Still Gravity

Apache Girl by E.S. Curtis - The North American Indian , Vol. 1 - 1906. The photographer used very dramatic lighting. The images are impressive. The visual ethnographic work... amazing.  Edward Sheriff Curtis took more than 40,000 photos of people from 80 Indian tribes in a project financed by  J. P. Morgan . Curiously, he didn't get a salary and at the time of his death the photographer/ethnologist was mostly forgotten. But there is no doubt that his  The North American Indian  book series was a project of epic proportions.  President Theodore Roosevelt wrote the foreword of the first volume and said about Curtis:   He is an artist who works out of doors and not in the closet. He is a close observer, whose qualities of mind and body fit him to make his observations out in the field, surrounded by the wild life he commemorates. He has lived on intimate terms with many different tribes of the mountains and the plains. He knows them as they hunt, as they travel, as they go about the

It's illegal to carry a gun in California. Yet, criminals don't care about the laws and carry guns in California. Unpaired match between the good and the bad.  Another dead from violence .

Kiva A in the Tusayan ruins of Grand Canyon National Park -  License our images here . These ruins are in the South Rim of the Grand Canyon . They are from the12th century and were excavated in 1930. The ancient dwellers only lived in this village for a couple of decades - our photos are from a camping trip in 2010.  The circular kivas are the biggest structures. They were named kiva A and kiva B. A 1931 study from archeologist  Emil Walter Haury - the one who chose the name of the Mogollon Culture - pointed that kiva B was older and ended destroyed by fire. Then kiva A was constructed after the lost, but it wasn't as good as the first one. He also said that this pueblo was very small with no more than 8 living rooms.  The square structures of the Tusayan ruins. Some believe they were used for storage. The small building with stone walls is the museum. Built in 1928, it was designed by Herbert Maier, the architect that created buildings for Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the lodge o

Two black spiny-tailed iguanas in Key Biscayne, Florida. The defined black bands indicate that this an adult. This species invaded and conquered the southern parts of the state  -  License our images here . 39.4 kilometers per hours! - according to the Guinness Book of World Records. This speed can beat the fastest human on record at 37.58. Ctenosaura similis or Black spiny-tailed iguana doesn't look that fast in my photo.  These iguanas are migrants from Mexico and Central America. In Florida they've claimed terrain up to Tampa Bay. They grow big, reaching up to 1.3 meters - 4 ft 3 in. The adults often have a whitish gray color, like seen in my previous image.  Black spiny-tailed iguanas are good climbers and like rocky places. They love to wander during the day and are kind of vegans - herbivorous diet. One in a while, they crave for something else and catch a small animal. The youngers tend to eat insects.  I read that in parts of Central America are called "chicken o

Interesting interview with Tyler Cowen in The Generalist . No real estate bubble?  The way prices have evolved over the past ten years indicates that the original 2007 prices were not a bubble. So, I’ve swung back to my earlier view. There was some kind of strange collective panic in 2008 and 2009, but most of the prices have been validated or even exceeded.  Why I’ve Stopped Using Google Search  is a recent video published in YouTube. Can we still trust Google search? - the video suggests DuckDuckGo as alternative and looks like this search engine is getting traction . Someone created a Chrome extension to turn off AI Overviews in Google Search - I haven't tried it.   Are you one of the many (many!) people that dislikes Google’s new ‘AI Overviews’ that summarise (plagiarise?) information from across the web — often with hilarious/awful results? Learn how to handle a rattlesnake before the next hike.  In one study published in the journal Biology of the Rattlesnakes, Morris rigged

Interesting reading published in The World Tomorrow: A Journal Looking Toward a Christian World  in 1928. Firs thing I've read from Zora Neale Hurston , an Alabamian born in 1891 that was moved to Florida at short age. She grew in Eatonville near Orlando before the era of Mickey Mouse and became part of the Harlem Renaissance or "New Negro Movement" - Eatonville was one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States.  The author style in the essay is simple and unapologetic. She refuses to play to be a victim of her race unjust past and present discrimination. She grows from the ashes and focus on her future, be it good or bad.  Some excerpts from "How It Feels To Be Colored Me". Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. Slavery is the price I paid for civiliza

Bloody Knife kneeling on the right side of General Custer pointing to a map. Pvt. John Burkman and the Indian scout Goose standing behind. Little Sioux kneeling with a revolver in his hand - Image from 1876 in Public Domain.  Bloody Knife was the most famous Indian scout of the West. He was the favorite of  General Custer  and second in command of the Indian scouts of the 7th Cavalry Regiment after  Lieutenant Varnum . Bloody Knife also died in the Battle of the Little Bighorn - Battle of the Greasy Grass for the Lakota Indians  - but not near Custer. In  this photo , the scout is seen on his horse and dressed in his lance corporal uniform. Bloody Knife was a mix of Sioux and Arikara. He lived with the Sioux but was bullied and discriminated for his Arikara origins. He left the tribe and became an enemy of the Sioux.  Custer's wife - Elizabeth Bacon Custer - describes Bloody Knife in her book  "Boots and Saddles": Or Life in Dakota with General Custer   - affiliate link

We all knew that was coming. Google has added AI to its search engine. They called it  AI overviews . For the searcher, it promises to bring a quick answer to the query - means more convenience. For the publisher, it promises a drop in traffic because less people will go to their website pages after getting the answer in the AI summary - means less income.  AI gets "its knowledge" from the web. And the irony here is that Google's AI overviews will scrap and regurgitate the content written by others in a summary, something that Google always advised publishers not to do without adding "new and helpful information".      How will the small publishers survive with the potential drop of traffic and income? What will be their incentive to keep posting? Even news media organizations are at risk of falling further down -  Publishers horrified at new Google AI feature that could kill what is left of journalism . Fasten your belts for more changes in the virtual world an

Can AI deceive humans?  New research says that, Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems have already learned how to deceive humans, even systems that have been trained to be helpful and honest. Writing by hand helps for thinking and learning because it slows us down. The good news is that  scribbling with a stylus on a screen also works .  ...according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults. Do you know what a "croqueta" is?  The Cuban cuisine in Miami.  "We've shipped to every single state now, which is just nuts to me," says Fernandez. "You don't really think anyone knows who you are outside of a zip code! There's a map in our office and we put a pin in every state we shipped to, and we've been able to fill every single state." 4500 years old  L-shaped structure discovered in Egypt  found buried near the Great Pyr

Trying to propose a balance between humans and nature, Thoreau wrote the essay "Walking" in the 1850s - it was a lecture. Some excerpts from this work of the American philosopher and naturalist. I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, —to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,  Our expeditions are but tours;  Half the walk is but retracing our steps. Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character,  So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.  Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the

Imagine you find a video of yourself saying what you never said. Speaking languages you don't speak. Supporting politics, causes, or countries you don't support. Advertising products you don't use, own, or sell. This is already happening thanks to the new AI tools. And like always happen, the governments are already late in controlling the damages. How many implications this can have for our lives? You are free to imagine. Or maybe, you may ask to your future AI impersonator.  We may stop being we for the public eye to become someone else - and not necessarily for the best. Read the news report here . 

Gravity affects the three dimensions of the physical world and also time - the fourth dimension. There are scientific laws - or "laws" - about this, but strange things happen when we play on the scale of the Universe. ... when we try to understand gravity on a cosmic scale, at the scale of galaxy clusters and beyond, we encounter apparent inconsistencies with the predictions of general relativity. It's almost as if gravity itself stops perfectly matching Einstein's theory. We are calling this inconsistency a 'cosmic glitch': gravity becomes around one per cent weaker when dealing with distances in the billions of light years.  Oops! Here comes the exception to the rule. Interesting idea from this research .

The Chinese Bridge in Deering Estate, Miami, Florida -  License our images here . Interesting bridge over a creek at the Chinese Bridge Trail by the Deering Estate Museum. It was constructed by  Charles Deering  in 1918 over Cutler Creek to reach his retirement home on the coast of Biscayne Bay. The road them was "Old Cuttler Road" and now is the 72nd Avenue after Old Cuttler was moved west. Charles Deering chose a Chinese theme for his bridge as a reminder of his Asian travels as naval officer. There is one photo of the construction  on the website of the Deering Estate Museum and some others in the Florida Memory website that show the bridge completed: Image 1 , Image 2  - these are from December of 1918.  The Chinese Bridge Trail is closed to vehicles. Many locals ride bikes, run, or walk on this path. The nature of the area is beautiful.  The path of "Old Cuttler Road" is now a trail closed to vehicles. The road follows the western boundaries of Deering Estate.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? What some scientists think .  According to the theory, four rules -- an enemy of an enemy is a friend, a friend of a friend is a friend, a friend of an enemy is an enemy and, finally, an enemy of a friend is an enemy -- lead to balanced relationships. 3,500-Year-Old Obelisk in NY's Central Park. Did you know about it? Created to celebrate the 30th year of Thutmose III’s reign, each was carved from a single piece of quarried stone. Are the fears of our economists in the wrong place? Tales from the 1980s . On one hand, I was comforted to learn that many of these fears turned out to be unfounded. On the other, I am concerned that many current economists are not worried about the correct things. One more from Marginal Revolution : Who was the wealthiest man in the 1930s in the whole world? Hint: Not an American. The irresistible puppy dog eyes are also in the wild dogs. A study on the African wild dogs . "Puppy-dog eyes didn’t just evolve for u

The three got oceans and atmospheres. Atmospheres act like "cozy blankets," Gilmore says. On Earth, for example, the atmosphere helps keep the planet habitable by shielding life from radiation and also keeps the surface at temperatures that we humans can live in. And to have a stable atmosphere, a planet needs a few things: volcanism, sufficient mass, and oceans. And volcanoes are a vital element. The problem is, planets actually need volcanoes to constantly replenish their atmospheres, because those atmospheres are constantly being lost to space, Gilmore explains. Another thing is the distance to the Sun.  Source:  Venus and Earth used to look like 'twin' planets. What happened?

The advice goes against feeding wildlife, but some people are doing this in Africa.  "Since I support and give fruit to the chimps, they don’t disturb anything else,” says Mr. Isingoma, who has planted 20 jackfruit trees on his 17-acre plot in the western Ugandan village of Kasongoire, The report here .

Opening in segments as an official UK National Trail, the path will stretch across the whole of the English coastline once it's finished – a distance of 2,700 miles.  Via BBC . 

Illustration of the Hugh Glass bear attack from an old newspaper - Public Domain.   The most famous bear attack is not in YouTube but was portrayed in the movies  The Revenant  and  Man in the Wilderness. The original tale comes from the short chronicle "The Missouri Trapper" published in 1825 in the section "Letters from the West" of  The Port Folio  magazine. This text recounts the return of Hugh Glass alive to Fort Atkinson after everybody assumed that he was killed by Arikara Indians. (According to the  Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes , "Arikara" could mean "horns", "elk people", or "corn eaters" - "horns" for their custom to wearing two horns, probably in the way of this Crow Chief ). Working for  Andrew Henry  in an expedition to the Yellowstone River, Hugh Glass was attacked by a grizzly. The old chronicle says that a "white bear" came from nowhere and grabbed him by the throat taking a chunk

Is dark energy diluting over time in the Cosmos? This may change a universe model.  Blue rock thrush (blue rock thrush ( Monticola solitarius ), an alien bird in the US -  Someone got a picture in Oregon . This is the national bird of Malta.  The drugs of the Mayan. Hallucinogens found in Yucatan.  Is politics all about personal identity and self-interest? Here comes a theory .  Why do we die? Do we really want to live forever? The views of a Nobel a Prize-winning molecular biologist . I think this quest for immortality is a mirage. One hundred and fifty years ago, you could expect to live until about 40. Today, life expectancy is about 80, which, as author Steven Johnson has said, is almost like adding a whole extra life. But we’re still obsessed about dying. I think if we lived to be 150, we’d be fretting about why we’re not living to 200 or 300. It’s never-ending. Have a great weekend!

Here we go again with the enigmatic Gallo-Roman dodecahedron. Last January,  another one was found . And now is in the news again .  Over a hundred Roman dodecahedrons have been found, but nobody knows their use. No mention of this artifact in ancient sources - if there was, probably was lost with the texts of the Library of Alexandria. We are left with conjectures for this archeological enigma - sundial, instrument, magic, religion, etc.  12 faces... 12 constellations...  one of the 5  Platonic solids ... Free your imagination with the shape of a dodecahedron.

Self-explanatory comic strip from Racheli Rottner  -  Source here .  A quote from Einstein comes to mind: Information is not knowledge. (The image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

I think this is a first-time capture in video. It was posted by Isabelle B. Laumer, one of the authors of the paper  Active self-treatment of a facial wound with a biologically active plant by a male Sumatran orangutan  - published in Nature . She explains in the caption of the video: Videos show male orangutan Rakus on the day as the wound was first observed, on the day he treated his wound with Fibraurea tinctoria, on the day after as he was feeding on Fibraurea tinctoria, and four and five days after wound treatment. Fibraurea tinctoria is used in Borneo as traditional medicine.  Link to the video .

Scientists did a visualization from the remains of a woman that died in her 40s. This is a mix of science with art. Just a way to put a human face to a bony skull.   The skull on which the model is based was found in Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. It is an iconic place where the remains of at least 10 Neanderthal men, women and children were unearthed in the 1950s.  Via BBC . (More about the findings in Shanidar Cave here .)

Some scientists now believe that elements of consciousness exist in insects, reptiles, and mollusks - imagine it here , here , or here . They even signed a declaration.  One of them frames the proposal.  We are experiencing an artificial-intelligence revolution where similar questions are being asked about machines. So it behoves us to ask if and how this adaptive quality of the brain might have evolved in nature. What is consciousness? Is it just awareness of internal and external existence?  Complex and controversial.  Via: Nature .

We found a blooming epiphytic plant holding on a street wire -  License our images here . These plants are amazing survivors. Known as epiphytic, they get food and moisture from the air. Their roots secure them to other plants or artificial structures like this public utility wire.  Well-known epiphytics are orchids, bromeliads, and mosses like Spanish moss - check this photo of the Fairchild Oak of Bulow Creek State Park with plenty of them. Fungal partners of plants as lichens are also epiphytes.  My photo shows a ball moss ( Tillandsia recurvata ). This flowering plant takes a spheric shape. The wind takes care of spreading their seeds. Ball moss matures in three years and then blooms for seven years.  Epiphytes don't harm the host plant. The amazing mechanisms of the natural world.

The book and now the television series are very popular. What is scientifically true and what is fiction?  An alien civilization spying on humans using quantum entanglement. A planet chaotically orbiting three stars. Nanofibres capable of slicing through Earth’s hardest substance, diamond. Despite being chock-full of hardcore science, 3 Body Problem, a television series released on 21 March by the streaming service Netflix, has been a hit with audiences. So far, it has spent five weeks straight in Netflix’s list of the top-three programs viewed globally. Via Nature .

At the minimum, social conventions.  I always believed a tie was  designed  to be uncomfortable, that it had no real point otherwise. I thought the buttons on a suit jacket—button  this  one, but not  that  one—were more or less random ways of building secret knowledge tests into daily life, arcane little rituals to screw the regular guy. The author of this article describes manners in this way: They are norms or customs which describe a polite way of doing something, and later become rules, and then after that approach doctrine. Whether they’re “real” in some sense doesn’t really matter. If manners did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. Polite, rules, inventions. A world of constructs and appearance open to be exploited by deceptive minds. In any case, what's wrong with the regular guy? The article here .