Darwinian Blog

Old Florida, originally uploaded by Delany Dean.

OK, I guess this is turning into a photo blog... at least, for the time being. Above is a photograph I took a few years ago in Florida; I call it "Old Florida," because that's what it says to me. It sure as hell ain't "Disney"! I have applied some post-processing layering work, using Photoshop Elements, involving a technique I recently learned about (called the "Orton Effect").

Anyhow, as to the blog, maybe it's time to say something about the changes my readers may have noticed. I first started writing a blog several years ago, when I was teaching at Avila University. The idea came up one day, during lunch with some colleagues; somebody mentioned that potential students (we called them "shoppers") considered having a blog to be a positive factor. They apparently liked to see that professors had blogs. So, I said: "I can do that!" And I did. First, at MySpace, which I quickly grew to dislike. Then I moved over here, into Blogger. Originally, my idea was to have a blog with lots of links to, and discussion/analysis of, contemporary science news, especially research in psychology, cognitive science, etc. It would be a resource for students.

As it turned out, I found a larger audience outside the university campus, and also realized I was enjoying the discipline of keeping up with, and writing about, science news.

This was never intended to be a personal blog. However, when my mother got very sick (about a year ago), I became even more acutely aware of the difficulty, the frustrations, and the terrible tasks involved in care of elderly parents. I decided to write about it; and I learned a lot from my writing and from my searches for helpful resources, in this world that had suddenly become such a part of of my life. And I found that many people found these "elderly mother" entries in the blog to be helpful, or at least supportive in some way.

My own "elderly mother" situation is somewhat stabilized, now; and I am no longer teaching at Avila University. (I wrote about that, too, here in the blog, but not in gruesome detail. Academic politics can be a savage game.)

These days, I am getting a whole lot of creative satisfaction out of photography, along with the excitement of learning new things. Accordingly, that's what is being reflected in the blog. But that doesn't mean I will not still post post links for, and occasionally write about, science news in psychology and cognitive science.

A final note, for the moment: one of the weirdest things about this whole blog saga has been the "Buffalo Bill's Defunct" phenomenon. I wrote about that ee cummings poem once, and since that time it has become something like the number one Google entry, when people look for the poem. I think that a significant number of people (high school students, probably) click on this blog just because they were searching for something about that poem. And then they follow my link to another resource, and I guess they never come back. Interesting.