On digital cameras

  Tonight I saw a beautiful thing.  The moon over Strawberry Hill was full and uncommonly luminous; ringed by a striking, vivid, perfectly circular double rainbow.  It was breathtaking.  My inner scientist smiled in wonder while my inner writer clamoured - and still clamours - for the words to do such a sight justice.  Failing that, I took the camera out and snapped off half a dozen photos, bracing hard to  lamp post to keep my arm steady.  Alas, this was the best of them:

Fucking cameras!

  This would lead me to despair at the shitness of there being such a thing as an incapturable moment, but for the fact that it drew my attention to something just as amazing: my eye.  We like to say that the human eye is woefully inefficient, that it is an evolutionary hodge-podge that isn't half the instrument it could be.  Fair enough, but when we set out to build a camera with precision-engineered lenses and fuckillion-megapixel resolutions and more extra features than you can shake a stick from the guardhouse toilets on Hadrian's wall at we still can't get it to see something that my squishy, evolutionary hodge-podge of an eyeball can.  

Biology 1, technology nil.