Admidst foul-smelling mists, a colorful surprise.

Posted on by

Photo #493: Artists PaintpotsLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012

There’s a geothermal feature at Yellowstone called Artist’s Paintpots, and well, this is why.

That’s a spectacularly vibrant yellow-orange in that one flow, and a marvelous red in the other, don’t you think?

I’m pretty sure I actually do have those colors in my paint collection.

*checks*

Yup, that yellow-orange is pretty close to my “Yellow Mid” color, and that red is almost identical to my “Cinnabar”.

Though in my paints, the “Cinnabar” color doesn’t contain any actual cinnabar. Cinnabar contains high levels of mercury, you see, which, while it produced a gorgeous color, was also, well, toxic. Not that people understood that, or perhaps just didn’t care, when they started using it in paints. I mean, lead white was popular for a long time, and lead’s toxicity has been known for ages. These days, other compounds have been found that produce a similar color without all those nasty side effects.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is actually a stream of cinnabar, really. Cinnabar is Mercury Sulfide, and sulfur is quite common in geothermal vents. So all it would take is a little mercury contamination, and you get a brilliant red stream. Though cinnabar isn’t soluble in water, but then, the stream itself looks really muddy. I mean, sand isn’t soluble either, but it gets carried by streams all the time.

I wonder if any artist has actually tried using these “Paintpots” as actual paintpots in the past. Knowing how strange humans can act, I wouldn’t be too surprised…

  

This Land is Full of Secrets and History and Beauty.

Posted on by

Photo #492: Agewa SecretLocation Taken: Agawa Bay, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2012

I did not know it at the time, but right where the sun is setting, just a bit past where the land curves away out of sight, is a tall rock wall with ancient pictographs on it.

They’re all faded with the centuries they’ve seen, but the red pigment they were drawn in still stands out against the rock.

It’s a combination of human figures, canoes, animals, and mythical beings, drawn facing the lake. One of the key figures is Mishipeshu, the Great Lynx. Despite the feline name, which matched most of its features, this creature bore large horns, scales down its back and long tail, and was an aquatic reptile. According to myth, Mishipeshu was a temperamental Lord of the Lake, responsible both for many drownings and for assuring good fishing. It also guarded the native copper that is abundant and easily gathered in the region.

I find it interesting that while I had no clue about such things, I was still drawn to the area. It is beautiful, in that somewhat otherworldly way some spots have, where nature is in perfect balance and barely deigning to let you see its glory. I’d already wanted to visit the Provincial Park that this bay is part of again, just for its beauty. Now I have another place in the area I want to see.

  

The Curve of our Planet (isn’t quite this strong)

Posted on by

Photo #491: Tilted BirdsLocation Taken: Eastern Washington
Time Taken: October 2012

AAAAAHHH! The world is tilting! Quick, grab onto something, or you’ll just roll forever!

Or maybe I just took the photo at an odd angle, one of the two.

Now, some of it is natural. There was a slope to the horizon from mountains fading into foothills. And the vegetation is tipped as well, from the strong breezes coming off of the mountains. But I still put in about a 5 degree tilt on the photo. Maybe I was being tipped by the wind as well…

There were birds in the bushes in front, at least a hundred of them. The air was filled with the sound of chirping. And yet, they blended in, so not a one is visible in this photo.

There was a small dish partly filled with water tucked under the largest bush. I suspect someone wanted the birds to come near this small rest area off of I-90 through the dry scrub of eastern Washington state. It was a lonely little part of the world, sparsely populated, filled with the large expanses of cattle farms. And well, the enthusiastic vividity of the birds was catching. I was smiling for a while afterwards, as we drove further on.

  

You can tell it’s a Damselfly from the refined way she tucks away her wings, really.

Posted on by

Photo #490: DamselflyLocation Taken: Thousand Islands, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: July 2012

It’s always fun when I’m just randomly looking through my photos and I find something unexpected.

I mean, I’m sure this damselfly was the reason I took the photo, but I don’t recall it specifically, and said insect blends into the background at thumbnail size. I took a series of photos of a bee gathering nectar just a minute or two later, so I suspect that overwhelmed the earlier “awesome bug and flower” photo achievement as well, which usually makes me remember such things.

I do rather like damselflies though. They seem more delicate than the more common dragonfly, with a thinner body and smaller wings. There’s a good chance that’s why they’ve also got a more delicate name, damsel versus dragon. This tends to make them a bit tougher to notice, so it’s all the more special when I find one.

This one’s also sitting on a young curled-up Queen Anne’s Lace flower, which is also rather delicate, with its thin leaves and bracts. You can almost imagine the flower is so delicate it bent from the almost non-existent weight of the damselfly landing on it.

And it was a bit unexpected to find this flower in the first place. It was a wildflower, growing along the edge of a parking lot, one of those inhospitable places we humans seem to like creating. And yet, the flower was growing strong, and the insects were visiting, and the patterns of life continued all around me.

  

There’s the big landslide scar, but I think there’s one or two other up above as well…

Posted on by

Photo #489: Landslide ScarLocation Taken: Banff, Alberta, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

You know, ever since I started reading The Landslide Blog, I’ve been looking for landslide scars in every photo. Finding a bunch too, though this one’s the clearest. But it’s not just photos, I’m looking for them everywhere. Even in video games, where the land is certainly not about to slide down the cliff, since it’s just a giant polygon pretending to be a rock.

This is actually a pretty common mental quirk. You either learn a fascinating new fact or play a game that forces you to do something unusual, and you literally start to see the world in a new way. Even when you’re just wandering around, anything that’s even close to this new way of looking at things stands out at once.

I think of it as the Katamari Effect, after the game Katamari Damacy, which caused the first time I noticed that effect. In that game, you roll up objects that are smaller than your katamari (the ball you’re pushing around), which attach to the katamari, making it bigger, so you can roll up larger items, and get even bigger, and so on. And that doesn’t even capture the glorious oddity that makes up the game in the least!

After a long session of rolling around picking up thumbtacks, Mount Fuji, and everything in between, you get in a mental pattern of sorting things by size, so when you’re just driving down the road a little later, you keep spotting mailboxes and trashcans and bushes and going “That’s smaller than my car, I can pick it up… Wait, bad brain, no running over mailboxes.” And yet, even with the higher chance of property damage, it’s a wonderful state of mind, thinking about objects that you usually just let fade into the background.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the mental quirk that causes confirmation bias. That’s the one that makes you more likely to see neutral results as slanted the way you expected them to be slanted. If you like a politician, you’re more likely to brush aside comments she made that you disagree with, whereas if you dislike her, you pounce on them and shove them in the face of anyone nearby. Just like the Katamari Effect, confirmation bias changes the way you view the world. It’s just a lot tougher to notice happening, since you rarely leave that mental state, creating no opportunities for comparison.

Confirmation bias is a major problem in politics, science, and many other fields, but the Katamari Effect seems a bit more harmless. It’s a temporary effect, after all, fading after a while as the new way of viewing the world loses its freshness. And hey, sorting things by size or looking for tell-tale marks of landslides is actually pretty fun!