21 December 2020 - TRASHTAG CHALLENGE IS CHANGING THE WORLD

 

TRASHTAG CHALLENGE IS

 CHANGING THE WORLD

 

G'day folks,

Can you feel it in the air? There’s an upswell of people who will not sit idly while pollution takes over our planet. Whatever your opinions about climate are, everyone can agree that garbage, particularly plastic waste, mars the face of our precious planet. 

 

One of the most welcome trends in environmental awareness is the TrashTag Challenge, where people take it upon themselves to collect garbage at their local parks, beaches or holiday resorts and post the fruit of their labor online. Is it enough to make a dent? We don’t know, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

 

Clancy's comment: Go, you good people. Well done.

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20 December 2020 - LIFEBOAT THAT RETURNED TO TITANIC SURVIVORS

 

LIFEBOAT THAT RETURNED 

TO TITANIC SURVIVORS

G'day folks,

 

We have all heard or read about the Titanic, but did you know this?

 

The story of the ill-fated RMS Titanic needs no introduction. On April 15, 1912, the ship struck an iceberg on its way from Southampton to New York City. The Titanic was the largest ship afloat then, and there were 2,224 people aboard the ship at the time of the disaster. More than 1,500 died that day, rendering the sinking of the Titanic as one of the most devastating peacetime commercial naval disasters in history. One of the survivors was Harold Lowe, the ship’s fifth officer, who operated lifeboat No.14 during the disaster. 

 

Not only did he collect a group of boats together to be able to save more people immediately after the disaster without sinking the lifeboats, he was also the only one to return to the shipwreck, successfully saving three more souls from the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

Clancy's comment: That would have been an awful night.

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10 December 2020 - JAPANESE PENSIONERS BACK ON DUTY AFTER FUKUSHIMA DISASTER

 

JAPANESE PENSIONERS 

BACK ON DUTY AFTER 

FUKUSHIMA DISASTER

 

G'day folks,

Welcome to a series of people who stepped up during troubling times.

The nuclear disaster that occurred on March 11, 2011, on the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan is the largest nuclear accident after Chernobyl. The nuclear accident led to radiation being released both in the atmosphere and the water, the long-term negative effects of which will continue to affect the population and the environment for decades to come. Part of the containment and damage control strategy was the creation of a 20-kilometer restricted zone around the nuclear power plant, and the brave volunteers who were among the first to tackle some of the most dangerous tasks on and around the power station were… pensioners. 

 

A group of more than 200 Japanese retired workers of the plant that called themselves The Skilled Veterans Corps, all past the age of 60, volunteered to deal with the nuclear disaster instead of younger people. The group claimed that what they signed up for was not brave, but rather logical, as the negative effects of radiation will likely start affecting them decades after exposure, and so they have a much lower chance of experiencing them. The humility of these heroes is truly astounding.

 

Clancy's comment: Well done. Certainly brave.

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21 November 2020 - ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT CANNOT BE DECIPHERED

 

ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT 

CANNOT BE DECIPHERED

 

G'day folks,

The Voynich manuscript is one of the biggest riddles in the entire world, and has remained unsolved for centuries. But what is truly amazing about this manuscript is its content. 

 

 It is written in a script indecipherable by any living soul, despite basically using the Latin alphabet. It also features illustrations of what seem like fantastical plants (or are they?) on many of its pages. Experts have tried to unravel the mystery of this script for centuries without success. Thousands of cryptographers, including Allied code breakers during both world wars, tried and failed. It is believed that the number of characters used may be anywhere from 15 to 40. 

Faced with repeated failure, some have hypothesized that the manual just cannot be deciphered, and is actually a very complex hoax. However, many point out that the text obeys numerous laws of real language, including Zipf's Law, a statistical rule on the frequency of words used in a natural language, where the most common word appears twice as often as the next most common word, etc. 

Now, let's look at this problematic manuscript.

 

Clancy's comment: Extraordinary, eh? 

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2 November 2020 - WONDERFUL EXAMPLES OF MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY

WONDERFUL EXAMPLES

 OF

 MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY 

G'day folks,

At some stage in their career, photographers have dabbled in macro photography. Some are better than others, and many have become experts. Check out these examples. 

Clancy's comment: Yes, some of the subjects are quite extraordinary. I love the frogs.

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