While writing some code in ASP.Net, I got a run time error where two variables of unequal type were compared.

If varA = varB Then
    ' somecode
End If

By accident varA was a String and varB a Number. One would say, that those variables are unequal and life goes on. But no. The program refused to run. Alarm, Error, Wrong, Impossible.

I am totally puzzled. There is only one reason why this could be: a String and a Number (it was a Long, but that’s too much detail maybe), can not be equal, so comparing them is useless. But then again, comparing Strings of unequal length is fine, even though they can not be equal either, or Strings which start with a different letter.

The point of my code is to evaluate if two things are equal or not. I want an answer. So seriously, my question to all programming gurus around the internet, explain why a language can not answer a simple question, but wants to tell me – as the programmer – that I should not ask.

One day I was out in nature and saw a butterfly. Nothing special, just a Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta), a species which even I have photographed many times. But I could not resist taking some photos of this one. At first nothing special.

But then I decided to get creative. There is not much to be creative about when photographing a butterfly. I don’t know. I set the camera on manual focus and just tried some things. I sort of liked one of these photos, desaturated it a bit and uploaded it to a upload-your-photos-and-comment-on-other-photos site. That was last June. Nothing special happened then. One person said he liked it, another wondered why the focus was so weird. As I am not very active commenting photos of others, I don’t get many comments in return. That is only fair.

And then some months later the photo gets some more comments (wel actually only 2). That is as such a bit remarkable, because comments are usually written on recently uploaded photos. The interesting thing about these comments is that it seems as if the commenter has been made angry by this photo. One commenter suggested that I made this photo without looking through the lens, that I was trying to annoy people with uploading that photo. Another suggested that I should have thrown the photo away, as anyone would have done. Both could have easily ignored the photo (which is what people usually do when they don’t like it).

What is it that makes people angry about a photo of a butterfly?

Just to show to the world some of the Damselfly photos I made this year. If you are really impressed: click on the photo and order a print. But it is fine with me if you just enjoy looking at them here.

Female Red-eyed Damselfly (Erythromma najas). The rain left some drops on her wings.

Female Green Emerald Damselfly (Lestes viridis). The sunlight shines on the grass from behind.

Male Emerald Damselfly (Lestes sponsa). Holding on to grass on a very windy day.

Female Common Winter Damselfly (Sympecma fusca). A new generation has emerged. Winter Damselflies get through the winter as an adult, reproduce early in spring. The last of them can be seen until half June. Then the new generation emerges halfway July – this is one of them.

The search results from Google are getting worse to a level that is annoys me. The reason is that Google search has been made “smarter”. While searching for a couple of terms, Google now supposes that the search results should include also search terms that are supposed to be related.

Some examples.

As I am interested in dragonflies, and I am Dutch (the Dutch word for dragonfly is “libel”), I do quite frequently use the search term “libel”. I am aware that this word has a totally unrelated meaning in English, but that meaning is mostly suppressed by using multiple search terms in Dutch, or for example adding the name of an area in the Netherlands. Or by setting the language to Dutch. But, searching for “libel Nederland” gives as the first hit a Dutch woman’s magazine called “Libelle”. Yes. I see the similarity in the words. Words can be similar but can have a totally different meaning.

Another example. Recently I was trying to find some information about legislature on internet privacy. The words “internet” and “privacy” are used in Dutch to, but legislature is “wetgeving”. That last word exists only in Dutch, so you’d think that it would return only Dutch search results. Well, it doesn’t. Check it out: searching for “privacy internet wetgeving” makes Google think I might also be searching for something wet, like “wet dreams poetry” or “wet women” or “wet ink printing”. So stuff like this is inserted between the results.

Google thinks it is smart by supposing I am dumb. That is really annoying.

The Robin is a curious bird. I only found out since the time I usually carry around a camera on my walks.

Currently I am more into dragonflies than into birds. Mainly because dragonflies are easier to photograph, but also because there are fewer species of them which makes them usually easier to identify. But because the dragonfly forum which I frequent, is on the same site as a bird forum, I sometimes read go to read that bird forum. Especially in the winter when there is not much to do at the dragonfly forum.

That bird forum is interesting. When I was young I had some interest in birds and bought a quality bird guide (from my own hard-earned money) in order to identify the species I saw. I still have that guide, but it is totally out of date. It seems that every species in that guide now has been split into several species or subspecies. Of course that is mostly done to satisfy the need of the bird watchers. They love to have a check behind as many species as possible. Did you know that there is a special word for this kind of people? They are called “twitchers” and it is not easy to become a fully accepted twitcher. There is a long trajectory, in which you first see only common species, then find out that there are rare species too – which you apparently start seeing everywhere until you realize that you are just fooling yourself (and others) and return to seeing common species everywhere with only very occasionally a rare species (after which that sometimes gets eaten).

An essential part of bird watching is bird listening. I remember reading a story on mentioned forum about someone who though he had seen an extremely rare species (at least for the Netherlands).  Because many bird species migrate between their summer and winter residence, bird listeners spend a small capital on microphones and spend days and nights on locations where these migrating birds fly over and occasionally come to the ground to feed. With these microphones they try to identify migrating birds by their sound. I don’t know how hard that is. I have trained myself to recognize about 10 or 20 bird species by their sound. It always makes me happy to hear the first Chiffchaff again in spring – and it can surprise me sometimes that others don’t notice. But the real twitchers take that to another dimension with their microphones. So this person wrote on the forum about a sound he heard, which was familiar, but then he swa the bird and it did not look like the species it sounded like. Then he remembered that there was this species which sounds like the familiar one, looks a bit like another (also familiar) species, but is very, very rare. Did he see that very very rare species? He could not be sure, because he heard nor saw it again. But he wrote a long story on the forum with remarkable details such as how many meters away he saw the bird (he measured it very precise, something like 84.5 metres), wrote about the sound he heard and what he thought about it at that moment and then what he thought when he saw the bird and if he could be sure if the bird he saw was the same one as the bird that made the sound. I was impressed. True, not everybody on the forum was as impressed as I was.

Anyway, these kind of stories are what keeps me interested in the bird forum. People want so much to see some rare species and at the same time are aware that they are probably mistaken when they think to have seen one. This tension between desire and self-control and an effort to be ’scientific’ gives many contributions on this forum a great suspense.

The Robin is a curious bird. I only found out since the time I usually carry around a camera on my walks. First time was when I took the photo displayed at the top. Walking in the dunes I noticed a Robin. I prepared my camera in a reflex, but mosty expecting that the bird would have flown far away by the time I had it in focus. To my surprise it did not fly away, but kept sitting there, seemingly watching me.

Last week I must have remembered that moment, when I was in a city park which has some pretentions to be natural, and saw another Robin no too far away. The thought came to me that I should just stay there with my camera ready until the bird would come to watch me from a bit closer. Half to my surprise that was exactly what happened. The bird came to me to have a closer look. And this was the result.

No.

Here’s my list of small annoyances on the internet.

• Visit counter on 360.yahoo.com.
  I have a yahoo 360 page.  Sometimes that shows a visitors count. Sometimes not. So sometimes I keep on clicking on my account pages just to see the visit count. There are actually two versions of the visit count: one that shows only the overall visit count and one that also shows the visits for the current week and the current month.
  
• Reddit auto-downmods of submissions.
  Reddit.com sometimes is interesting, sometimes a bit boring. But interesting enough for me to occasionally take a look at it. I tried submitting a number of pages, but found out that they almost always were voted down instantly to zero points. Only recently, after two years and something like 20 submitted urls, I actually got a karma above 1.
• Everywhere this Google login.
  Google is everywhere. I do use some Google services, search mainly. But also occasionally gmail, blogspot, analytics, picasa. Maybe some more. But wheneever I log in to one of them, I am logged in to all of them. I am even logged in to Google search. I do not want to be logged in to Google search. Mind your own business Google!
• Impossible captchas.
  I understand the point of captchas. But it happens more and more often that I am not able to decipher it. Usually I need a few tries before ‘breaking’ the code. I read that I’m not alone in that.
• The obviousness of my mediocracy.
  Of course I always knew that there was someone better than me for each of my qualities. But with the internet, it becomes so painfully clear.
• Stolen content in blogs.
  People who embed a video from YouTube,  a photo from flickr or a text, created by somebody else and presenting it as their own in their blog. Usually with no reference to the source and with no or very little explanation. People doing this and getting away with it.

There are many sites where one can upload photos in order to sell them. I have accounts on several of such sites, and on each I have a couple of photos. I am not very active in promoting my sales – I have a regular job, and it’s just to see if and how selling photos works.

In 2008 I did sell a couple of photos this way. Here they are. The photos are displayed here as they are on the site where they are offered, so I apologize for the differences in size.

Natuurwerkdag

This photo is from the Dutch ‘Natuurwerkdag’, a national day where people can volunteer to do some work in nature. It was sold twice from the Nationale Beeldbank, which is a Dutch stock photo site which gives photographers quite a reasonable price. I received about €30,- for each sale.

Rana temporaria

A photo of a frog, sold through Imagekind. Imagekind does not pay much. After two sales (the first was in 2007) they owe me about $4,-. Imagekind will not pay me anything until they owe me $50,-. With my current rate of selling there, that will be in 25 years.

In the forest

My most successful photo in many ways, it won some awards, has been published in a couple of magazines and this year it sold twice as a framed print through Redbubble, for a total income for me of about €20,-.

That’s all. It is a bit more than 2007.  Maybe this year will bring even more sales. But the total income is not something to get excited about.

For what it is worth, because flickr’s interestingness rating usually does not agree with my personal choice. Nevertheless, except for one I do understand that these photos did get a certain interestingness rating.

#10.Viola arvensis

This photo is taken with multiple extension tubes in a cleared part of a forest. The background is a cloudy sky, nothing artificial. Indeed the flower itself is sort of tiny – there are very big pansies growing in gardens, but wild ones aren’t that big where I live.

#9. untitled

Well, people on flickr love this kind of photos. It’s fun and quite easy to make, but I do not regard it as anything special.

#8. Sturnus vulgaris

Portrait of the European Starling. Taken in my garden. In the days I made this, I was happy with it, because it was showing that my plans for backyard bird photography were working. Although there is not much wrong with it, this photo would not be on my personal list of 2008.

#7. Aegithalos caudatus

Long-tailed Tit. Taken from inside my car. While spending a weekend somewhere nice, I noticed that some birds were really interested in their reflection in the car mirrors. I wanted to make a photo of that. To do that, I sort of hid myself under a blanket on the back seat of the car and made this photo. It belongs to my personal 2008 favorites, so much bokeh and I like it that the bird is undisturbed by my presence.

#7. Coot vs Great Crested Grebes

The fight for a nesting place between two species of birds. I witnessed this fight and took a number of photos of it. The nice thing is the expression of the Grebe in the middle of the photo.

#6. IMG_4441

Not sure why flickr thinks that this photo is so interesting. It has been viewed twice and one of the viewers made it a favorite. Personally I never bothered to change the title of the image. Just an average damselfly photo.

#5. Sympetrum danae

Black Darter (Sympetrum danae). This photo made me happy. The first time I could photography this species from close by. I even had the time to use my extension tubes.

#4. Mushroom

The autumn, when most dragonflies have died, always brings me to photograph mushrooms. This photo has an emphasis on “atmosphere”, and that probably is a result of the course in Landscape Photography which I followed earlier in 2008.

#3. Aeshna viridis

The Green Hawker, a rare species of dragonfly in the Netherlands. I was excited to find it close to where I live. Not a groundbreaking photo, but it made me happy to have it.

#2. Aeshna isoceles

This year I took the time to make flight photos of dragonflies. I agree with the masses that this one is the best of my efforts this year.

#1. Hello!

This is all about cuteness, one of the things which do so very well on flickr.

Sometimes a magazine makes about poll with a question involving the promiscuity of its readers.  Such a poll is of course only meant to write an interesting headline for one of the issues of the magazine. And an interesting headline is of course that there are differences between the promiscuity of the two human sexes.

Differences in promiscuity between males and females are however non-existent, at least when it comes to heterosexual partners. That is because the amount of males and females on this world are about the same. In every heterosexual contact, both a male and a female are involved.  To make the math a bit easier, let’s simply divide humanity in two pools: one of females, and one of males. With every heterosexual contact, each pool gets a point. There is no other way, because a heterosexual contact always involves both a male and a female.

After a certain period of time, the average number of heterosexual contacts per individual can be calculated by dividing the total number of points of a pool by the number of individuals in that pool. The math is easy. Both pools have the same amount of points and both pools have the same amount of individuals. Ergo: the average male has just as many heterosexual contacts (and partners) as the average female.

The really interesting thing is why polls sometimes show otherwise. The first thing that comes to my mind is that for magazines it does not make an interesting headline if males and females are just as promiscuous.  Magazines might “interpret” the poll results  just to make an interesting headline.

Other things might play a role. Maybe some very promiscuous individual are excluded from the polls, for example  prostitutes. If males count their contacts with prostitutes, but the prostitutes do not participate in the poll, then the poll would say that males are more promiscuous than females.  Also other non-representative samples are thinkable. Maybe the readers of the magazine (=respondents to the poll) do not form a representative sample of the population.

Another source of bias can be in the minds of people. Maybe women remember more of their sexual partners. Males don’t count those they have forgotten about, maybe they were not important enough to remember. Such a thing would result in females giving a higher amount of sexual partners than males. Or maybe it is the other way around. Another thing might be that males count something to be sex, which females do not count to be sex. How far do you go before you call it sex?

Anyway: if polls show a difference between the promiscuity of males and females, then the conclusion that males or females (whatever the outcome was) are more promiscuous is false. The really interesting question is why such a difference is reported.