Galapogos HDTV

Finding information on specifically the Planet Earth Galapogos Islands 3 Part Documentary Series shot using High Definition cameras - what a mouthful - is almost as difficult as it must be to actually reach the superbly isolated location. Okay not really, but taking 10 minutes to google your way to the fact that Tilda Swinton - on the tip of my tongue - narrated this awesome jewel of photography, well, that's some kind of online excursion.

But she does, and her enunciation enhances the perfection behind the filmamakers craft, and the natural scenery they're focussed on. Sure, Galapogos has been done before. What makes this documentary special, is the high definition crystal clear photography. Is that Earth?! Wooooow! Interestingly, there are a number of still shots. There is very little panning, very little zooming in. The cameras are placed in position, and the animals just move in front of the lenses. That might be a boring scheme anywhere else, but not on the Galapogos Islands.

It is fascinating to understand the lifespan of this moving island archipelago. Since these islands are on a conveyor belt of techtonic plates (one has moved 20 miles and is dying), they go through a vivid volcanic lifespan. The creatures that must survive in these hostile and incredibly unique conditions are certainly worth our attention.

Last week was Born of Fire, episode one. Catch the second of 3 installments on Thursdays at 22:00, on SABC 2. For more info, click here.

King's Platter

It's been an unusual weekend. Yesterday especially was topsy turvy. After cycling 1:45 (just under 50km) I went to a lunch which turned into a feast:

Chops, sosaties, boerewors, salads (avo/beetroot/sweet potatoes), followed by a desert that included ice cream and custard, with chocolate cake and cappuccino coffee a little later. Wine and sodas fuelled already restless braincell activity. Meanwhile there was a heated debate at the table that started with a chance comment on 9/11 and escalated into Fundamentalistic Ideology. The debators included a director at Rand Merchant Bank, a preacher, and me!

Then we watched the rugby; what a storming game. Brian Lima was funny. He concussed himself in a brutal dive he'd premeditated. Looked like he only managed to hurt himself. I think he was on the field for less than 5 minues.

After the rugby I got roped into a dinner meal/homecell thing. We had another major debate based on an issue I raised: faith + works as opposed to faith only. Fortunately there was quite a loot of feel-good banter to balance out the heavy-serious stuff.
The dinner comprised roast lamb with mint sauce, salads, strawberry and cream dessert along with capucinnos once more.

Interesting: the rugby world cup has an audience of 75 million.
The cricket world cup: 87 million.
The third most popular/watched sporting event in the world is cycling (Tour de France).
2nd is the Olympics with hundreds of millions of viewers, and 1 in 9 of Earth's population watch Soccer (around 700 million).

Advanced Life Forms

When I was a pikkie at school, I remember seeing some x-ray footage of someone eating. You know, the lower jaw like a mandible, chomping off something, grinding it into small mush with our small monkey teeth, and then swallowing it. You see the white pulp, globs of it, dripping like snot down towards our sewer like digestive system (reeking with vaporised meat gas). At the time this simple depiction of the see-thru human jaw was like watching Star War special effects, but the impression it made on me was this: when you step away from being a human being, we're not a very graceful animal. For the most part, we're a vulgar species.

In the movie Venus Peter o' Toole's character interestingly points out that the most beautiful thing a man will see in his whole life is the naked body of a woman. Jessie asks him what the most beautiful thing is that a woman will see. He says: "Her first child." I wonder if that is true, and if it is, should it be true.

What about the beauty of an entire planet, of a mountain standing tall in an icy gale. Or the ocean.

While having lunch I reflected on this thing we do. When we humans eat, it involves finding something that was alive (dead now on our behalf), and we use pieces of metal to first cut it and then we break the dead tissue into smaller fragments and swallow it. That's essentially how we function. We get our energy from biting the bodies of other creatures and digesting them. Spiders do that too.

I suppose nothing is wrong with it, except that I think I prefer the elegance of say, a sunflower that simply absorbes the energy of the sun in its face, and in its fingers. Or moss on a log or tree limb, or a mushroom poking its white head out of chocolate cake soil, sucking nutrients out of bare soil, or even the beauty and power of entire forests. I suppose I admire the beauty and elegance of a form of life that opens its arms and fingers to the sun and absorbes its energy. By pure chemical reaction. Not by some primitive chewing process, where your teeth break the body of some other delicate life form, and in so doing, you're able to live. Imagine the elegance of living where simply breathing and standing in the sun gives life to oneself and energy to the world.

And we think we are advanced life forms.

Originin of Life: Created or Evolved?

Stanley Miller, Who Examined Origins of Life, Dies at 77
By NICHOLAS WADEPublished: May 23, 2007

Stanley L. Miller, a scientist whose spectacular discovery as a young graduate student pioneered the study of the origin of life on earth, died Sunday at a hospital near his home in National City, Calif. He was 77.

The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Donald Miller.
Dr. Miller was known for a classic experiment that he performed as a graduate student and published in 1953. The experiment showed how amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could easily be generated from the simple chemicals assumed to have been present on the primitive earth.

The finding caught the imagination of scientists everywhere by suggesting that it might soon be possible to reconstruct the emergence of the first living cells from the soup of chemicals generated by natural conditions on the early earth. Dr. Miller had opened an experimental approach toward one of the hardest remaining problems in biology.

He spent much of the rest of his scientific career at the University of California, San Diego, doing elaborations of his famous experiment and showing how more and more of the basic chemicals used by living cells could have arisen under natural conditions. But despite the brilliant beginning, neither he nor others were able to take the next step, that of providing a plausible mechanism by which these chemicals could have been assembled into living cells or the macromolecules — DNA and proteins — on which cells depend.

In the last decade, a rival theory, advocated by the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser and others, held that Dr. Miller’s approach was a blind alley. Dr. Wächtershäuser argued that life was more likely to have arisen in the exotic conditions near volcanoes, driven by metal catalysts, not in the more natural conditions simulated in Dr. Miller’s experiments.Dr. Miller, defending his approach, said that his rival’s theory was “overblown” and that it failed to show how copious amounts of amino acids could be produced, as he had done.