Pitted Darkling Beetle (Adesmia cancellata)
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” (E. O. Wilson)
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This guy is a warrior…one leg and one antenna missing and his still kicking !
“Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves. The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important. But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.” (Joseph W. Krutch)
Soul !?
We feel, we are extremely emotional, we sacrifice , we compromise, we desire, we love, we suffer….. And our “soul” takes it all in, with courage, like a never ending storage for what touches us the deepest, down to the core of our being. And gets richer, bigger, sometimes better, sometimes worst, and drives our engine, our being through whatever life throws at us, and pushes us through to the next again…and again.
Religions say it is that white cloud of smoke that raises up to havens when we end this earthly life, or goes down the road of fire and pain towards the melting red hell, or just jumps over and helps another living thing rise from nothingness and grow , just to die again and continue this ideal and imaginary infinite cycle.
Science can not disprove its existence, and nobody else can prove it; we can not see it, but we know it is there, somewhere, in the hidden corners of our hearts and minds, we feel it, we think it and it is reality to every individual. A subjective reality that we can almost touch but we can never identify from the complexity of our thoughts.
Bits of Nature !!!
“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” (Emerson)
“Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher” (W. Wordworth)
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better” (Einstein)
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished” (Tzu)
Arachnophobia !!! (interesting facts…not about arachnophobia…but facts about spiders)
Love them or hate them…spiders are some amazing creatures.
There are around 40,000 of different spider species living on our planet.
Spiders have eight legs.
Spiders have so far been found on every continent, except Antarctica.
Unlike insects spiders do not have antennae. Most insects use antennae as the primary olfactory sensors.
Spiders that produce tangled cobwebs are more abundant and diverse than orb-web spiders.
First spider like creatures appeared around 386 million years ago, and first predecessors of todays spiders around 200 million years ago.
Almost all spider species are carnivores and predators. In 2008 scientists have also discovered spider species that was vegetarian, the Bagheera kiplingi in Central America.
Spiders are very versatile when it comes to hunting a prey, they use techniques such as trapping prey in sticky webs, lassoing it with sticky bolas, mimicking the prey to avoid detection, or running it down. In other words they are excellent hunters.
Spiders are mostly individual creatures with very small number of spider species being social
Most spider species live at most for two years though there are some species (like for instance tarantulas) that can live more than 20 years in captivity.
Some spider species have venom that can be highly dangerous for humans.
Spiders, together with scorpions, belong to the group of arachnids. Arachnids have eight legs while insects have six legs.
Spiders have a narrow gut that can only deal with liquid food.
Most spiders have four pairs of eyes, with the main eyes being located on front of spider’s head. The secondary eyes are mostly used as the light detectors.
Spiders do not possess balance and acceleration sensors so they depend on their eyes to tell them which way is up.
Spiders use hydraulic pressure to flex their limbs.
Jumping spiders can jump up to 50 times their own length. They achieve this by increasing the blood pressure in the third or fourth pair of their legs.
Spiders have at least six types of silk gland, each producing a different type of silk.
Male spiders, to avoid being eaten by female spiders, need to perform very complex mating rituals prior to mating process.
Female spiders lay up to 3,000 eggs.
The smallest spiders are less than 0.37 mm long, while some tarantula species have body lengths up to 90 mm (3.5 in) and leg spans up to 250 mm (10 in).
Alien Earth !?
It does feel as we are living on an every day more alien Earth, doesn’t it? It is a very awkward feeling …but is as real as my backache. And as Bengay does wonders to my back…the crazy dream to have been born on another Blue Planet in another Green universe makes that awkward feeling more normal than it should actually be if I ever wish not to be considered for a place in a madhouse.
And maybe the day will come when my crazy dream will be a reality were the evolution of Homo Sapiens will have a chance for a fresh beginning in an “Eurekan” society were love,logic and thought will prevail and stupidity, ignorance and arrogance will be outlawed.
(just rambling thought or maybe too wishful thinking …crazy is always a possibility)
I will let you take a guess at what is the thing in the image bellow and you will see how right you were in your guess once I publish my next post.
Your critique, opinion or any comments you might want to share are always welcomed …so don’t be shy or afraid to write down your thoughts ….
Quantum – The End
This is the end of Quantum. Just six images. They were inspired by the powerful beauty of the small, the beauty that usually escapes our sight or we just don’t pay enough attention to it, but yet it is so powerful that can change the way we look at the world around us, can change the way we look at life itself.
Your comments are welcomed and your critique is more than I could hope for. It is very constructive to read what you have to say.
Thank you all for your comments and for following my blog. Hopefully I will be able to at least tingle your imagination for you to keep on following it.
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Artificial Intelligence vs Human Intelligence – Annihilation or Renaissance ?
Artificial Intelligence was for a long time the subject of trilling books and exciting movies. Entertainment industry has stretched and pushed the boundaries of our imagination to almost inconceivable extends. Science has moved on in getting closer than ever to making a reality of it all. We are already building intelligent machines, capable of recognizing patterns, objects, capable of adapting to a certain given situation and probably the most important thing, capable of learning and self improving. Human like characteristics that today’s science has managed to build robots with are mind blowing. The scientists at HONDA have spend 20 years of continuous research to finally be able to build a robot with human like walk and body movement. There is even a organic computer chip were the silicon is replaced by organic molecules which brings almost limitless possibilities of what a computer can do because of the complexity of connections possible between organic molecules. So we are closer than ever to machines starting to challenge our intelligence. The more machines will become more organic, the possibility of these machines to one day be able to autonomously learn, adapt and take rational decisions becomes more real.
Human intelligence is on the verge of getting and artificial burst as well. Already surgeons are implanting, with the help of microcomputers, electrodes in the human brain to stimulate damaged or under performing areas. This technology is widely used today in Parkinson disease, Severe Epilepsy and even chronic depression. There are studies made in using electrodes implants to stimulate our learning capabilities. Also there have been an immense amount of research into the creation of memory chips to be implanted to help people that had brain damage and can not create new memories. There is research done in creating a micro chip much like an image sensor in a video camera to be able to repair damaged eyes sight. The science fiction of yesterday it is become a reality. So probably, sometime soon, we will be able to replace body parts with reliable and unnoticeable artificial parts.
This raises some very interesting and profound questions. How much of us we can “robotize” before loosing our sense of being humans? Where we have to stop to be able to draw the line between humans and machines? Or were to draw the line to not be overtaken by machines much more intelligent than us, capable of faster, better and more precise thinking and decision making, constantly improving at an extremely high speed?
While I do not have an answer to these question, I can only imagine were we are heading if we will not get these answers in time. Maybe we are heading to a world were humans are becoming more robotic and robots more organic, were the machines will be assimilate into the society and we wouldn’t be able to call us humans but rather humanoids. A world were organic will not be the main ingredient but rather a spare part. And that is a bit of my most optimistic scenario.
What I fear is that the science fiction of today will become tomorrow’s reality were we will replace us with machines, capable of learning a thousand times faster, evolving at extraordinary speed and the colonialism of the 15th to 19th century will be paled significantly by a new one were the division between the classes will be based on techno-have and techno-have not, were the ones left humans would be merely pets or pests as we treat today other species.
Now that sounds almost illogical, unthinkable and crazy but the truth is that with the technological and scientific boom of today’s world, this becomes more real every single day.
And our solutions and choices are in the answers to those questions.
Multiverse (3ed part)
As I have mentioned before, I was really decided to give it another try at these series of photos using engine oil. I brought in my home makeshift “studio” some oil borrowed from my cousin’s trunk and started setting up the shoot. While in my previous 2 experiences with oil I had no problem using cold water, I knew that with engine oil that situation would change. The water temperature will influence how this oil will react. So , first, on the cold water…took couple of shots and then observed that the oil has thickened and started to look very murky, like some dirty water. It was very disappointing to see that I just couldn’t take any decent shot and it was nothing I can do to change that.
So had to wait around for a bit , just enough for the water to get to room temperature. Now , the warmer it gets, the thinner my oil would get and I was excited that I might just have found the best oil to give me this Multiverse , even better than the first one. I really thought that because of the color of this oil, it’s viscosity, I would get the best shots in this series. So I got everything set again, played around with a colors a bit more and started shooting. After maybe around 50 shots and half an hour of trying to make it work , It just didn’t work. There was nothing I could do to make it work. It was just not cooperating with me at all.
So it was time for my final weapon in the arsenal….warm water. Now I knew that will thin out the oil even more and I could hit the jackpot. So I replaced everything once again, got my oil in and….yet more disappointment. I am still a bit pissed as I was expecting to have maybe the best results using engine oil. But it seems that the oil that is usually less dense seems to give the best results. (engine oil has a density of aprox. 899kg/m3, sunflower oil aprox 920 kg/m3 and olive oil aprox 800 kg/m3) . The last remaining on my list is hydraulic oil. As its density of aprox 870kg/m3 is higher than that of olive oil, and considering the results I got till now, I do not expect much at all from it, but I will still try.
Somebody has suggested I should use massage oil or baby oil, but from the research I’ve done, they have a density of aprox 800 kg/m3 so I might just get very similar results like my first try. So I will leave these two for now.
So next to come – HYDRAULIC OIL. Till then just have a look bellow at few of the engine oil tries. I don’t really like them…(not for this theme anyway…) but still wanted to share them with you.
The density values above are approximated and depend on the brand of oil used as well. So some of them might work better for you than for me.
Multiverse
I recently got a burst of curiosity and had a quick look into what scientists are calling Multiverse. It is a hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise everything that exists and can exists like space, time, matter and energy (that brief definition alone gave me a headache…but I still find this theory very interesting and I am forcing my brain to understand it) . This also implies the notion of parallel universes, a theory which has proven to not only be a very good subject for a countless number of books and movies that captured our imagination, but also a theoretical possibility.
After I took all these shots and had a proper look at them, the first few thoughts that popped in my mind were space-time, universe, parallel universes.
Dr. Michio Kaku explaining the Multiverse Theory
