sky first then shoes: animals

2014-02-08

swan-rād

Old English poetry was full of a metaphorical technique called kenning, in which regular words were replaced by compounds which gave a poetic flavour to the description. Thus 'sun' can become 'sky-candle', and 'warrior' can become 'feeder of war gulls' - a double modified expression, in which war-gulls refer to ravens, the carrion birds attracted by the dead after a battle (nice, eh?). And what of the sea? In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, mighty ships plough the sail-road, the whale-road and the swan-road.

The when light hits the surface of the water, it creates a dispersed pattern of reflection stretching from the horizon towards the viewer. As light scatters off the moving surfaces of the ripples, only those beams which reflect towards the observer are visible. The resulting twinkly surface is called a glitter-path, and when the individual twinkles are summed together (as in this long exposure), the result is a clear, bright bridge. Here, the moon-bridge stretches right across the bay to the old town of Swanage (Anglo-Saxon name: Swanwich, meaning... wait for it... swan-village). Anyone fancy a stroll along the moon bridge across the swan-road to Swan-town?

Captured at Boscombe, Dorset

2013-03-20

On sleep disruption...

REM sleep is the first stage of a typical sleep cycle. It is characterised by Rapid Eye Movements, and typically accompanied by dreams. Freud proposed that dreams give a window into the subconscious mind, and put forward a complex interpretive structure detailing what different symbols appearing in dreams might really mean. His proposals about the subconscious are largely untestable, and there's a general consensus that his Interpretation is no better than the obvious: things that appear in our dreams might sometimes reflect something that is on our mind - something that the brain needs to deal with - but equally, they often don't.

In other news, it's been a while since we've considered cucumber sandwiches... Perhaps I'm yearning for a slice of summer...

2010-04-12

nebulus taxonomy: cloud ray

featuring a luscious scientific stingray illustration. sourced from Wikipedia commons: "The oldest published depiction of a common stingray, from Pierre Belon's , 1553 De Aquatilibus Libri Duo".

2009-06-03

sunset dogs

Does anyone else see a sun pillar here as well as the upper edge of the sun dog (parhelion)? The 22 halo had been visible for a while - though faint - but the sundogs were pretty clear in the mixed sky.

(a week of ice haloes continues)