Sundry cephalinks

Here are a few miscellaneous cephalopod-related things people have sent me lately.

I guess I chose wisely

i-92fe9d5d7f90de35b9669f95eef0ff6e-nikond50.jpg

Foreign Dispatches posts some digital camera recommendations, with explanations. I just went through a fair amount of research before going out and getting a new camera myself a few weeks ago, and it’s all good—most importantly, his best choice is the same camera I got for myself, the Nikon D50. Whew, what a relief. Don’t you hate it when you dump a bucket of loot on something and then you find a good review that tells you you should have got something else?

As he notes, how many millions of pixels you’ve got are no longer the most important criterion for a good camera. What settled me was that I finally wanted some good optics—the teeny-tiny cheap lenses on your standard point-and-shoot have always bugged me, and I wanted a camera body where I could actually mount some good lenses. Since my working camera for film (which I have hardly used in years now) was a Nikon 6006, that pretty much settled it for me, so I went with the camera body that would handle my Nikkor lenses.

One other thing Abiola didn’t mention in his review: a good camera is useful, but it isn’t the most important thing in good photography. I don’t consider myself a good photographer, but I’m not bad as a microscopist, and know by analogy what works. On a scope, you get the best objective you can afford, but when you’re working at micrography, you just sort of aim that at the specimen and forget about it. Where you put all your effort and fuss and tweak is in the illumination, and what you learn to appreciate is a condenser with all the knobs and dials and filters. Same with a camera; you want to be able to point a good light collector at your subject, but the difference between a blah picture and a great one is the lighting.

Irony meter test

As a public service, I provide here an extremely rigorous and intense test of your irony meters. Please set your resistance values to at least one gigOhm, make sure all shielding is in place, and please have a fire extinguisher and first aid kit handy. If you are using some cheap off-brand meter, do not click to read anything below the fold. You have been warned, and I will not be liable for any mishaps.

[Read more…]

Somebody explain Colorado to me

I’ve visited Boulder, Colorado a few times—it’s a wonderful place, and at least so far it’s got Gary—but usually when I hear about the state it’s all about lunatics like Dobson and Coors and about megachurches and our air war for Jesus, and now…some overendowed Christian charity based in Colorado plunks ONE MILLION DOLLARS into Ken Ham’s collection plate, donating all that money to his fake museum.

One million dollars to fund disinformation and fraud, and this from a charitable institution that claims their “vision is to glorify Jesus Christ by inspiring and enabling personal commitment of time, talent, and treasure to the expansion of the Kingdom of God.” Glorious lies, inspiring fraud, well-funded delusions…that’s the gift this Christianity brings to us.

Fishing for Architeuthis, the giant squid

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

Lots of people have been emailing me with the news about this filmed sequence showing a giant squid snagged on a deep line. Did you know that the paper is freely available online (pdf)? It’s very cool. The researchers were jigging for squid with a 1km long line, snagged one by a tentacle, and then watched for the next four hours as it struggled to get free.

The squid’s initial
attack was captured on camera (figure 3a) and shows the
two long tentacles characteristic of giant squid wrapped in
a ball around the bait. The giant squid became snagged
on the squid jig by the club of one of these long tentacles.
More than 550 digital images were taken over the
subsequent 4 h which record the squid’s repeated
attempts to detach from the jig. For the first 20 min,
the squid disappeared from view as it actively swam away
from the camera system. For the next 80 min, the squid
repeatedly approached the line, spreading its arms widely
(e.g. figure 3b) or enveloping the line. During this period
the entire camera system was drawn upwards by the squid
from 900 m to a depth of 600 m (figure 3g). Over the
subsequent 3 h, the squid and system slowly returned to
the planned deployment depth of 1000 m. For the last
hour, the line was out of the camera frame, suggesting
that the squid was attempting to break free by swimming
(finning and/or jetting) away from the system. Four hours
and 13 min after becoming snagged, the attached tentacle
broke, as seen by sudden slackness in the line (figure 3c
versus d ). The severed tentacle remained attached to the
line and was retrieved with the camera system (figure 3e).
The recovered section of tentacle was still functioning,
with the large suckers of the tentacle club repeatedly
gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers (figure 3f ).

I’ve put the figure they describe below the fold. It’s a thing of beauty: an 8meter (26 foot) beast attacking the bait. Remind me not to go swimming below 500m, OK?

[Read more…]