Ultraviolet Sight

Source

The spectrum of light that we and most mammals can see is called visible light.  There is, however, one mammal that can perceive more than that.  They can see ultraviolet light.

The animal in question is a reindeer.  Because of the snow they must spend so much of their time in, they seem to have developed the ability to see the ultraviolet light that reflects off the snow (and cause the effect known as snow blindness in humans).  Not only does this prevent them from being blinded, but they also use it to spot things other animals would miss.  For example, urine and fur of other animals appear as black on an ultraviolet camera, thereby highlighting it against the background.

Snow blindness is caused because the human eye is not equipped to deal with UV light.  So when an overdose of it does occur, the cornea and lens take the damage and causes the (mostly) temporary effect.

However, reindeer seem to somehow prevent the damage to the eyes that humans would take.  And if they can somehow stop it, perhaps we can replicate it.

Longer article and source.

Tweet

Balancing

From GameSpy.  Copyright Ubisoft.

Life is a scale that hangs in balance.  For everything in life, there is an extreme left and an extreme right.  Don’t take in too much starch, don’t take in too little starch.  Don’t focus too much on work (and thus neglect your family), don’t focus too much on your family (and neglect your work, leading to financial troubles).  Don’t spend all your time alone, don’t spend all your time with other people.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.  Everything is on a scale and we’re battling to get the balance just right.  The same goes for writing.

I could talk about balancing planning too much and planning too little, but what I’d rather touch is writing too much and writing too little.

You’d think there isn’t such a thing as writing too much, but there is.  And with all these ratios, the amount of weight needed per side to get it into balance differs for each person.

The main point is, don’t neglect life in order to write.  Find an equal balance.  Stephen King says in On Writing, “Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”  Henry David Thoreau said, “How can you sit down to write until you have stood up to live?”

Writing is an odd practice, for it feeds off the other activities in life.  If you make your life’s work chess, you can concentrate solely on chess every day (but you should, of course, balance out chess with relaxing and family etc.), but with writing, you need other experiences to write.  You have to live before you can write about living.

Tweet

Quotation of the Week

Every week, I’ll put up a quotation related to writing or creation and tell you a little bit about the person who said it.  I’ll try to vary the speakers as much as possible.

"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused." - Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is a fairly known writer, having published classics like The Old man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  He is also known for his drinking (and apparently he frequently embarked on “alcoholic sprees” with James Joyce).  His writing style is very heavily ice-berg based, meaning that very little is said explicitly, but a lot is going on under the surface.

Tweet