Still Gravity

The carbonized  Herculaneum papyrus scrolls are revealing Plato's burial place and new information about the Greek philosopher. According to Graziano Ranocchia, the lead researcher on the project, the newly revealed details pinpoint Plato’s burial place to a private garden within the Platonic Academy in Athens, near the sacred Museion.   Furthermore, the scrolls suggest a tumultuous chapter in Plato’s life, indicating that he was sold into slavery following the Spartan conquest of the island of Aegina, possibly between 404 BCE and 399 BCE.             (Source here .) The Vesuvius Challenge to decipher the scrolls with help of AI is bringing results.

Image from a steel plate called "On the coast of Florida" illustrating the chronicle - Public Domain.  This is an old sketch of the Everglades region published in 1901. It's in Volume 1 of  With the World's Great Travellers , a book edited by Charles Morris and Oliver H. G. Leigh. The author of the short chronicle was S. C. Clarke.  This tale of an expedition to Lake Okeechobee recounts the killing of a panther.  Morris and I fired, and the panther sprang from the tree among the dogs, which all piled on him at once. There was a confused mass of fur rolling on the ground, snarling, and snapping, for half a minute; then the panther broke loose, and was making off, when Weldon put half a dozen buckshot in his head, They also shot various alligators on the shores of Lake Okeechobee.  In the mean time we had commenced hostilities against the alligators, which were here very large, bold, and numerous. They lay basking in the sun upon the beach in front of our camp, some of

Cuba has been a great experiment on socialist economic planning. Ruled by a government with only one political party and not plurality of views, it always meant a "command economy". Their system also had the convenient excuse of the US embargo to cover up for its own shortfalls, inefficiencies, and corruption.  After the fall of the Soviet Union and their yearly subsidies, in the 1990s all plunged to chaos. Today, things are worse. According to official figures, inflation stood at 77% in 2021, then dropped to 31% in 2023. But for the average Cuban, the official figures barely reflect the reality of their lives, since market inflation can reach up to three digits on the informal market. For example, a carton of eggs, which sold for 300 Cuban pesos in 2019, these days sells for about 3,100 pesos. The monthly salary for Cuban state workers ranges between 5,000 and 7,000 Cuban pesos (between $14 and $20 in the parallel market).           (Source here .) And then you have a piece

Coral made home with iguanas on the roof -  License our images here . Do you like this house? I found it interesting for its coral walls, but when I took the photo didn't notice the iguanas sun basking on the roof. First floor humans, second floor iguanas. Two species coexisting in harmony. Good balance of nature and urbanism.

The title of this article published in Outside is pretentious.  "Best things" depend of the traveler. What is "best" for me may be bad for you - or at least not "best", just "fine". But I get it, the web is full of "bests" to play the game of the search engines.  The author tried hard to find the best adventure for each national park through personal experience and that counts. This was her process: In 2020, I embarked on a quest to visit every single national park in under a year, which took me well outside of my comfort zone, kayaking to glaciers in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords, solo backpacking in the red rocks of Utah’s Canyonlands, and rock climbing on the moss-splotched cliffs of California’s Pinnacles. New ideas for our list. Read it here . 

White-tailed deer - one of our photos here - is expanding their habitat to the north. Sounds good but... Areas with more deer typically have more wolves, and these wolves are predators of caribou -- a species under threat. Deer can handle high predation rates, but caribou cannot. Source here .

Recently, I took some photos of a  Cassia bakeriana  in full bloom.  Pink shower tree in a park of Florida -  License our images here . This native from Thailand and Myanmar is commonly known as pink shower tree, wishing tree, or dwarf apple blossom tree. The showy tree blooms in spring with amazing pink-purple flowers.  According to the website of  Pha Tad Ke Botanical Gardens in Luang Prabang, Laos, Its symbolic value this Cassia owes in part to the fact that it is often reinterpreted in Thailand as being a “Kappa tree”, Kalapheuk, a paradise tree in Buddhist mythology which produces everything one could desire. Let's plant one to get our wishes.  The tree. The flowers. The branches.

May be a surprise to many that one of the favorites songs of Honest Abe was " Dixie " - also known as "Dixie's Land" or "I Wish I Was in Dixie".  I say "surprise" because this song was adopted during the Civil War as a de facto national anthem of the Confederacy - together with " The Bonnie Blue Flag " and " God Save the South ".  Lincoln had been quoted as saying, 'I have always thought "Dixie" one of the best tunes I have ever heard.'  Check the old article, " If Abraham Lincoln Had An iPod ."

Tyler Cowen pointed to the book  Native Nations: A Millennium in North America   from Kathleen DuVal, professor of early American history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill - link to Amazon is affiliate.  The excerpts are interesting. Some ideas sound familiar to our time. Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality.  The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political economic centralization to build new ways of living… Distrust, centralization, hierarchy, inequality... More in Marginal Revolution . 

Decades of space exploration and satellite communications technology have left a lot of garbage in the space .  To make things better, now some countries are OK with deploying nuclear weapons there - Russia vetoed and China abstained .  Japan and the United States drafted the Security Council resolution, which they billed as the first devoted to outer space issues. The resolution directed members to uphold Article 4 of the Outer Space Treaty, which forbids countries from placing nuclear weapons in orbit or on celestial bodies. It also called on countries not to develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction specifically designed to be placed in orbit. Where will the madness end?

The general consensus in SEO - Search Engine Optimization - circles is that Google Search is broken and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai has been a disgrace for the company. A couple of days ago, journalist Edward Zitron poured gasoline to the fire with an article named " The Man Who Killed Google Search ".  There he speaks of the fall of Ben Gomes , After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.  the raise of  Prabhakar Raghavan , It’s very, very difficult to find much on Raghavan’s history — it took me hours of digging through Google results to find the three or four articles that went into any depth a

Reid Hoffman trained a language model on himself and got a virtual copy. Are we close to the age of digital impersonators? Watch the video of Hoffman vs. Hoffman here .

Do you plan to write a book?  First learn a little about the publishing business from the data revealed in the antitrust case against Penguin Random House, The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. 29,000 titles sold less than a dozen books? Not much hope for new writers - neither money. Very interesting article in this link .

Like the author Oliver Goldsmith  wrote in The Vicar of Wakefield ,  - affiliate link to Amazon.  I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books and old wines.   The past is a teacher that complements the present. Old books are a collective vault of experiences that you only need to know how to open.   Discovering old unpopular books feels like an archeological adventure. There is joy in the process of looking and finding forgotten gems - those surprises that make you see some modern publications as regurgitations with a twist.  We all know that knowing about the past is important but, what about the future? Leave it to dreams, fiction, and imagination. And yes, I also like old wines. 

The ValuJet monument facing the Tamiami Trail canal -  License our images here . The monument looks weird from the road. Just a bunch of grey concrete pillars standing on the north side of the Tamiami Trail before entering the Miccosukee Indian Reservation.  This structure was built in 1999 to honor the 110 victims of the ValuJet Flight 592 that felt in the Everglades on May 11, 1996 - learn more about the accident  here . Seen from the air, the triangular shape of its base points to the location of the accident many miles into the Everglades - you can see it better in Google Maps . Not the most beautiful memorial I've seen.

Easy: restraint the dead bodies to their graves. LOL.  Learn the recipes used by ancient cultures from northern Europe to stop dead people from coming back to the world of the living in this article .

It's "The Hand that rocks the Cradle Is The Hand That Rules The World" from 1865. Blessings on the hand of women! Angels guard its strength and grace, In the palace, cottage, hovel, Oh, no matter where the place; Would that never storms assailed it, Rainbows ever gently curled; For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world. Infancy's the tender fountain, Power may with beauty flow, Mother's first to guide the streamlets, From them souls unresting grow— Grow on for the good or evil, Sunshine streamed or evil hurled; For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world. Woman, how divine your mission Here upon our natal sod! Keep, oh, keep the young heart open Always to the breath of God! All true trophies of the ages Are from mother-love impearled; For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world. Blessings on the hand of women! Fathers, sons, and daughters cry, And the sacred song is mingled With the worship

The mysterious manuscript from the Middle Ages written in an unknown language and with strange drawings that look from another planet got some new interpretations.  New colors for the many theories surrounding this text. Check them  here .

Never fight someone with cauliflower ears no matter how old he is. Watch this short video .  Cauliflower ear, also known as wrestler's ear or perichondrial hematoma, is a deformity caused by blunt trauma to the auricle. It occurs as blood accumulates in the pinna that can disrupt the blood supply of the healthy cartilage. The resulting fibrosis leads to the development of a cauliflower ear.  Source: National Library of Medicine .

Does peace exist in wild things?  Nature, wilderness, and the wild are a yin yang wheel of danger and safety, stress and relaxation, movement and stillness. But there is a good thing in all this primitive existentialism: absence of conscious worries about the future. Like Wendell Berry wrote,  I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  (The complete poem here .) Living in the present brings peace to the mind. Don't tax your life. 

One of the shacks of Jimbo's Place -  License our images here . Little over a decade ago, we got many photos of Jimbo's place, the popular shack "village" across downtown Miami visited once by President Nixon and a weekend destination for the boating community of Miami. Now the park of Virginia Key built a kayak launching ramp to Lamar Lake on these lands.  Get the tale of the old place with a photo of Jimbo Luznar  here .  Boats in Lamar Lake in the times of Jimbo's.  

It's here. It means more gator sightings and encounters with more aggressive males - meaning more territorial. Take a look at this biker encounter on a residential street this week. Yield to pedestrians. LOL.  Check some of our photos of alligators here . 

Warren Buffet put it simple: If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die. And which are the ways to make money while sleeping?  Investments and/or passive income. The sooner you start the better.

10,190 miles (16,400km). 352 days. 16 countries.  Not an easy task what the " Hardest Geezer " accomplished. His motivation? Not having end of life regrets - those regrets of never trying.  There were others before. The American ultrarunner Charlie Engle 's ran across Africa.  When I decided to run across the Sahara Desert with Ray Zahab and Kevin Lin, I knew it would be a life changing expedition. But I could never have known that, in many ways, my life would be defined by this run and the film about the journey. While running more than 4,500 miles across Africa was a difficult physical challenge, we were buoyed daily by enlightening encounters that opened our eyes to the people and the culture of the Sahara. Ewart Grogan walked from Cape Town to Cairo.  To describe the first stage of the route from the Cape to Cairo, that is to say, as far as the Zambesi, which I accomplished four years ago, would, if time be counted by progress, be reverting to the Middle Ages. (Quote

Cleaning the statues of the temple. Everybody pours water on them -  License our images here .   Once again, we've been in a Songkran festival, the Thai celebration of the Buddhist new year and the most important celebration in Thailand. In this occasion was in the Wat Buddharangsi Buddhist Temple of Miami. This event means change and transformation, cleanliness and rejuvenation. Water is the big protagonist and that's why it's also known as the "Water Festival". Water runs on the Buddhist statues and on the attending crown - if you are not careful. But water is fresh and good. It cleans and Songkran is all about spring cleaning, the washing away of bad luck - our world needs a lot of water nowadays.  Interesting cultural experience. Just try it.  (More of our pictures for your delight.)

Alfred Burdon Ellis spent a long time in Africa. The British officer fought in the Zulu war and the Third Anglo-Ashanti War - he was wounded in 1878. Ellis also served as governor of Sierra Leone in 1892. A year later, he was sent to fight the Malian Sofas - "sofa" meant warrior in the Mandinka language of the Mali Empire. On his way back, he got the fever and died in 1894 in Tenerife, Canary Islands. Ellis wrote many books and his ethnographic work in West Africa was well known during his time. His texts are usually signed as A. B. Ellis.  The Land of Fetish was published in 1883. The book recounts his time as Captain of the First West Indian Regiment in West Africa, a position he got in 1879. The text contains interesting descriptions of African cultures and historical events.  These are some excerpts: About his visit to the ruins of a British fort destroyed by the French in the 17th century. About an hour’s row up the river from Bathurst is the island of St. James, which

New findings say that these monkeys famous for their lovemaking behavior are not that peaceful.  The results, Mouginot says, “really came as a surprise.” Overall, male bonobos turned out to be about three times as likely as chimps to engage in aggressive behavior.  Nature and social life in humans and animals are complex matters.  The common perception of bonobos as peace loving may fail to capture “the nuance of a species that has a lot of complex behavior,” Mouginot argues. (Indeed, even primatologist Frans de Waal—whoske work helped popularize the image of the bonobo as a lover, not a fighter—cautioned people not to romanticize them.) Read the story here .

Don't have photos of events that happened in your past? No worries. The Synthetic Memories Project can help.  Synthetic Memories have turned dozens of people’s thoughts into AI images; working with refugees who fled their homes and exploring whether the technology could be used to help people with dementia. Visualize your memories with fake images through generative AI.

California has less online access to news in these days.  Google is temporarily blocking California-based news outlets’ content for some state residents, reprising a political tactic the tech industry has repeatedly used to try to derail such bills in places like Canada and Australia that require online platforms to pay journalism outlets for articles featured on their websites. Google displays news content through snippets that many publishers argue is stealing visitors from their websites. The idea behind the California online journalism bill is that Google should pay these publishers for the content that generate profits for them.  Should Google pay for the used content to publishers or not?

The amazing flower of shameplant -  License our images here . The flowers of this plant look alien. In close view, they appear covered by tiny lights. Electric plant? No. Just an illusion.   Shameplant is  Mimosa pudica  for science -  pudica  means "shame" or "shrinking" in Latin. It's a curious plant for its sensitive leaves that react to the touch and fold inward. Minutes later, they will go back to normal.  This is how the leaves look when open.  Open leaves of shameplant.  The folding of the leaves are an example of sensitive defense against potential predators. The plant tries to reduce its exposure. The folding comes from a flow of potassium within the leaf.  Shameplant is native to the tropical Americas but lives well in South Florida and regions with similar climate around the world. It's considered an invasive species in many places - a beautiful invasive. 

Revelations from a tomb from 5500 BC found in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux near Avignon, France. Recent research has unearthed chilling evidence of ritual sacrifices in Neolithic Europe, a practice that involved the gruesome method of "incaprettamento" - tying victims' necks to their bent legs, leading to self-strangulation. Read the findings here .

NPR has been accused before for left bias in its news coverage. What is different this time is that the accusations come from the inside - the people that really know.  What Uri Berliner says in his article published in The Free Press :   "I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust." What NPR responded: "NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust." So far, I haven't seen too much coverage of this in the main media. Only found articles in Fox News , The Times , and The New York Post . I worked in television newsrooms long ago and saw these issues on both sides of the political spectrum. Modern woke trends and political tribalism have made the thing worse - read this interesting book quote about wokeism and political correctness. Journalists taking sides and pretending "to save the world" don't have a place in serious news coverage. PS: This is what a page of the NPR website says abo

This month Scientific American published an interview with one of the researchers that "invented" the popular Dunning-Kruger Effect in 1999. About the "effect', he says: The Dunning-Kruger effect visits all of us sooner or later in our pockets of incompetence. They’re invisible to us because to know that you don't know something, you need to know something. It’s not about general stupidity. It’s about each and every one of us, sooner or later. You can be incredibly intelligent in one area and completely not have expertise in another area. Check " The Dunning-Kruger Effect Shows that People Don’t Know What They Don’t Know ".

Azul Wells shared some good points in his YouTube Channel. This is a summary: At 60, we can estimate less than a thousand weeks left of healthy active life. We can make more money, but not more time.  There is no amount of money that we "must have" to retire - we have to make it work. Financial planning works with assumptions of the future. When retirement arrives, reality may differ from the plans - and again, we've to make all work with the money we have.  The most dangerous phrase is "one more year of work", because we'll never be totally ready to retire. This gentleman recommends not to waste the youth of our senior years - and, of course, I totally agree.  I love this phrase that bounces around the web from time to time: Life is meant to live, not work yourself to death. Don't work yourself to death.

Humans are tribal. Everybody knows this. We are tribal in mostly everything, and politics are not the exception. In this area, we dig in hard in "positional tribalism". Right wing, left wing, "center".  These labels began as a purely spatial thing. They were seating arrangements in the National Assembly of France in 1789 - those convulse times of the French Revolution. The physical seatings of people brought the "progressive left" and the "traditionalist right". That was the beginning of the craziness. Later we got more creative and appeared the "center", the "center left", the "center-right", and on and on. We have a deep fascination for labels.  Most of the times, when tribalism wins the best ideas lose.

In a podcast interview the philosopher John Gray explained the actual growth of conservative populism as a social blowback against liberal laws. He said that liberals don't understand how they by themselves produce populism and tend to point all the guilt to a populist opportunist. Agree. People need to focus on the roots of the problems and leave aside their obsession for political personalities. Let's use more our brains and become less passionate with our tribal instincts.

The blue heron took off when we were approaching in the trail -  License our images here . Last week I captured this sequence of a blue heron taking off and getting airborne. Interesting how the big bird gets aerodynamic pushing the legs back. Then it pulls back the head holding the long neck in an "S" curve. They can reach a speed up to 55 kilometers per hour with relatively slow wing beats. The suggestion for the "S" curved neck points to center mass - check this article .  A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.                         John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

The famous Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós wrote in the first paragraph of his novel  Nazarín . A un periodista de los de nuevo cuño, de estos que designamos con el exótico nombre de reporter , de estos que corren tras de la información, como el galgo a los alcances de la liebre, y persiguen el incendio, la bronca, el suicidio, el crimen cómico o trágico, el hundimiento de un edificio, y cuantos sucesos afectan al orden público y a la justicia en tiempos comunes, o a la higiene en días de epidemia, Here we go with my loose translation:  To a journalist of the new type, one of those we call by the exotic name of 'reporter', those who run after information like a hunting dog goes after a hare, and chase the fire, the fight, the suicide, the crime, comic or tragic, the falling of a building, and any event that affects public order and justice or the hygiene on epidemic days, This book was published in 1895, but this complex sentence still applies to the reporters of

AI for video creation is developing fast. Images created from prompts are getting better - check these samples made with Sora from OpenAI. Still not perfect, but good enough to imagine the future. We'll get drown in a world of fakes and won't have enough journalists to factcheck the upcoming avalanche of AI creations. The frontier between real and fake will become blurry. What's next?

I just heard the Sam Harris' interview with William MacAskill . He sounds like a good guy, but so naive! I felt sorry for him. How can someone believe in  Sam Bankman-Fried ?  The truth is that it's very easy to believe because of the desire of good folks to help social causes that look noble and altruist. This is the same that happens when people fall by the promises of leaders like Fidel Castro and other communist or socialist dictators.  There are many wolves in sheep clothes. Open your eyes Will . You are a philosopher and should has known better. 

Now is a cave. The "influencer" craziness at work. Instagramers and YouTubers visit the place and need to do something "cool" for their channels, and... what can be cooler than dumping trash and painting walls?  Graffiti and trash leftovers aren't new, but social media is making all worse. Poor souls with an extreme need for attention -  Read it here . 

Henry Pratt Fairchild, "Immigration".  Immigration is a hot topic today and was a hot topic in the past, but most of us don't know much about the old views on immigration. This is why this century old text caught my attention.  Henry Pratt Fairchild published this book in 1913 - a year before the start of WWI. The full title was  Immigration: A world movement and its American significance. The text covers the immigration to North America since the colonial times. The author was born in 1880. He became a sociologist and taught at New York University. Fairchild covered controversial topics such as race, abortion, contraception, and immigration - there is a list of his books at the end of the post. He got involved with Planned Parenthood since 1916 and was a member of the American Eugenics Society. Fairchild served as president of the American Sociological Society in 1936.  Some interesting points from the book.  A Dutch ship introduced the first African slaves to North Amer