Booksellers on the Spassky Bridge (1916). Apollinari Vasnetsov (Russian, 1856-1933). Watercolor. Moscow History and Reconstruction Museum.
In addition to epic landscapes of Russian nature, Apollinary Vasnetsov created his own genre of historical landscape reconstruction on the basis of historical and archaeological data. His paintings present a visual picture of medieval Moscow.
“It was evident to me that wireless transmission of energy, if it could ever be accomplished, is not an invention; it is an art. Bell’s telephone, Edison’s phonograph, or my induction motor were inventions, but the wireless transmission of energy is an art that requires a great many inventions in combination.
“We are living on a planet that is rushing through space; this planet is partly conducting and partly insulating. If it were all conducting, or if it were all insulating, we could not transmit energy without wire. It is only because it is partly conducting and partly insulating that a glorious future for man is reserved through the application of this art.”
–Nikola Tesla
(From a pre-hearing interview with Nikola Tesla and his legal counsel in 1916 to protect his radio patents from the Guglielmo Marconi and the Marconi Company.)
[Fig. 1]:
“We are living on a planet of well-nigh inconceivable dimensions, surrounded by a layer of insulating air above which is a rarefied and conducting atmosphere. This is providential, for if all the air were conducting the transmission of electrical energy thru the natural media would be impossible.” –NT
[Fig. 2]:
“My early experiments have shown that currents of high frequency and great tension readily pass thru an atmosphere but moderately rarefied, so that the insulating stratum is reduced to a small thickness as will be evident by inspection of [Fig. 2], in which a part of the earth and its gaseous envelope is shown to scale. If the radius of the sphere is 12½”, then the non-conducting layer is only 1/64″ thick and it will be obvious that the Hertzian rays cannot traverse so thin a crack between two conducting surfaces for any considerable distance, without being absorbed.” –NT
Been on a huge hydrogen atom orbital/Schrodinger solution kick the past few months, which means I’ve been balls deep in Legendre polynomials and spherical harmonics lately. And one of the best/coolest/most insightful finds I’ve made on a resulting Google Images treasure hunt is this badass text about geodesy that NOAA put out in 1959. The gold is in its appendix about spherical harmonics starting on p.87, which explains things in the context of calculating earth’s gravitational potential when it is assumed to be the ~oblate spheroid~ it really is irl rather than a sphere.
(Me and my sketchbook had some great brain sex the night I found this, tell u wut.)
Winding its way across a floodplain in the Alaskan Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge, the Kanuti River is a classic example of a meandering river. The formation of meandering rivers is driven by erosion and deposition along the rivers edge. Water in the river flows fastest around the outer bend of a meander, causing erosion that both removes sediment from the riverbank and deepens the channel. Around the inner bends of the river, water moves much more slowly, and sediment is deposited in point bars.
"One of the key ideas in modern evolutionary theory is that of preadaptation. The term may sound oxymoronic but its significance is perfectly logical: every feature of an organism, in addition to its obvious functional characteristics, has others that could become useful in totally novel ways under the right circumstances. The forerunners of air-breathing lungs, for example, were swim bladders with which fish maintained their equilibrium; as some fish began to move onto the margins of land, those bladders acquired a new utility as reservoirs of oxygen. Biologists say that those bladders were preadapted to become lungs. Evolution can innovate in ways that cannot be prestated and is nonalgorithmic by drafting and recombining existing entities for new purposes–shifting them from their existing function to some adjacent novel function–rather than inventing features from scratch."
"Biological networks are in the realm of matter. Social networks are in the realm of meaning. Both produce material effects. But social networks also produce non-material outcomes like values and culture. Both types of systems create their own boundaries. A key lesson we can learn from cellular biology is that the cell’s boundary—the cell membrane—is not a boundary of separation but a boundary of identity. By letting certain molecules through and keeping others out, the membrane shapes the cell’s identity. Similarly, the cultural boundary of a community shapes the identity of the community’s members."
The Orinoco Mining Arc is a massive deposit of mineral wealth - primarily gold, diamonds, and coltan - in the Bolivar state of Venezuela.
In February 2016, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared that the area would become a strategic development zone — a move some journalists view as an effort to fill the coffers of the nation and combat dropping oil prices.
Reporters who have visited Orinoco found that, instead of prosperity, crime has increased. The authority of the Venezuelan state has been replaced by organized crime groups who benefit from illegal mining and have brought violence to the region.
Furthermore, deforestation and the use of mercury in mining activity that continues to develop chaotically cause environmental damage and violate the right to land of 198 indigenous communities.
Information from Edgar López and Julett Pienda 6.196550,-61.455958 Source imagery: DigitalGlobe
