🌟The Mupanah Museum is a cultural and architectural jewel summarizing the rich history of Haiti.
Magnificent exhibition dating back several centuries to the present day tracing the Indigenous Tainos epochs, slavery, independence then the various heads of State and presidents of the Republic.
Condensed, simple but effective.
🌟El Mupanah Museum es una joya cultural y arquitectónica que resume la rica historia de Haití.
Magnífica exposición que se remonta a varios siglos hasta nuestros días, trazando las épocas indígenas Tainos, la esclavitud, la independencia y luego los diversos jefes de Estado y presidentes de la República.
Condensado, simple pero eficaz.
🌟Le Musée du Mupanah est un joyau culturel et architectural résumant la richesse Historique d'Haïti.
Magnifique exposition datant de plusieurs siècles jusqu à nos jours retraçant les époques Indigènes Taïnos, l'esclavage, l'indépendance puis les différents chefs d'Etat et présidents de cette République.
🌟The Mupanah Museum is a cultural and architectural jewel summarizing the rich history of Haiti.
Magnificent exhibition dating back several centuries to the present day tracing the Indigenous Tainos epochs, slavery, independence then the various heads of State and presidents of the Republic.
Condensed, simple but effective.
🌟El Mupanah Museum es una joya cultural y arquitectónica que resume la rica historia de Haití.
Magnífica exposición que se remonta a varios siglos hasta nuestros días, trazando las épocas indígenas Tainos, la esclavitud, la independencia y luego los diversos jefes de Estado y presidentes de la República.
Condensado, simple pero eficaz.
🌟Le Musée du Mupanah est un joyau culturel et architectural résumant la richesse Historique d'Haïti.
Magnifique exposition datant de plusieurs siècles jusqu à nos jours retraçant les époques Indigènes Taïnos, l'esclavage, l'indépendance puis les différents chefs d'Etat et présidents de cette République.
The stuff of dreams, the journey of the first human created probes to journey into the cosmos. Without vision, determination, and the sense to discover, would we have sent these two probes on their journey? The scientific discovery from these two probes will always be one of the groundbreaking moments in science history, forever a turning point that fueled our knowledge of the solar system.
Will they be discovered by an alien civilization? Will we eventually meet up for a reunion as we venture out from our home system? Take a moment to reflect on what can be accomplished with great vision and forward thinking. Take a moment to thank those who dedicate their lives to the advancement of science and knowledge.
When Einstein first began telling the world of his ideas of relativity, pretty much everyone was floored.
Relativity describes a world which continues to excite and baffle many people today. It’s a world of forward time-travel, a world of shrinking objects and one where the path of light is bent along the curvature of gravity wells.
Broadly speaking, there are two branches of relativity: special and general. Special relativity can be thought of as the study of the structure of spacetime or the physics of objects moving extremely fast.
For the layperson, you might be wondering what exactly special relativity means and how you can think of it. It’s actually surprisingly easy to get. The theory manages to marry space and time together so that things that physics equations which have to do with space have consequences with regards to time as well (and vice versa).
Let me lay out a scenario for you which illustrates quite how special relativity will play into our lives in the far future (assuming Joe Haldeman is right):
Let’s say we discover intelligent and hostile extraterrestrials in the Alpha Centauri star system (which is 4.37 lightyears away). We deploy a force of elite “space soldiers” to travel to Alpha Centauri and fight these aliens.
On Earth, soldiers have 1 year deployments. If we assume these space soldiers had a ship which could carry them at 99% the speed of light then by the time they reached their faraway battlefields, fought their war and returned home they would have only aged 1.25 years - about as long as a soldiers deployment can go for today.
On Earth, however, 8.83 years will have passed.
-> 8.83 years = γ*1.25 years
Kids will have grown up, family and friends will have passed away, politicians will have risen and fallen and, who knows, the country that sent you to war may have collapsed and been replaced with a new one years ago.
Perhaps the governments will find new ways of avoiding paying their soldiers by giving them high interest funds that will grow equivalently in their time gone that they would’ve had to have been paid.
This is called a Lorentz Transformation and it can be used to calculate many of the strange phenomena predicted in special relativity. Often you can solve a LT by simply introducing the Lorentz Factor into an otherwise plain equation. If the above is the LF than here is what it looks like:
EarthTime = (1/√(1-v^2/c^2))*SoldierTime
Where (1/√(1-v^2/c^2)) = γ, v is velocity and c is the speed of light.
Equivalently, objects moving extremely fast shrink in the direction of their movement (this is called length contraction). Say the goddess Athena was in a javelin throwing competition and she throws a 6-foot long javelin at 99% the speed of light, the javelin, while in mid-flight, would shrink to 0.85 feet in length. Perhaps it would fit in Pandora’s Box?
Alternately, there is general relativity. This is the study of how gravity relates to space and time. It turns out, it does, and it does so a lot.
The mathematics behind general relativity is beyond me at the moment and therefore beyond my ability to teach to you. However I can still tell you about some well-known consequences of the theory:
Time dilation! Again! Time goes slower in deep gravitational wells. What this means is that near a very massive object (and more mass = more gravity -> general relativity is a gravitational theory) an object ages slower. This is why, were you to fall into the event horizon of a black hole time would slow down so much for you that you could turn around and watch the life of the Universe. You would see stars born and die as you drift into singularity (Maybe? That’s another post).
This is also why our GPS satellites need to have a mathematical correction in them. The time difference generated by gravitational time dilation would throw them off and we wouldn’t be able to ever get to work on time.
To me, one of the most exciting aspects of general relativity is that gravity bends the direction of light.
The fabric of spacetime warps as a function of gravity. Very massive objects (like, say a galaxy or the sun) can have visible influence on what we actually are looking at.
For example, a galaxy can warp the image of things behind it so that their image is distorted and sometimes simply magnified!
(Gif credit: G. Mikaberidze)
This has two really profound consequences:
1) We have incredible images of massive galaxies warping spacetime so much that the light of objects around it are skewed and it’s almost like we’re staring at the stars through a rippling pond:
(Image credit: NASA and ESA)
2) When done carefully, this effect can be used to bend light in such a geometrically precise manner as to essentially be cosmically large telescopes. If we can properly use the gravitational well of the sun, for example, we would be able to see surface features on exoplanets! This is known as gravitational lensing.
Gravitational lensing was famously proven by Arthur Eddington when he saw that, during the solar eclipse of 1919, the constellations and stars of the sky near the sun weren’t where they were supposed to be!
Now, they were of course, but their images were distorted as they traveled through the sun’s gravitational well.
(Image credit: F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. Davidson, “A Determination of the
Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations
Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical Character (1920): 291-333, on 332.)
“In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri’s Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.
The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro’s loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus’s story.”
Poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in 1959 in Minna, northern Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and Urhobo father. He grew up in London before returning to Nigeria with his family in 1968. Much of his early fiction explores the political violence that he witnessed at first hand during the civil war in Nigeria. He left the country when a grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to read Comparative Literature at Essex University in England.
Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.
Okri’s short fiction has been described as more realistic and less fantastic than his novels, but these stories also depict Africans in communion with spirits, while his poetry and nonfiction have a more overt political tone, focusing on the potential of Africa and the world to overcome the problems of modernity.
Okri was made an honorary Vice-President of the English Centre for the International PEN and a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre. On 26 April 2012 Okri was appointed the new vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing, having been on the advisory committee and associated with the prize since it was established 13 years previously.
NASA is about to make history by allowing humans to get an up-close look at a 10,000-mile-wide storm on Jupiter.
The
agency’s Juno spacecraft is set to fly by Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,
which scientists have been watching since 1830.
The spot is essentially a
giant storm that scientists believe could be up to 350 years old,
though there’s still plenty to learn when it comes to Jupiter and its
space weather.
“Now,
Juno and her cloud-penetrating science instruments will dive in to see
how deep the roots of this storm go, and help us understand how this
giant storm works and what makes it so special,” Scott Bolton, a
principal investigator of Juno at San Antonio’s Southwest Research
Institute, said in a release. Read more (7/3/17)
The goddess Sekhmet, illustration from ‘Pantheon egyptien: collection des personnages mythologiques de l'Ancienne Egypte’ by Jean-Francois Champollion, published 1823-25
Asteroid Day (also known as International Asteroid Day) is an annual global event that aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations. Asteroid Day is held on the anniversary of the June 30, 1908 Siberian Tunguska event, the most harmful known asteroid-related event on Earth in recent history.
Research using ancient DNA has allowed a team of scientists led by Museum Curator Ross MacPhee
to firmly establish the relationships of one of the strangest mammals
in the known South American fossil record. Their study of this unusual
species, Macrauchenia patachonica, was published today in the journal Nature Communications.
“Macrauchenia was the last of its kind, part of a hugely
successful group of ungulates that had ranged over much of South America
for tens of millions of years. One of its early relatives even made it
to what is now part of Antarctica,” says MacPhee.
Weighing as much as 1,100 pounds, Macrauchenia patachonica
was long-necked, with a body shape vaguely reminiscent of a camel’s. Its
most distinguishing trait was its weirdly placed nasal opening,
situated high on the skull, between the eye sockets. To some scientists,
this feature suggested an elephant-like trunk.
Since morphology hadn’t solved the riddle of Macrauchenia’s relationships, the team came up with the solution of using ancient mitochondrial DNA, extracted from an 11,000-year-old Macrauchenia fossil found in a cave in southern Chile…
