Still Gravity

The deadly stiffness of an Orange-crowned Warbler - License our images  here .   Leo Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace : Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. But is it that terrible?  This is a topic that nobody likes to talk about, but death is part of the experience of life. It's a natural and expected thing. Everyone alive gets a free ticket for this trip.  We all know that we will die, and everything we know in this world will end - at least for us. Thoughts, experiences, stuff, family, and friends will vanish in a moment.  Does this horrible thing make death bad or good?  Probably neither. All depends on how you see it. At the end, death is death. Things have an end. Even the stars! Let's call it recycling.  Following with Tolstoy, he chose to die far from the mundane. He went away after privacy, looking for solitude and quietness for his death experience.  He said in his prose:  ...to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and e

My universe of condensation - License our images here .   We thought that we knew and, like usual, the Cosmos surprises again. We thought that there were "laws" - because we are fond of rules and patterns -, but now, things that shouldn't exist by our " cosmological principle ", actually exist. Welcome the Big Ring of galaxies! Exception to the rule? Well... looks like there is more than rings. We got "rings" and "walls" .  This is science at work. The magic of self-correction.

The Volume X: "The Opinionator" - Book in the Public domain.  Two short articles caught my attention reading this book. One was "The Novel", the other, "On Literary Criticism". Both are in The Opinionator section of Volume 10 of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce.  Ambrose Bierce wrote about many things. Some strange for his time, like the trendsetting  The Devil's Dictionary. In this book   lives the funniest definition of a conservative. Conservative (n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. The journalist, writer, and Civil War veteran was sharp and fierce. Bierce was Bierce, and always had a thing for controversy and shocking the readers. Of course, he never ran short of enemies. Often his newspaper columns got hosti

One way to darkness - License our images  here .  This is a complex topic that mixes the internal and the external. A universe of dreams and illusions of happiness and fulfillment combined with weird searches for meaning, purpose, and transcendence in a material world where each of us is one more of the many. Addictive alchemy for the minds entangled in the comparison trap of social life, that "big competition" in our eternal pursuit for external validation.  How to define success? No easy answer. In most cases, we look for external markers such as money and wealth and fame and status. Often, all of them combined in a big pancake. Simplifying: we tend to define success for our public standing and how others see us.  What a game of appearances that sometimes dwells in the dark path of deception. What a hangover of the mind after drinking too much Kool-Aid to blur a universal reality that is hard to accept: our ephemeral one-way trip. What a dull plan for a live in denial from

In our last trip to the wild side of the world, we got close to a cormorant drying its feathers after a plunge.  The blue of its eyes is really amazing. Also, there is something on those eyes that screams dinosaur - science believes birds descend from a dinosaur clade called theropods, so our birds are distant cousins of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptors. You can notice the reptilian feel in the skin around the cormorant eyes.  The eye of the cormorant - License our images  here .   There are many species of this bird around the world, but all have something in common: they are great swimmers. 

Photographer taking a photo of himself - 1893 - Photo: Public Domain.   What is a "conceptual photo"? The picture of an idea that doesn't "exist" in the picture. A puzzle of associations and correlations where the parts by themselves alone don't imply the concept. The decoding of the "right message" depending on the life experiences of the viewer. How to cook a conceptual photo? Define the topic. Find conceptual associations. Visualize and define elements. Mix everything in a cauldron going for an emotional soap (a message without words).   Easy thing to write but hard to accomplish. I guess the secret hides in simplicity.