Joseph T. Lapp

A child dances in the flame The sky is a ruddy flood. Basalt clouds pump brilliant blood. And a child dances in the flame. The ground is a surface of darkness, an empty sheet shaping hill and plain. Fiery footprints lash upon nothing, spontaneous flares quick-to-die. A body races, the body dances, a beating frolic, torchlight lurid. Glowing knees hurl high and down-hammer hard, torso twists, face flashes. The hair strikes out across the clouds, the head thrown back, the hands thrown high. A silhouette is seen in silent laughter. A child dances in the sunset flame. (Written in October of 1992 while sitting on the grass one evening at the University of Maryland, College Park)

Here is a collection of my favorite quotes, in no particular order: "Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress ." ~James Clear "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." ~James Clear " Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." ~Apple Computer, Inc., 1997 "The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away." ~Pablo Picasso "Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand." ~Mark Twain "If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you won't give up. If you give up, you're not worthy. ... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." ~Bob Marley "[W]e find a capacity for fulfillment we never knew we had when we accept love and jo...

Here is a technique for pilling a dog without getting your fingers crushed between the dog's molars. Try this technique if your dog manages to spit out the pill no matter how you disguise it, or if the pill disintegrates too quickly for any other means of delivery. The technique should work with medium or large dogs. I don't know how well it works with small dogs. I was able to train my shar-pei mix to enjoy pilling for many years, although later in life it became less fun again. My cattle dog mix never cared for the pilling, but she is happy to get it out of the way because I always reward her with a meal afterward. Cardinal Rules The most important rule when pilling a dog is that the dog should be happy to have participated by the end. Praise her each step of the way for even the slightest bit of cooperation. For a dog, praise is an excited, happy tone. The words you use hardly matter. Praise especially when you're done. The corollary of this rule is that pillin...

It had always been a mystery to me how arthropods manage to get bigger by shedding—or "molting"—their exoskeletons. If you're molting an exoskeleton, you're losing mass, right? It makes more sense that an arthropod would get smaller by molting. I've seen spiders before and after molting, but it wasn't until I witnessed a large spider molting that I finally understood what was going on. It turns out that I had seen the process before when a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis. It is most apparent that a spider's legs get longer after molting. Here are two photos I took of a spider in 2011. Both photos are of the same spider, taken two days apart. The bottom photo is of the spider prior to molting, and the top is of the spider after molting. The measurements given are the lengths of the first legs. The two photos are proportioned correctly relative to each other, so you can visually compare the before and after sizes. The spider is a male Mecaphesa d...

Usually when I come across a spider, I can tell which family of spiders it belongs to, but this spider baffled me. I found a female under a dog bed on my patio on November 23, 2014, in Austin Texas. Three days later I found a similar-looking male spider, and again I couldn't be sure of the family. The female is on the left, the male on the right. These photos are not proportionally scaled: the female has a body length of 4.5mm and the male 4mm. We don't include the legs. These two spiders have the general body shape and color pattern of a wolf spider (lycosidae), but they don't have the eyes of a wolf spider. Often a spider that looks like a wolf spider but isn't might be a funnel spider (agelenidae), but these eyes also were not a match for agelenidae. It is hard to see in these photos, but these spiders' eyes are in two rows of four, with all eyes about the same size. Funnel spiders have eyes in three rows, except for Tegenaria , which these definitely are ...

Here is a list of problem-solving strategies. Most of these strategies arose from reflection on how I develop software design specifications. This is an evolving document. Identify and attack tangentially related problems. This often sheds light on or even resolves the original problem, even if the process happens to reveal more problems. Create solutions gradually by iterative refinement. The best solutions are evolved. Solve select problems, leaving others unsolved. Gradually throw more solutions into the mix. Don't expect solutions to grow by accrual, as periodic complete transformations may be necessary. Each new iteration still benefits by being derived from preceding solutions. Find and depict specific examples of the problem. Articulate the problem separately for each example to find a common articulation or to learn the problem's component pieces. Find the right questions to ask -- about the nature of the problem and what is desired in the solution. Asking questio...

The robber fly is usually considered to be the top aerial predator of the bug world. These photos may dethrone the robber fly and establish the spider as true king of the sky. This past summer, I visited an  Argiope aurantia (aka "Black and Yellow Garden Spider") in my front yard day after day to see what she was up to. She had made her web below some cables that string to my house. I often saw a robber fly monitor the sky from the bottom cable. I thought it was a cool sight and took this photo on August 7th, 2014. Three days later, on August 10th, I found that my spider had caught a robber fly. This isn't a great photo, but it shows the spider's web near the cables on which the robber fly would perch. She is feeding on a robber fly in this photo. This close up makes it clear that her prey is a robber fly. Out of curiosity, I kept looking for a robber fly on the cable for days afterward but never saw one there again. I suspect that my first photo is of th...