Pause to Wonder

– along the East African Rift, a 3,000 kilometre-long series of deep basins and flanking mountain ranges. An enormous plume of hot, partially molten rock is rising diagonally from the core-mantle boundary, some 2,900 kilometres beneath Southern Africa, and erupting at the Earth’s surface, or cooling just beneath it, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. It is the rise of this plume that is stretching the Earth’s crust to breaking point.

In September 2005, a series of fissures suddenly opened up along a 60-kilometre section as the plate catastrophically responded to the forces pulling it apart. [ read article ]

This story is amazing!

Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers. The ancient vegetation - now turned to rock - is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares.

… Once the coal seams have been removed (what were, essentially, the compacted soils of the forests), it is possible to go into the tunnels and look up at what would have been lying on the forest floors. [ read the whole article ]

And scroll down to the second half of this page for more incredible details like these:

… a unique snapshot of what tropical rainforests were like 300 million year ago, at a time when gigantic woodlice, several feet across, crawled on the forest floor and equally large dragonflies flew through its branches…

… that herds of grazing animals all face the same way?Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

To find out why they think this happens, read the BBC article here.

A group of Czech artists who inserted a nuclear explosion into a national weather broadcast have been told by a prosecutor they could be sent to jail. [see video, read BBC article…]

I have to admit, my first reaction was laughter. Lots. It reminded me of Orson Well’s little stunt.

Then, I started thinking. What a cynic I’ve become! It never even occurred to me that people would see the footage and think it was real. Guess I’ve seen too many movies, used Photoshop too often — and I never watch television, so I’m not used to reality feeds. I am as skeptical of images as I am of what I read in the paper.

It’s a given that you don’t just accept and believe whatever you hear or read, whether it be in the media, the local pub or what one co-worker says about another. You look at alternate sources, you ask around, you keep in mind likely biases, you think about it.

So why doesn’t this automatically apply to images? More precisely: to photographs and video? We don’t look at a cartoon and think: “Oh my god, that chicken knows how to drive a car and I can see what he’s saying!” I think it’s safe to say that most people in most cultures don’t confuse reality with depictions of reality.

So why is photography (and by extension, video) different? I guess, because it’s new (150-odd years) compared to drawing, sculpting, painting, etc. which we’ve been doing for eons. And perhaps also because it seems scientific due to the more or less mysterious mechanical/chemical processes involved.

But from the very beginning of photography, people were making adjustments. Why, then, are we still so quick to believe photos? Why does it seem disappointing and even disturbing not to be able to believe images? Perhaps because there’s no obvious filter between us and the realness of the image: no brush strokes in the paint, no pencil lines on the paper, chisel marks in the marble — photos just look so damn real. Like what we see with our own eyes. And if you can’t believe your own eyes… what can you trust, what can you believe? What links us to reality?

This reminds me of an essay by Montaigne on the importance of truth between people: “we have no other bond with one another but our word”.

P.S. The Montaigne link just above is an episode from a television series done for BBC 4 by Alain de Botton, who is one of my favorite authors. I discovered it utterly by chance when looking for a good Montaigne link. I’ve never seen any of the episodes before, so this is a gift from the gods as it’s not available on DVD (yet?). Enjoy!! To support the man, and for a wonderful book, pick up his “Consolations of Philosophy” or any of his others, they’re all extremely good.

Two interesting things in this story.

The first, is that modern man is incapable of wrapping his mind around the fact that someone could say no to money and fame. The only explanation is some sort of mental disturbance. But what if he just doesn’t want to be rich or famous?

And the second interesting thing (which would have come first if my math was better) is that the above mentioned Dr Perelman appears to have solved the Poincaré Conjecture back in 2002. I’ve read a couple of interesting explanations of this problem here and here and if you speak math: here.