Apple #712: Brain Fog after Exercise

Earlier today, I played tennis.  Not a real game, just hitting the ball around with a friend for about an hour and a half.  This is the second time I've played tennis in I'm not sure how long.  Twenty years?  I'm embarrassed that such a number like that exists in my life.  Anyway, it's been a very long time, and I am woefully out of practice.

Also, as my body is reminding me, it is not used to being so active & athletic.  Most of the time, my exercise consists of hour-plus-long walks in the woods or equally lengthy bike rides.  Neither of those things is as challenging as running down a little bouncy yellow ball and trying to hit it back over the net with speed and accuracy.  Or so my aching thighs and biceps are telling me.



Heather Watson, at Wimbledon 2014. I would like you to notice how muscular her arms and legs are. This is how fit you have to be to play tennis well. This is not me.
(Photo from Celeb Mafia)


The last time my friend & I played, it was a pretty hot day.  When I got home, I took a shower and passed out for about three hours.  Wiped. Out.  Today, it wasn't that hot, so I thought I wouldn't find myself so completely out of commission afterward.  And that was true; it wasn't as bad.  No total blank-out sleep, but I did take a couple of naps.  What's relevant to this here Daily Apple is that I have felt fogged in the head most of the day.



One of many depictions of brain fog. This one, made with Microsoft Paint, seems especially apt.
(Image by Lydia King)


I've been trying to settle on a Daily Apple topic for, what, three hours now.  I've read news articles, found a couple of things that seemed like good candidates, read a page or two about the topic, but just could not see how I could contribute anything further to the information available.  I chalk this up to the brain fog: it's not that I doubt my abilities, I'm just having trouble visualizing what I could do.



This one might be my favorite.
(Image from Tara Skye Golden)


I looked up brain fog and exercise, and I got a lot of flotsam & jetsam.  It takes some thinking at a higher level than my brain wants to do right now to sort out what's relevant and useful from what's not.  But I'll give it a bit of a go.  We'll see what comes out.

• Brain fog is not any kind of official medical term.  But it's something most of us have experienced at some time or other.  It can be characterized by

• inability to focus or concentrate
• poor memory retention or recollection
• difficulty learning new information
• you tend to view a task as more difficult than you otherwise would
• difficulty expressing thoughts articulately
• disorientation
• lack of mental clarity

• In other words, your brain just won't work as well as it normally does.

(Image from Chronic Curve)

• All kinds of things can contribute to brain fog.  Here are some of those things.  I will alphabetize them, because I'm not a medical-enough person to tell you which causes are more or less common, and the alphabetizing will be a good exercise for my cloudy cortex.

• ADHD
• Anxiety
• Brain injuries or brain tumors
• Chemotherapy
• Chronic fatigue syndrome
• Dehydration
• Depression
• Diabetes
• Electrolyte imbalance following exercise
• Fibromyalgia
• Food allergies, especially gluten
• Hormonal imbalance
• Low blood sugar
• Lack of sleep (guilty)
• Lyme's disease
• Lupus
• Menopause 
• Multiple sclerosis
• PTSD
• Schizophrenia
• Stress
• Substance abuse or withdrawal from substance abuse
• Thyroid disorders

• I like the alphabetical list because it puts big scary things next to fairly common things -- schizophrenia next to stress, for example.  I find it interesting that common things like dehydration or low blood sugar can have an effect that is similar to one of the effects of a big scary thing like schizophrenia or a brain tumor.

• That said, I'm sure the level or duration of brain fog probably does differ, depending on which of these causes is involved.

• I suspect I'm not saying this right.  Hopefully you will know what I mean.

(Image from As My Body Attacks Itself)

• One of the main points here is that a lot of us experience brain fog, for any one of a multitude of possible reasons.  

• In my case, I've got the fog probably because of a suite of three or four causes: after-effects of exercise, dehydration, and lack of sleep.  I would kind of like to go to bed right now and sleep for a day or two.

• Here's one interesting thing I read about dehydration: some researchers studied what would happen to women who exercised and got dehydrated versus women who exercised and did not get dehydrated.  The researchers tested the women's mental abilities before and after exercising to determine how their brain function was affected. 

• The women who were dehydrated reported
• less vigor
• more fatigue
• increased perception of task difficulty
• headaches that were more severe than those not dehydrated

• The other interesting tidbit is that the women who were dehydrated didn't know that they were.  This doesn't surprise me because I remember reading elsewhere that it doesn't take much for your body to be effectively dehydrated.  The symptoms of dehydration can be very severe -- think of the bearded thirsty guy crawling through the desert -- but you can be a very long way from that point and still be dehydrated.

Thirsty? If so, take a tip from this cat and have a drink of water.
(Photo from VetriScience Laboratories)

• Signs of mild dehydration are:

• Thirst
• Dry, sticky mouth
• Sleepiness

• (That last one is especially interesting in this context, isn't it?)

• I remember reading some doctor saying somewhere, "If you're thirsty, you're dehydrated."  Surprising, but true.

• But I want to know more about how or why exercise reduces your mental capacity.  

• A lot of guys who lift talk about "CNS fatigue" or having trouble paying attention the day after a heavy lifting session.  

• Some say they try to avoid it by taking naps before and after a lifting session, or they eat more (there's a debate as to whether proteins or carbs will be more helpful in this situation).  

• So it's very much a real thing. But why does it happen?

 
(Image from Alaska Health Improvement Center) 

• [looks up more stuff]

• Well, I can find all sorts of things that say exercise is good for the brain.  Stimulates blood flow, which means more oxygen gets carried to the brain, which encourages mental function and also possibly the generation of new brain tissue.  Stimulates endorphins, which reduce levels of depression, and can give you a "runner's high" feeling afterward.  Improves cardiovascular function, helps control blood sugar levels, as well as of course helping to burn fat and reduce weight.

• I can also find things that say that too much exercise, as in people who train intensely for really long periods of time -- people training for the Iron Man, for example -- can be bad for you.  Your body can't cope with the amount of stress all that exercise is putting on it, so the immune system gets overtaxed.  Regular high-intensity exercisers may find that they're getting colds and flu a lot, or they're developing problems with their heart rate, or they may even suffer a stroke.

• I am nowhere near having that kind of exercise problem. 

Exercising so hard this happens can actually be bad for you.  It can make your body vulnerable to illnesses and injuries.
(Photo originally from Lava Magazine, sourced from Iron Man Finish Line Collapse)

• Ah, here's one article.  "Researchers suggested that too much exercise may cause the brain to “max out” in the production of BDNF [brain-derived neurotrophic factor] and neurons, and this may prevent learning."
• (BDNF, by the way, is a protein that supports the health of synapses in the brain and also protects and helps grow new neurons.)

• That quote is taken from an article discussing research on the effects of exercise on mice & rats over long periods of time.  Researchers in one study found that mice who were bred to be more active, down to the 30th generation, were very physically active and fit, but they had a lot more trouble navigating a maze than the less-fit mice.

• In other words, the more physically fit mice had reduced mental capacity compared to the less active mice.

• This runs counter to expectations because most of the time, exercise increases your mental acuity.  But that's in the short-term.  This study was looking at bred-into-them traits over the long term. 

• So this study doesn't really answer my question. But maybe the business of there being an overload of BDNF may apply in the immediate short-term, too.

Brain fog, someecards style
(Image posted somewhere on this Beat Brain Fog Pinterest page)

• [looks up more stuff.]

• OK, I can't find anything that tells me what I want to know.  Even so, I think I've read enough to formulate a theory of my own.  Here goes.

• A moderate level of exercise is good.  Gets all the juices flowing, improves your mood, sharpens mental abilities -- in general does all sorts of wonderful things for your mind and body.

• But when you do too much exercise, then you can run into problems.  This can mean too much exercise over the long term, or too much exercise in a single session.

• Lots of those body builders report that if they have a really intense session one day, whether or not they get the brain fog the next day depends on how in shape they are already.  If they've kind of fallen out of shape for a while and then go back to it hard, they get the brain fog.  Or if they're at a good, consistent level of lifting but they don't give their body sufficient recovery time in between sessions, then they'll get the brain fog the next day. 

• And here's my theory about why this happens.  This is completely and totally my theory -- not even that, it's actually only a hypothesis. And not a scientific one, at that.  

• I'm thinking that exercise that reaches a level of intensity that your body is not prepared for because of factors such as

• not enough sleep
• not enough carbs to fuel the body & the brain
• your body just isn't used to that much exercise

• then your body doesn't have enough juice to power both the body and the brain.  So your body makes some tough decisions about where to divert the resources it does have.  And since it's always going to choose that which is absolutely necessary for survival first, it's going to feed the most basic functions first and let the nice-to-have stuff slide for a bit.  Higher brain function probably falls into the nice-to-have category as opposed to, oh, keeping your blood flowing and your heart beating, regulating your body temperature, sending food to your cells, and so on. 

• So while your muscles are twitching and your heart rate is returning to normal and your muscles are trying to rebuild, your brain is temporarily left in the zombie zone.

• So, what to do if you find yourself in the post-exercise brain fog?  Here are my suggestions:

• drink water
• sleep
• eat
• drink water
• sleep
• eat
• rest

• That's all I've got.  Thank you and good night.

This is more like me. Not enough sleep.  Cause I got stuff to do. 
(Photo from Inquisitr)

Sources
Mental Health Daily, Brain Fog Causes: A List of Possibilities
Rodale News, The Real Reason behind Brain Fog
BeBrainFit, Stop Brain Fog: Causes, Symptoms and Solutions
Bodybuilding.com, Solution to Brain Fog from lifting heavy?
T Nation, Reduced Mental Capacity after Workout
T Nation, Brain Fog Next Day After Workout
WebMD, Can Too Much Exercise Be Harmful?
Science 2.0, Is Too Much Exercise Bad For You?
Mempowered! Does physical exercise improve cognitive function?
Mayo Clinic, Dehydration Symptoms
The New York Times, How Exercise Benefits the Brain

Apple #711: Do Ladybugs Bite?

If you've been reading the series of entries on how I put together these here Daily Apples, you'll already be a little bit familiar with this topic (I used this topic as an example in Part 2 of Behind the Daily Apple).  But it seems to me that the best way to finish the question, how do I do what I do, is to show you the final result.  So here is the final result.

So here's the question I said I would take up: what's up with the biting ladybugs?  To get a bit more specific, where did they come from?  Did they always bite, or is this a new thing?  Let me insert one more general question ahead of that: Do ladybugs bite?

• Short answer: Yes. And it's kind of our own fault.

Asian ladybug. This kind bites.
(Photo from GardenWeb)
 

• This is a case of unintended consequences. Or put another way, people not really thinking through the effects of their actions.

• As early as 1916, again in the 1960s, and yet again in the 1970s, people in the US brought ladybugs from Asia here to this country because those Asian ladybugs ate aphids.  

• What better way to control this pest problem? they said with excitement. No pesticides necessary!  We just drop a bag of Asian ladybugs on these pecan trees, or on these rose bushes (that's what the ladybugs were sold for in my home town, back in the day), and they'll eat up the aphids!  No more aphid problem!  Sure, maybe we've got a few extra ladybugs.  So what?  They're harmless.  They're ladybugs!

• Well.  After enough years of dropping bags full of ladybugs onto pecan trees and rose bushes and whatever else, the Asian ladybugs made themselves at home here in this country.  They "jumped ship" as one source put it, meaning they did not die off at the end of the season but rather started building little ladybug homes, having little ladybug babies, and raising their offspring, who then went and had more little ladybug babies.

Multicolored Asian lady beetle females can lay up to 3,800 eggs in one season, sometimes in batches of 20 to 30 eggs per day.  Lots of ladybugs making lots of ladybug babies, and you'll get a pretty big ladybug population pretty fast.
(Photo from The Ohio State University OARDC)

• They were "observed in the wild" -- meaning there was a large enough colony living on their own, outside of any farmer's or gardener's observation or assistance -- in New Orleans in 1988.  Since then, the Asian ladybug has spread like crazy across most of the United States and Canada.

• They are now considered established in the Northwest, the Northeast, and the Midwest.

• Why is this such a problem?  After all, they're only ladybugs, right?

• To answer that, we have to know a little more about this particular kind of ladybug.

• The Asian ladybug, a.k.a. . . .

• Harmonia axyridis
• multicolored Asian lady beetle
• Asian lady beetle
• Halloween lady beetle
• Japanese lady beetle
• harlequin ladybird
• many-named ladybird
• multivariate ladybird
• pumpkin ladybird
• Japanese ladybird
• southern ladybird

• . . . eats aphids.  I mean, they really go to town on the aphids.  They were first brought here to eat the aphids on pecan trees, but then they discovered all the soybean fields all across the south and the Midwest.  Rife throughout those soybean fields were soybean aphids.  A smorgasbord to the multicolored Asian lady beetle.  And they went to town, munching up the soybean aphids like nobody's business.

Pictures of soybean aphids en masse -- or any swarming bugs -- give me the creepy crawlies, so I won't post a photo of them here.  But if you want to see what soybean aphids look like, take a look at Purdue University's page about them. Or just trust me when I say they're little yellow-green bugs and they generally cover the undersides of soybean leaves.

• So, that's good, right?  Multicolored Asian lady beetles eat lots of soybean aphids, and that helps our soybeans grow, farmers are happy, we're happy.  Right?

• Well, the multicolored Asian lady beetle does some other things too.  They migrate each year in the fall.  And before they migrate, they all get together to make their migration plans.  OK, I don't know if that's what they're doing, but they do combine to form great colonies of lady beetles.

• They like to find tall sheltered places, like the where the wall of a house meets the roof, or the side of a mountain, or the sides of tall buildings.  They generally prefer light-colored buildings as places to hang out.

Again, I am not a fan of pictures of swarming bugs, but if you want to see what a whole bunch of multicolored Asian lady beetles congregating on the arm of a sofa looks like, be my guest.

• The way they call to other multicolored Asian lady beetles is by releasing pheromones.  In most cases, you and I can't consciously smell pheromones.  But we can smell the pheromones of the multicolored Asian lady beetle.  And the pheromones smell terrible.  People describe it as "foul," "unpleasant," or "acrid." 

• That might not be such a big deal, if there were only one multicolored Asian lady beetle on your arm.  But hordes of them swarming on the side of your house?  If you smashed them with a broom, those stinky pheromones (or perhaps it's another substance, one designed to ward off predators) would come out of the leg joints of the smashed lady beetles, and you'd have a pretty stinky mess.

• And mess is right, because not only do the pheromones stink, they can also stain.  So if they're in your house and they're climbing up your aunt's beige silk curtains or they're crawling across your pearl-colored Asian carpet, perhaps thinking finally they're home, and you smash them, now you've got stinky lady beetle juice all over your aunt's lovely curtains and your pearl-and-now-lady-beetle-colored Asian carpet.

The stain of smashed Asian lady beetles.  All over your nice carpet. 
(Photo from University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment)

• So what, you say.  So they stink a little bit.  So they might make a stain if I smash them.  I just won't smash them.  I'll seal up the cracks and crevices of my house so they can't get in, they'll stay out side, I'll let them eat all my aphids, and we'll all be happy.

• OK, well, they also bite.  The lady beetles native to the US do not bite.  But these foreign imports do.

This is the biting kind of ladybug (the multicolored Asian lady beetle).  You can identify it as such by the M or W shape on the lighter colored back of its neck behind the head.
(Photo from Maclean's in CA)



The multicolored Asian lady beetle can range in color from yellow to orange to russet, and the number of spots on their backs may vary.  But the one thing that is consistent is that M or W shape on the back of the neck.  You will also know it by its bite.
(Photo from Michigan State University)

• Eh, big deal to that too, you say.  It's just a little bug.  The bite might sting a bit at first, but it's not like a mosquito bite, or a bee sting.  It's not going to itch and itch or really hurt or anything like that . . . right?

• Um, sort of wrong.  It's true that the bite from a multicolored Asian lady beetle is more like an annoying pinch than anything especially painful.  But some people can have an allergic reaction.  And the way this allergy expresses itself is in the form of rhinoconjunctivitis, more commonly known as pink eye. 

• If you've ever had pink eye, you know it's really unpleasant.  And people tend to back away from you like you have the plague.  If you watched Bob Costas covering the Olympics when he had pink eye, you know what I'm talking about.

Bob Costas, with pink eye.  He didn't get his from a reaction to a ladybug's bite, but let his painful-looking eyeballs be a cautionary tale to you nonetheless.
(Photo from Faboverfifty) 

• Some sources also suggest that allergic reactions to the bite of a multicolored Asian lady beetle could trigger asthma.  And that is most certainly not fun.

• Another problem is one which, in general, we hear about a lot when people talk about invasive species: lack of predators, and the inability of native species to compete.  In parts of southeast Michigan for example, the multicolored Asian lady beetle has so aggressively out-competed the native lady beetles for food, the native species are now severely threatened.

• We're starting to learn enough about how ecosystems work to know that if even one plant or animal is threatened or on the verge of disappearing, that can have a huge ripple effect up the food chain.  So it's probable in another five or ten years or so, scientists will start telling us about some frog or bird or other creature that relies on the native ladybirds for food but can't find any to eat because there are only the noxious multicolored Asian lady beetles flying around, and so now the frog or bird or whatever it is has become at risk.

Here is an excellent drawing of the food chain involving a ladybug. The ladybug eats the aphid, the spider eats the ladybug, and the bird eats the spider.
(Drawing by Joshua Campes, posted at LALB)

• Putting all this another way, the Asian ladybugs became an invasive species in this country -- and we were the ones responsible for the invasion.  You know, good intentions.  Trying to control a pest without using pesticide.  But unhappy results.

• One final tidbit: the multicolored Asian lady beetle is cannibalistic.  That is, some of them eat their own larvae or their own eggs.  This seems to be an inherited trait, first of all.  But it also seems to be influenced by the number of aphids.  Lots of aphids, less cannibalism.  Few aphids, and they eat their young.  

• I'm not saying we should bring in bags of some other aphid-eater from some other country to try to force the multicolored Asian lady beetle to eat their young. I'm just saying, something else to think about.  When you get a bite from a ladybug, did that ladybug use those same jaws to eat its own offspring?

• Changes how you feel about ladybugs a little bit, doesn't it?

The ladybug. Cute classroom clipart, or vicious child-eating insect?
(Clip art from PublicDomainPictures.net)

Sources
Creature Control, Asian Lady Beetle
University of Minnesota Extension, Multicolored Asian lady beetles
Michigan State University Diagnostic Services, Multicolored Asian Ladybeetle
R L Koch, The multicolored Asian lady beetle, Harmonia axyridis: A review of its biology, uses in biological control, and non-target impacts,  J. Insect Sci., 2003, 3:32
Michael F. Potter et al., University of Kentucky, College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment, Asian Lady Beetle Infestation of Structures
Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Biological Control, Harmonia axyridis

Apple #710: Behind the Daily Apple -- Assembly and Images

This is part 3 in a series of posts about how I put together a typical Daily Apple entry.  The first was about how to construct a good search query to search Google for a given topic.  The second entry was about reading through the results and deciding what's a good source and what's not, comparing data among sources and looking for confirmation.  This one will be about putting it all together.  And also finding the images.

I have admittedly dragged my feet on this one.  Because I don't know how to explain to you, "and this is how I assimilate everything I've read and then I turn it all into one coherent thing."  Those of you who teach composition know it is pretty dang difficult to explain and teach this skill to someone else.  Try doing that, but in a typed-up way, and make it highly visual to keep people's short-attention-internet-span-interest.  Here goes.

THE STRUCTURE

Finding the right framework is part of the process of constructing a Daily Apple entry.  This part often takes some noodling.
(Image from Slideshare.net)


I guess what I usually do is I look for a framework that will help me organize or present the information.  Here are some typical frameworks that I might use:

• A series of questions and answers.  I start by answering the first question that is where each Daily Apple entry begins.  Then something about what I find might lead to another question.  So I'll answer that.  Which then may lead to another question.  So I'll answer that. And so on. For example, in my entry on the Dollar Sign, I tried to answer how that $ came to be our standard symbol. Then I was curious if the symbols for other types of currencies were developed in the same way. So I looked up the Pound, the Yen, and the Euro.

The evolution of the dollar symbol might be similar to the evolution of the entry itself on the Dollar Sign.
(Image of the transformation from Wikimedia)

• Introducing you to a species. What are the first things you want to know about a particular animal or plant? First, you want to know its name.  Sometimes this is not as straightforward as you might think. Then I would tell you two or three basic things about that species.  

• If it's a plant or animal that I think most people are unfamiliar with, I would start with the most notable things about them. In the entry on Sea Fans, for example. I started with the name, which turned out to be a little tricky because people disagree about what's a sea fan/Gorgonian and what's not. Then I described them: they're soft corals, they have flexible, bendy skeletons, and they anchor themselves in sand or mud.  From there, I ventured into deeper details, about photosynthetic versus non-photosynthetic sea fans, the different ways they reproduce, and so on.  So I start with the general and work down to the more specific.

Sea Fans of various types.  The fact that there are lots of different types made that the primary thing I talked about, and organizing my description by those types determined the structure of the entry.
(Photo from a German site about marine zoology, with lots of photos, called Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft)

• If it's something that I think people already know the basics about -- jellyfish, for example.  i skipped all of the typical encyclopedia-type information and went straight to the interesting tidbits. Jellyfish have been on this planet for 650 million years.  Longer than sharks.  Jellyfish are always growing. But they only live 3-6 months.  A group of jellyfish is called a "smack."  And so on.  This is still an introduction, but I want to get you to the good stuff as soon as possible.

Jellyfish. You already know they have a lot of tentacles, and they sting, and yada yada yada, so I skipped all that.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

• Sub-categories. Often when I'm researching a topic, I discover a few different collections of facts that I think are interesting.  I group like concepts together, and then I use boldface headers to make it clear where the subcategories are, in case people want to know only about one particular sub-topic.

• Sometimes I'll decide, in the interests of time or my sanity and yours, only to tell you about one sub-category and leave the rest out of it.  For example, in my entry on Football Penalties, I could have told you about all sorts of sidebar things I discovered, like penalties for not wearing the approved uniform, which I thought were interesting but were a little off-topic.  Or I could have ventured into other types of before-the-snap penalties such as too many men on the field. But I decided to keep focused on motion-related penalties around the time of the snap.  Then I organized them according to penalties that get called against the offense and moved into penalties against the defense.

Football Penalties. I organized this entry by types of penalties, but I confined them to penalties that typically get called at the snap.
(Photo from Illinois Wesleyan University Magazine)

 

• Or I might venture into lots of different sub-categories.  In the entry on Ice Cubes, for example, I started with how they were invented. Because without that, we're not talking about ice cubes.  Then I grouped the entry into things that ice does as it freezes -- it expands, warm water freezes faster, it forms ice spiks, how do you make ice cubes that are clear -- and then things ice does as it melts -- when does it melt faster or slower, and it melts from the bottom up.

The entry on Ice Cubes maybe got a little out of hand.  But there were so many interesting things to know!
(Photo of ice cubes from Habimama)

• The nature of the thing itself often suggests what sort of structure I should use to describe it.

• If it's a question about an historical event -- when were Escalators invented, for example -- the history provides the structure.  That is, I go chronologically.  First this guy with a beard came up with thus & so, then this other guy with a beard came up with this other thing, and then such & such enormous company bought the technology and now it's everywhere and nobody makes any money off it anymore, so now it's made mostly in China.  (Actually, in the case of escalators, they're now made mostly in Japan.)

 

The entry on Escalators followed a pretty typical structure for an historical entry -- a chronological description of how the things were invented and improved upon over time.
(Photo from Elevator World)

• I do a lot of entries about word origins. A.k.a. etymology.  With those, I start with the obvious starting place: the dictionary definition.  I'll give the definitions my own take, summing up or giving examples.  I'll try to find pictures that illustrate the word at hand.  A good example of this is the entry on Jealousy vs. Envy (with Covetousness thrown in as a bonus).  I looked up the definition of envy, gave a little of my own input, then gave you a picture of the Wicked Witch of the West as a personification of envy.  Jealousy took a little more doing because we often use this word inappropriately. So I had to undo what we think it means by providing a little more definition & description of what it does mean.  Plus a couple pictures and even some video.  Finally, I looked up Covetousness, gave you the definition and my take on it, plus a picture of Hannibal Lecter.  Even though it's Buffalo Bill who was really the personification of covetousness gone wrong.  Then I summed it all up in a brief sentence for each term, hoping that would help the definitions to stick with you.

The Wicked Witch of the West, personifying Envy, and thereby assisting in my word origins-type entry.
(Photo sourced from The Pop Culture Divas)

• Sometimes this type of entry will become more like a historical entry, if the meaning of the word changed over time.  As in my entry on Shampoo. 

Unless you'd read the entry on Shampoo, you might not know that it originally meant "massage."
(Screenshot from a video showing the entirety of the massage, which begins with a head massage.)

THE IMAGES

• [^ note use of header. Key element in structuring an entry.]

• Once I've got the thing typed up, then I'll search for and insert images.  I always hope that this process will take only about an hour, but it usually takes a really flippin' long time.

• I scroll down through the entry and look for an image to correspond with some paragraph or statement often enough that an image will be visible somewhere on your screen most of the time. 

• But if I'm in the midst of some complex explanation that I think is best uninterrupted, I'll wait until the end of the explanation to provide an image, and then I try to choose one that sums things up in some way.

• I search for images in much the same manner that I search for text, except I use Google Images instead of Google Web.

Today's Google Image search on the word "framework" and the resulting images that come up.  You can see I chose the one in the second row down, second from the right.

• It gets time-consuming because, first of all, Google Image's interface is cumbersome.  First, you click on the image you want.  Then a larger version of the image in a black box is displayed.  This takes a bit of time.  Then you have to decide whether you want to view just the image in the browser by itself, or go to the page where the image was originally posted.

• If you choose to go to the page where the image originally appeared, sometimes you discover the page is not there anymore.  So if you used this image, it would disappear from your site pretty quickly.  Better to find something else.

• Or you discover that the page has all sorts of copyright or do-not-touch notices surrounding the image. So, better look for something else.

• Also, if the image belongs to a stock photo site, I don't use it.  Because they definitely want money for those images.  If it belongs to a major news source like Getty or the AP, I usually try to find something else.  Though sometimes, there just isn't another image like it.  So I might post it anyway, since this blog is definitely not a for-profit venture.  I don't make any money from this site, no one pays me anything for anything, and the purpose of this blog is for educational purposes.  So I think Fair Use applies.  Still, I don't want to take any unnecessary chances if I don't have to.

• Usually I like to the image.  I type in the code [left pointybracket]imgsrc[equalssign][space][quotationmark][complete URL][space][slash][right pointybracket].  I think linking to the image is more respectful of the original poster of the image.  Though some people disagree.  Some people really dislike this practice.

• If I link to an image of, let's say, Don Cornelius's on my site, when you look at my page, the code is going to query Don Cornelius's page to provide the image from that page to mine. This will tax Don Cornelius's server.  Some people get mad about this, and they don't like it that my page is drawing on their server's energy or bandwidth or whatever it is.  It has happened in a couple cases when a page owner has substituted an image I linked to with something extremely rude or obscene and I didn't know about it until a faithful Daily Apple reader alerted me to the fact. 

 
Oh my gosh, I picked Don Cornelius's name out of the blue.  I completely forgot that he shot himself.  Well, this is the image of the foundation that his son started in order to provide awareness, prevention, and support for those contemplating suicide and for those who love them. I've linked to this image from that site.
(Image from the Don Cornelius Foundation)

• Another option is to copy the image and upload it to my site. This seems to me to be much more like stealing.  I'm copying the file to my hard drive and uploading the copied file to my web page.  Conversely, in linking to the image, I'm letting you keep that actual file, and I'm only making a connection to it.

• The downside to linking to images as opposed to copying them is you get "link rot." The site that hosted the image changes or goes away, so then the image can't be displayed.  Well, them's the breaks, I think.  Sometimes I go through old pages and update them with new images, but that takes time.

• Whether linked to or more rarely copied, I usually reduce the size of the image somewhat.  I figure if I'm going to provide a version of someone else's image, it ought to be a little less optimal than the original.  Usually the full size version is to big for the blog's frame, but even so, I usually reduce the size a smidge.

• I also always give a credit beneath the caption with a link to the page where I found the image.  I provide a deep link to the exact page if I can, rather than to the site's home page as many people do.  I do this so that if someone wants to see that image in its full-size glory, or in its original context, they can.  Or maybe they want to see what other images this site or person has; the link allows a reader to go there.  Or in some cases I'm linking to an image on a shopping website, so the link allows the reader to go to the page where that product is being sold.

• In some cases, I took the picture.  I credit myself: Photo by the Apple Lady. 

Sunset in Sarasota Bay. I took this photo.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)
 

• As you might imagine, this business of searching for images, linking to them, typing the caption, formatting the size of the image and the size of the caption is time-consuming.

• But sometimes in the process of looking for images and looking at the page where the image is posted, I discover new facts.  I might learn something that my textual search didn't turn up, or I might discover a clarification of something I didn't understand and was going to omit.  So sometimes I have to go back and revise the text I already typed up.  In a few rare cases, I've had to re-write half the entry, based on information I found this way.

• So it is worth the time to add images.  The real reason I've learned the value of images is that, with the exception of a few die-hard regular readers, the majority of the traffic that comes to my site arrives here thanks to an image search. I think this is because I usually provide descriptive captions beneath the images, and Google uses captions as key terms in their image search process.  I like to think my content is witty and engaging, but really, most people only come here for the pictures.

• What's even more disheartening is that most "strangers" who come to the Daily Apple -- and this is the vast majority of the traffic here -- only stay for about 1 second. 

• (I know this information courtesy of site statistics.  I use Sitemeter and also StatCounter.)

• Every once in a while, a new visitor will come here from the results of a Google search, check out the Daily Apple page they were brought to, and then they'll look around at a few other pages. They might click on a link to one or two Ripe Apples, or they might click on a Subject category in the right frame and browse there for a bit.  I especially enjoy those visits.

• The visits that are really the most gratifying are those when someone comes to a Daily Apple page, stays for a good 10 or 15 minutes, clicks on one of the Sources at the bottom of each entry, and then comes back.  To me, that says the reader has been fully engaged--enough to want to know more about some aspect of the entry, and enough to want to come back.  Those are the ones I consider A+ visits.

• Of the visits from strangers, that is.  The other kind of A+ visits are those from people who are regular readers, who check this here Daily Apple regularly.  Regularly enough to ask me a question.  Regularly enough to want to know how this thing gets put together.  

• To you my, my faithful Daily Apple Reader, I thank you for reading.  I thank you for asking questions. Never stop doing either one.

• Love, Your Apple Lady

(Photo from Chauncey's in the UK)