A Year in Pictures – Point Lobos Egret

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We took a trip down to Point Lobos recently to enjoy the nature: cypress trees, seals, and egrets who apparently think nothing of perching on slender layers of flotsam. I caught this one just as he was about to take flight, which is a fine demonstration of the role of luck in photography.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Automated Processes

This is apropos of my recent post on cooking vs. driving. It seemed easier to make a new post than to respond individually to the multiple people who made related points.

When I talked about the “attention” either task requires, what I’m really referring to is the extent to which certain processes are automated or not. If you think back to when you first started driving, changing lanes involved something like the following steps:

1. Look for a suitable gap
2. Put on turn signal
3. Check blind spot
4. Move into gap
5. End turn signal

(Or some variant thereof.)

Once you’ve been driving for a while, though, the process of changing lanes looks something more like this:

1. Change lanes

All the smaller steps that go into the act are sufficiently automated that you don’t have to think about them, not to the degree that you did before.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.