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During the second step of humankind’s first-ever lunar-Earth flyby, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) captured this stunning view of Earth and the Moon. The image was taken after the flyby was complete and Juice was moving away from the Earth-Moon system.
The image was taken by Juice monitoring camera 1 (JMC1) just at 02:53 CEST on 21 August 2024, as Juice was heading towards its closest approach to Earth. This successful flyby of Earth redirected Juice’s path through space to put it on course for a flyby of Venus in August 2025.
The Juice monitoring cameras were designed to monitor the spacecraft’s various booms and antennas, especially during the challenging deployment period following launch.
They were not designed to carry out science or image the Moon and Earth. A scientific camera called JANUS is providing high-resolution imagery during the cruise phase flybys of Earth, Moon and Venus, and of Jupiter and its icy moons once in the Jupiter system in 2031.
JMC1 is located on the front* of the spacecraft and looks diagonally up into a field of view that sees deployed antennas, and depending on their orientation, part of one of the solar arrays. JMC images provide 1024 x 1024 pixel snapshots. The images shown here are lightly processed by Simeon Schmauß and Mark McCaughrean.
Guide to Juice’s monitoring cameras
More information on the lunar-Earth flyby
Rewatch the livestream of Juice’s first Moon images, including Q&A with the team
More images from Juice's monitoring cameras in ESA's Planetary Science Archive
*Additional technical information: ‘front’ means +X side of the spacecraft (the opposite side, -X hosts the high gain antenna). JMC1 looks towards the +Y/+Z direction.
Processing notes: In each case, two images of different exposures have been added to increase the details in the shadows.
Credits: ESA/Juice/JMC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Acknowledgements: Simeon Schmauß & Mark McCaughrean
This thing is enormous. Unlike most ancient temples around here, it has columns that still stand from antiquity -- and most of the columns that don't have been lost to the depredations of humankind, not earthquakes. Abridged (though I know it doesn't look it!) from Wikipedia:
Construction began in the 6th century BC during the rule of the Athenian tyrants, who envisaged building the greatest temple in the ancient world, but it was not completed until the reign of Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD, some 638 years after the project had begun. During the Roman period, the temple, which included 104 colossal columns, was renowned as the largest temple in Greece and housed one of the largest cult statues in the ancient world.
The temple's glory was short-lived, as it fell into disuse after being pillaged during a barbarian invasion in 267 AD, just about a century after its completion. It was probably never repaired and was reduced to ruins thereafter. In the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was extensively quarried for building materials. However, a substantial part of the temple remains today, notably 16 of the original 104 gigantic columns.
An earlier temple had stood there, constructed by the tyrant Peisistratos around 550 BC. The building was demolished after the death of Peisistratos and the construction of a colossal new Temple of Olympian Zeus was begun around 520 BC by his sons, Hippias and Hipparchos. They sought to surpass two famous contemporary temples, the Heraion of Samos and the second Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
The work was abandoned when the tyranny was overthrown and Hippias was expelled in 510 BC. Only the platform and some elements of the columns had been completed by that point, and the temple remained in that state for 336 years. The temple was left unfinished during the years of Athenian democracy, apparently because the Greeks thought it was hubris to build on such a scale. In his treatise Politics, Aristotle cited the temple as an example of how tyrannies engaged the populace in great works for the state (essentially, white elephants) and left them no time, energy or means to rebel.
It was not until 174 BC that the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who presented himself as the earthly embodiment of Zeus, revived the project. The building material was changed from the local limestone to the expensive, higher quality Pentelic marble and the order was changed from Doric to Corinthian, marking the first time that this order had been used on the exterior of a major temple. However, the project ground to a halt again in 164 BC with the death of Antiochus. The temple was still only half-finished by that stage.
Serious damage was inflicted on the partly built temple by Lucius Cornelius Sulla's sack of Athens in 86 BC. While looting the city, Sulla seized some of the incomplete columns and transported them to Rome, where they were reused in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. A half-hearted attempt was made to complete the temple during Augustus' reign as the first Roman emperor, but it was not until the accession of Hadrian in the 2nd century AD that the project was finally completed.
In 124–125 AD, when the Philhellene Hadrian visited Athens, a massive building programme was begun that included the completion of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. A walled marble-paved precinct was constructed around the temple. The temple and the surrounding precinct were adorned with numerous statues depicting Hadrian, the gods, and personifications of the Roman provinces. A colossal statue of Hadrian was raised behind the building by the people of Athens in honor of the emperor's generosity. An equally colossal chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Zeus occupied the cella of the temple. The statue's material was unusual, as the use of chryselephantine was by this time regarded as archaic. Hadrian may have been imitating Phidias' famous statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon.
Material from the building was incorporated into a Christian basilica constructed nearby during the 5th or 6th century. Over the following centuries, the temple was systematically quarried to provide building materials for the houses and churches of medieval Athens. In 1436, near the end of the Byzantine period, only 21 columns remained standing. Of those, 15 still stand and the fate of some of the others is known: one was demolished in 1759 under the Ottomans to use the marble to make plaster for a mosque in the city, and one fell in a storm in 1852. The monument is currently under conservation to prevent any further collapse.
Impermanence. The folly of humankind. Since childhood the decay of modernity, the passage of all things into history, has fascinated me in a way I can't quite put into words. Something slipping through my grasp. The advance of time. Ethereal vapours of existence. I'm trapped in that fog, wasting away, monocular lens scanning for relics. A pilgrim at the gates of the temple of entropy.
David Findlay sent a card from England to his fiancée Fanny Wynter, the girl he loved. The card was sent just before he was posted to the Western Front at Messines, Belgium where he was killed. David and Fanny would marry should he return. He never returned. His special girl never forgot him, not marrying until 1942 when she was 49. She lived till she was 91, the last 29 years as a widow.
THIS IS DAVID'S STORY:
Private David Gray Findlay (Service No. 2648) was a despatch rider in the 47th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force during the 1914-18 War. He was killed in action on that dreadful day of June 7th, 1917, when the Allied offensive, intended to take the Ypres Salient, began with the detonation of 19 tunnels packed with high explosives. The resulting explosions, erupting almost simultaneously at 3.10am, created the largest explosion ever created by humankind to that point, left large craters up to 300M across and destroyed an estimated 10,000 German soldiers.
The 47th Battalion AIF were waiting behind the New Zealand Division. Once the German front line was devastated and the remnants in shock, the New Zealanders were to advance east across No Man’s Land, then take Messines and advance down the slope beyond. Only 2 kms to the south, from the splintered woods near the village of Ploegsteert, gas-shells rained down all night long to prevent any advance by the Allies through the forest. That night was well lit by an almost full moon and on the Messines Ridge ahead the Germans were silent though expecting an attack. What they weren’t expecting was for the ground to erupt beneath their front lines.
It may have been expected that no one slept that night as the Allies prepared for zero hour at 3.10am. However because of the effort taken to move forward and assemble ready for the advance, many of the men did sleep. To heighten the suspense, at 2.52am, green and yellow flares rose above the horizon just to the left of Messines and that was the German signal for artillery-fire. The barrage that broke out could be heard coming from the area to the north of Messines. All troops were now anxiously awake.
The Germans were in position awaiting the Allied artillery. Then, the ground shook and the “trench-walls rocked; to the left” less than a mile way , “ a huge bubble was swelling, mushroom-shaped from the earth, and then burst to cast a molten, rosy glow on the under-surface of some dense cloud low above it. As its brilliance faded two more bubbles burst beside it.” Within those fateful 20 seconds, a total of 19 great mines detonated and an estimated 10,000 German soldiers along the front line were blown to smithereens. The barrage of Allied machine guns followed and for 2 hours Messines and its ridge could not be seen by the Allies because of the smog and dust.
Under the cover of the dust and smoke the Allies moved forward. For a while enemy resistance was almost absent. As the New Zealanders advanced on Messines, they found a few Germans in concrete shelters, and some in shell holes, but most had fled leaving a litter of paraphernalia (including rifles, munitions, food, cigars). The New Zealanders worked their way around and fought their way through Messines as some of their enemy were still firing from cellars or concrete shelters.
Just to the south-east of Messines the Australian 38th Battalion encountered some opposition as they reached the major frontline trench, Ungodly Trench, and other German defences on Bethleem Farm. Blockhouses were taken, guns captures, then enemy troops became fugitives on the run or surrendered.
The New Zealand Division reached the intended position with the Australians to the right and left forming the new front line and all began to entrench themselves.
The Australian 52nd, 49th, 45th and 47th Battalions marched forward ready to be part of the afternoon attack. They were lined up north to south behind the New Zealand Division by 11.30am ready to move east. They had less than 2 hours to move forward to the new front line and resume the attack.
Private David Findlay and his mates could see the landscape ahead: the devastation of the former no man’s land, the trenches and fortifications of the former German frontline across the shallow valley on the slope and the pocked farmland on the broad low ridge that they knew now as Messines Ridge, and to their left was the damaged village of Messines. No word had arrived to confirm or alter the new zero hour to begin the assault, so the Australians had moved into their new positions – the 47th Battalion had moved forward beyond the former German Front line position and onto Bethleem Farm. What lay ahead was a landscape of treed windbreaks, a few large farmhouses and barns, and a clear view as far as the church spires of Comines (6kms). But what the trees concealed was the movement of the German reinforcements that had been urgently gathering at Warneton, just 3 kms away and out of sight in its vale.
Captain Grieve of the 37th Battalion stated that at this stage it seemed “more like a picnic than a battle” on this bright, hot day, except for bursts of the protective barrage. But further up the line to the north there had been delays and the result was that the troops south of Messines were in position and exposed whilst the zero hour was set back by 2 hours. This was necessary on the section of the front north of Messines through to Ypres, but at Bethleem Farm the unprotected battalions were exposed to the renewed German counter-offensive. Some picnic!
There were losses in all the battalions around and to the south of Messines that afternoon. One of those killed was Private David Gray Findlay. When word of him arrived home to his parents in the rural community at Maroondan, outside Bundaberg, Queensland, it was to the effect that he was missing in action. The Findlay family continued praying and hoping that he would one day, “walk in the door”. In fact it wasn’t until a Court of Inquiry was held “in the field” on 24th November 1917, that it was officially determined that David had been killed.
Two of his mates in the 47th Battalion, those who witnessed his signature on his will just a few days before he was killed, both suffered different fates but both returned to Australia after the war. Grenadier Tom McPhail from the Darling Downs was wounded (thigh wound) and taken prisoner, imprisoned at Güstrow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany. (There were 25,000 prisoners held at Güstrow and another 25,000 registered there and assigned to work camps.) On release he was hospitalised at Étaples, France then returned to London. Discharged from medical care he went awol having been caged for too long, for which he was punished by loss of pay. He was repatriated to Australia. Ernest Cunningham, a younger fellow, formerly a pattern maker in the Bundaberg foundry, was also wounded with severe wound to a foot. But after hospitalisation, Ern was returned to the battle front before the war ended. He also returned to Queensland.
But for David’s family, the grief and questions continued. His mother, Jessie Findlay , wrote to the Australian Army on September 24th, 1917:
Officer in Charge,
Dear Sir,
My son, (No. 2648) David Gray Findlay was reported Missing since June 7th, 1917 and heard no more word since about him when I got a letter from one of his mates on Sept 21st saying he had been wounded & he was in England somewhere. We have heard no word from himself since he was missing. Could you possibly find out for me where he is and if he is severely wounded. If you can find out any information would you kindly let me know as early as possible.
And you will oblige Mrs J. B Findlay, Maroondan, Mount Perry Line, via Bundaberg, Queensland.
Mrs Findlay’s distress is reflected in a response to another letter she wrote and placed it in a comforts parcel that was sent to troops. The parcel containing the letter was received by Driver T. C. G. Phillips, Australian Armed Service Corps to the British Red Cross Association. Phillips wrote, "In a comforts parcel received from Queensland, I found a rather pathetic appeal from a mother requesting information about her son - 2648 Pte David G Findlay 47th Battalion AIF. I am writing to the mother Mrs J. B. Findlay, Maroondan, Queensland, Australia and would be very pleased if you could furnish me with some particulars and details about her son. I think he was reported missing 7/6/17 and later on reported killed. Thanking you in anticipation. Yours faithfully, Driver TCG Phillips.”
The reply to Driver Phillips simply informed him that Private Findlay was officially reported killed in action on 7.6.17 having been previously reported missing on that date. "We have no further information about him at present except that he is reported to be buried 550 [sic.] yds past of Messines. We are making every possible enquiry concerning him and will immediately advise you should we succeed."
David Findlay’s last postcards sent home were received by his mother, his fiancée Fanny Wynter, and sister Kate, in late May, 1917. Kate replied the next day. She told all the news of family and home and of her impending move to the Monsildale in the upper Brisbane Valley “where there is some good timber hauling there. Bob is going up on Monday to have a final look around. Bob wanted me to live in town for a few months but I’d rather go straight away. I don’t like leaving Mum behind, but all being well, I’ll come and have a look at them every year or so.” She continues, “You won’t know Heatherleigh when you come home. We are shifting the Bullyard house down to Bundaberg. We have got an allotment in Barolin Street near the school...”
Give our love to Charlie [Clarke] and yourself, with fond love and thanking you for remembering me – I remain your loving sister, Kate Stehbens.
David never did come home, and Kate’s letter never reached David. It was eventually returned to Kate with the following successive messages added:
“On Active Service Abroad”
“Missing”
“UNDELIVERABLE AMPO RETURN TO SENDER”
“RETURNED MAIL OFFICE VICTORIA BARRACKS BRISBANE”
“DECEASED”
“Not Maroondan - Try MRS R G STEHBENS, Monsildale Sawmill, Via Linville, Brisbane Valley Line, Queensland”
Kate treasured the returned letter for the rest of her life, a tangible memento of a brother she would never forget.
Though there are unknown soldiers buried in the Bethleem East Cemetery, very close to where David Findlay was said to be buried “750 yards east of Messines” at the Allied Black Line, his burial place “is known only to God” and his life and military service are commemorated in perpetuity on the Menin Gate, Ypres Memorial, Ieper, Belgium.
IRS
Roughly translated, the Japanese caption above reads : "Sound (technology) has evolved ... But what about humankind?" This was one of the few voice-overs that Sony used in their award-winning TV commercial in Japan back in the 80's for their Walkman cassette players - viewing the youtube is compulsory!
The star of the commercial was a snow monkey called Choromatsu, a.k.a The Sony Ape-man, who passed away in 2007, just a few years before Sony stopped production of the Walkman in 2010. MP3 players may be the norm for portable music players nowadays but the Walkman was one of the first of such devices, selling 220 million worldwide in more than 30 years of production.
After doing the Mitsubishi Mirage TV commercial inspired Frilled Lizard, I have been wanting to do this Sony Walkman thingy but I simply couldn't find a Walkman to use in the photo that I had in mind - folks I had approached said they have either thrown away their old players or can't remember where they have stored away their old players. Furthermore, there was also some hesitation on my part as I have always felt that it is irreverent to mess around with Komatsu's designs. So, I am hereby apologizing to him in advance (on the off-chance that he stumbles upon this someday), 失礼致しました！Anyway, I have to fold this macaque again ... properly ... someday.
Origami related info :
Model : Japanese Macaque, designed by Komatsu Hideo, folded/interpreted by Cavemanboon. Paper : Elephant Hide, 110gsm, 38 x 38cm (?), acrylic paint applied on one side.
Walkman related info :
A million thanks to Philip Lim, for graciously lending me this WM-R707. Btw, I used to own a WM-R202, all those years ago. For folks who miss their old Walkmans (Walkmen?), the Walkman Central site may allow u to take a walk down memory lane. :-)
Oh, I need to thank Seng Kai too, for lending me his Discman and for trying so hard to find his old Walkman albeit unsuccessfully. I did take a pic of the macaque with the Discman, but it somehow didn't feel right.
And Sifu, if u are reading this, thanks for accompanying me to the flea market at Sungei Road to look for used Walkmans! We didn't find anything suitable but hope that famous Sg Road Laksa was worth the while. :-)
Okay, I have probably taken silliness to a whole new level ... time to get back into the cave and hide ... :-)
One of the six Days of Creation windows in the north wall of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic church in Bilton, Warwickshire.
This was my first scheme of windows installed in 1998-99 and one of my favourite projects, the windows being small in size but rich in subject and detail (and for once unfettered by any desire for something overly traditional which gave me a lot more freedom).
Originally built in 1958 on a traditional plan with an oblong nave and chancel in one chamber, the church was dramatically re-organised and extended in the early 1990s under the guidance of Fr Paul Chamberlain, wherein the axis of the church was re-orientated by 90 degrees with a centralised granite block altar in what was the heart of the old nave. The 'south' nave wall was removed to allow an extended aisle and ambulatory on this side. The former main entrance narthex was blocked up to create what is now the Blessed Sacrament chapel.
One of the most dramatic innovations in the re-ordered church is the full immersion fount, a cruciform marble pool set into the floor before the altar, evoking the earliest method of Christian Baptism by immersion in the River Jordan.
The two main stained glass windows on either side of the old nave were removed and re-sited in truncated form in the new extension, and in the place of the northern one a large crucifix (painted by Fr Chamberlain) has been set up as a focus behind the new altar. The six high windows on this wall are the latest addition to the church and are my own work from 1999.
For more detail on my work here see my website via the following link:-
aidanmcraethomsonstainedglass.weebly.com/sacred-heart-bil...
The New York Public Library
Libraries are the memory of humankind, irreplaceable repositories of documents of human thought and action. The New York Public Library is such a memory bank par excellence, one of the great knowledge institutions of the world, its myriad collections ranking with those of the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Virtually all of the Library's many collections and services are freely available to all comers. In fact, the Library has but one criterion for admission: curiosity.
The New York Public Library comprises simultaneously a set of scholarly research collections and a network of community libraries, and its intellectual and cultural range is both global and local, while singularly attuned to New York City. That combination lends to the Library an extraordinary richness. It is special also in being historically a privately managed, nonprofit corporation with a public mission, operating with both private and public financing in a century-old, still evolving private-public partnership. The research collections (for reference only, and organized as The Research Libraries, with four major centers) resemble the holdings of the great national and university libraries, and the community circulating libraries (organized as The Branch Libraries) resemble classic American municipal libraries.
All these features, taken together, make The New York Public Library a unique and complex institution, wonderful to use but not always easy to grasp. A useful way to understand the Library is to consider its beginnings and subsequent evolution. It has been very much a creature of time and place, bearing the imprint of its origins but always, like any living organism, coping with struggles and problems while adapting to an ever changing environment.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - May 18 - Sandy Li and Lindsay Sencenbaugh attend CommonSpirit's Humankindness Gala 2023 on May 18th 2023 at San Francisco in San Francisco, CA (Photo - Devlin Shand for Drew Altizer Photography)
The gathering of all the nations of the earth refers to the uniting of the world's political powers, as a gradual process beginning in 1914 and seen later in manifestations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations following the First and Second World Wars.These political powers are said to be influenced by Satan and his demons in opposition to God's kingdom.Babylon the Great is interpreted as the world empire of false religion, and that it will be destroyed by the beast just prior to Armageddon. Witnesses believe that after all other religions have been destroyed, the governments will turn to persecute them, and that God will then intervene, precipitating Armageddon. One day gather in this city, but instead seems to predict only that "they (will gather) the kings together to .... Armageddon". The text does however seem to imply, based on the text from the earlier passage of Revelation 16:14, that the purpose of this gathering of kings in the "place called Armageddon" is "for the war of the great day of God, the Almighty".The Dispensational viewpoint interprets biblical prophecy literally and expects that the fulfillment of prophecy will also be literal, depending upon the context of scripture. In his discussion of Armageddon, J. Dwight Pentecost has devoted an entire chapter to the subject, titled "The Campaign of Armageddon", in which he discusses Armageddon as a campaign and not a specific battle, which will be fought in the Middle East. Pentecost writes: It has been held commonly that the battle of Armageddon is an isolated event transpiring just prior to the second advent of Christ to the earth. The extent of this great movement in which God deals with "the kings of the earth and of the whole world" (Rev. 16:14) will not be seen unless it is realized that the "battle of that great day of God Almighty" (Rev. 16:14)[13] is not an isolated battle, but rather a campaign that extends over the last half of the tribulation period. The Greek word "polemo", translated "battle" in Revelation 16:14, signifies a war or campaign, while "machē" signifies a battle, and sometimes even single combat. This distinction is observed by Trench, (see Richard C. Trench, New Testament Synonyms, pp.301-2) and is followed by Thayer (see Joseph Henry Thayer, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, p. 528) and Vincent (see Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament, II, 541). The use of the word polemos (campaign) in Revelation 16:14 would signify that the events that culminate in the gathering at Armageddon at the second advent are viewed by God as one connected campaign.— Pentecost, p.340The religion's current teaching on Armageddon originated in 1925 with former Watch Tower Society president J. F. Rutherford, who based his interpretations on the books of Exodus, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Psalms as well as additional material from the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. The doctrine marked a further break from the teachings of Watch Tower Society founder Charles Taze Russell, who for decades had taught that the final war would be an anarchistic struggle for domination on earth.[41] Tony Wills, author of a historical study of Jehovah's Witnesses, claimed that Rutherford seemed to relish his descriptions of how completely the wicked would be destroyed at Armageddon, dwelling at great length on prophecies of destruction. He stated that towards the close of his ministry Rutherford allocated about half the space available in The Watchtower magazines to discussion of Armageddon. The end time (also called end times, end of time, end of days, last days, final days, or eschaton) is a future time-period described variously in the eschatologies of several world religions (both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic), which believe that world events will achieve a final climax. believe that the gathering of all the nations of the earth refers to the uniting of the world's political powers, as a gradual process beginning in 1914 and seen later in manifestations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations following the First and Second World Wars.[35] These political powers are said to be influenced by Satan and his demons in opposition to God's kingdom.[33] Babylon the Great is interpreted as the world empire of false religion, and that it will be destroyed by the beast just prior to Armageddon.[36][37] Witnesses believe that after all other religions have been destroyed, the governments will turn to persecute them, and that God will then intervene, precipitating Armageddon. The Abrahamic faiths maintain a linear cosmology, with end-time scenarios containing themes of transformation and redemption. In Judaism, the term "end of days" makes reference to the Messianic Age and includes an in-gathering of the exiled Jewish diaspora, the coming of the Messiah, the resurrection of the righteous, and the world to come. Some sects of Christianity depict the end time as a period of tribulation that precedes the second coming of Christ, who will face the Antichrist along with his power structure and usher in the Kingdom of God. However, other Christians believe that the end time represents the personal tribulation experienced before they become enlightened with the Word of God.[1] In Islam, the Day of Judgement is preceded by the appearance of the Mahdi mounted on a white stallion. With the help of Isa (Jesus), the Mahdi will triumph over Masih ad-Dajjal (the false messiah). Non-Abrahamic faiths tend to have more cyclical world-views, with end-time eschatologies characterized by decay, redemption, and rebirth. In Hinduism, the end time occurs when Kalki, the final incarnation of Vishnu, descends atop a white horse and brings an end to the current Kali Yuga. In Buddhism, the Buddha predicted that his teachings would be forgotten after 5,000 years, followed by turmoil. A bodhisattva named Maitreya will appear and rediscover the teaching of dharma. The ultimate destruction of the world will then come through seven suns. Since the development of the concept of deep time in the 18th century and the calculation of the estimated age of the Earth, scientific discourse about end times has centered on the ultimate fate of the universe. Armageddon is viewed as a spiritual battle or struggle in the present age between the forces of good, i.e. righteousness, purity and virtue, and the forces of evil. The final struggle between the two comes as satanic influence is let loose with the emergence of Gog and Magog. Satan gathers all his powers, and uses all his methods to mislead people, introducing an age where iniquity, promiscuity, atheism, and materialism abound.Theories have included the Big Rip, Big Crunch, Big Bounce, and Big Freeze (heat death). Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as ethical limitations of using such technologies. The most common transhumanist thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings. The contemporary meaning of the term "transhumanism" was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman".The assertion would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990 and organizing in California an intelligentsia that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement. Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion. Researchers in futures studies and transhumanists investigate how the accelerating rate of scientific progress may lead to a "technological singularity" in the future that would profoundly and unpredictably change the course of human history, and result in Homo sapiens no longer being the dominant life form on Earth Eschatology /ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/ (About this sound listen) is a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. This concept is commonly referred to as the "end of the world" or "end times". The word arises from the Greek ἔσχατος eschatos meaning "last" and -logy meaning "the study of", and was first used in English around 1844. The Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as "the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind". In the context of mysticism, the phrase refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the Divine. In many religions it is taught as an existing future event prophesied in sacred texts or folklore. History is often divided into "ages" (aeons), which are time periods each with certain commonalities. One age comes to an end and a new age or world to come, where different realities are present, begins. When such transitions from one age to another are the subject of eschatological discussion, the phrase, "end of the world", is replaced by "end of the age", "end of an era", or "end of life as we know it". Much apocalyptic fiction does not deal with the "end of time" but rather with the end of a certain period of time, the end of life as it is now, and the beginning of a new period of time. It is usually a crisis that brings an end to current reality and ushers in a new way of living, thinking, or being. This crisis may take the form of the intervention of a deity in history, a war, a change in the environment, or the reaching of a new level of consciousness. Most modern eschatology and apocalypticism, both religious and secular, involve the violent disruption or destruction of the world; whereas Christian and Jewish eschatologies view the end times as the consummation or perfection of God's creation of the world, albeit with violent overtures, such as the Great Tribulation. For example, according to some ancient Hebrew worldviews, reality unfolds along a linear path (or rather, a spiral path, with cyclical components that nonetheless have a linear trajectory); the world began with God and is ultimately headed toward God's final goal for creation, the world to come. Eschatologies vary as to their degree of optimism or pessimism about the future. In some eschatologies, conditions are better for some and worse for others, e.g. "heaven and hell".Katechon is found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 in an eschatological context: Christians must not behave as if the Day of the Lord would happen tomorrow, since the Son of Perdition (the Antichrist of 1 and 2 John) must be revealed before. St. Paul then adds that the revelation of the Antichrist is conditional upon the removal of "something/someone that restrains him" and prevents him being fully manifested. Verse 6 uses the neuter gender, τὸ κατέχον; and verse 7 the masculine, ὁ κατέχων. the Antichrist will come at the End of the World. Since St. Paul does not explicitly mention the katechon's identity, the passage's interpretation has been subject to dialogue and debate amongst Christian scholars. The term is found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 in an eschatological context: Christians must not behave as if the Day of the Lord would happen tomorrow, since the Son of Perdition (the Antichrist of 1 and 2 John) must be revealed before. St. Paul then adds that the revelation of the Antichrist is conditional upon the removal of "something/someone that restrains him" and prevents him being fully manifested. Verse 6 uses the neuter gender, τὸ κατέχον; and verse 7 the masculine, ὁ κατέχων. Since St. Paul does not explicitly mention the katechon's identity, the passage's interpretation has been subject to dialogue and debate amongst Christian scholars.In Nomos of the Earth, German political thinker Carl Schmitt suggests the historical importance within traditional Christianity of the idea of the katechontic "restrainer" that allows for a Rome-centered Christianity, and that "meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon." The katechon represents, for Schmitt, the intellectualization of the ancient Christianum Imperium, with all its police and military powers to enforce orthodox ethics (see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G.L. Ulmen, trs., (New York: Telos, 2003), pp. 59–60.) In his posthumously published diary the entry from December 19, 1947 reads: "I believe in the katechon: it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful" (Glossarium, p. 63). And Schmitt adds: "One must be able to name the katechon for every epoch of the last 1,948 years. The place has never been empty, or else we would no longer exist." Paolo Virno has a long discussion of the katechon in his book Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. He refers to Schmitt's discussion. Virno says that Schmitt views the katechon as something that impedes the coming of the Antichrist, but because the coming of the Antichrist is a condition for the redemption promised by the Messiah, the katechon also impedes the redemption.[1] p. 60. Virno uses "katechon" to refer to that which impedes both the War of all against all (Bellum omnium contra omnes) and totalitarianism, for example the society in Orwell's Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four). It impedes both but eliminates neither. Virno locates the katechon in the human ability to use language, which makes it possible to conceive of the negation of something, and also allows the conceptualization of something which can be other than what it is; and in the bioanthropological behavior of humans as social animals, which allows people to know how to follow rules without needing a rule to tell how to follow a rule, then a rule to tell how to follow that rule, and so on to infinity. These capabilities permit people to create social institutions and to dissolve or change them. Wolfgang Drechsler and Vasilis Kostakis have recently interpreted the katechon as Law that in contemporary technological development holds up immediate dangers but also prevent the ultimate e-society; they combine the interpretations by Schmitt, Agamben, and Virno to that end.1 Concerning the coming [the presence: tēs parousias] of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, 2 not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. 3 Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion [apostasia] occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed [kai apokaluphthēi ho anthrōpos tēs anomias], the man doomed to destruction. 4 He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. 5 Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? 6 And now you know what is holding him back [to katechon], so that he may be revealed [apokaluphthēnai] at the proper time. 7 For the secret power of lawlessness [to mustērion tēs anomias] is already at work [energeitai]; but the one who now holds it back [ho katechōn] will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed [apokaluphthēsetai ho anomos], whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming [tē epiphaneia tēs parousias autou]. Paul’s letter inaugurates the long and fascinating history of the katechon as a political concept that is still producing its effects today. So many strata of interpretation have accumulated ever since. For Tertullian, John Chrysostom, or Augustine, the katechon is the Roman Empire. In his Apology for the Christians (XXXII, 1) Tertullian thus very clearly states: There is also another need, a greater one, for our praying for the Emperors, as for the whole estate of the empire and the interests of Rome. We know that the great force which threatens the whole world, the end of the age itself with its menace of hideous suffering, is delayed by the respite which the Roman Empire means for us. We do not wish to experience all that; and when we pray for its postponement are helping forward the continuance of Rome. [Est et alia major necessitas nobis orandi pro imperatoribus, etiam pro omni statu imperii rebusque Romanis, qui vim maximam universo orbi imminentem ipsamque clausulam saeculi acerbitates horrendas comminantem Romani imperii commeatu scimus retardari. Itaque nolumus experiri, ea dum precamur differri, Romanae diuturnitati favemus.] A divergent reading is proposed by John Calvin in his commentary on Paul’s Second Epistle, where he considers it “more probable” [probabilius] that the Apostle declared: “the light of the gospel must be diffused through all parts of the earth before God would thus give loose reins to Satan” [prius circumferendam per omnes terrae partes Evangelii lucem, antequam Deus ita Satanae frena laxaret].4 The katechon would thus be the evangelizing mission itself: “This, therefore, was the delay, until the career of the gospel should be completed” [haec igitur dilatio erat, donec completus esset Evangelii cursus]. According to Calvin, then, we could say that the katechontic deferral is the time the evangelic word needs to unfold its effects. It was Carl Schmitt who passed the concept on to contemporary political theory. In a letter to Hans Blumenberg dated October 22, 1974, Schmitt himself recognizes in the katechon the key to his political theory: “For more than 40 years I have been collecting materials on the problem of the ‘Κατεχων’ or ‘Κατεχον’ (2 Thess. 2, 6); and for all these years I have looked for a human ear that would listen to this question and understand it—for me the crucial question [Kernfrage] of (my) political theology.”5 Indeed, the word keeps recurring in Schmitt’s works from 1942 onward to characterize the most different entities or historical figures: it is used for the first time in an article published in the journal Das Reich on April 19, 1942, in order to negatively portray the United States as a “delayer of world history” [Verzögerer der Weltgeschichte] in front of the Nazi imperial project; it then appears later in the same year, in the essay Land and Sea, to describe the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire (said to have “acted as a rampart, a katechon, as it is called in Greek . . . against the onslaughts of Islam”) and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (depicted as being “not an active hero, but rather a brake, a delaying factor . . . able to delay the Thirty-Years War by several decades”).6 Even Hegel ends up becoming katechontic in a 1950 article where Schmitt, discussing Karl Löwith’s book The Meaning of History, speaks of “a force that defers the end and restrains the evil one” [einer Kraft, die das Ende aufhält und den Bösen niederhält]: This is the katechon of the mysterious passage of Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. The medieval empire of the German rulers understood itself historically as the katechon. Luther still understood it in these terms, whereas Calvin takes a significant turn by no longer taking the empire but rather the preaching of God’s words as the katechon. The conception of withholding and deferring forces and powers can in some form probably be demonstrated to be active for every great historian [die Vorstellung haltender und aufhaltender
Kräfte und Mächte lässt sich in irgendeiner Form wohl bei jedem großen Historiker nachweisen]. Nietzsche furiously identified Hegel and the sixth sense of the Germans, i.e., the historical sense, as the great deferrer on the way to expressed atheism [Nietzsche hat voller Wut gerade in Hegel und in dem sechsten, das ist in dem historischen Sinn der Deutschen, den großen Verzögerer auf dem Weg zum offenen Atheismus erblickt]. With Schmitt, the differentiation in the concept’s extension—the pluralizing of its possible embodiments—is well under way, thereby turning the katechon into a metahistorical structure beyond the historically identifiable forces that represent it.8 As Schmitt himself notes in an entry in his Glossarium dated December 17, 1947: The katechon is the only possibility as a Christian to understand history and find it meaningful [er ist für mich die einzige Möglichkeit, als Christ Geschichte zu verstehen und sinnvoll zu finden]. We have to be able to name the katechon for every epoch in the last 1948 years [Schmitt writes in 1947]. The place has never been unoccupied, otherwise we would not be present anymore [der Platz war niemals unbesetzt, sonst wären wir nicht mehr vorhanden] . . . There are temporary, transient, splinter-like fragmentary bearers of this role [es gibt zeitweise, vorübergehende, splitterhaft fragmentarische Inhaber dieser Aufgabe]. In Schmitt’s writings, then, we are witnessing a striking generalization of the katechon. It now becomes possible to consider the katechontic force that withholds as inherent to “every theory of the State, including Hobbes’s,” as Agamben puts it in The Time That Remains. It now becomes possible to ask, as Massimo Cacciari does in a recent book entitled Il potere che frena (“The Power That Withholds”): “Does not every constituted power that is effectively in force belong to the dimension of the katechon? Shouldn’t it have at its disposal a katechontic energy?” Katechon is here abstracted from its initial context, it undergoes a process of “secularization,” as Agamben emphasizes, while obviously retaining something of its original Christian logic (or theologics). With this (quasi-)secularization also comes a shift from the question “quid or quis est katechon?,” as Cacciari formulates it, toward the complex temporality of the katechontic as such.11 For the postponement that the katechon produces or enacts amounts to a double deferral. To borrow Roberto Esposito’s words in Immunitas: “[I]n delaying the explosion of evil . . . it also at the same time delays the final victory of the principle of good. The triumph of evil is held in check, true, but the divine parousia is also delayed by its very existence. Its function is positive, but negatively so.”Withholding the coming of an Antichrist who in his turn precedes the coming of the Messiah, the katechon amounts to a kind of postponement of a postponement. And this is the reason why Agamben goes as far as to identify Derrida as the paradigmatic thinker of the katechontic force of our times: The katechon, suspending and withholding the end [sospendendo e trattenendo la fine], inaugurates a time in which nothing can really happen [or occur: avvenire] because the sense of historical becoming, that has its truth only in the eschaton, is indefinitely deferred [differito] . . . . Schmitt’s katechontic time is a blocked messianism [un messianismo bloccato]: but this blocked messianism reveals itself as the theological paradigm of the time in which we live [il paradigma teologico del tempo in cui viviamo], the structure of which is nothing else than the Derridian différance. Christian eschatology introduced a sense and a direction in time: katechon and différance, suspending and deferring this sense, render it undecidable. Of course, on the one hand, Derrida himself would have protested against this reduction of différance to a mere characterization of “the time in which we live.” The unity or consistence of such a “time” has always been the target or focus of deconstruction’s questioning, from Derrida’s early insistence on the impossible closure of a context to his appropriation of the Shakespearian motto quoted over and over again in Specters of Marx: “Time is out of joint.”But, on the other hand, Agamben’s attempt to historicize différance could very well be supported by some of Derrida’s own statements: suffice it to recall here that even when Derrida defined deconstruction as “what happens” [ce qui arrive], i.e. as what disrupts the very epochality of an epoch or a “time,” he immediately added: “It remains then to situate, localize, determine what happens with what happens, when it happens. To date it.” In other words, even if Agamben’s unashamed historicization of deconstruction seems to be at odds with the latter’s insistence on untimeliness, even if it apparently yields too quickly and easily to Schmitt’s Christian-historical requirement that “we have to be able to name the katechon for every epoch in the last 1948 years”—ours supposedly being deconstruction itself—, he also might be said to further one of deconstruction’s constant concerns or efforts. And this should be a sufficient reason to try to take Agamben’s suggestion seriously, or at least take it as a sign, as a symptom worth analyzing, without procrastinating anymore. Indeed, you might be wondering what I am getting at with this long reconstruction of the history of the katechon, from Paul to Agamben and beyond. You might even be thinking that I keep deferring this very question—“what am I getting at?”—, that I delay the moment when, hopefully, I will finally spell out the political stakes of the katechon for today. In sum, you might be suspecting that I am using the archaeology of the katechon as the very katechon for my political discourse on it. Now, at the risk of appearing paradoxical, I would argue that nothing is more urgently needed than this concept of the katechon as general(ized) deferral, provided we pursue the movement initiated by Schmitt, i.e. its abstraction, the severing of its ties with its original Christian context. (Of course, the name of this abstracting process could well be Christianity itself as globalization, as what Derrida has called “globalatinization,” mondialatinisation.
*
爆心地 / Hypocenter, Hiroshima, Japan
Carried to Hiroshima from Tinian Island by the Enora Gay, a U.S.Army B-29 bomber, the first atomic bomb used in the history of humankind exploded approximately 600 meters above this spot.
The city below was hit by heat rays of approximately 3,000 to 4,000°C along with a blast wind and radiation.
Most people in the area lost their lives instantly. The time was 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945.
We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855
Planet Earth Needs your Help. If you are interested in saving the planet for our feathered friends, wild flowers, wild animals and nature areas, as well as humankind follow the links below to articles I and my girlfriend have published. Each article explains in mostly layman terms what scientist are observing and forecasting about climate change as well as offering things an individual can do to help reduce global warming.
Latest Article
Our third article in our series on climate tipping points is on the melting of the world’s permafrost and its consequence to the planet. Here is the link. planetearthneedsyou.blogspot.com/2021/01/melting-permafro...
All Previous Articles
The most powerful and complex space telescope ever created by humankind has achieved its final form as a fully assembled observatory. Reaching a major milestone, technicians and engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California.
To combine both halves of Webb, engineers carefully lifted the Webb telescope (which includes the mirrors and science instruments) above the already-combined sunshield and spacecraft using a crane. Team members slowly guided the telescope into place, ensuring that all primary points of contact were perfectly aligned and seated properly. The observatory has been mechanically connected; next steps will be to electrically connect the halves, and then test the electrical connections.
Read more about this major milestone: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-james-webb-space...
In this image: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, post-integration, inside Northrop Grumman’s cleanroom facilities in Redondo Beach, California
Image credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
The most powerful and complex space telescope ever created by humankind has achieved its final form as a fully assembled observatory. Reaching a major milestone, technicians and engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California.
To combine both halves of Webb, engineers carefully lifted the Webb telescope (which includes the mirrors and science instruments) above the already-combined sunshield and spacecraft using a crane. Team members slowly guided the telescope into place, ensuring that all primary points of contact were perfectly aligned and seated properly. The observatory has been mechanically connected; next steps will be to electrically connect the halves, and then test the electrical connections.
Read more about this major milestone: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-james-webb-space...
In this image: Integration teams carefully guide Webb’s suspended telescope section into place above its Spacecraft Element just prior to integration.
Image credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
The most powerful and complex space telescope ever created by humankind has achieved its final form as a fully assembled observatory. Reaching a major milestone, technicians and engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California.
To combine both halves of Webb, engineers carefully lifted the Webb telescope (which includes the mirrors and science instruments) above the already-combined sunshield and spacecraft using a crane. Team members slowly guided the telescope into place, ensuring that all primary points of contact were perfectly aligned and seated properly. The observatory has been mechanically connected; next steps will be to electrically connect the halves, and then test the electrical connections.
Read more about this major milestone: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-james-webb-space...
In this image: The fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and unitized pallet structures (UPSs) that fold up around the telescope for launch, are seen partially deployed to an open configuration to enable telescope installation.
Image credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
During the second step of humankind’s first-ever lunar-Earth flyby, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) captured this stunning view of Earth. The image covers the northern Pacific Ocean.
The image was taken by Juice monitoring camera 1 (JMC1) just at 23:48 CEST on 20 August 2024, as Juice was heading towards its closest approach to Earth. This successful flyby of Earth redirected Juice’s path through space to put it on course for a flyby of Venus in August 2025.
The Juice monitoring cameras were designed to monitor the spacecraft’s various booms and antennas, especially during the challenging deployment period following launch.
They were not designed to carry out science or image the Moon and Earth. A scientific camera called JANUS is providing high-resolution imagery during the cruise phase flybys of Earth, Moon and Venus, and of Jupiter and its icy moons once in the Jupiter system in 2031.
JMC1 is located on the front* of the spacecraft and looks diagonally up into a field of view that sees deployed antennas, and depending on their orientation, part of one of the solar arrays. JMC images provide 1024 x 1024 pixel snapshots. The images shown here are lightly processed by Simeon Schmauß and Mark McCaughrean.
Guide to Juice’s monitoring cameras
More information on the lunar-Earth flyby
Rewatch the livestream of Juice’s first Moon images, including Q&A with the team
More images from Juice's monitoring cameras in ESA's Planetary Science Archive
*Additional technical information: ‘front’ means +X side of the spacecraft (the opposite side, -X hosts the high gain antenna). JMC1 looks towards the +Y/+Z direction.
Credits: ESA/Juice/JMC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Acknowledgements: Simeon Schmauß & Mark McCaughrean
The Baroque facade detail of the church of Santa Maria Assunta is very special. I was particularly taken with the view looking skyward; the symmetry, lines of architrave, columns.
Venice abounds in beautiful religious buildings and the Jesuit church of Santa Maria Assunta is one of them - located in the Cannaregio district, in Campo dei Gesuiti.
Sources give its origins as 1148, the designer of the current building was Domenico Rossi (1657 - 1737).
I learned that the symbol/christogram of IHS came to stand for Jesus Savior of Humankind. Being Iesus (Jesus) Hominum (of humankind) Salvator (Savior).
© All rights reserved.
Despite humankind’s scientific prowess there are still many phenomena that defy explanation or a common agreement on why something happens. A ‘glory’ is a rare optical phenomenon that is mostly seen by pilots and mountain climbers looking down at mists or clouds. Forming a miniature circular rainbow, glories are seen when the Sun shines from behind and interacts with water droplets to refract light back to the observer.
This picture is an even more rare example of a glory seen from space. Snapped by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst on 14 September 2018 during his Horizons mission, he commented: “Surprised to see a pilot's glory from the International Space Station, an optical phenomenon that is often visible from aircraft, or on volcanoes when looking down in a foggy crater, with Sun in the back. Our shadow is (theoretically) right in the middle of the rainbow, but we don't have a core shadow due to our altitude.”
To see a glory at the International Space Station’s cruising altitude of 400 km is surprising as they require specific atmospheric conditions.
Our atmosphere extends to 480 km above the surface of Earth but most of it stays within 16 km, making the boundaries of where “space” begins hardly a defined point.
The Kármán line at 100 km altitude is a generally accepted point that represents the boundary between Earth and space, but weather, and space weather, will often take no heed of boundaries defined by humans.
In the upper reaches of our atmosphere many more phenomena have been spotted that we know little about, from noctilucent clouds to sprites, blue jets and elves, but the International Space Station offers a great platform to investigate these phenomena.
The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) was installed this year as a dedicated facility outside the European space laboratory Columbus. The collection of optical cameras, photometers and X- and gamma-ray detectors are designed to look for electrical discharges born in stormy weather conditions that extend above thunderstorms into the upper atmosphere.
This observatory is not designed to investigate glories but space events such as sprites and blue jets are just as awe-inspiring to view from space. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen captured a sprite on camera from the International Space Station, proving the phenomenon can be observed from space – rare photos of the phenomena were also taken by pilots and researchers from mountaintops.
Sometimes a simple photograph can spark scientific investigation or even full-blown scientific research. Alexander’s pictures of aurora from his last mission in 2014 are adding extra information for researchers analysing these beautiful atmospheric displays of light.
The International Space Station also hosted ESA’s Solar facility that monitored the radiation emitted by the Sun across the electromagnetic spectrum. For almost a decade it tracked the Sun to measure our star’s energy, delivering the most accurate data on the Sun’s power that influences our climate on Earth but also how satellites operate in space.
The phenomenon in this picture is related to atmospheric physics and so strictly speaking not space weather. This week, however ESA is highlighting space weather, from the science behind it and how we study it, to its effect on satellites in space and ESA’s plans for the future. Keep your eye on ESA’s online channels to find out more, or follow these hashtags in social media: #SpaceWeather #SolarHazards #SafeguardingOurPlanet.
Credits: ESA/NASA
14-Jan-2021: 1. Death to 2020
Fave! Mockumentary.
Tennyson Foss, historian: "Now, of course, all this division, all this intractable conflict, was tearing humankind asunder at the worst possible time. Because, of course, at the very moment that we were preoccupied with fighting each other, the corona virus was steadily bearing down upon us. Now, those who've closely studied the history books, such as myself, knew that this was strongly reminiscent of the time the White Walkers led their army of the dead towards the warring factions of Westeros."
Interviewer: "So you mean like in 'Game of thrones'?"
Foss: "No, no. I am discussing history."
Interviewer: "I'm pretty sure that was 'Game of thrones'."
Foss: "Well, I'm pretty sure that I am the historian here."
Foss: "…"
Foss: "Cut to a map or something."
Dr Maggie Gravel, behavioural therapist: "Human beings are social animals, so shutting down social interactions goes against our instinct. I mean, for most folks, not me. I fucking hate people. My god, it was bliss!"
Kathy Flowers, soccer mom: "I know criminal behaviour when I see it. Whether it's someone breaking a window or a Black man sitting in a car."
Interviewer: "Wasn't there a video of you haranguing a Black man sitting in a car that went viral this year?"
Flowers: "…"
Man in video clip: "And I'm telling you this is my car!"
Flowers in video clip: "Well, then I'm sure you'll prove that with some ID! Yeah."
Flowers: "First of all, I… I wasn't haranguing. I was politely inquiring. For less than an hour."
Interviewer: "So that was the only time you did something like that this year?"
Flowers: "Um… There was an incident at a pool."
Woman in video clip: "Give it back!"
Flowers in video clip: "Do you have a receipt for this towel? I just need to see a receipt!"
Flowers: "Uh, there was an incident up in the hills."
Man in video clip: "I'm painting a water colour!"
Flowers in video clip: "OK, the way that you're wielding that paintbrush is very unsettling to me."
Flowers: "And at the hospital."
Flowers in video clip: "Sweetie, are you absolutely sure that this is your dialysis machine?"
Girl in video clip: "Mommy, the crazy lady's back again!"
Flowers in video clip: "I was just asking. I'm allowed to ask."
Flowers (voice breaking): "I don't know why people are so quick to judge."
Flowers: "…"
Flowers: *points to boom operator, a black man*
Flowers (mouthing): "Is he with you?"
Interviewer: "That's Mike. He's been here all day."
21-Feb-2021: 2. David Attenborough: A life on our planet
Fave! Docu. BRB CRYING
David Attenborough: "A marked change in atmospheric carbon has always been incompatible with a stable Earth. It was a feature of all five mass extinctions. In previous events, it had taken volcanic activity up to one million years to dredge up enough carbon from within the Earth to trigger a catastrophe. By burning millions of years' worth of living organisms all at once as coal and oil, we have managed to do so in less than 200."
"Rewilding the world is simpler than you might think. And the changes we have to make will only benefit ourselves and the generations that follow. A century from now, our planet could be a wild place again. And I'm going to tell you how. Every other species on Earth reaches a maximum population after a time – the number that can be sustained on the natural resources available. With nothing to restrict us, our population has been growing dramatically throughout my lifetime. On current projections, there will be 11 billion people on Earth by 2100. But it's possible to slow, even to stop population growth well before it reaches that point. Japan's standard of living climbed rapidly in the latter half of the 20th century. As healthcare and education improved, people's expectations and opportunities grew, and the birth rate fell. In 1950, a Japanese family was likely to have three or more children. By 1975, the average was two. The result is that the population has now stabilized and has hardly changed since the millennium. There are signs that this has started to happen across the globe. As nations develop everywhere, people choose to have fewer children. The number of children being born worldwide every year is about to level off. A key reason the population is still growing is because many of us are living longer. At some point in the future, the human population will peak for the very first time. The sooner it happens, the easier it makes everything else we have to do. By working hard to raise people out of poverty, giving all access to healthcare, and enabling girls in particular to stay in school as long as possible, we can make it peak sooner and at a lower level. Why wouldn't we want to do these things? Giving people a greater opportunity of life is what we would want to do anyway. The trick is to raise the standard of living around the world without increasing our impact on that world. That may sound impossible, but there are ways in which we can do this."
28-Feb-2021: 3. Crush proof
1-Mar-2021: 4. Mank
2-Mar-2021: 5. The social dilemma
Fave! Docu about social media addiction and stuff. If you need to lock yourself out of the Internet or just specific sites (and a time-locked cookie jar isn't strong enough for you), I strongly recommend the app Freedom. If time = money, Freedom will pay its own way pretty quickly… At least it did in my case. :p Willpower depletion is a thing.
In other news, the docu mentioned the idea of taxing data collection. I approve of this. :q
3-Mar-2021: 6. The game changers
Fave! Docu about a bunch of vegan athletes who get insane results. Produced by Arnold, Jackie Chan, and some other people. :)
6-Mar-2021: 7. A plastic ocean
Docu. I expected to fave it, of course, but I didn't. For reasons. -_- Anyway, click here for a great video about cute baby birds. Stop making humans.
16-Mar-2021: 8. Becoming
Fave! Docu.
18-Mar-2021: 9. Ricky Gervais: Humanity
Stand-up show.
30-Apr-2021: 10. Eat pray love
15-May-2021: 11. The truth about alcohol
Docu. (I do not partake.)
20-May-2021: 12. Eurotrip
In honour of the 10th anniversary of my first Interrail trip...
9-Jun-2021: 13. The Santa incident
Yeah, that happened. I ordered the DVD in the final week of 2020 and it arrived like 4 months later and… -_-
10-Jun-2021: 14. The prom
Fave! And the soundtrack too! x)
11-Jun-2021: 15. The intouchables
12-2021: 16. Once upon a time in Hollywood
14-Jun-2021: 17. Rocketman
Fave! The best non-documentary film I saw this year. I became especially obsessed with the "Saturday night’s alright" scene and watched it OVER 9 BAZILLION TIMES. o_O AAAAAAAAAAAAAA. And several other songs also made me go "Hmm, this sounds pretty nice. I should probably check out more of his music." I'd had a handful of Elton songs in my collection for decades (I first heard him on "The lion king" soundtrack), but now I really started to spend time with ALL THE ALBUMS. (Er, I'm almost done.) Normally, the high point of my week is… the Flickr upload… :B But the Flickr habit had kind of been broken over the summer, for reasons. So the new high point of each week was to sit the fuck down with a new (to me…) Elton album and a can o' energy drink and no distractions. Ahhh. And I've got THREE ELTON SHOWS booked for 2022 and 2023! But I half expect them to get postponed or cancelled. :'( I COULD have started listening to him properly in 1995 or some shit. PS. Fave Elton song: "Live like horses". :'D Never heard it before 2021. D:
15-Jun-2021: 18. Bo Burnham: Inside
Comedy special. Funny and catchy songs. xD I put several of them on my iPod, such as "How the world works" and "Sexting". :B
19-Jun-2021: 19. Django unchained
25-Jun-2021: 20. The mustang
27-Jun-2021: 21. Steve Jobs
21-Jul-2021: 22. Kingsman: The secret service
Fave!
22-Jul-2021: 23. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Heehee. :B
23-Jul-2021: 24. Chernobyl 1986
There’s a scary man in this movie. Oh, and a nuclear meltdown.
31-Jul-2021: 25. Harriet
11-Sep-2021: 26. Assassin's creed
18-Sep-2021: 27. Mammal
25-Sep-2021: 28. The big short
2-Oct-2021: 29. Deepwater Horizon
9-Oct-2021: 30. Late night
Employee Gabe: "I'm in a single-income household. And Jen and I just had our second baby, Taylor. *shows photo* Adorable, huh?"
Boss Katherine: "She takes after you."
Gabe: "Yeah. Thanks. So, there's just a lot of expenses at home right now, and I think it's time for a raise."
Katherine: "I see. This is actually very exciting to me."
Gabe: "Really? Great."
Katherine: "Because what you're describing is the most clear-cut example of the classic sexist argument for the advancement of men in the workplace. You're asking for a raise not because of any work-related contribution you've made, but simply because you have a family. And that's why, in the 1950s, family men were promoted over the women they worked with. I've never encountered it, actually, in such a clean, teachable way."
Gabe: "I don't think that's at all what's happening."
Katherine: "I can't give you a raise, Gabe. It's like giving a raise to a drug addict."
Gabe: "What?"
Katherine: "Well, your situations are virtually identical. A drug addict makes certain decisions outside of work for their sense of self and comfort, and then the addiction demands more time, more energy, more money, just like a child."
Gabe: "My child's like a drug problem?"
Katherine: "Exactly. :D You want special treatment. I'm sure you can see how unfair that would be to a single man, or woman."
Gabe: "There are no women on this staff."
Other employee: "Gabe…"
Gabe: "And the reason there aren't any women is because you hate women. So you can sit there spouting all this pseudo-feminist bullshit, but we all know what's going on here."
Katherine: "We need to hire a woman. [To Gabe] You're fired, obviously."
16-Oct-2021: 31. Attack of the Hollywood clichés!
Fave! Docu.
23-Oct-2021: 32. Cast away
My biology studies included a course in outdoor pedagogy, during which we had to choose a practical project. My classmate took a bunch of kindergarteners into the woods for a nice day of grilling hot dogs over a campfire and shit like that. A kid had reportedly happened to drop their hot dog in the fire, which caused them to exclaim…
"I HATE NATURE!"
This became a bit of a catchphrase in our class whenever something went slightly or terribly wrong in the great outdoors.
So I heard "I HATE NATURE!" in my head kind of frequently while watching "Cast away". :B
13-Nov-2021: 33. No time to die
*nudge* Check out my photos of A CERTAIN BRIDGE! :B I found out during the roadtrip that the new Bond movie would feature the Atlantic Ocean Road… IIRC, it was filmed only a few weeks before my visit! :D (But don't quote me on that.)
14-Nov-2021: 34. Eurovision Song Contest: The story of Fire Saga
Fave! It… it made me want to start watching the actual Eurovision Song Contest. o_O THE PEOPLE FROM MY KEWL NINE INCH NAILS CIRCLE MUST NEVER FIND OUT
27-Nov-2021: 35. Last Christmas
Kate, re Brexit: "They're not gonna send you back. You live here. This is your home."
Mum: "I know how it start. They point a finger. They say, 'Those people, they are reason your life is bad.' And people believe. They believe."
Kate: "I know. I know."
Mum: *sob*
Mum: "I blame the Poles."
Kate: "OK…"
Kate: -_-
If you liked this movie, you may also enjoy "The sixth sense", "Sweet November", and "Truly, madly, deeply". Lastly, thanks to Netflix for spoiling the movie with a poorly chosen still that is shown while the movie loads. YEAH! At least I didn't spot the spoilage right from the start. Nor did I suspect that the very title is kind of spoily. Ahem.
11-Dec-2021: 36. En underbar jävla jul (a.k.a. Holy mess)
24-Dec-2021: 37. The road to El Dorado
25-Dec-2021: 38. Bird box
Music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross! Mad breath-holding skillz and body-heat-preservation skillz by the little birdies in the box. o_O
Dec-2021: 39. The square (2013)
Docu.
31-Dec-2021: 40. Don't look up
Fave! I'm happy it seems to be so popular. :B Netflix dropped the trailer on me one day. I only read the synopsis and put the movie on my to-see list immediately. :p
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Vegan FAQ! :)
The Web Site the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See.
Please watch Earthlings.
Freeing God’s Slaves: The Emperor Wears No Clothes ~
“Is anything god’s work? God doesn’t do any work – he just gets his peasants to do it for him.”
- Wonder Boy, Aged 8
Humans (domesticated primates) have long been trained to worship externalised gods – a dangerous addiction humankind has carried forth from its primat-ive childhood; a merely imagined need that usually serves to only impede progressive change and unfolding evolution. Protective and instructive deities are nothing more nor less than the parent figures all children crave. All wise kids eventually learn that obeying the often arbitrary dictates of others who are actually just overblown, overgrown, adulterated children is a dumb idea.
Respect must be earned. Most elders in modern societies have far less of value to impart to subsequent generations than did their more ‘primitive’ tribal counterparts. Many older people are the same simpletons and ignoramuses they were when they were young. Those who claim to be today’s authority figures are almost all control freaks at best, and clinical psychopaths at worst. Almost all conspire to fatten themselves on poisonous excesses at the expense of the ecosystem that truly nourishes their children; mindlessly slaving away at tasks which destroy the planet and alienate them from their loved ones, with the idiot excuse that they’re ‘supporting their families’.
In the modern world ‘bosses’ are actually parasites, sucking life from the host of workers who labour under their dictates. CEOs are nothing more than common enemy overlords. The further up the ‘ladder of success’ one progresses, the more excesses and crimes of omission are committed. And everyone who toils on that ladder is equally culpable, supporting and maintaining a loathsome system with their precious time and effort.
Many ‘bosses’ earn fantastically higher wages than those who toil at much harder jobs – as intrinsically unfair, untrue and unjust as any racist dictate of classic caste or class systems. Those who crave power are those who deserve it the least. Anyone who sucks and arse-kisses their way up the totem pole is best pitied and avoided – not praised. Independent contractors and others who are their own bosses are the freest workers in the modern feudal wage slave era.
Those who remain inside institutions beyond their maturity are insecure timeservers who are happiest locked inside a comfortably familiar prison. Anyone with a PhD is automatically suspect as an institutionalised ignoramus. Most are overeducated buffoons who never realised that throwing away all the best years of their lives to conform and confirm the lies and misapprehensions of other fossilised brainwashed academics is a stupid idea. Most are just insecure kiddies afraid of stepping out into the great wide world – afraid of nature and their own unexamined nature; afraid of their own shadow.
Most people are carefully convinced by society to show more respect – and give more money – to a domesticated primate with the word ‘doctor’ (or some other aggrandising title) in front of their name than to anyone else. We’re trained to think that the work done by someone who has spent many years ‘studying’ is somehow more worthwhile – and worth more – than work that’s considered more ‘common’, such as planting and nurturing trees, growing organic food, building homes or educating young children. We’re entrained to believe that one person’s time can be worth more than another’s.
A cogent way to remove this classic conditioning can be to avoid calling anyone ‘sir’, ‘doctor’ or (heaven forfend) reverend. Such aggrandising titles are far too damaging for any egocentric wannabe leader to hear and only serve to establish subservience. If you always refer to so-called doctors as ‘docturds’, and discourage anyone from trusting the words of such moneygrubbing, authoritarian, self-inflating egotists, you can train yourself to stop supporting an intrinsically unethical system. Avoid using made-up titles entirely; why not simply call a person by their name?
Almost all docturds are only in it for the money – shamelessly rorting medical insurance systems to squeeze every drop from society. The rest is hopeful confabulation on the part of their desperate victims. In most cases, people actually heal themselves (there are exceptions – see below).
They target the most helpless and vulnerable groups of humankind above others, foisting their theoretical practices on women and children in particular. Female humans are thoroughly entrained to entrust their bodies (and minds) to paternalistic authority figures. From a very young age they’re taught to visit docturds regularly, and to trust them with every intimate detail of their lives. Women (in particular) are trained to have ‘regular tests’ for ‘abnormalities’ – tests which actually cause the very ‘abnormalities’ they purportedly search for – and to enrich the coffers of white coated professionals with ‘preventative’ and ‘elective’ surgery and toxic chemical intervention. Pap smears, mammography and the treatment of ‘abnormal’ cells produce more false positives (fake results) than accurate ones and the docturds and their pathological host of pathologists apologise all the way to the bank after each mistimed misstep and misanthropic mistake.
‘You know them by their fruits’ – and most of the fruits of ‘medical professionals’ are rotten and poisonous. More people die from medical (t)errors than from any other cause. Pill-pushing salesmen for chemical industries deserve the OPPOSITE to respect, as do ‘scientists’ who lend their time to the industrious military establishment, or to corporations of ignorant savages who randomly interfere with healthy biological processes to make money from poisoning the food chain and planetary ecosystem with pesticides or genetically modified ‘products’.
Surely we all know better than to show any respect to banksters by now. The most lame offenders of all are probably so-called ‘economists’ who peddle a pseudoscience that every taxpayer is brainwashed into believing, even though their ‘forecasts’ are even less accurate than those of the average 20th Century weatherman. So-called news reports overflow with their senseless, tedious effluvia, drowning out any meaningful news or information beneath their hazy bullshit and babble.
The biggest (and potentially most dangerous) liars of all are ‘religious’ people – conmen and women who peddle superstitious pernicious sexism, racism and utter bald faced balderdash to the most ignorant and insecure people on the planet, offering filthy lies to those suffering from the greatest terror on Earth – the fear of death; just like docturds.
Those who profit from other people’s misery deserve no respect whatsoever.
photo Motive is everything
This writer now observes the world from a remote forest, but once lived directly opposite the medical school of a major metropolitan university, with the opportunity to meet many up and coming young docturds. Whenever the chance arrived to converse with a medical student in private I asked each of them the same innocuous question; ‘Why did you decide to become a medical professional?’
Over the course of several years literally scores of these young professionals had the same opportunity to present their case. Not a single one replied; ‘Because I wanted to help the sick’ or ‘to be a healer.’ Not one claimed to have a particular interest in anatomy or biology. None even bothered to feign any real interest in medicine. Without exception their replies were almost identical; “Well, I was going to be a lawyer but my mother/father thought there’d be more money in medicine.’
When I asked if they’d taken the Hippocratic Oath (which simply requires medical practitioners to ‘do no harm’ and to help the sick and suffering regardless of payment), they all simply stared at me with an expression that seemed to say, ‘Are you really that naïve?” I never allow a docturd to come anywhere near me. I’ve set my own bones, healed internal bleeding and cancerous conditions without subjecting myself to their ignorant meddling (and am still alive and healthy as a result).
Surgeons who capably repair damaged individuals and those who genuinely care for and look after the sick and injured – like nurses – naturally deserve respect. But most docturds are self aggrandising arseholes at best, and outright dangerous nincompoops at worst. Few include things like diet and lifestyle in their diagnoses and routinely prescribe inappropriate but profitable poisons to desperate people.
Those who profit from people’s misery are nothing short of despicable.
Like many or most purveyors of ‘professionalism’ a large number cheated their way through school. They don’t deserve your trust or respect. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask virtually any nurse you happen to meet; they know what’s going on!
Those who can, do
‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’ This old truism needs to be revived and spread far and wide. Very few ‘teachers’ are anything but institutionalized time servers who’ve been trained to brainwash others with gormless mind control served up as ‘education’. They have no life experience and know nothing but what they’ve been told to believe. All their textbooks were hopelessly outdated even when they were newly published.
The great technological and social advances of humankind have all been brought about by people without doctorates – in many cases without any formal ‘education’ at all. Tesla, Einstein, Edison and most celebrated creative thinkers achieved the improbable despite the ‘education’ institutions they were subjected to (and escaped while still young), not because of them.
Creative thinking suffers from regimentation. Authority poisons it. Once a child can read, write and understand basic mathematics they are capable of choosing their own path to knowledge and remain individual enough to have unique creative insights. As all teaching institutions are automatically outdated and operated by superannuated time servers, all a person can really expect to learn in ‘higher education’ institutions is conformity – and how to babble to other cocooned minds in obscurantist jargonese.
Don’t put off living your life until later! There’s no time BUT the present. What do you really want to do with your precious time? Do you really want to serve the obnoxious dweebs who are destroying the planet with their ‘efficient’ industries and ‘profitable’ pastimes? Start something new, fresh and original instead – away from their pernicious influence, where you can’t feed them with your efforts.
Around two generations ago people in advanced nations were informed that by the 21st Century they’d have to learn how to make use of their coming abundance of ‘leisure time’. Automation would ensure that fewer and fewer people would be able to ‘earn a living’ by toiling their lives away and an era of plenty and freedom was dawning. The need for anyone to work full time would soon be redundant. People were told they’d have to learn how to share the shrinking pool of jobs that remain – and to learn to share everything else as a result.
Everyone needed to learn how to best use their newfound freedoms. Guess what? It’s the 21st Century! Wake up and smell the flowers.
Me? This time of year I shovel clean dry horseshit by day to provide healthy, honest, wholesome food for myself and those around me. You can’t buy clean manure – almost all animals are filled with poisons and only the ones you feed and look after can be trusted to provide clean fertiliser. By night I shovel bullshit out of the way on the worldwideweb to make way for the growth of truth. The evolution of the internet is doing away with any need for the fossilized ivory towers of ‘education’ institutions.
Every time someone uses anything fuelled by poisonous fossil fuels – every time you turn on a light, drive in vehicle, borrow money, use anything made of plastic or almost anything created by this toxic civilisation – you are as culpable and destructive as any oil company executive or bankster. Every person who works in an office tower, factory or mine is as bad as the executive who squats atop the totem pole. Every worker who props up the totem deserves to go down in the tower along with their boss. Those who serve pain and death deserve it.
Changing the system is a good idea, in the long run. Yet in today’s world you can only do anything of real worth for yourself and your family by leaving the old workaday system behind and helping it to wither on the vine with your absence. The only real way to succeed is by abandoning the dominant paradigm and creating, living and loving a new way of life – preferably with likeminded change agents.
Turn off your TV and get rid of it (if you refuse to read much watch my Youtube channel instead)! The internet is a great alternative – if you use it for something other than supporting the system with your time and energy.
If you like to learn, become one of the New Illuminati in this new Enlightenment @ nexusilluminati.blogspot.com . Learn how to plant and nurture living things; learn about something worthwhile, such as Permaculture. Ally yourself with life through your thoughts and actions, and object out loud to slaves and bosses who want you to help them saw off the limb you’re perched on. Let them know what you really think of them!
If you want to actually save the world, join any group that’s actively stopping loggers or miners or chemical factories/farmers/poisoners or other corporate slaves from destroying the planet, and get out into the real living world, to experience its actual glorious splendour while you stop the moronic workers from filthying their own nests and yours. Stand in front of a bulldozer driver with other wise souls – and stop them in their tracks.
Above all, take time out to examine your mind and motives. Your thoughts create the world! See where your thoughts/programs/memes actually come from and decide whether you want to own them. Enjoy life (without shopping or spending money). That’s why you’re here. Don’t put it off. Do it now!
Turn on. Tune in. OPT OUT!
Time appears to flow onward…
- R. Ayana
“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”
- Buddhist Saying
For more by R. Ayana see nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/r.%20 ayana
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855
Happy Bokeh Wednesday!! :)
I took this photo at a place called Boundary Bay. When the tide is out it looks more like a marsh or wetland, strands of seaweed are left behind in the low laying grasses and as they dry in the afternoon sun, some take flight in the breeze and get caught up in frames of winter plants..
© Carmen Brown. All rights reserved. Do not use without my permission.
Xerophyta retinervis in habitat at the "Cradle of Humankind" (a World Heritage Site in Kromdraai, Gauteng, South Africa). Spotted Aloes (Aloe greatheadii var. davyana) and Proteas (Sugar Bush) are scattered throughout the grasslands.
"Mrs. Ples" (Australopithecus africanus) was found in this area in 1947, and is currently the oldest human fossil found to date. This gave rise to the idea that Africa is the "Cradle of Humankind".
In 2008 two fossilised skeletons of a new species of early human "Australopithecus sediba" were discovered.
Winter, June 2007.
Best viewed LARGE.
Martin
-
Administrator of:
All things beautiful in Nature Group
confluence (also: conflux) occurs where two or more flowing bodies of water join together to form a single channel.
Since rivers often serve as political boundaries, confluences sometimes demarcate three abutting political entities, such as nations, states, or provinces, forming a tripoint. Various examples are found in the list below.
A number of major cities, such as Chongqing, St. Louis, and Khartoum, arose at confluences; further examples appear in the list. Within a city, a confluence often forms a visually prominent point, so that confluences are sometimes chosen as the site of prominent public buildings or monuments, as Lyon, and Winnipeg. Cities also often build parks at confluences, sometimes as projects of municipal improvement, as at Lyon . In other cases, a confluence is an industrial site, as in Philadelphia or Mannheim. Often a confluence lies in the shared floodplain of the two rivers and nothing is built on it, for example at Manaus, described below.
One other way that confluences may be employed by humans is as a sacred place in a religion. Rogers suggests that for the ancient peoples of the Iron Age in northwest Europe, watery locations were often sacred, especially sources and confluences. Pre-Christian Slavic peoples chose confluences as the sites for fortified triangular temples, where they practiced human sacrifice and other sacred rites. In Hinduism, the confluence of two sacred rivers often is a pilgrimage site for ritual bathing. In Pittsburgh, a number of adherents to Mayanism consider their city's confluence to be sacred.
The Confluence project aims to double the area of downtown Lyon by urbanizing the area. It was created by Lyon Mayor Raymond Barre, who launched the idea in 1995 by creating the Lyon-Confluence mission. An international definition competition was launched in 1997 and won by the MBM team (Thierry Melot, Oriol Bohigas and Catherine Mosbach), which took over the study contract that led to the elaboration of the first master plan for the operation presented to the public in 19991.
This master plan proposes a 30-year vision and provides for the long-term opening up of the peninsula through major infrastructure measures: decommissioning of the A7 motorway into an urban boulevard along the Rhone, creation of the western motorway bypass in Lyon, transformation of the Lyon-Perrache station and creation of a north-south urban continuity through the installation of a railway viaduct, demolition of the interchange centre for the resettlement of the A7. This long-term vision is the support of a phased project in several short term urban operations, sequentially linked and programmed in sequence. Raymond Barre's state of health may not have allowed him to run for a second term as mayor or president of the urban community, even if he had always indicated that he wanted to serve only one term (see his conversation book L' expérience du pouvoir); the election of Gérard Collomb in 2001 led to the eviction of the MBM team in favour of urban planner François Grether and landscape architect Michel Desvigne
The developer is the Urban Community of Lyon4. The completion of the operation necessitates the creation of a mixed economy company, SEM Confluence, created in July 1999 to promote and carry out the operation. First chaired by Raymond Barre, it is then chaired by Gérard Collomb, the new mayor and president of the urban community since 2001, and headed by Jean-Pierre Gallet. The SEM was transformed in 2007 into SPLA (Société publique locale d' aménagement) Lyon Confluence; in 2012 SPLA became SPL (Société publique locale d' aménagement). After Mr. Gallet's retirement in 2014, Pierre Joutard was appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer.
The architects and urban planners of the project are for housing, in particular integral Lipsky+Rollet architects, Manuel Gautrand, Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV-Winy Maas and for offices, among others, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, Jakob-Mac Farlane, Rudy Ricciotti, Odile Decq.
The headquarters of the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes is run by Christian de Portzamparc. The museum, known as the Museum of Confluences, designed by the Austrian architectural firm Coop Himmelb (l)au, has been under construction since October 2006 and was arrested in 2007, before being taken over by Vinci in April 2010; it opens to the public on 20 December 20145. In January 2015, the Urban Community (Le Grand Lyon) became a metropolis, and in January 2015, it took over all departmental infrastructures located on its territory, including the museum.
The project also provides for the opening up of the district by building heavy infrastructure connecting it to the Gerland district and the Perrache railway station. A first extension of the T1 tramway was inaugurated in September 2005, from Perrache station to Montrochet street, and a second extension was opened in February 2014 to Debourg station. Four bridges over the Rhône and the Saône are also planned: the Girondins bridge overlooking rue des Girondins in Gerland, the Raymond Barre bridge between the Musée des Confluences and Parc des Berges6, and a "transversal modes-doux" bridge with two footbridges, the first on the Rhône and the second on the Saône. On the other hand, the abolition of the A7 motorway is awaiting the western motorway bypass, and the construction of new vaults under Perrache is only partially planned for the 2014-2020 mandate.
In 2011, Greater Lyon and the Japanese para-government agency Nedo, responsible for supporting research and development in environmental technologies, are launching the implementation of a smart community. The demonstrator project consists of the construction of 3 buildings on island P (the last island to be built along the nautical basin), the deployment of a fleet of electric car-sharing vehicles, the installation of energy boxes to assist residents in controlling their energy consumption, and the creation of a community management system for energy audit8. The sub-project, estimated at 50 million euros, is managed by Toshiba.
The Confluence is recognised by the French government as an eco-district, a sustainable district by the WWF, and has been awarded the European Concerto label for low energy consumption of buildings9.
Companies such as GL Events or Euronews established their global headquarters in the neighbourhood in 2014.
As the first phase ends with the Denusière district, at the end of the development, the second phase can begin, on the site of the old "market-station", called the "Quartier du Marché", then the "Quartier du Champ" or "du Campo".
A new day breaks in the "Cradle of Humankind" (a World Heritage Site in Kromdraai, Gauteng, South Africa).
"Mrs. Ples" (Australopithecus africanus) was found in this area in 1947, and is currently the oldest human fossil found to date. This gave rise to the idea that Africa is the "Cradle of Humankind".
In 2008 two fossilised skeletons of a new species of early human "Australopithecus sediba" were discovered.
Winter, June 2007.
Best viewed LARGE.
Martin
-
Administrator of:
All things beautiful in Nature Group
…after a long walk, with the threat of heavy rain, you get to spend a good hour or two slipping and sliding, crouching and crawling along one of the oldest tunnels dug by humankind. That mud is sticky…very sticky and I’ll defy anyone to go down there and not come out covered!
It’s normal to spend a good couple of hours cleaning your camera equipment once you have been down here!
Went with a good friend Jim who, as a postman, you would have thought a long walk would have been no bother…jeez…the moaning !
All pictures copyright to www.mckenzie.photos
The full history....
The idea of a fixed link across the English Channel was first put forward in the early part of the 19th Century but concerns over national security stalled attempts to progress it.
But an Anglo-French protocol was established in 1876 for a railway tunnel under the Channel. South Eastern Railway Chairman Sir Edward Watkin and French Suez Canal contractor Alexandre Lavalley conducted exploratory works on either side of the water, coming together in 1882 under the umbrella of the Submarine Railway Company.
In 1880, No.1 shaft was sunk and a 7-foot diameter pilot tunnel begun below Abbot's Cliff, between Dover and Folkestone, 10 feet above high water level. The driving force was Captain Thomas English's rotary boring machine - 33 feet in length and powered by compressed air - which was capable of cutting 5/16" for every rotation of its cutting head, at a rate of two revolutions per minute and almost half-a-mile per month. It was though hoped that this performance could be improved over time.
In February 1881, with about 800 feet driven and the machine proven, work was refocused at a site further along the coast, accessed via the 160-foot No.2 shaft at Shakespeare Cliff. Here another pilot tunnel was started under the foreshore, progressing through lower grey chalk towards a meeting with the French pilot tunnel - which was extending from Sangatte - 11 miles out to sea. This phase of the work was expected to be complete by 1886. Machinery was being developed which would then have enlarged the heading to 14 feet in diameter before a 2-foot thick concrete lining was inserted. The approach railways would fall on a gradient of 1:80 before reaching a depth of 150 feet below the sea bed. Operational ventilation would be provided by the compressed-air locomotives used to haul the trains.
But 1882 saw the government call a halt, worried about the military implications of a land-link to Europe. Sir Edward's well-reasoned reassurances fell on deaf ears with 2,040 yards of the Shakespeare Cliff heading driven, another 897 yards at Abbot's Cliff and 1,825 yards on the French side of the Channel. Both shafts were later backfilled.
When the idea of a tunnel was revisited in both 1974 and 1988, various remedial works were carried out on the 1880s workings as a result of the new alignments potentially intersecting with them. This work discovered a number of roof falls and broken timber supports. A concrete bulkhead was installed 890 yards into the No.2 heading, effectively entombing the boring machine.
Access to the original heading has been maintained as it meets one of the drainage adits driven from the base of the cliff under the coastal railway. This joins the 1880 tunnel 70 metres from the surface, after passing beneath Shakespeare Cliff Tunnel where it has been reinforced with concrete arches. Adjacent to the junction is a timber-lined passage leading to the base of the shaft where the boring machine would have been assembled.
Fanny Marion Wynter received a card from England from her fiancée David Gray Findlay, her true love. They were engaged before he enlisted, intending to marry when he returned from his military service. David sent the card just before he was posted to the Western Front at Messines, Belgium where he was killed. His special girl never forgot him, and she didn't marry until she was 49. She lived till she was 91, the last 29 years as a widow.
THIS IS DAVID'S STORY:
Private David Gray Findlay (Service No. 2648) was a despatch rider in the 47th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force during the 1914-18 War. He was killed in action on that dreadful day of June 7th, 1917, when the Allied offensive, intended to take the Ypres Salient, began with the detonation of 19 tunnels packed with high explosives. The resulting explosions, erupting almost simultaneously at 3.10am, created the largest explosion ever created by humankind to that point, left large craters up to 300M across and destroyed an estimated 10,000 German soldiers.
The 47th Battalion AIF were waiting behind the New Zealand Division. Once the German front line was devastated and the remnants in shock, the New Zealanders were to advance east across No Man’s Land, then take Messines and advance down the slope beyond. Only 2 kms to the south, from the splintered woods near the village of Ploegsteert, gas-shells rained down all night long to prevent any advance by the Allies through the forest. That night was well lit by an almost full moon and on the Messines Ridge ahead the Germans were silent though expecting an attack. What they weren’t expecting was for the ground to erupt beneath their front lines.
It may have been expected that no one slept that night as the Allies prepared for zero hour at 3.10am. However because of the effort taken to move forward and assemble ready for the advance, many of the men did sleep. To heighten the suspense, at 2.52am, green and yellow flares rose above the horizon just to the left of Messines and that was the German signal for artillery-fire. The barrage that broke out could be heard coming from the area to the north of Messines. All troops were now anxiously awake.
The Germans were in position awaiting the Allied artillery. Then, the ground shook and the “trench-walls rocked; to the left” less than a mile way , “ a huge bubble was swelling, mushroom-shaped from the earth, and then burst to cast a molten, rosy glow on the under-surface of some dense cloud low above it. As its brilliance faded two more bubbles burst beside it.” Within those fateful 20 seconds, a total of 19 great mines detonated and an estimated 10,000 German soldiers along the front line were blown to smithereens. The barrage of Allied machine guns followed and for 2 hours Messines and its ridge could not be seen by the Allies because of the smog and dust.
Under the cover of the dust and smoke the Allies moved forward. For a while enemy resistance was almost absent. As the New Zealanders advanced on Messines, they found a few Germans in concrete shelters, and some in shell holes, but most had fled leaving a litter of paraphernalia (including rifles, munitions, food, cigars). The New Zealanders worked their way around and fought their way through Messines as some of their enemy were still firing from cellars or concrete shelters.
Just to the south-east of Messines the Australian 38th Battalion encountered some opposition as they reached the major frontline trench, Ungodly Trench, and other German defences on Bethleem Farm. Blockhouses were taken, guns captures, then enemy troops became fugitives on the run or surrendered.
The New Zealand Division reached the intended position with the Australians to the right and left forming the new front line and all began to entrench themselves.
The Australian 52nd, 49th, 45th and 47th Battalions marched forward ready to be part of the afternoon attack. They were lined up north to south behind the New Zealand Division by 11.30am ready to move east. They had less than 2 hours to move forward to the new front line and resume the attack.
Private David Findlay and his mates could see the landscape ahead: the devastation of the former no man’s land, the trenches and fortifications of the former German frontline across the shallow valley on the slope and the pocked farmland on the broad low ridge that they knew now as Messines Ridge, and to their left was the damaged village of Messines. No word had arrived to confirm or alter the new zero hour to begin the assault, so the Australians had moved into their new positions – the 47th Battalion had moved forward beyond the former German Front line position and onto Bethleem Farm. What lay ahead was a landscape of treed windbreaks, a few large farmhouses and barns, and a clear view as far as the church spires of Comines (6kms). But what the trees concealed was the movement of the German reinforcements that had been urgently gathering at Warneton, just 3 kms away and out of sight in its vale.
Captain Grieve of the 37th Battalion stated that at this stage it seemed “more like a picnic than a battle” on this bright, hot day, except for bursts of the protective barrage. But further up the line to the north there had been delays and the result was that the troops south of Messines were in position and exposed whilst the zero hour was set back by 2 hours. This was necessary on the section of the front north of Messines through to Ypres, but at Bethleem Farm the unprotected battalions were exposed to the renewed German counter-offensive. Some picnic!
There were losses in all the battalions around and to the south of Messines that afternoon. One of those killed was Private David Gray Findlay. When word of him arrived home to his parents in the rural community at Maroondan, outside Bundaberg, Queensland, it was to the effect that he was missing in action. The Findlay family continued praying and hoping that he would one day, “walk in the door”. In fact it wasn’t until a Court of Inquiry was held “in the field” on 24th November 1917, that it was officially determined that David had been killed.
Two of his mates in the 47th Battalion, those who witnessed his signature on his will just a few days before he was killed, both suffered different fates but both returned to Australia after the war. Grenadier Tom McPhail from the Darling Downs was wounded (thigh wound) and taken prisoner, imprisoned at Güstrow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany. (There were 25,000 prisoners held at Güstrow and another 25,000 registered there and assigned to work camps.) On release he was hospitalised at Étaples, France then returned to London. Discharged from medical care he went AWOL having been caged for too long, for which he was punished by loss of pay. He was repatriated to Australia. Ernest Cunningham, a younger fellow, formerly a pattern maker in the Bundaberg foundry, was also wounded with severe wound to a foot. But after hospitalisation, Ern was returned to the battle front before the war ended. He also returned to Queensland.
But for David’s family, the grief and questions continued. His mother, Jessie Findlay , wrote to the Australian Army on September 24th, 1917:
Officer in Charge,
Dear Sir,
My son, (No. 2648) David Gray Findlay was reported Missing since June 7th, 1917 and heard no more word since about him when I got a letter from one of his mates on Sept 21st saying he had been wounded & he was in England somewhere. We have heard no word from himself since he was missing. Could you possibly find out for me where he is and if he is severely wounded. If you can find out any information would you kindly let me know as early as possible.
And you will oblige Mrs J. B Findlay, Maroondan, Mount Perry Line, via Bundaberg, Queensland.
Mrs Findlay’s distress is reflected in a response to another letter she wrote and placed it in a comforts parcel that was sent to troops. The parcel containing the letter was received by Driver T. C. G. Phillips, Australian Armed Service Corps to the British Red Cross Association. Phillips wrote, "In a comforts parcel received from Queensland, I found a rather pathetic appeal from a mother requesting information about her son - 2648 Pte David G Findlay 47th Battalion AIF. I am writing to the mother Mrs J. B. Findlay, Maroondan, Queensland, Australia and would be very pleased if you could furnish me with some particulars and details about her son. I think he was reported missing 7/6/17 and later on reported killed. Thanking you in anticipation. Yours faithfully, Driver TCG Phillips.”
The reply to Driver Phillips simply informed him that Private Findlay was officially reported killed in action on 7.6.17 having been previously reported missing on that date. "We have no further information about him at present except that he is reported to be buried 550 [sic.] yds past of Messines. We are making every possible enquiry concerning him and will immediately advise you should we succeed."
David Findlay’s last postcards sent home were received by his mother, his fiancée Fanny Wynter, and sister Kate, in late May, 1917. Kate replied the next day. She told all the news of family and home and of her impending move to the Monsildale in the upper Brisbane Valley “where there is some good timber hauling there. Bob is going up on Monday to have a final look around. Bob wanted me to live in town for a few months but I’d rather go straight away. I don’t like leaving Mum behind, but all being well, I’ll come and have a look at them every year or so.” She continues, “You won’t know 'Heatherleigh' when you come home. We are shifting the Bullyard house down to Bundaberg. We have got an allotment in Barolin Street near the school...”
Give our love to Charlie [Clarke] and yourself, with fond love and thanking you for remembering me – I remain your loving sister, Kate Stehbens.
David never did come home, and Kate’s letter never reached David. It was eventually returned to Kate with the following successive messages added:
“On Active Service Abroad”
“Missing”
“UNDELIVERABLE AMPO RETURN TO SENDER”
“RETURNED MAIL OFFICE VICTORIA BARRACKS BRISBANE”
“DECEASED”
“Not Maroondan - Try MRS R G STEHBENS, Monsildale Sawmill, Via Linville, Brisbane Valley Line, Queensland”
Kate treasured the returned letter for the rest of her life, a tangible memento of a brother she would never forget.
Though there are unknown soldiers buried in the Bethleem East Cemetery, very close to where David Findlay was said to be buried “750 yards east of Messines” at the Allied Black Line, his burial place “is known only to God” and his life and military service are commemorated in perpetuity on the Menin Gate, Ypres Memorial, Ieper, Belgium.
IRS
My piece for Cabinet of Curiosities, a group show by Kult.
("Miss Anne Trophy" = Misanthropy, which is defined as a dislike of humankind.)
This Envisat image of the Horn of Africa shows parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and, to the northeast across the Red Sea, a portion of Yemen’s west coast. The lighter-coloured area to the east is known as the Afar Triangle and includes the Danakil Desert. Further west we can see the somewhat heart-shaped Lake Tana. With a surface area of over 2000 sq km, the average depth is only 14 m owing to high levels of sediment. This image was acquired on 13 November 2011 by the MERIS instrument on ESA’s Envisat satellite.
For more information, and a higher resolution of this image, please visit: www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMUKFZXHYG_index_0.html
Credits: ESA
It is not late for a change, for solidarity, for love, for a better humankind...
No es tarde para un cambio, para la solidaridad, para una mejor humanidad...
"Artigo I.
Fica decretado que agora vale a verdade.
agora vale a vida,
e de mãos dadas,
marcharemos todos pela vida verdadeira.
Artículo I.
Queda decretado que ahora vale la vida,
que ahora vale la verdad,
y que de manos dadas
trabajaremos todos por la vida verdadera.
Article I.
It is decreed that life now has value,
that truth now has value,
and that offering our hands
we will all work for true life.
Thiago de Melo
Os estatutos do homen
Santiago de Chile, 1964"
Especialmente dedicada a Analia y Feli, gracias por todo desde el corazón.
Specially for Analia and Feli, thank you for all from the heart.
The Reconnection® is an accelerated exchange of the energy, light and information found in the Reconnective Healing Frequencies™. It is a tool to connect three systems: the lines of our planet, the meridian lines of the human body, including chakras and the universal energy grid. The Reconnection® is a once in a lifetime experience that ties us back into a timeless system of intelligence. Originally the meridian lines (sometimes called acupuncture lines) on our bodies were connected to the grid lines that encircle the planet and cross at acknowledged power places such as Machu Picchu and Sedona. These grid lines were designed to continue out and connect us to a vastly larger grid, into the entire universe.
As we reconnect and awaken to the depths of the Light that we are, we become aware of our ‘multi-dimensional’ existence and our dormant DNA is awakened. The Reconnection is about restoring yourself to spiritual wholeness and releasing or removing the blocks or interferences that have kept you separate from your intrinsic perfection.
The Reconnection takes place in two sessions, each session lasting about 45-60 minutes. You’ll lie on a massage table, shoes off, eyes closed. Sessions take place on consecutive days or with one day in-between. The Reconnection is a touch-free procedure.
Extra rest may be needed in the days following the Reconnection to allow the body to assimilate the energy change. The process of reconnecting can continue for months after the actual Reconnection takes place. As you include these frequencies into your life, your consciousness and awareness begin to shift and expand, and so do you within yourself. The Reconnection is highly recommended for people who practice any form of energy healing. Many practitioners have reported an increase in their ability to access healing energy after their Reconnection.Recognized and supported by science, Reconnective Healing® is a form of healing that facilitates us to return to an optimum state of balance by interacting with the full spectrum of frequencies that consists of energy, light and information.
These frequencies work on the whole person, therefore the work is not symptom based. Dr. Eric Pearl defines healing as, “the restoration of the person to spiritual wholeness”. This is what allows for a possible release of symptom and disease. He also points out that healing is about our evolution. It includes the evolutionary restructuring of our DNA and our reconnection to the Universe (or to God/Light/Love/ So/ Creator) on a new level.
It is recommended for persons feeling that something on the physical, mental, emotional or spiritual level is out of sync. Animals as well as humans respond very well to the Reconnective Healing experience. It is a wonderful way to honour our friends and companions of many dispositions by offering this experience to them.
Personal reconnection is the process of re-connecting the physical energy meridians person (allowing for the exchange lines) with grid lines of the planet Earth and the Cosmos. Specifically, each body has its own set of energetic lines and points that have the role of our relationship with the universe as a channel for the transmission of energy, light and information between large and small, macrocosm and microcosm, the universe and humankind.Reconnective Healing (RH) is a return to an optimal state of balance. It is the result of interacting with the fully comprehensive RH spectrum of frequencies that consists of energy, light and information. Its first basic element is energy. Energy is everything we are made up of organically, our very essence and our actual physical body. Light is the resonance and communication within these frequencies between the universe and us. The information comes through the very interaction and entrainment with the energy and the light. It’s tangible, measurable… you can actually feel it.
Reconnective Healing completely transcends traditional energy healing techniques as it allows us to let go of the concept and approach of technique itself. It is neither a therapy nor a treatment, as it does not focus on symptoms. It is something much, much more. In Reconnective Healing we do not diagnose or treat. We simply interact with the RH frequencies, bringing about healings that are often instantaneous and tend to be life long.
While science continues to explore how it works, Reconnective Healing has been confirmed and documented in more than a dozen international studies. When RH frequencies entrain with our energy body we emit and vibrate at a higher level of light. This has been shown to restructure our DNA, resulting in the emission of measurably higher levels of bio-photonic light. Stanford Professor Emeritus Dr. William Tiller says that when information carried through the Reconnective Healing frequencies is introduced, it creates coherence and order. In other words, greater harmony and balance within us.
"If you're lucky, your healing will come in the form you anticipate. If you're really lucky, your healing will come in a form
you've not even dreamed of--one which the Universe specifically has in mind for you." ~Dr. Eric Pearl
HERE
"The Reconnection is the umbrella process of reconnecting to the universe that allows for Reconnective Healing to take place. These healings and evolutionary frequencies are of a new bandwidth and are brought in via a spectrum of light and information that has never before been present on Earth. It is through
The Reconnection that we are able to interact with these new levels of light and information, and it is through these
new levels of light and information that we are able to reconnect." ~Dr. Eric Pearl
The Reconnection is about connecting our personal energy grid system, acupuncture lines and subtle anatomy, including chakras, with the energy grid system of the greater universe and the energy system of Planet Earth. When we connect with the greater universal energy grid, we receive an influx of light and information. When we connect to our planets energy grid, the circuit is complete with grounding. The full connection completely transforms our body-mind-spirit, by bringing our system to optimal balance.
Imagine your personal energy grid as a computers’ operating system. The Reconnection basically upgrades your system exponentially. Circuits fly open, new connections are made and dormant DNA is awakened as huge amounts of "new" information/light pours in. Your energy lines connect with axiatonal lines; circuits of the higher frequency grids that open the flow to higher dimensions. You are now able to receive light and information that your system was not able to receive or process before. Imagine, what that would mean for you to be fully functioning energetically?
To describe the awakenings, knowing’s, insights, aha moments, connections, or quantum leaps in knowledge that occur when you receive, or are awakened to, more Light, or to the greater being that you are, is a unique description for each individual. The Reconnection is about restoring yourself to spiritual wholeness. It's about releasing or removing the blocks or interferences that have kept you separate from your intrinsic perfection. It's about the restructuring/awakening of your DNA and your reconnection to the universe on a new level.
The Reconnection is different from Reconnective Healing. For The Reconnection, Shanell uses a “hands-off” technique and you are fully clothed. The session spans 2 days, one hour each day, in which you lay on a massage table and experience the frequencies of energy, light and information, in a way that is unique for you - sometimes you may experience pleasant physical sensations, sometimes you may see colours or symbols, you may hear sounds or you may simply enter a deep sleep for the hour. There is a higher intelligence at work during the session which supplies you with exactly the experience you need to have. The Reconnection has been known to catapult individuals on their life path, bringing clarity to life purpose and creating positive and lasting shifts.
www.healingyogini.com/reconnective-healing--the-reconnect...
Sometimes, when I meet someone for the first time, it feels like my soul has recognised this feeling before. I don't even know how to explain it, it is not mysticism nor anything of the sort, but the feeling of connection, which all of a sudden emerges to the surface, is real and totally familiar.
I went to buy Matzot for Pesach / Passover and to my big surprise the store ran out of them. I couldn't believe my ears when she told me so. How is it possible? It has never ever happened in all the decades I've been buying matzot for Pesach.
Winnie said they will get more on Thursday, but I needed matzot for Leil Ha'Seder tonight.
"Well," I said, "do you have at least one piece of Matzah? I need a piece, not bigger than the size of an olive, to say the blessing. Don't you have an open box somewhere and a few pieces left?" I insisted.
Winnie turned around and out of an open box she pulled out three whole pieces of matzot and said: "I wouldn't want you not to celebrate because of lack of matzot."
She put the matzot in a white paper bag and handed it to me. No charge, with a smile and a blessing.
My heart felt joyous. I hugged and kissed her, and at that moment, I saw tears building up in her dark eyes. Mine were there already.
"What's your name?," I asked her.
"Winnie, like Winnie the Pooh", she answered, "although I'd rather think of my name as Winnie Mandela," she added.
"Winnie the Pooh, I love that! Winnie," I said, opening my bag and pulling out my camera, "would you let me make a picture of you?"
"You certainly may!", she said.
"Where do you want me to stand?", Winnie asked.
"I'd like you to stand right here, in the middle of the store."
"Very well," Winnie was so cooperative, "anywhere you want."
I made a couple of environmental portraits and then asked her to come closer to the display window for a closeup.
I could still see her eyes shining through the tears.
"I have been blessed," she said with deep gratitude in her voice.
Winnie is 40 y/o, she came to study in Finland 15 years ago.
She was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. Her sister lives here with her.
"I need to have at least one member of my family with me," she said, and I totally understood what she meant.
"The Good Lord had plans for me which I didn't know of... My being here, in this very spot, is a blessing. I didn't look for this job, it came to me..."
"Are you Jewish,? I asked, assuming she was because she was working in the sole Jewish grocery store in town.
"Well no, but in the sense that I believe in the G-d of Abraham, I am, although I was born Christian," she said.
"Well, aren't we all the children of the same creator," I said and hugged Winnie once again.
"I have found so much love here," Winnie retuned my hug, "I don't have my parents here, but I feel like I've been adopted by so many loving people."
I remembered an African song that I had learned more than half a century ago. I sang it to Winnie asking her to translate the words. She knew the Zulu song and did translate the beautiful words about peace and freedom.
How strange that after more than 55 years, this song comes to my mind simply because it had the word Kenya in it.
All memories are stored somewhere deep inside, like feelings, we are lucky as long as we can recall and feel them.
Such as life, and love, we move on holding cherished memories in our heart.
www.flickr.com/groups/100strangers/discuss/72157633469671...
This new millennium will be the first in the history of humankind without the horse as the mainstay of our transport system. The horse owes us nothing. They have fought with us in our wars, plowed our fields, fed us and remained the most faithful of servants.
“Man’s best friend” has probably been an accolade preserved for our dogs for a few thousand years now. I’ve heard it said the Egyptian pharaohs were the first to use this term. I love dogs and I believe that people can love them deeply and that dogs try to please us far more than most people will, but there is also a case for the horse being man’s best friend”
-- Monty Roberts’ Horse Sense for People
The Centaurs are best known for their fight with the Lapiths, which was caused by their attempt to carry off Hippodamia and the rest of the Lapith women on the day of Hippodamia's marriage to Pirithous, king of the Lapithae, himself the son of Ixion. The strife among these cousins is a metaphor for the conflict between the lower appetites and civilized behavior in humankind. Theseus, a hero and founder of cities, who happened to be present, threw the balance in favour of the right order of things, and assisted Pirithous. The Centaurs were driven off or destroyed.[6][7][8] Another Lapith hero, Caeneus, who was invulnerable to weapons, was beaten into the earth by Centaurs wielding rocks and the branches of trees. Centaurs are thought of in many Greek myths as wild as untamed horses. Like the Titanomachy, the defeat of the Titans by the Olympian gods, the contests with the Centaurs typify the struggle between civilization and barbarism.
Theories of origin[edit]
The most common theory holds that the idea of centaurs came from the first reaction of a non-riding culture, as in the Minoan Aegean world, to nomads who were mounted on horses. The theory suggests that such riders would appear as half-man, half-animal (Bernal Díaz del Castillo reported that the Aztecs had this misapprehension about Spanish cavalrymen).[11] Horse taming and horseback culture arose first in the southern steppe grasslands of Central Asia, perhaps approximately in modern Kazakhstan.
The Lapith tribe of Thessaly, who were the kinsmen of the Centaurs in myth, were described as the inventors of horse-back riding by Greek writers. The Thessalian tribes also claimed their horse breeds were descended from the centaurs.
Centaur carrying off a nymph (1892) by Laurent Marqueste (Tuileries Garden, Paris)
Of the various Classical Greek authors who mentioned centaurs, Pindar was the first who describes undoubtedly a combined monster.[12] Previous authors (Homer) only use words such as pheres (cf. theres, "beasts")[13] that could also mean ordinary savage men riding ordinary horses. However, contemporaneous representations of hybrid centaurs can be found in archaic Greek art.
Lucretius in his first century BC philosophical poem On the Nature of Things denied the existence of centaurs based on their differing rate of growth. He states that at three years old horses are in the prime of their life while, at three humans are still little more than babies, making hybrid animals impossible.[14]
Robert Graves (relying on the work of Georges Dumezil argued for tracing the centaurs back to the Indian gandharva), speculated that the centaurs were a dimly remembered, pre-Hellenic fraternal earth cult who had the horse as a totem. A similar theory was incorporated into Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea. Kinnaras, another half-man half-horse mythical creature from the Indian mythology, appeared in various ancient texts, arts as well as sculptures from all around India. It is shown as a horse with the torso of a man in place of where the horse's head has to be, that is similar to a Greek centaur.[17][18]
The Greek word kentauros is generally regarded as of obscure origin.[19] The etymology from ken – tauros, "piercing bull-stickers" was a euhemerist suggestion in Palaephatus' rationalizing text on Greek mythology, On Incredible Tales (Περὶ ἀπίστων): mounted archers from a village called Nephele eliminating a herd of bulls that were the scourge of Ixion's kingdom.[20] Another possible related etymology can be "bull-slayer".[21] Some[who?] say that the Greeks took the constellation of Centaurus, and also its name "piercing bull", from Mesopotamia, where it symbolized the god Baal who represents rain and fertility, fighting with and piercing with his horns the demon Mot who represents the summer drought. In Greece, the constellation of Centaurus was noted by Eudoxus of Cnidus in the fourth century BC and by Aratus in the third century.
Female centaurs[edit]
Though female centaurs, called Kentaurides, are not mentioned in early Greek literature and art, they do appear occasionally in later antiquity. A Macedonian mosaic of the 4th century BC is one of the earliest examples of the Centauress in art. Ovid also mentions a centauress named Hylonome who committed suicide when her husband Cyllarus was killed in the war with the Lapiths.
In a description of a painting in Neapolis, the Greek rhetorician Philostratus the Elder describes them as sisters and wives of the male centaurs who live on Mount Pelion with their children.
"How beautiful the Centaurides are, even where they are horses; for some grow out of white mares, others are attached to chestnut mares, and the coats of others are dappled, but they glisten like those of horses that are well cared for. There is also a white female Centaur that grows out of a black mare, and the very opposition of the colours helps to produce the united beauty of the whole."
The idea, or possibility, of female centaurs was certainly known in early modern times, as evidenced by Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV, Scene vi, ln.124–125: "Down from the waist they're centaurs, / Though women all above"
In the Disney animated film Fantasia, during the Pastoral Symphony, some of the main characters are female centaurs, referred to as "Centaurettes" by the Disney studio.
The Eden Project is a visitor attraction in Cornwall, England, UK. The project is located in a reclaimed china clay pit, located 2 km (1.2 mi) from the town of St Blazey and 5 km (3 mi) from the larger town of St Austell.
The complex is dominated by two huge enclosures consisting of adjoining domes that house thousands of plant species, and each enclosure emulates a natural biome. The biomes consist of hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) inflated cells supported by geodesic tubular steel domes. The larger of the two biomes simulates a rainforest environment (and is the largest indoor rainforest in the world) and the second, a Mediterranean environment. The attraction also has an outside botanical garden which is home to many plants and wildlife native to Cornwall and the UK in general; it also has many plants that provide an important and interesting backstory, for example, those with a prehistoric heritage.
There are plans to build an Eden Project North in the seaside town of Morecambe, Lancashire, with a focus on the marine environment.
The clay pit in which the project is sited was in use for over 160 years. In 1981, the pit was used by the BBC as the planet surface of Magrathea in the TV series the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By the mid-1990s the pit was all but exhausted.
The initial idea for the project dates back to 1996, with construction beginning in 1998. The work was hampered by torrential rain in the first few months of the project, and parts of the pit flooded as it sits 15 m (49 ft) below the water table.
The first part of the Eden Project, the visitor centre, opened to the public in May 2000. The first plants began arriving in September of that year,[8] and the full site opened on 17 March 2001.
To counter criticism from environmental groups, the Eden Project committed to investigate a rail link to the site. The rail link was never built, and car parking on the site is still funded from revenue generated from general admission ticket sales.
The Eden Project was used as a filming location for the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day. On 2 July 2005 The Eden Project hosted the "Africa Calling" concert of the Live 8 concert series. It has also provided some plants for the British Museum's Africa garden.
In 2005, the Project launched "A Time of Gifts" for the winter months, November to February. This features an ice rink covering the lake, with a small café-bar attached, as well as a Christmas market. Cornish choirs regularly perform in the biomes.
In 2007, the Eden Project campaigned unsuccessfully for £50 million in Big Lottery Fund money for a proposed desert biome.[10][11] It received just 12.07% of the votes, the lowest for the four projects being considered. As part of the campaign, the Eden Project invited people all over Cornwall to try to break the world record for the biggest ever pub quiz as part of its campaign to bring £50 million of lottery funds to Cornwall.
In December 2009, much of the project, including both greenhouses, became available to navigate through Google Street View.
The Eden Trust revealed a trading loss of £1.3 million for 2012–13, on a turnover of £25.4 million. The Eden Project had posted a surplus of £136,000 for the previous year. In 2014 Eden accounts showed a surplus of £2 million.
The World Pasty Championships, an international competition to find the best Cornish pasties and other pasty-type savoury snacks, have been held at the Eden Project since 2012.
The Eden Project is said to have contributed over £1 billion to the Cornish economy. In 2016, Eden became home to Europe's second-largest redwood forest (after the Giants Grove at Birr Castle, Birr Castle, Ireland) when forty saplings of coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which could live for 4,000 years and reach 115 metres in height, were planted there.
The Eden Project received 1,010,095 visitors in 2019.
In December 2020 the project was closed after heavy rain caused several landslips at the site. Managers at the site are assessing the damage and will announce when the project will reopen on the company's website. Reopening became irrelevant as Covid lockdown measures in the UK indefinitely closed the venue from early 2021, though it had reopened by May 2021 after remedial works had taken place. The site was used for an event during the 2021 G7 Summit, hosted by the United Kingdom.
The project was conceived by Tim Smit and Jonathan Ball, and designed by Grimshaw Architects and structural engineering firm Anthony Hunt Associates (now part of Sinclair Knight Merz). Davis Langdon carried out the project management, Sir Robert McAlpine and Alfred McAlpine did the construction, MERO jointly designed and built the biome steel structures, the ETFE pillows that build the façade were realized by Vector Foiltec, and Arup was the services engineer, economic consultant, environmental engineer and transportation engineer. Land Use Consultants led the masterplan and landscape design. The project took 2½ years to construct and opened to the public on 17 March 2001.
Once into the attraction, there is a meandering path with views of the two biomes, planted landscapes, including vegetable gardens, and sculptures that include a giant bee and previously The WEEE Man (removed in 2016), a towering figure made from old electrical appliances and was meant to represent the average electrical waste used by one person in a lifetime.
At the bottom of the pit are two covered biomes:
The Tropical Biome, covers 1.56 ha (3.9 acres) and measures 55 m (180 ft) high, 100 m (328 ft) wide, and 200 m (656 ft) long. It is used for tropical plants, such as fruiting banana plants, coffee, rubber and giant bamboo, and is kept at a tropical temperature and moisture level.
The Mediterranean Biome covers 0.654 ha (1.6 acres) and measures 35 m (115 ft) high, 65 m (213 ft) wide, and 135 m (443 ft) long. It houses familiar warm temperate and arid plants such as olives and grape vines and various sculptures.
The Outdoor Gardens represent the temperate regions of the world with plants such as tea, lavender, hops, hemp, and sunflowers, as well as local plant species.
The covered biomes are constructed from a tubular steel (hex-tri-hex) with mostly hexagonal external cladding panels made from the thermoplastic ETFE. Glass was avoided due to its weight and potential dangers. The cladding panels themselves are created from several layers of thin UV-transparent ETFE film, which are sealed around their perimeter and inflated to create a large cushion. The resulting cushion acts as a thermal blanket to the structure. The ETFE material is resistant to most stains, which simply wash off in the rain. If required, cleaning can be performed by abseilers. Although the ETFE is susceptible to punctures, these can be easily fixed with ETFE tape. The structure is completely self-supporting, with no internal supports, and takes the form of a geodesic structure. The panels vary in size up to 9 m (29.5 ft) across, with the largest at the top of the structure.
The ETFE technology was supplied and installed by the firm Vector Foiltec, which is also responsible for ongoing maintenance of the cladding. The steel spaceframe and cladding package (with Vector Foiltec as ETFE subcontractor) was designed, supplied and installed by MERO (UK) PLC, who also jointly developed the overall scheme geometry with the architect, Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners.
The entire build project was managed by McAlpine Joint Venture.
The Core is the latest addition to the site and opened in September 2005. It provides the Eden Project with an education facility, incorporating classrooms and exhibition spaces designed to help communicate Eden's central message about the relationship between people and plants. Accordingly, the building has taken its inspiration from plants, most noticeable in the form of the soaring timber roof, which gives the building its distinctive shape.
Grimshaw developed the geometry of the copper-clad roof in collaboration with a sculptor, Peter Randall-Page, and Mike Purvis of structural engineers SKM Anthony Hunts. It is derived from phyllotaxis, which is the mathematical basis for nearly all plant growth; the "opposing spirals" found in many plants such as the seeds in a sunflower's head, pine cones and pineapples. The copper was obtained from traceable sources, and the Eden Project is working with Rio Tinto Group to explore the possibility of encouraging further traceable supply routes for metals, which would enable users to avoid metals mined unethically. The services and acoustic, mechanical, and electrical engineering design was carried out by Buro Happold.
The Core is also home to art exhibitions throughout the year. A permanent installation entitled Seed, by Peter Randall-Page, occupies the anteroom. Seed is a large, 70 tonne egg-shaped stone installation standing some 13 feet (4.0 m) tall and displaying a complex pattern of protrusions that are based upon the geometric and mathematical principles that underlie plant growth.
Environmental aspects
The biomes provide diverse growing conditions, and many plants are on display.
The Eden Project includes environmental education focusing on the interdependence of plants and people; plants are labelled with their medicinal uses. The massive amounts of water required to create the humid conditions of the Tropical Biome, and to serve the toilet facilities, are all sanitised rain water that would otherwise collect at the bottom of the quarry. The only mains water used is for hand washing and for cooking. The complex also uses Green Tariff Electricity – the energy comes from one of the many wind turbines in Cornwall, which were among the first in Europe.
In December 2010 the Eden Project received permission to build a geothermal electricity plant which will generate approx 4MWe, enough to supply Eden and about 5000 households. The project will involve geothermal heating as well as geothermal electricity. Cornwall Council and the European Union came up with the greater part of £16.8m required to start the project. First a well will be sunk nearly 3 miles (4.5 km) into the granite crust underneath Eden.
Eden co-founder, Sir Tim Smit said, "Since we began, Eden has had a dream that the world should be powered by renewable energy. The sun can provide massive solar power and the wind has been harnessed by humankind for thousands of years, but because both are intermittent and battery technology cannot yet store all we need there is a gap. We believe the answer lies beneath our feet in the heat underground that can be accessed by drilling technology that pumps water towards the centre of the Earth and brings it back up superheated to provide us with heat and electricity".
Drilling began in May 2021, and it was expected the project would be completed by 2023
Other projects
Eden Project Morecambe
In 2018, the Eden Project revealed its design for a new version of the project, located on the seafront in Morecambe, Lancashire. There will be biomes shaped like mussels and a focus on the marine environment. There will also be reimagined lidos, gardens, performance spaces, immersive experiences, and observatories.
Grimshaw are the architects for the project, which is expected to cost £80 million. The project is a partnership with the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership, Lancaster University, Lancashire County Council, and Lancaster City Council. In December 2018, the four local partners agreed to provide £1 million to develop the idea, which allowed the development of an outline planning application for the project. It is expected that there will be 500 jobs created and 8,000 visitors a day to the site.
Having been granted planning permission in January 2022 and with £50 million of levelling-up funding granted in January 2023, it is due to open in 2026 and predicted to benefit the North West economy by £200 million per year.
Eden Project Dundee
In May 2020, the Eden Project revealed plans to establish their first attraction in Scotland, and named Dundee as the proposed site of the location. The city's Camperdown Park was widely touted to be the proposed location of the new attraction however in May 2021, it was announced that the Eden Project had chosen the site of the former gasworks in Dundee as the location. It was planned that the new development would result in 200 new jobs and "contribute £27m a year to the regional economy". The project is in partnership with Dundee City Council, the University of Dundee and the Northwood Charitable Trust.
In 2021, Eden Project announced that they would establish fourteen hectares of new wildflower habitat in areas across Dundee, including Morgan Academy and Caird Park.
In July 2023, new images were released depicting what the Dundee attraction would look which accompanied the planning permission documents for the new attraction which would be submitted by autumn 2023.
South Downs
In 2020, Eastbourne Borough Council and the Eden Project announced a joint project to explore the viability of a new Eden site in the South Downs National Park.
Qingdao, China
In 2015, the Eden Project announced that it had reached an agreement to construct an Eden site in Qingdao, China. While the site had originally been slated to open by 2020, construction fell behind schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the opening date was delayed to 2023. The new site is expected to focus on "water" and its central role in civilization and nature.
Eden Project New Zealand
A planned Eden Project for the New Zealand city of Christchurch, to be called Eden Project New Zealand/Eden Project Aotearoa, is expected to be inaugurated in 2025. It is to be centred close to the Avon River, on a site largely razed as a result of the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake.
Eden Sessions
Since 2002, the Project has hosted a series of musical performances, called the Eden Sessions, usually held during the summer.
The 2024 sessions will be headlined by Fatboy Slim, Suede, Manic Street Preachers, The National, JLS, Crowded House, Rick Astley, Tom Grennan and Paolo Nutini.
In the media
The Eden Project has appeared in various television shows and films such as the James Bond film Die Another Day, The Bad Education Movie, in the Netflix series The Last Bus, and in the CBeebies show Andy's Aquatic Adventure.
A weekly radio show called The Eden Radio Project is held every Thursday afternoon on Radio St Austell Bay.
On 18 November 2019, on the Trees A Crowd podcast, David Oakes would interview the Eden Project's Head of Interpretation, Dr Jo Elworthy, about the site.
The “Nuremberg Chronicle” is an illustrated world history that follows the story of humankind related in the Bible, from Creation to Last Judgment. It was written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel in the city of Nuremberg and is one of the best-documented early printed books – an incunabulum – and one of the first to successfully integrate illustrations and text. The publisher and printer was Anton Koberger, the godfather of Albrecht Durer. The large workshop of Michael Wolgemut, then Nuremberg’s leading artist, provided the unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations. Albrecht Durer was an apprentice with Wolgemut from 1486 to 1489, so may well have participated in designing some of the illustrations for the specialist craftsmen who cut the blocks.
Approximately 400 Latin and 300 German copies of the Chronicle survived into the twenty-first century. Some copies were broken up for sale as decorative prints. The larger illustrations in the book were sold separately, often hand-colored in watercolor. Many copies of the book are also colored, with varying degrees of skill; there were specialist shops for this. The coloring on some examples has been added much later.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - May 18 - Cathy Lassiter and Elizabeth Banko attend CommonSpirit's Humankindness Gala 2023 on May 18th 2023 at San Francisco in San Francisco, CA (Photo - Natalie Shrik for Drew Altizer Photography)
As you may guess, this is/was NOT the correct time on the oven. Just about every single global problem is potentially easier to disentangle than the correct combination of button presses to set the time or a timer on ANY oven. Stephen Hawking would have had nightmares over this.
In other news: Golf, dog walks, sausages.