PhotoHunt: "Natural" at Walden Pond

My PhotoHunt contribution this week is a tad late, but I couldn't actually even get this photo until yesterday. It is a close-up detail of autumn leaves floating in Walden Pond...

Far bigger than what you might think from its name (as you can see below), Walden Pond is located near Concord, Massachusetts and was made famous by the writings of the great American author, Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. His book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, is one of the most important books on nature ever written.

As a result, I thought it would be a fitting expression of this week's PhotoHunt theme, "natural"! After all, as Thoreau himself said in Walden,

"Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still."

photohunt

How much difference a single person can make: "The Man Who Planted Trees"

I first saw this 30 minute-long animated short film more than 20 years ago, and it's still every bit as poignant today, if not even more so. Please watch - ideally in fullscreen - and I hope you will be as inspired by its beauty, hope, and wisdom as I continue to be to this very day.



"The Man Who Planted Trees tells the story of a solitary shepherd who patiently plants and nurtures a forest of thousands of trees, single-handedly transforming his arid surroundings into a thriving oasis. Undeterred by two World Wars, and without any thought of personal reward, the shepherd tirelessly sows his seeds and acorns with the greatest care. As if by magic, a landscape that seemed condemned grows green again. A film of great beauty and hope, this story is a remarkable parable for all ages and an inspiring testament to the power of one person." -amazon.com

T.E.D.: Day One Talks (Distilled and Hyperlinked)

• Biotech CEO Juan Enriquez discussed what he saw as the future of human evolutionary development, in which we would use bio-technology to pre-design our own future evolution (making homo sapiens - he said - into homo evolutis). His conclusions were based on the fact that, among other things, we're already growing replacement body parts in labs.
• Military strategist P.W. Singer presented his investigations for his new book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, including the 12,000+ robots which are doing battle right now on the ground in Iraq, current military robotic projects in the works, and what might be the strategic and philosophical implications of non-human robotic warfare.
• David Hanson of Hanson Robotics demonstrated his research on getting robots to emulate human emotional expressions, and even suggested that an eventual potential development of introducing empathy into AIs might be one approach to the ethical dilemmas posed by Singer in his previous talk.
  
• In a very much publicized talk (in which he unleashed a hoard of mosquitoes on the conference goers), Bill Gates talked about the challenge his philanthropic foundation faces in trying to eradicate malaria. (Video already available here!)
  
• Tim Berners-Lee imagined taking even further his original concept of the World Wide Web and using it to render useful raw data fully public and “linkable” by everybody
• Al Gore updated his 2006 presentation of the Inconvenient Truth slideshow by reporting about the disappearance of the Artic ice cap.
  
• Yves Behar and Forrest North of Mission Motors debuted the Mission One high performance electric motorcycle, the top speed of which is 150 mph!
  
• Nandan Nilekani discussed the globalization implications of what he called India's "demographic dividend," in which it will soon become the only young country in an increasingly aging world.
  
• Sustainable business pioneer Ray Anderson explained how, after he read Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, he decided that business what the only institution large and pervasive enough to change the status quo of the "take, make, waste industrial system," and went on to reduce his company's carbon emissions in his successful carpet tile business by 82% in 14 years, all while doubling profits.
• Marketer Seth Godin argued that mass marketing is out, but marketing to “tribes” or fostering specialized communities of people with shared interests is where it’s at in order to really “change the world”.
• Filmmakers Yann-Arthus Bertrand and Jake Eberts each premiered clips from their own soon-to-be released gorgeous nature documentaries.
  
• MIT Media Lab researcher Pattie Maes debuted a prototype of an internet sixth sense which would give real-time updated information which would be literally directly projected unto products, places and persons, all without the user having to modify his or her behavior to access it. (Plus, she suggested provocatively, it might be potentially implantable in the brain within a decade!) Check out the embedded video below!

Other blog coverage of TED's first day can be found at...

• Brainpickings
• TED2009: Juan Enriquez - Boing Boing
• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee - Boing Boing
• TED2009: Bill Gates on eradicating malaria - Boing Boing
• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee - Boing Boing
• TED2009: Nandan Nilekani - Boing Boing
• TED2009: Seth Godin - Boing Boing
• TED2009: Pattie Maes - Boing Boing

Via White African:

• Framing TED 2009
• PW Singer and Robots Wired for War

Via My Heart's in Aggra:

• Big pictures of the world, above, below and on the dance floor
• Seth Godin, and movements worth starting
• Carpeting a green world
• Pattie Maes invents a sixth sense
• Nandan Nilekani explains India… in ideas
• Tim Berners-Lee: Raw Data Now
• Rebooting: Bill Gates

Venice to give up mineral water for Lent?

"The diocese of Venice is encouraging people to give up mineral water for Lent and start drinking tap water in a campaign to raise funds for charity..." (more at Rome general News: Venice gives up mineral water for Lent.)

What's more, Italians are already "locavores" when it comes to their (natural, not tap-filtered!) mineral water... Take that, Dasani!

VIDEO: Thousands of balls released on Rome's Spanish Steps

Longtime readers of MMC will remember that I'm completely enamored of the Sony Bravia commercial in which a quarter of a million super bouncy balls were released on the steep streets of San Francisco.

First, there was the beautiful original... (which you can't even fully appreciate unless it's in ultra high resolution!)

(How'd they do it? You can see here!)

Then there was the great British Tango fruit juice parody...


Now it's been done on Rome's famous Spanish Steps (strangely, as what is apparently an incredibly abstruse political demonstration to protest the ongoing appalling garbage crisis in Naples)

(via Decio: Il Blog)

My comment (#27) about this prank should be appearing any minute here on Boing Boing.

UPDATED: Stormy Weather in Venice...

Originally, I was going to take these photos and blog about religious processions in Italy.

(I'm not Catholic - at least not in any way, shape or form "officially" - but I love watching Italian religion processions. My favorite so far was probably the one when the entire village of Capri in southern Italy carried this impossibly heavy statue of the Madonna all the way up the hillside to a little sanctuary, at which point the band inexplicably broke into a rousing rendition of the "Mexican Hat Dance"! LOL)

I went to the saint's day celebration of Saint Anthony of Padua on Wednesday, where the main event is likewise a procession of the saint's huge votive statue through the streets of the city, together with lots of marching bands, boy scouts, firefighters, etc. all parading with him. You can see the Saint Anthony just being carried out of his basilica at right...

But then the sky on the horizon suddenly turned black with storm clouds and it started to rain... The next time I saw Saint Anthony at the end of the procession, he was going about twenty miles a hour as the folks carrying him sprinted for shelter in the church, just before all hell (pardon the expression since I'm talking about a saint!) broke loose with the weather. (See the picture... He was literally just a blur!!)

And all those people you saw above in the piazza? They all took cover under the relatively narrow archways lining the streets, where thousands of people were then crushed together tighter than sardines so that you literally couldn't move. I conveniently decided to take refuge both from the crowd and the storm in a nearby wine bar... (Hey, there are worse ways to pass a thunderstorm!) I did however come out just in time to get a picture of a double rainbow!!

Anyway, the very same thing happened yesterday, with far more devastating results. I don't know if you all heard about the disaster at the rock concert in Venice... No joke!

I had even thought seriously about going to the Heineken Jammin Festival: 4 days of music in a part of Venetian mainland, including the Killers, Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Iron Maiden, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Aerosmith... But then I heard that the concert organizers were expecting 300,000 people from all over Europe, and I decided that I no longer had the courage to face such a monster concert, and I'm not sure I really ever did in the first place! :-)

Good thing! Weather's not usually too extreme around here, but with global warming and all, it's been acting more and more sub-tropical in recent years, with those relatively rare, but sudden, violent thunderstorms like I saw in Padua.

In fact, the festival had literally just opened, and only a few hours before Pearl Jam was due to take the stage, a sudden squall with hail and wind gusts estimated in excess of 90 kph hit the open field where the concert was being held, and brought 8 of the 10 huge light and speaker towers down on some of the concert-goers... Last I heard something like 50 people were injured with broken bones and the like, but thankfully no one was killed!

I could be wrong, but it does seem that I've been seeing more and more of these violent summer storms around Venice in recent years. I hope that before Venice sinks from global warming that it's not blown off the map first!!

UPDATED: Here's a video of the whole thing!

Newsflash: Climate Change Brings Tropical Disease back to Venice!

Disturbing news! In the wake of global warming, "at the southern edge of the globe's temperate area... Italy is being particularly hit by the collapse of the climatic equilibrium."

Not only has malaria returned to Italy, but also "tick-borne encephalitis, a virus which attacks the nerve system, is also on the way back. While only 18 cases had been reported before 1993, 100 have been since, mostly around Venice..." [more at The Guardian Unlimited]

"The Day After Tomorrow" in Venice?

Just saw "An Inconvenient Truth" a couple of nights ago. It certainly gives one pause... especially if you just happen to live sometimes in Venice, Italy!

What kind of catastrophe awaits the island city if some of the worse global warming threats come true? Take a look (you can even zoom in!) at Alex Tingle's flood map of Venice... (My neighborhood seems to keep its head above water until sea levels rise 4 meters, although I've seen my own alleyway flood if a high tide runs even just 40 centimeters above normal, so I really wouldn't hold my breath! On second thought, maybe I'd better practice doing just that unless we do what little things we can to help stop global warming!!)

(via Flood Maps at Gridskipper)

You don't have to believe everything you see in "An Inconvenient Truth," but you owe it to yourself (and your descendents!) to watch it with an open mind and make whatever changes to your lifestyle you deem for the best!!