few photos in the hour allotted for such things can manage.

  

Ahh, the Joys of Small Towns!

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Photo #338: Small Fishing TownLocation Taken: Trout River, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

I love little fishing towns, especially northern ones. They’re so picturesque!

Well, mostly because northern lands in general are pretty, especially the parts that can’t support larger towns. Pretty rocks aren’t so good for growing plants, after all. And fishing can only support so many, so only a few people stick around the towns, keeping them quaint and small.

And some areas, like here, aren’t the best for tree growth either. So you get a lot of grass and low-lying trees, which creates great sight lines. And the high winds off of the ocean that trees block in other parts of the world can just blow magnificently through the tall grass!

Of course, since there’s a lot more space for houses than you’d have in a town that had to squeeze in as many people as it could, people just build on whatever spot gives them the best combination of view and access. So the houses are spaced out amongst the hills in semi-random patterns, adding nice splashes of color without adding too many lines that aren’t natural.

And of course, the rolling hills themselves are marvelous for photos. Especially facing a lovely ocean view like this one. And the colors that Newfoundlanders paint their houses are quite vivid. You can paint quite vibrantly if you don’t have to worry about day after day of sunny, cloud-free weather that dims the paint quickly like other parts of the world have to deal with.

Doesn’t it just sound like paradise?

  

An Electrifyingly Pretty Photo of an Iris

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Photo #337: Pretty IrisLocation Taken: Trout River, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

Nothing special about this photo, other than being a magnificent picture of an iris I found a few photos away from the photo I posted yesterday.

I have a tendency to post photos close to each other because the program I use to sort my photos automatically opens up the last folder I was looking at when I get it running each day. And it shows about twenty photos at a time. Since I tend to pick by randomly looking through my photos until I find one that says “I have something you can talk about”, I’m much more likely to pick a photo close to my last one, simply because that’s where I start looking.

So today it’s an iris on the same beach as yesterday’s photo. It might even be IN yesterday’s photo, since that had a bunch of irises. Tomorrow I’ve got a better than average chance of picking another Newfoundland picture, with the highest chance being a photo from the same beach.

That reminds me of a cute statistics trick I read in a book once.

Let’s say there’s a completely random occurrence, say lightning hitting your house (which actually isn’t completely random in real life, but we’re going to analogyland here). On average lightning hits your house about once a month. (I guess you either live in a lightning-prone area or have an extremely tall lightning rod or something.)

So, the once a month lightning strike just hit your house today. What day is it most likely for it to strike your house next?

Did you say “a month from now” or “a few days from now” or the like? Those are the standard answers, after all.

The real answer, however, is tomorrow.

And it will always be tomorrow, no matter how long ago the previous strike was. Well, unless it’s “later today”, but the analogy seems to assume that you only get one strike a day max. Just roll with it.

If that seems odd to you, you’re in good company. I mean, if it strikes once a month and just hit today, why is it likely to hit again so soon?

It comes from a trick in the phrasing and in the odd aspects of a truly random distribution of events.

The trick, of course, is asking when the NEXT strike will hit. This means, if a lightning struck both tomorrow and a month from now, the “tomorrow” would be the one to count, and the other would not. In order for the one a month from now to count, lightning would have to not strike any of the days in between.

To toss some math in there, if there was a 3.33% chance for lightning to strike each day (that’s 1/30, in case you’re wondering), that would be the exact chance for lightning to strike next the next day (again, analogyland only allows one strike per day, in reality we’d be talking milliseconds not days). For the next strike to hit two days from now, the base chance for lightning to strike at all would still be 3.33%, but the chance for it to be the NEXT strike would be reduced by about 3.33% (the chance for it to hit the previous day) and thus drop the chance to 3.22% that two days from now would be the next strike. That’s about one tenth of one percent difference, but it is a difference The next day gets dropped a bit more , and a bit more and so on. So while there’s a 96.6666% chance that the lightning will not strike tomorrow, it’s still more likely than the 96.78% chance the next day, which is better than the next day, and so on.

It still feels wrong to those of us who expect random patterns to have, well, a pattern. Our brains see a cluster of data (like five lightning strikes in a week) and say “something must be up, that’s not matching a once-per-month pattern!” But we don’t fully appreciate how much that ever-decreasing chance that the next strike might take two months, or a year, or 1000 years to strike evens out the average.

After all, if someplace isn’t struck by lightning in 1000 years, would you believe it really has, on average, one strike per month?