Chance, luck, fortune—the building blocks of life. The gods cast the stones and the players fill the gaps. Chaos was the first Greek God. From Chaos, meaning gap or chasm, came Gaia, the Earth. Chaos and beauty seem to be eternally linked. Click on this image of Little Moose Island in Acadia National Park to see a larger version.
Tag Archives: Summer in Maine
Little Moose Island
The southern tip of Little Moose Island off Schoodic Point in Acadia National Park. The Gulf of Maine is beyond that. Once exposed to air, the bedrock fractures and exfoliates like cells of dried skin. Click on the image for a larger view.
Double Rainbow
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Walls of Green
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June Forest
It was cool and windy yesterday. Click on the image for a larger view.
Oak Apple Gall
While clearing up some low hanging limbs on one of our oak trees, I found this under a leaf—an oak apple gall. The gall is created by a tiny wasp of the Cynipidae family that lays its egg in a young oak leaf. The secretions from the egg cause the leaf to mutate and create this structure—humans are not the first to experiment with genetic engineering. If you open the gall up, you will find a small center capsule that holds the larvae and is suspended by filaments stretching out to the thick walls of the gall. The wasp will emerge later in the summer. This gall is about an inch in diameter. Click on the image for a larger view.
Water and Rock
The Swift River in the White Mountain National Forest. Click on the image for a larger view.
Memorial Day Weekend
Naomi and I went to the White Mountain National Forest on Saturday. The weather was hot and humid—unusual for this time of year, especially since the temperatures reached 93°F. This is also one of the busiest weekends to travel to this park. While it would have been nice to be at the cool summit of Mt. Washington, we had no desire to jostle with the crowds. We had lunch at the bottom of the auto road and simply enjoyed the view. Click on the image for a larger view.
Cicada
The exuvia of a cicada nymph. Click on the image for a larger view.
More than Meets the Eye
Cameras imitate human vision. Color is purely a human response to light: it does not actually exist in nature. How far we see in the electromagnetic spectrum, we call that range light, is simply a response of our biology.
But eyes are not simply tiny cameras. Our vision is a complex system. Part of the retina of our eyes (rods) only sees luminance—how bright things are. Part (cones) only sees color, or, maybe more accurately, differences in color. These signals are transmitted to our brain where it recreates an image of the world. But even in our brain, luminance and color are processed in entirely different areas. So while our experience is a unified vision of a color world (the middle image), the reality is part of our brain is processing luminance (the left image) and another part color (the right image).
We are really not that good at seeing color, which is a late evolutionary adaptation (many animals do not see in color). But it is important. The sky is rather dull in simple luminance—the orange sky at the horizon has the same brightness, or equiluminant, as the blue sky through the cloud. The addition of color in our perception creates far more separation. But color alone lacks structure and detail—color acuity is low in human vision, which why it can be really hard to read red text on a green background when both colors are equiluminant. Click on the image for a larger view.
