I didn’t get a lot from the rest of this article, but I really liked this thought:

As social networks shift our perceptions of authority, we have to guard against the problems that can arise when large numbers of people have access to information without context. Institutional authorities provided this context in the past. Now that another, more organic kind of authority plays a larger role in how and how quickly we receive information, we have a new responsibility to ensure that the reporting we share is accurate.

As we’ve lowered the barriers to entry for broadcasting your own voice, we’ve also eliminated many of the consequences for spreading misinformation. With no entity enforcing authenticity on the internet, which I’m not saying is a bad thing, the reader gains responsibility in measuring the trustworthiness of the content they read and lend credibility to by forwarding on to others. In an environment where the arguments of experts, agendas and armchair commentators often claim equal authority, without research or first hand experience, repetition can be powerfully persuading, but does not ensure veracity.

We lost the battle of pinching back the flowers on the basil months ago. It didn’t turn out so bad though, as the basil reseeded itself, in pretty much every nearby pot. Even the original parent plants, whose older leaves get tough and pale after flowering, have grown a few fresh leaves since then. Many of the new plants have ended up a lovely hybrid between the purple and sweet varieties we were originally growing.

It really takes more than one or two plants of most herbs to support a kitchen. And other things than you may eat or otherwise kill your plants. Two armies of caterpillars ate through all four of our parsley plants. This is all that’s left.

So we’re back to buying parsley from the store for now. And parsley are difficult to start from seed.

Anyway, we’ve been making good use of all the basil, mainly by making pesto. Getting a food processor has been instrumental in this. Despite being often disappointed by pesto dishes at restaurants, it’s quite easy, although the ingredients are fairly expensive: fresh basil, pine nuts, parmesan, garlic and olive oil. (Parsley and walnuts are not acceptable substitutes.)

We toss the pesto with pasta, and we make chicken pesto pizza. I used to make the dough by hand, but we found that the local grocery store’s bakery makes a better version. I blame their success on letting the dough rise overnight.

I’m still in the process of making friends with my new camera, a Canon Powershot SX210 IS. It’s a slightly more compact camera than my previous point and shoot, offering 14 megapixels and a 14x optical zoom, and way more features than my trusty but aging Lumix has. The increased picture size really makes it apparent how slow my current memory card is.

Saturday was our first park outing since getting the new camera. I keep entering into options menus accidentally, and there’s no place for my right thumb. The flash position is unfortunate, but since I so rarely use flash, unintentionally holding it closed/off because there’s nowhere else to put your left hand works fine for me. I’m fairly pleased with its focusing choices and colors. Exposures have been a little bright sometimes, but it handles low light decently. Some of that may be settings I haven’t adjusted yet. It seems more aggressive with its denoising and sharpening.

There’s a butterfly garden behind the visitor’s center at Sawgrass. Having recently rained, there were not many butterflies out. We did get to see a long tailed skipper:

And what we think might be another spicebush swallowtail, with pretty badly torn wings. It hung around on these flowers for quite a while and I got several interesting shots, but the lighting was pretty contrasty for all.

I’ve heard repeated complaints (reported by the media) from people in the tourist industry claiming that the media has misrepresented the effects of the deepwater horizon disaster. That the media is driving away business because tourists think that every beach on the Gulf is black with oil and tar balls are everywhere you look. I, for one, have never heard the media say such a thing. Perhaps this is still what the tourists think, after all I’m a 15 minute drive away from the Gulf and have more incentive to track the oil’s progress, but there doesn’t need to be any oil on your beach right now to drive everyone away. I see little difference for a tourist planning a trip several months out, with any number of available destinations, whether a beach is black at the moment, or has a strong possibility having oil on it by the time their trip rolls around. I do not expect a casual tourist from a different part of the country/world to have a good grasp of sea currents or the geography of the gulf coast. Do not blame the media for posting pictures of oiled birds and coastlines. Blame BP for creating such a devastatingly newsworthy disaster.

It’s been rainy and green the last few days, but a few weeks ago we got a great sunset from Lake Seminole Park.

In our backyard. Mike took the bunny picture.