Germany has recently endured considerable criticism for not providing Ukraine with Leopard II tanks or even to allow third parties like Poland to provide Poland’s Leopard II tanks to Ukraine to push back against Russian invaders. Poland is one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters and has expressed a strong to desire to provide their German built Leopard II tanks to Ukraine, but by agreement Poland must have Germany’s approval before making the transfer. Germany has refused repeatedly to allow the transfer. Many military strategists consider the Leopard II to be ideally suited to help the Ukrainians in their counteroffensive to push the entrenched Russian forces out of the sovereign territory of Ukraine, such as the Donbas and Crimea.
Many are perplexed by the seeming unwillingness of Germany to furnish to Ukraine certain weapons, particularly those Leopard II tanks, that would help Ukraine conduct offensive military actions against Russia. Germany has provided Ukraine with much humanitarian aid and “defensive” weapons, but not the kind of weapons that would allow the Ukrainians to actually push Russian forces from their territory. If we look back at the speech given in the German capital of Berlin by Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and Member of the German Bundestag on February 27, 2022 we may find a few hints.
First, we should review some of the more unsavory aspects of the relationship between Germany and Russia, and the Russian dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, during the last hundred plus years. I want to emphasize that I am myself partly of German heritage and what follows is not, I feel, an anti-German diatribe. All four of my mothers grandparents immigrated from German to the United States right after the American Civil War and my own maternal grandparents spoke German in their native Illinois, although they would not allow their children to. My father’s family history is more complicated, but he too had more than a few German ancestors that immigrated to North America, the last being in the early 1800’s.
During World War I, Germany was at war with Tsarist Russia and Russia was an ally of France and England. Russia’s participation in the war to end all wars was at least partly responsible for the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917. Germany worked to destabilize Russia after the implosion of Tzarist Russia by sending Vladimir Lenin, the undisputed intellectual and political leader of the Russian Communist Party, on a secret train car from Switzerland to the Russian capital of St. Petersburg right after the first Russian Revolution in February of 1917.
Many erroneously think that the Communists under Lenin overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. This is simply not the case. Lenin wasn’t even in the country, let alone St. Petersburg or Moscow. Neither were other noted Russian communists like Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky present for the first revolution or the catalyst for the Tzar’s implosion. The Tzar imploded under the weight of his own incompetence and the stress of an increasingly unpopular war. Germany sought to capitalize on that implosion for Germany’s own benefit by sending Lenin back to Russia in hopes he’d further destabilize the country. Lenin and the Russian Communist Party did just that.
After Germany’s defeat in World War I Germany sought a way to circumvent their obligations under the punitive Versailles Treaty imposed by the victorious allies by making entreaties to Lenin and the new Communist leaders in Russia. Germany was successful in their subterfuge. During the interwar period between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II Germany and the Soviet Union secretly conspired to build up each of their militaries. Germany supplied expertise in all things military to the USSR and the USSR supplied raw materials and a location far beyond the prying eyes of the French, the English and their other allies to do training and research. In this way Germany and the USSR could both prepare to once again draw Europe into needless bloodshed. This secret collusion did not even cease when Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 despite his professed anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.
Importantly, during the infamous Holodomor the Soviet’s brutal treatment of Ukrainian peasants leading up to the winter of 1932/1933 did not cause the pre-Hitler German government to completely end their military collaboration with the Soviets. Nor did the deaths of literally millions of these Ukrainian peasants by starvation caused by the Soviets prove too much for Hitler’s Nazi Party Germany to continue with their collaboration. The death by starvation of millions of Ukrainian civilians did not dissuade Germany and the USSR from working together.
The cooperation between the Germans and the Russians reached its peak in 1939 when the Soviet Union’s foreign minister, Vlaches Molotov, and Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Under this pact and related agreements, Germany agreed to supply the Soviet Union with manufactured goods, including armaments, and the Soviets agreed to supply raw materials, including oil, to Nazi Germany in preparation for another conflagration in Europe. Part and parcel of the Pact was that Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union secretly agreed to invade and dismember Poland and divide between themselves the rest of Eastern Europe which lied between their nations. This is precisely what Germany and the Soviet Union did in September of 1939.
This collaboration between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union persisted not only through their mutual destruction of Poland but also through Germany’s invasion and conquering of much of Western Europe, including France, and the Battle of Britain. The collaboration between Germany and the Russians only ended, to Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin’s astonishment, with Germany’s massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Then and only then did the Soviet Union join forces with the allies fighting their former collaborator, Nazi Germany.
We tend to talk about the Germans attacking the Russians in World War II but because of geography the Germans primarily fought in and through the Soviet Republics of Belorussia and Ukraine. These two Soviet Republics and their peoples took the brunt of the Nazi war machine blazing a path of destruction through the western regions of the Soviet Union to attack Moscow and other primarily Russian cities. While the Soviet leaders in Moscow made a stand in Stalingrad, the capitals of Minsk in Belorussia and Kyiv in Ukraine fell in short order.
To return to the present, in Olaf Scholz’s address at the outbreak of Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine he said all the right things. He opened his remarks by stating that the “twenty-fourth of February 2022 marks a watershed in the history of our continent” and that “the Russian President Putin has started a war of aggression in cold blood.” Scholz labeled Putin’s actions “inhumane” and “a violation of international law” that “nothing and nobody that can justify.” Scholz said Putin showed an “utter lack of scruples.” “The appalling injustice, the pain of the Ukrainian people – they affect us all very deeply.” Scholz says all of this and more against Putin but then within his speech he gives us a number of hints as to the strength of Germany’s support for Ukraine in defending themselves from Putin and Russia’s invasion. At this very early date Germany’s leader declares that “in the long term security in Europe cannot be achieved in opposition to Russia.” In other words, Germany will support Ukraine but not in opposition to Russia.
In his speech, when Scholz is discussing the relationship between Germans and Russians during World War II it seems very clear that he sees Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union as one of Germany’s more noteworthy crimes during the war. Scholz states, “It is important to me to specify this. Because reconciliation between Germans and Russians after the Second World War is – and remains – an important chapter of our shared history.” Germany seems very solicitous of the feelings of the Russian people but peculiarly dismissive of the feelings of the people Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union colluded to deprive of their freedoms with the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact.
One is left to wonder if it is important to Olaf Scholz and the rest of the German government to be reconciled with the Polish people. In his whole speech the one nation which other than Ukraine is put most at risk by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland, is not mentioned at all. Why wouldn’t Scholz mention by name their fellow NATO partner? And what of the Estonians, the Latvians, and the Lithuanians? Certainly Germany stabbed in the back the Soviet Union when they turned on their erstwhile ally, but what of all the millions of people squeezed mercilessly between the two behemoths during World War II?
The same dynamic that caused both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is largely still present. Germany is still a nation with perhaps the most sophisticated and productive economy in the world. Germany is also still a nation very much lacking in natural resources, especially the oil needed to fuel their economy. Russia is still a nation with a vast wealth of natural resources that is at times inexplicably incapable of putting those resources to productive use. Both are understandably attracted to making deals with each other because of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Both are at best dismissive of the thoughts and dreams of the peoples unfortunate enough to be stuck between them.
In his speech on February 27 of last year, Olaf Scholz says the following about Ukraine and the Ukrainians:
In Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and Mariupol, people are not just defending their homeland. They are fighting for freedom and their democracy. For values that we share with them. As democrats, as Europeans, we stand by their side – on the right side of history! With his attack on Ukraine on Thursday, President Putin has created a new reality. This new reality requires an unequivocal response. We have given one.
Perhaps the words of Olaf Scholz and the German government have been unequivocal and on the right side of history. On the other hand, the inaction of the German government in not supplying or even allowing others to supply the Ukrainians the German built weapons that would enable them to right the wrong they have suffered is more than a little equivocal. If Germany sees itself on the right side of history, who does Germany sees as ultimately victorious in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? What outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the German leadership really looking forward to?
After almost a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t Putin and the Russians proven themselves to be even more cruel and incomprehensible than eleven months ago? After Bucha and Mariupol, after countless missile attacks upon Ukrainian civilian targets, including apartment buildings, maternity wards, and hospitals, can we say that Scholz overexaggerated on February 27, 2022 Russia’s inhumanity towards the Ukrainians? If anything, aren’t Putin and his cohorts’ actions and rhetoric growing more extreme and violent?
Time for Germany and the rest of the free world to live up to our shared ideals or recognize we have abandoned them.


First Aid for Fatal Poisons
A poison is a substance that causes damage, sickness or loss if it penetrates the body. Poisons might enter the body in the shape of fluids, gas or solids. Chemicals that are consumed might damage the digestive area, or cause more extensive damage if they penetrate the bloodstream and move to other sections of the body.
Harmful chemicals comprise of regular domestic substances. For instance, peroxide, dishwasher chemicals etc. Drugs, whether they are approved or purchased over the counter, are also destructive if an overdose is taken. The result of poisoning depends on the chemical that has been consumed.
Poisons can go in via:
- the oral cavity and digestive system
- vapours via the lungs
- absorption of a substance through the skin
- insertion of drugs through the skin
Symptoms and signs (some may be present)
- queasiness or nausea
- abdominal throbbing
- unconsciousness or weakening conscious condition
- breathing trouble altered or altered behaviour – e.g. illusion, hostility
How you can help
- Check for hazards before approaching the casualty
- Ensure protection for yourself, the casualty, and any others prior to approaching to offer first aid. If secure and essential, remove the casualty to a safer spot.
- Note down any information about the poisoning occurrence – e.g. drugs, burns surrounding the mouth, etc.
- Verify the casualty’s level of awareness
- If breathing usually, revolve the casualty on their side in a supported location and check to see if the airway is clear.
Call the paramedics.
- If the mouth has burns from an acidic toxin, clean the region with a damp cloth or tissue.
- Phone the National Poisons Center
- If poisoning has taken place, but the casualty displays no undesirable signs or symptoms you can call the national poisons center (most countries have one) for detailed guidance on the first aid management necessary.
- Pursue all information regarding medical instruction.
Unique poisoning situations
Poisons via inhalation
- Ensure wellbeing prior to approaching the casualty
- If toxic vapors are present in a limited space the casualty has to be moved into clean air as soon as possible. The first aider might require entering the space if the casualty is unconscious and must be pulled to safety. Though, the first aider should take no unwarranted risks.
- When it is secure to do so, verify the casualty’s level of consciousness and provide general first aid for poisoning.
When dragged into clean air, the casualty might recuperate quickly from inhaled gases.
Though, some poisonous substances can cause severe troubles once inhaled into the lungs, therefore, medical evaluation and treatment are vital.
Related Video on First Aid for Poisons


The Commens Dictionary
Quote from ‘Logic’
It is generally admitted that there is a doctrine which properly antecedes what we have called critic. It considers, for example, in what sense and how there can be any true proposition and false proposition, and what are the general conditions to which thought or signs of any kind must conform in order to assert anything. Kant, who first raised these questions to prominence, called this doctrine transcendentale Elementarlehre, and made it a large part of his Critic of the Pure Reason. But the Grammatica Speculativa of Scotus is an earlier and interesting attempt. The common German word is Erkenntnisstheorie, sometimes translated Epistemology.


Guest blog series by: Sophie Mogg
In this installment of A Travelling Botanist I will be focusing on Moringa oleifera, commonly referred to as the miracle tree.
Moringa oleifera is native to South Asia however due to the multitude of useful products it can provide its distribution has increased in more recent years and now covers the majority of Asia, Africa and Europe. M. oleifera is a hardy tree, requiring little in the way of compost or manure and being drought resistant it is well suited to the environment of developing countries. M. oleifera reaches heights of up to 3M within the first 10 months and initial harvests of leaves are able to occur between 6-8months, with subsequent yields improving as the tree reaches maturity at around 12M tall.
Many parts of the Moringa tree are utilised in South Asian cooking. The young seed pods, more often referred to as drumsticks, are used in a variety of dishes such as curries, sambars, kormas and dals. The drumsticks can also be incorporated into soups such as the Burmese Dunt-dalun chin-yei. This is true also for the fruit of the drumsticks, the white seeds can either be cooked as you would green peas or incorporated into a variety of soups. Flowers can also be used, generally being boiled or fried and incorporated into a variety of friend snacks such as pakoras and fritters or alternatively used in tea.
The leaves of the Moringa tree are considered to be very nutritional, with the suggestion that a teaspoon of leaf powder being incorporated into a meal three times a day could aid in reducing malnutrition. The leaves can be prepared in a variety of ways, from being ground into a find powder or deep-friend for use in sambals. They can also be made into a soup with the addition of rice, a popular breakfast during Ramadan. The leaves of the Moringa also contain antiseptic properties with a recent study suggesting that 4g of leaf powder can be as good as modern day non-medicated soap. This provides some means of sanitation to people who would otherwise not be able to properly clean their hands.
The seeds of a single Moringa tree can be used to provide clean water for up to 6 people for an entire year. With their outer casing removed, the seeds can be ground to form what is known as a seed cake that can be used to filter water thereby removing between 90-99% of the bacteria present. This works on the basis of attraction whereby positively charged seeds attract negatively charged bacteria and viruses causing them to coagulate and form particles known as floc. This floc then falls to the bottom of the container leaving clean water above it. It is estimated that only 1-2 seeds are required for every litre of water.
Oil is a by-product of making the seed cakes, comprising of around 40% of the seed. This oil, often known as “ben oil” by watchmakers, can serve a variety of purposes due to its properties. Due to being light, it is ideal for use in machinery and produces no smoke when lit making it ideal for oil-based lamps. The oil also contains natural skin and hair purifiers and is becoming more popular with well known cosmetic companies such as The Body Shop and LUSH thereby providing revenue to the farmers who grow the miracle tree. It also bears similarities to olive oil making it ideal for cooking and therefore another avenue for marketing this multipurpose oil.
Moringa oleifera and its close relatives are also known for their medicinal properties, containing 46 antioxidants which aid in preventing damage to cells. Due to containing benzyl isothiocyanate it has been suggested that Moringa may also contain chemo-protective properties.
I know that you may think I have completely forgotten the bark of the tree. But no, that too has its use. The tree bark is beaten into long fibres ideal for making strong rope.
I hope you have enjoyed reading about the Miracle tree as much as I have, if you wish to seek more information just follow the links below.
As always comment below with your favourite plant and if it’s in our collection and found within South Asia or Europe, I’ll be happy to feature it!
Since returning from the Ke EMu conference in Washington on Saturday I’ve been thinking about Manchester Museum’s next temporary exhibition which will be about the stone statues or moai of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. We are in the fortunate position of being able to borrow a statue called moai Hava from the British Museum, and a selection of supporting objects from the BM and other museums. The exhibition will draw upon the results of fieldwork on Easter Island undertaken by Professor Colin Richards of the University of Manchester’s Department of Archaeology. Our ‘Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues of Easter Island’ exhibition will open in early April 2015 and run for four months in the Museum’s temporary exhibition gallery.
It is incredibly exciting to work with material from Easter Island, which must rank as some of the highest profile…
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Iceland’s native forests are primarily composed of downy birch (Betula pubescens) with some rowan (Sorbus acuparia). The aspen (Populus tremula) is also found in Iceland, but is extremely rare and the shrubby tea-leaved willow (Salix phylicifolia) can sometimes get tall enough to be counted as a tree.
Beyond these species, the Iceland Forestry Service has experimented with a number of species from overseas, as well as planting more birch, and plantations of trees are now maturing. We have wandered through a few forested ares and we were privileged to meet Throstur Eysteinsson (division chief of the forestry service) who wrote this excellent description of forestry in a treeless land.
While David Gelsthorpe stopped to collect some interesting basalt specimens, mine and Dmitri Logunov’s attention was drawn to this lovely juniper bush.
Growing over the rocks and through a mound of moss, this juniper has grown into a low-lying shape which gives it some protection from high winds and the winter snows.
With warmer weather on the way we invite you to join us for Whitworth: Past, Present & Future: An outdoor tour for those interested in finding out more about the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester’s gallery in the park, whilst we undergo a £15 million redevelopment (opening Saturday, 25 October).
The Whitworth’s very own Visitor Team will take you back through the Gallery’s illustrious 125 year history, from its humble beginnings as Grove House, a gallery established ‘for the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester’, right up to the present day. Hear about what the redeveloped Whitworth will offer: brand new exhibition spaces, a fabulous art garden designed by Sarah Price, the innovative Clore Learning Studio and more… All this whilst taking a stroll through Whitworth Park, with views of the original façade of the building and encounters with…
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Hello! My name is Josh and I am new to the herbarium. I am a member of the faculty of life sciences at the University of Manchester, and for the work placement part of my degree it is my pleasure to spend a year working in the herbarium with Rachel and Lindsey . This is only my first week but we’ve already been busy collecting lots of tree samples from the array of trees we have on campus. Henry McGhie, Dr Webster and I started out by recording the geographic location of each tree we sampled, measured the girth of each tree’s main trunk and took small clippings of the leaves (and fruits in some cases!) Samples included the tulip tree, genus Liriodendron. The British crab apple tree, family Rosaceae and the Willow tree Salix.
The University of Manchester has broken up for the Easter holidays and so it must be the right time of year again for the 1st year field course in Comparative and Adaptive Biology. This year the staff and students were even more enthusiastic than usual to escape the unseasonably cold snow flurries of Manchester and head for sunny Mallorca. We’ve been braving the mosquitoes in the shrubberies to study how plants cope with the challenges of Mediterranean living and to see some interesting examples of plant endemism.
Last year I blogged about one of our days on the seashore, so I think this time I shall go more terrestrial and share some images from a site which is one of the staff favourites. Although there are other places to go and see Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) woodland, the Bronze Age talayotic site of Ses Paisses is pretty special. Excavated in the mid 20th century, the settlement is arranged around a central tower (or talaiot) and is now covered by a very nice woodland.
Under the shade of the oak trees we find black bryony (Tamus communis), butcher’s broom (Ruscus aculeatus) and a hemi-parasitic plant Osyris alba which can produce it’s own sugars by photosynthesis but steals water and minerals from a host plant .
However, with all these rocks around there is always the chance that botanical lectures on the effects of light and shade can end up being disrupted by sudden acts of zoology….


Textile chemical processing today, particularly the pre-treatment processes require a highly sophisticated technology and engineering to achieve the well known concepts of "Right first time, Right everytime and Right on time" processing and production. Chemical pre-treatment may be broadly defined as a procedure mainly concerned with the removal of natural as well as added impurities in fabric to a level necessary for good whiteness and absorbency by utilising minimum time, energy and chemicals as well as water.
This book discusses the fundamental aspects of chemistry, chemical technology and machineries involved in the various pre-treatment process of textiles before subsequent dyeing, printing and finishing. With the introduction of newer fibres, specialty chemicals, improved technology and sophisticated machineries developed during the last decade, this book fills a gap in this area of technology. However, its real strength is its clear perception of ample background description, which will enable readers to understand most current journals, thus staying abreast of the latest advances in the field.
For teachers and students in the chemical textile industry.
Chemical Technology in the Pre-Treatment Processes of Textiles, 1st Edition
Preface. Kinds of Fibres.
Introduction. Classification of fibres. Chemical composition, morphology and structure of cotton. Natural protein fibres. Long vegetable fibres. Regenerated natural fibres. Synthetic fibres. Miscellaneous synthetic fibres. References. Preparation before Chemical Processes.
Introduction. Inspection. Sewing. Mechanical cleaning of fabrics. Singeing. Process sequence. Desizing.
Introduction. Methods of desizing. Desizing of synthetic fabrics and their blends. Desizing machineries. References. Scouring
. Introduction. Mechanism of removal of impurities. Scouring of cotton in alkaline agents. Surfactants. Solvent scouring. Scouring of raw wool. Scouring wool yarn and fabric. Carbonising of wool. Degumming of silk. Degumming of remie. Scouring of linen. Scouring of jute. Scouring of synthetic-polymer fibres. Scouring of blended fibre fabrics. References. Scouring Machineries.
Introduction. Batch type (rope) scouring machines. Batch type (open-width) scouring machines. Semi-continuous scouring machines. Continuous scouring machines. Wool scouring machines. Silk degumming machines. References. Bleaching of Textiles.
Introduction. Bleaching with hypochlorites. Bleaching with peroxides. Bleaching of wool with hydrogen peroxide. Bleaching of silk with hydrogen peroxide. Bleaching of synthetic fibres with peroxide. Advantages and disadvantages of peroxide over hypochlorite bleaching. Bleaching with sodium chlorite. Bleaching with peracetic acid. Reductive bleaching of wool. Bleaching of silk with reducing agents. Reductive bleaching of nylon. Peroxygen bleaching compounds. Bleaching of jute. Bleaching of linen. Bleaching of blended fabrics. Bleaching of cotton weft knitted fabrics. References. Bleaching and Washing Equipment.
Introduction. Batch bleaching process machineries. Semi-continuous bleaching process machineries. Continuous bleaching by J-Box systems. Continuous open-width bleaching equipment. Washing equipment. References. Heat-Setting.
Introduction. Thermal behaviour of synthetic fibres. Stages of heat-setting. Methods of heat-setting. Heat-setting conditions for different kinds of fibres. Heat-setting of blended fibre fabrics. Effect of heat-setting on properties of synthetic fibres. References. Mercerization.
Introduction. Conditions for mercerization. Changes in properties of cellulose on mercerization. Mercerization of remie and flax fibres. Mercerization of blended fibre fabrics. Mercerizing machineries. Hot mercerization. Liquid ammonia mercerization. References. Optical Brightening Agents.
Introduction. Chemical constitution of optical brighteners. Mechanism of fluorescent whitening. Factors influencing the functions of optical whiteners. Application of optical brighteners. References. Combined Pre-Treatment Processes of Textiles.
Introduction. Combined scouring and desizing. Combined scouring and bleaching. Combined desizing, scouring and bleaching. References. Degradation of Fibres Associated with Chemical Pre-Treatment Processes.
Introduction. Degradation of cotton during desizing. Degradation of cotton during scouring. Degradation of cotton during bleaching. Damage of wool during pre-treatment processes. Damage of silk during pre-treatment processes. Damage of polyester during pre-treatment processes. References. Conservation of Energy and Water, Economy and Effluent Control in Pre-Treatment Processes.
Water consumption in textile industry. Impurities in water. Water purification. Economy through energy conservation. Economy through water conservation. Economy through process modification. Pollution aspects in pre-treatment processes of textiles. Pollution load and pre-treatment processes. Waste water treatment from pre-treatment plants. Protective measures for ultra-violet radiation. References. Pre-Treatment of Textiles under Plasma Conditions.
Introduction. The concept of plasma. Generation of plasma and its action. Surface modification of fabrics under plasma treatment. High energy radiation of textiles. References. Application of Bio-technology in the Pre-Treatment Processes of Textiles.
Introduction. Enzymes for textile application. Treatment of cotton with enzymes. Treatment of protein fibres with enzyme. Bio-technology and effluent treatment. References. Analysis and Testing in Preparatory Processes.
Introduction. Analysis of water. Analysis of non-cellulosic residues. Evaluation of wax content in cotton. Evaluation of lubricants. Determination of moisture content. Tests and analyses of sizes. Determination of the efficiency of scouring. Testing and evaluation of bleaching agents. Assessment of damage of cellulose. Assessment of damage of wool. Determination of degree of mercerization. Evaluation of whitening efficiency of optical brighteners. Determination of degree of heat-setting. Determination of biodegradability of surfactants. References. Subject index.


The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, by Sara Wheeler; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 315 pp.; $26
Throughout the 1800s, Europe and the United States were gripped by Arctic Fever. It is hard for us to comprehend today how profoundly the industrial nations of the world, locked in competition, needed to scratch this particular exploratory itch. There was national and personal glory to win up there, and riddles of geography to solve. Many practical considerations were floated as justifications for pursuing the Polar Grail—landmasses that might be claimed, minerals seized, shipping routes found. But the northering impulse had chiefly to do with the pure desire to win records and to go where no human had been before. “Man will not be content with a mystery unexplored,” observed a New York Times editorial in July 1879. He “will not rest with a perpetual interrogation point at the end of the earth’s axis, whose query he cannot answer.”
In recent years, interest in the Arctic has quickened once again. This has much to do with climate change, of course. Battalions of scientists now make routine junkets to the Arctic in hopes of assessing the planet’s future by peering into its past. As the ice has receded, mining conglomerates and petroleum companies covet the top of the world as never before. In maritime courts, several polar nations have attempted to enlarge the legal definition of their continental shelves—following a “use-it-or-lose-it” strategy in the race for precious metals and hydrocarbons. In 2007 a Russian expedition sent a submarine more than two miles below the icecap to plant a Russian flag in the bedrock of the North Pole.
Once again, we seem to be gripped by Arctic Fever.
It was at the onset of this contentious new era that the acclaimed British travel writer Sara Wheeler ventured into the Arctic to take stock of things. From Siberia to Greenland, from Prudhoe Bay to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, Wheeler spared no expense and shirked no hardship to experience life in some of the most inaccessible deep freezes of the world. Over several years, she gamely hopscotched across what she calls “the collar of lands” that lie above 66 degrees north. In Canada’s Nunavut, she was pursued by a peckish polar bear. In the Barents Sea, she crunched through the floes on a Russian icebreaker. In Lapland, she traveled with traditional Sámi (who, Wheeler mentions in passing, used to castrate reindeer with their teeth). Along the way, she took up residence in various Arctic research stations, living with atmospheric scientists who ponder the mysteries of climate change.
The result of her far-flung journeys, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, is a clear-eyed and extremely gritty work of modern travelogue. Though she experiences moments of epiphany and landscapes of intense beauty, her Arctic is hardly a romantic place. In her telling, the Northland is a mostly soulless realm of nuclear waste, processed junk food, and gulag ghosts, a place of scurvy, syphilis, obesity, alcoholism, and madness. It is a frozen archipelago whose tribal peoples live very much betwixt and between cultures, dwelling in “prefabricated housing in invented villages” and swilling vanilla extract with such regularity that it has become a controlled substance.
Wheeler’s take on the Arctic is mostly “a grim story,” she admits. But, she hastens to note, “I was not looking for a pretty picture. I was looking, in the words of T. S. Eliot, ‘to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.’” It is, for her, a sad truth that humankind’s worst traits often appear magnified in the planet’s cold, neglected attic.
A recurrent theme in The Magnetic North is a phenomenon Wheeler calls “The Arctic Paradox”: the most contaminated people and animals on earth are the ones who live farthest from the polluters. A variety of factors (long-range shipments by air, prevailing wind and ocean currents, and river outflow) have resulted in the Arctic functioning as a sink for POPs—persistent organic pollutants. These “villainous molecules” work their way up the food chain and “bioaccumulate” in the tissues of marine mammals, so that Arctic seal and whale blubber now contain alarmingly high concentrations of such pesticides and industrial toxins as DDT and PCB. These, inevitably, have insinuated themselves into human populations, resulting in abnormally high rates of cancer, immunological maladies, and other disorders. According to Wheeler, a leading health expert in the 1990s reported that many Greenlanders were so toxic that they “qualified as hazardous waste.”
Wheeler’s cumulative travels and inquiries leave her with no doubt that global warming is happening—and happening quite dramatically—but she is refreshingly free of political cant. While the scientists she falls in with agree on the fact of climate change, they seem to agree on little else. The most salient question—the precise extent to which “anthropogenic activity” is the primary culprit—appears to be up for grabs. “I found it reassuring,” Wheeler concludes, “when a scientist said he wasn’t sure.” That said, her assessment, and that of most of the climatologists she follows, is dire. Writes Wheeler: “I do not think one could stay long in the Arctic without concluding that the present way of the world is unsustainable and that many chickens will race home to roost in the lifetime of our children, if not in our own. Like the Viking chieftains, we in the developed world might find that we have merely bought ourselves the luxury of being the last to starve.”
What keeps Wheeler’s narrative from descending into pure bleakness is the quality of her observations, which are prismatic, wry, and often wise. In the Arctic, she says, “There are no answers, only stories and irreducible
difficulties.” At times Wheeler’s writerly exuberance in describing landscape and weather gets her into trouble—“periwinkle sky” . . . “the tintinnabulation of a swift-flowing brook” . . . “the valedictory amethyst of sunset”—but such purple moments are rare. Wheeler richly seasons her narrative with bons mots of fable, history, literature, and science. It is evident that she has read widely and deeply in Arcticana—from Chekhov to Solzhenitsyn, from Jack London to Jon Krakauer.
There are tales aplenty here of what Wheeler likes to call “frozen beards” and “shoe-eaters”: the 19th- and early 20th-century explorers who endured every calamity to reach the pole. In this rogue’s gallery of narcissists and gloryhounds, only the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen comes across as halfway sensible and sane. Wheeler gives Admiral Robert Peary no quarter, calling him “a tall, tireless showman addicted to fame” and “probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration.” Wheeler notes that Peary’s North Pole claims were probably specious, but no matter. “The Arctic attracts fiction to its facts until the two are indistinguishable,” Wheeler writes, “and the Peary legend lives on, just as he planned.”
In places, The Magnetic North has a cobbled-together feel—the perhaps inevitable result of many journeys taken over multiple years to many disparate lands—journeys that, in some cases, began as travel-writing assignments for newspapers and magazines. Because she rarely lingers very long with any one character, or in any one place, Wheeler has trouble finding and sustaining a natural rhythm. On the other hand, the fractal nature of the narrative mirrors the fragmented cultures she examines, and over time one gets a strong sense of a region whose consciousness is as shattered as its geography.
In the end, we may ignore the Arctic only at our peril, Wheeler suggests. It is, she writes, “the real world in all its degradation and beauty, and it is intimately connected to us—to our future, our crises, and our dreams.” Wheeler finds an abiding spirit in the Frozen North that she comes to admire. Centuries of hardship, abuse, and neglect have forged a resilience and stoicism that astonishes her everywhere she goes in the Arctic. Whether in Greenland, Lapland, or the most brutal precincts of Siberia, people “plucked new life out of death, as they always had.” As one anthropologist tells Wheeler, quoting Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
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Spent sometime to learn Python for setting up a Django web application framework. Summarize some useful tips for Python programming as well as share a modified program for feature-based homography tracking using OpenCV python wrapper (the sample codes come with OpenCV source has some bugs that cannot be executed)
Tips for Python Programming
1. Useful basic data types - list, tuple and dictionary
list - each one in the list is numbered, starting from zero. You can remove values from the list, and add new values to the end.
tuple - just like lists, but you can’t change their values. The values that you give it first up, are the values that you are stuck with for the rest of the program. Again, each value is numbered starting from zero.
dictionary - similar to what their name suggests. In a dictionary, you have an ‘index’ of words, and for each of them a definition.
2. List Comprehensions
A list comprehension is a construct consisting of logic that builds a list containing the values/objects generated by the logic.
e.g. Let’s say we have a list containing the integers 0 through 9. What if we wanted to increment each number and get all the results back in a list? With list comprehension:
In computer programming with object-oriented programming languages, duck-typing is a style of dynamic typing in which an object’s methods and properties determine the valid semantics, rather than its inheritance from a particular class or implementation of a specific interface.
4. Functions are First-Class Objects
In Python, you can treat functions as any other object, such as, store them in container, assign them to different variables, pass them in as arguments to functions, and so forth. The only difference is you can execute function objects, meaning you treat them as a function by appending the usual parentheses and arguments.
This is tricky. If we had set default to datetime.date.today(), the function would be called at the time the model was defined, which is not what we want. Instead, we pass the function object; Django is aware of this and calls the function at instance-creation time to generate the value for us.
5. *args and **kwargs
In function calls, * means to unpack a tuple and ** means to unpack a dictionary. In function signature, define variable arguments(varargs) using * representing a “tuple” and ** a “dictionary” as a “shopping bag”.
To reinstall ubuntu, opencv, cuda is always a struggle, but also a progress to learn and know better about all of these. Now working in ubuntu 12.04, opencv 188.8.131.52 and cuda 5.5. First time to try OpenCV python wrapper, and to be surprised by its efficiency and the ease to program. However there are some bugs in the official release.
The Bug is noted in the source (RectSelector Class in common.py), however I don’t quite understand why it happens. Instead of using the class, I rewrite a PlanerTracker Class to perform the tracking by mouse clicking.
The source is uploaded here.


Bériot, Charles Auguste de
Charles-Auguste de Bériot (Feb. 20, 1802 - April 8, 1870) was a Belgian violinist and composer who pioneered a playing style that blended classical beauty with technical skill.
By the age of nine, Bériot, a pupil and legal ward of Jean-François Tiby, performed publicly. After a mutually unsatisfactory training term at the Paris Conservatory with Pierre Baillot, he made his Paris and London debuts in 1826. When he returned to Brussels, King William I of the Netherlands appointed him as his solo violinist. The position came to an end with the Revolution of 1830, and he went on to travel extensively with the vocalist Maria Malibran, whom he married in 1836. She died just a few months after they married, and he didn't return to work for another two years. In 1842, he turned down the empty chair at the Paris Conservatory left by Baillot to become the director of the violin faculty at the Brussels Conservatory. In 1852, he was forced to resign due to impending blindness. Bériot's compositional and performing technique combined the virtuoso pyrotechnics of Niccol Paganini with the beauty and emotional sensitivity of the traditional French heritage.
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Ongoing declines among the world’s coral reefs require novel approaches to sustain these ecosystems and the millions of people who depend on them. A presently untapped approach that draws on theory and practice in human health and rural development is systematically identifying and learning from the ‘outliers’- places where ecosystems are substantially better ('bright spots') or worse ('dark spots') than expected, given the environmental conditions and socioeconomic drivers they are exposed to. Here, we compile data from more than 2,500 reefs worldwide and develop a Bayesian hierarchical model to generate expectations of how standing stocks of reef fish biomass are related to 18 socioeconomic drivers and environmental conditions. We then identified 15 bright spots and 35 dark spots among our global survey of coral reefs, defined as sites that had biomass levels more than two standard deviations from expectations. Importantly, bright spots were not simply comprised of remote areas with low fishing pressure- they include localities where human populations and use of ecosystem resources is high, potentially providing novel insights into how communities have successfully confronted strong drivers of change. Alternatively, dark spots were not necessarily the sites with the lowest absolute biomass and even included some remote, uninhabited locations often considered near-pristine. We surveyed local experts about social, institutional, and environmental conditions at these sites to reveal that bright spots were characterised by strong sociocultural institutions such as customary taboos and marine tenure, high levels of local engagement in management, high dependence on marine resources, and beneficial environmental conditions such as deep water refuges. Alternatively, dark spots were characterised by intensive capture and storage technology and a recent history of environmental shocks. Our results suggest that investments in strengthening fisheries governance, particularly aspects such as participation and property rights, could facilitate innovative conservation actions that help communities defy expectations of global reef degradation.


While eating milk chocolate every day may seem like a recipe for weight gain, starting the day with a concentrated amount of chocolate can help the body burn fat and lower blood sugar, study finds. Brigham researchers collaborated with researchers at the University of Murcia in Spain, looked at the effects of drinking milk chocolate in the morning on a small group of postmenopausal women.
The study published in The FASEB Journal found that consuming chocolate in the morning or evening did not lead to weight gain. On the contrary, eating chocolate in the morning or in the evening has been shown to influence hunger and appetite, the composition of the microbiota and sleep.
High consumption of chocolate during the morning hours can also help burn fat and lower blood sugar, and consuming chocolate in the evening or at night impairs the metabolism of rest and exercise the next morning.
“Our results underscore that not only ‘what’ but also ‘when’ we eat can impact the physiological mechanisms involved in the regulation of body weight,” said Frank AJL Scheer, neuroscientist in the Department of Medicine and Neurology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“Our volunteers did not gain weight despite the increase in calorie intake. Our results show that chocolate reduces energy intake ad libitum, which is consistent with the observed reduction in hunger and appetite. and the desire for sweets shown in previous studies, ”said Marta Garaulet, also from the hospital.
For the study, the team conducted a randomized, controlled, crossover trial in 19 postmenopausal women who consumed 100g of chocolate in the morning (within an hour of waking up) or at night (within an hour of waking up). to sleep). They compared weight gain and many other measures to not consuming chocolate.


In this blog, first published in Installer magazine (February 2018), Guy Cashmore, Technical Director at Kensa Heat Pumps, explores the future of energy self-sufficiency, focusing on the current market for ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) and complimentary technological advancements to help deliver energy self sufficient homes.
Turn the clock back 20 years and the market for ground source heat pumps barely existed. The majority of early customers tended to be innovative self builders constructing what would then have been called very low energy homes, often with other features like water recycling, exceptional insulation and, perhaps, some solar thermal tubes on the roof. In many cases, the self-builders intended to live in the property for the remainder of their lives which prompted investment in technologies with a long-term return.
Not much else was possible or even considered; in the pre-subsidy support era, solar photovoltaic panels were available but were far too expensive, and the early wind turbines suffered from reliability issues. The idea of being self sufficient in energy was not even on the cards. Today, things are looking much better.
Heat losses from new buildings have continued to fall. What would have been considered ‘state-of-the-art’ 20 years ago is now average; heat losses as low as 20 W/m2 are now a practical possibility. The peak heating load of a modest family home could now be as low as 2 to 3 kW, with seasonal averages around half this figure.
At the same time, ground source heat pump manufacturers like Kensa Heat Pumps have been working to improve the energy efficiency of their ground source heat pump products with compressors, heat exchangers and pumps all benefitting from significant investment aimed at enhancing performance. Typically these gains will add up to around a 25% efficiency improvement in 20 years. These two factors combined have made it possible to heat some new family homes using only around 10kWh of electricity a day; quite a remarkable reduction compared to the historical average.
Indeed, the development of Kensa’s Evo ground source heat pump series was driven by the ambition to deliver an ultra-efficient system; the result is a heat pump that is 15% more efficient than its predecessor and features a live coefficient of performance (COP) reading to ensure the most efficient system installation. It also maintains Kensa’s long-established tradition of simplifying the installation so the task can be undertaken by any plumbing contractor.
The increased efficiency not only reduces the running costs but also maximises the income available via the Government’s RHI scheme (Renewable Heat Incentive). (Tip: Use Kensa’s RHI calculator to find ground source heat pump costs and energy bill savings).
For most sites, only two practical options will exist for generation, PV and micro wind turbines. In the UK climate, these two technologies actually complement each other quite well, as usually the sun shines in the summer and the wind typically blows in winter. For anyone contemplating energy self sufficiency, the logical starting point has to be energy conservation. The physical size and cost of equipment needed to generate and store electricity tends to fall in a fairly linear fashion so reducing consumption is almost always more cost effective than enlarging generation and storage, certainly when the long term view is taken.
With any self generation system however the key is storage, the battery industry has made great advances in recent years, the cost ratio £ per kW capacity has tumbled while quality, reliability and round trip efficiency have all made gains. Developments in battery storage technology are largely being driven by electric car development with the major providers all boasting that further significant improvements are in the pipeline: in time, these refinements will feed through to domestic energy storage. The more storage capacity a property has, the less likely it is to need grid support, but if taken too far the cost of extra storage may never be recouped in grid savings.
All these combined gains have come together, only very recently, to make year round energy self sufficiency almost a practical possibility for many detached rural properties and others in suburban/urban locations. Of course, this won’t hold true for every day of the year, as windless but overcast conditions do happen, so for now retaining a grid connection is probably essential, but if becoming totally self sufficient in domestic energy is your goal, the future is looking good.
Equally, if the intent is to minimise the property’s carbon footprint, the installation of a ground source heat pump will make a very significant difference. Carbon Brief has recently reported that the average carbon intensity of all electricity generation in 2017 was 0.247kg per kWh which is far below the figures used in SAP and far below official Government projections. Given the efficiency of the latest ground source heat pumps, where a Seasonal Performance Factor of 350% is easily possible in a well-insulated home, it can be seen that the adjusted carbon intensity of 0.070kg is far below a gas condensing boiler so self-sufficiency can be delivered in a very green way.


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WE have already noted that to establish the significance of any period in art, it is necessary that the tendencies should unite and combine in some culminating spirits who rise triumphant over their contemporaries and soar above the age in which they live. Such a genius stands out above the eighteenth century crowd, and is not only of his century, but of every time. For two hundred years Tiepolo has been stigmatised as extravagant, mannered, as just equal to painting cupids, nymphs, and parroquets. In the last century he experienced the effect of the profound discredit into which the whole of eighteenth-century art had fallen. In France, David had obliterated Watteau ; and the reputation of Pompeo Battoni, a sort of Italian David, effaced Tiepolo and his contemporaries. When the delegates of the French Republic inspected Italian churches and palaces, and decided what works of art should be sent to the Louvre, they singled out the Bolognese, the Guercinos and Guidos, the Carracci, even Pompeo Battoni and other such forgotten masters, a Gatti, a Nevelone, a Badalocchio ; but to the lasting regret of their descendants, they disdained to annex a single one of the great paintings of the Venetian, Gianbattista Tiepolo.
Eastlake only vouchsafes him one line as ” an artist of fantastic imagination.” Most of the nineteenth-century critics do not even mention him. Burckhardt dismisses him with a grudging line of praise, Blanc is equally disparaging, and for Taine he is a mere mannerist, yet his influence has been felt far beyond his lifetime ; only now is he coming into his own, and it is recognised that the plein-air artist, the luminarist, the impressionist, owe no small share of their knowledge to his inspiration.
The name of Tiepolo brings before us a whole string of illustrious personagesdoges and senators, magnificent procurators and great captainsbut we have nothing to prove that the artist belonged to a decayed branch of the famous patrician house. Born in Castello, the people’s quarter of Venice, he studied in early youth with that good draughtsman, Lazzarini. At twenty-three he married the sister of Francesco Guardi ; Guardi, who comes between Longhi and Canale and who is a better painter than either. Tiepolo appeared at a fortunate moment. The demand for a facile, joyous genius was at its height. The life of the aristocracy on the lagoons was every year growing more gay, more abandoned to capricious inclination, to light loves and absurd amusements. And the art which reflected this life was called upon to give gaiety rather than thought, costume rather than character. Yet if the Venetian art had lost all connection with the grave magnificence of the past, it had kept aloof from the academic coldness which was in fashion beyond the lagoons, so that though theatrical, it was with a certain natural absurdity. The age had become romantic ; the Arcadian convention was in full force, Nature herself was pressed into the service of idle, sentimental men and women. The country was pictured as a place of delight, where the sun always shone and the peasants passed their time singing madrigals and indulging in rural pleasures. The public, however, had begun to look for beauty ; the traditions which had formed round the decorative schools were giving way to the appreciation of original work. Tiepolo, sincere and spontaneous even when he is sacrificing truth to caprice, struck the taste of the Venetians, and without emancipating himself from the tendencies of the time, contrives to introduce a fresh accent. All round him was a weak and self-indulgent world, but within himself he possessed a fund of buoyant and inexhaustible energy. He evokes a throng of personages on the ceilings of the churches and palaces confided to his fancy. His creations range from mythology to religion, from the sublime to the grotesque. All Olympia appears upon his ample and luminous spaces. It is not to the cold, austere Lazzarini, or to the clashing chiaroscuro of Piazetta, or the imaginative spirit of Battista Ricci, though he was touched by each of them, that we must turn for Tiepolo’s derivation. Long before his time, the kind of decoration of ceilings which we are apt to call Tiepolesque ; the foreshortened architecture, the columns and cornices, the figures peopling the edifices, or reclining upon clouds, had been used by an increasing throng of painters. The style arose, indeed, in the quattrocento ; Mantegna, the Umbrians, and even Michelangelo had used it, though in a far more sober way than later generations. Correggio and the Venetians had perfected the idea, which the artists of the seventeenth century seized upon and carried to the most intemperate excess. But Tiepolo rose above them all ; he abandoned the heavy, exaggerated, contorted designs, which by this time defied all laws of equilibrium, and we must go back further than his immediate predecessors for his origins. His claim to stand with Tintoretto or Veronese may be contested, but he is nearest to these, and no doubt Veronese is the artist he studied with the greatest fervour. Without copying, he seems to have a natural affinity of spirit with Veronese and assimilates the ample arrangement of his groups, the grace of his architecture, and his decorative feeling for colour. Zanetti, who was one of Tiepolo’s dearest friends, writes : ” No painter of our time could so well recall the bright and happy creations of Veronese.” The difference between them is more one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo’s lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of the decadence. Full of enthusiasm for his work, he was ready to respond to any call. He went to and fro between Venice and the villas along the mainland and to the neighbouring towns. Then coveting wider fields, he travelled to Milan and Genoa, where his frescoes still gleam in the palaces of the Dugnani, the Archinto, and the Clerici. At Würzburg in Bavaria he achieved a magnificent series of decorations for the palace of the Prince-Archbishop. Then coming back to Italy, he painted altarpieces, portraits, pictures for his friends, and a fresh multitude of allegorical and mythological frescoes in palaces and villas. His charming villa at Zianigo is frescoed from top to bottom by himself and his sons, and has amusing examples of contemporary dress and manners.
When the Academy was instituted in 1755, Tiepolo was appointed its first director, but the sort of employment it provided was not suited to his impetuous spirit, and in 1762 he threw up the post and went off to Spain with his two sons. There he received a splendid welcome and was loaded with commissions, the only dissentient voice being that of Raphael Mengs, who, obsessed by the taste for the classic and the antique, was fiercely opposed to the Venetian’s art. Tiepolo died suddenly in Madrid in 1770, pencil in hand. Though he was past seventy, the frescoes he has left there show that his hand was as firm and his eye as sure as ever.
His frescoes have, as we have said, that frankly theatrical flavour which corresponds exactly to the taste of the time. Such works as the ” Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto ” in the Church of the Scalzi in Venice, or the “Triumph of Faith ” in that of the Pietà, the ” Triumph of Hercules ” in Palazzo Canossa in Verona, or the decorations in the magnificent villa of the Pisani at Strà, are extravagant and fantastic, yet have the impressive quality of genius. These last, which have for subject the glorification of the Pisani, are full of portraits. The patrician sons and daughters appear, surrounded by Abundance, War, and Wisdom. A woman holding a sceptre symbolises Europe. All round are grouped flags and dragons, ” nations grappling in the airy blue,” bands of Red Indians in their war-paint and happy couples making love. The idea of the history, the wealth, the supreme dignity of the House is paramount, and over all appears Fame, bearing the noble name into immortality. In Palazzo Clerici at Milan a rich and prodigal committee gave the painter a free hand, and on the ceiling of a vast hall the Sun in a chariot, with four horses harnessed abreast, rises to the meridian, flooding the world with light. Venus and Saturn attend him, and his advent is heralded by Mercury. A symbolical figure of the earth joys at his coming, and a concourse of naiads, nymphs, and dolphins wait upon his footsteps. In the school of the Carmine in Venice Tiepolo has left one of his grandest displays. The haughty Queen of Heaven, who is his ideal of the Virgin, bears the Child lightly on her arm, and, standing enthroned upon the rolling clouds, hardly deigns to acknowledge the homage of the prostrate saint, on whom an attendant angel is bestowing her scapulary. The most charming amoretti are disporting in all directions, flinging themselves from on high in delicious abandon, alternating with lovely groups of the cardinal virtues. At Villa Valmarana near Vicenza, after revelling among the gods, he comes to earth and delights in painting lovely ladies with almond eyes and carnation cheeks, attended by their cavaliers, seated in balconies, looking on at a play, or dancing minuets, and carnival scenes with masques and dominoes and fêtes champêtres, which give us a picture of the fashions and manners of the day. He brings in groups of Chinese in oriental dress, and then he condescends to paint country girls and their rustic swains, in the style of Phyllis and Corydon.
Sometimes he becomes graver and more solid. He abandons the airy fancies scattered in cloud-land. The story of Esther in Palazzo Dugnano affords an opportunity for introducing magnificent architecture, warriors in armour, and stately dames in satin and brocades. He touches his highest in the decorations of Palazzo Labia, where Antony and Cleopatra, seated at their banquet, surrounded by pomp and revelry, regard one another silently, with looks of sombre passion. Four exquisite panels have lately been acquired by the Brera Gallery, representing the loves of Rinaldo and Armida, and are a feast of gay, delicate colour, with fascinating backgrounds of Italian gardens. The throne-room of the palace at Madrid has the same order of compositionsAEneas conducted by Venus from Time to Immortality, and other deifications of Spanish royalty.
Now and then Tiepolo is possessed by a tragic mood. In the Church of San Alvise he has left a ” Way to Calvary,” a ” Flagellation,” and a ” Crowning of Thorns,” which are in-tensely dramatic, and which show strong feeling. Particularly striking is the contrast between the refined and sensitive type of his Christ and the realistic and even brutal study of the two despairing malefactors one a common ruffian, the other an aged offender of a higher class. His altarpiece at Este, representing S. Tecla staying the plague, is painted with a real in-sight into disaster and agony, and S. Tecla is a pathetic and beautiful figure. Sometimes in his easel-pictures he paints a Head of Christ, a S. Anthony, or a Crucifixion, but he always returns before long to the ample spaces and fantastic subjects which his soul loved.
Tiepolo is a singular contradiction. His art suggests a strong being, held captive by butter-flies. Sometimes he is joyous and limpid, some-times turbulent and strong, but he has always sincerity, force, and life. A great space serves to exhilarate him, and he asks nothing better than to cover it with angels and goddesses, white limbs among the clouds, sea-horses ridden by Tritons, patrician warriors in Roman armour, balustrades and columns and amoretti. He does not even need to pounce his design, but puts in all sorts of improvised modifications with a sure hand. The vastness of his frescoes, the daring poses of his countless figures, and the freedom of his line speak eloquently of the mastery to which his hand had attained. He revels, above all, in effects of light” all the light of the sky, and all the light of the sea ; all the light of Venice . . . in which he swims as in a bath.
He paints not ideas, scarcely even forms, but light. His ceilings are radiant, like the sky of birds ; his poems seem to be written in the clouds. Light is fairer than all things, and Tiepolo knows all the tricks and triumphs of light.”
Nearly all his compositions have a serene and limpid horizon, with the figures approaching it painted in clear, silvery hues, airy and diaphanous, while the forms below are more muscular, the flesh tints are deeper, and the whole of the foreground is often enveloped in shadow. Veronese had lit up the shadows, which, under his contemporaries, were growing gloomy. Tiepolo carries his art further on the same lines. He makes his figures more graceful, his draperies more vaporous, and illumines his clouds with radiance. His faded blue and rose, his golden-greys, and pearly whites and pastel tints are not so much solid colours as caprices of light. We have remarked already that with Veronese the accessories of gleaming satins and rich brocades serve to obscure the persons. In many of Tiepolo’s scenes the figures are lost in a flutter of drapery, subject and action melt away, and we are only conscious of soft harmonies of delicious colour, as ethereal as the hues of spring flowers in woodland ways and joyous meadows. With these delicious, audacious fancies, put on with a nervous hand, we forget the age of profound and ardent passion, we escape from that of pompous solemnity and studied grace, and we breathe an atmosphere of irresponsible and capricious pleasure. In this last word of her great masters Venice keeps what her temperament lovedsensuous colour and emotional chiaroscuro, used to accentuate an art adapted to a city of pleasure.
The excellence of the old masters’ drawings is a perpetual revelation. Even second – class men are almost invariably fine draughtsmen, proving that drawing was looked upon as some-thing over which it was necessary for even the meanest to have entire mastery. Tiepolo’s drawings, preserved in Venice and in various museums, are as beautiful as can be wished ; perfect in execution and vivid in feeling. In Venice are twenty or thirty sheets in red carbon, of flights of angels, and of draperies studied in every variety of fold.
Poor work of his school is often ascribed to his sons, but the superb ” Stations of the Cross,” in the Frari, which were etched by Domenico, and published as his own in his lifetime, are almost equal to the father’s work. Tiepolo had many immediate followers and imitators. The colossal roof- painting of Fabio Canal in the Church of SS. Apostoli, Venice, may be pointed out as an example of one of these. But he is full of the tendencies of modern art. Mr. Berenson, writing of him, says he sometimes seems more the first than the last of a line, and notices how he influenced many French artists of recent times, though none seem quite to have caught the secret of his light intensity and his exquisite caprice.
Aranjuez. Royal Palace : Frescoes ; Altarpiece.
Orangery : Frescoes.
Bergamo. Cappella Colleoni : Scenes from the Life of the Baptist.
Berlin. Martyrdom of S. Agatha ; S. Dominia and the Rosary. London. Sketches ; Deposition.
Madrid. Escurial ; Ceilings.
Milan. Palazzi Clerici, Archinto, and Dugnano : Frescoes. Brera : Loves of Rinaldo and Armida.
Paris. Christ at Emmaus.
Strà. Villa Pisani : Ceiling.
Venice. Academy : S. Joseph, the Child, and Saints ; S. Helena finding the Cross.
Palazzo Ducale : Sala di Quattro Porte ; Neptune and Venice.
Palazzo Labia : Frescoes ; Antony and Cleopatra. Palazzo Rezzonico : Two Ceilings.
S. Alvise : Flagellation ; Way to Golgotha.
SS. Apostoli : Communion of S. Lucy.
S. Fava : The Virgin and her Parents.
Gesuati : Ceiling ; Altarpiece.
S. Maria della Pietà : Triumph of Faith.
S. Paolo : Stations of the Cross.
Scalzi : Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto. Scuola del Carmine : Ceiling.
Verona. Palazzo Canossa : Triumph of Hercules.
Vicenza. Museo Entrance Hall : Immaculate Conception.
Villa Valmarana : Frescoes ; Subjects from Homer,
Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso ; Masks and Oriental Scenes.
Würzburg. Palace of the Archbishop : Ceilings ; Fêtes Galantes ;
Assumption ; Fall of Rebel Angels.


What is vulvodynia?
Vulvodynia (say: "vul-vo-din-ee-a") is the word that describes pain and discomfort in the vulva. The vulva is a woman’s external genital area, or the area around the opening to the vagina.
Vulvodynia and Vulvar Vestibulitis: Challenges in Diagnosis and Management by Julius F. Metts, M.D. (American Family Physician March 15, 1999, http://www.aafp.org/afp/990315ap/1547.html)
Written by familydoctor.org editorial staff


(Independent) Einstein’s laws questioned as speed of light is broken again
SATURDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2011
An experiment showing it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light, and so confound a fundamental principle of theoretical physics, has passed its first serious test of validity.
Scientists have excluded one of the sources of error that could have led them to make a mistake when they announced in September that a beam of sub-atomic particles had travelled a fraction of a second faster than light.
They repeated the first experiment, in which they had fired pulses of neutrons from the Cern underground laboratory near Geneva through solid rock to subterranean particle detectors at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy about 750km (466 miles) away.


Length of Time: 30 minutes
Adult Support Needed?: No
Here in Santa Cruz, steelhead trout migrate from San Lorenzo River in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. This journey is a challenge and many factors influence their ability to migrate. Rain and the corresponding water levels in the San Lorenzo River are one of the deciding factors in determining the timing of their migration and if migration is possible at all. In this activity, you will:
- Learn about steelhead trout migration and water level needs for each life cycle stage
- Read and analyze a USGS hydrograph to learn about seasonal changes in water levels in the San Lorenzo River
- Combine your knowledge to create a drawing identifying what season we might see each of the steelhead trout life cycle stages
Virtual Activity Guide
Join CWC staff as they guide youth through the activity. Youth are taken step by step through the activity. You may choose to use the Virtual Activity Guide instead of the Activity Guide PDF as all the same information is provided in this Virtual Activity Guide.
Supports Next Generation Science Standards:
- 3-ESS2-1. Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
- 3-LS1-1. Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death.
- 5-ESS3-1. Obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect the Earth’s resources and environment.
- 5-ESS2-1. Develop a model using an example to describe ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and/or atmosphere interact
- Virtual Activity Guide OR Activity Guide PDF (see below)
- Blank paper
- Colored pencils (optional)
1. Complete the activity as you follow along with the Virtual Activity Guide (see above) or view the PDF Activity Guide online and grab blank paper to follow along.
2. Check out the illustration showing the migration path of steelhead trout and draw your own version including all the same information.
3. Look at two pictures, one with low water levels and another with higher water levels, decide which one is easier for steelhead trout to migrate in.
4. Learn about and analyze hydrograph of seasonal water levels for the San Lorenzo River from the USGS.
5. Learn about the water needs for steelhead trout in each of their life cycle stages.
6. Combine all that you have learned to identify what season you are likely to see each of the life cycle stages based on upon what you learned from 1) the hydrograph and 2) each life cycle’s water needs. Add this information to your earlier drawing.
7. (Optional): Share your drawings with us! Send an email to firstname.lastname@example.org or tag @CoastalWatershedCouncil on Instagram or Facebook.
- Watch this Coastal Watershed Council video about steelhead trout habitat in the San Lorenzo River.
- Take a virtual tour of the San Lorenzo River with the Coastal Watershed Council.
- Learn more about how steelhead population numbers in the San Lorenzo River and other Santa Cruz County watersheds have changed over the past 20+ years by visiting the County’s Steelhead Monitoring Program webpage.
To all of the Watershed Rangers students, teachers and program partners, although we will not be able to see you in classrooms, field trips and after school programs right now, we hope to provide you and your loved ones with online resources and activities during this time. We know that parents, teacher and lifelong learners are seeking ways to stay engaged and active, and we’re going to be working to bring activities to you through the Coastal Watershed Council blog. Please share these resources and activities with friends, neighbors and parents groups and stay tuned for more.
- Santa Cruz County Office of Education News & Food Programs: Parents are encouraged to call or email their child’s school or district prior to visiting the site in person if they have questions or need services beyond the food program available to their student or to pick up distance learning materials. Please find a master list of all Santa Cruz County food service distribution locations at http://sccoe.link/food_service. Please find an interactive map of all the food distribution locations and service times at http://sccoe.link/food_service_map.
- Speaking with your child about COVID
- Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency
- Santa Cruz County 211


Memorial Day: Warâ€™s Legacy
American politicians seem to feel that they have the right to decide what forms of governments are acceptable around the world. This reality has led to tragic consequences where masses of innocent people, often women and children have been killed by bombs marked â€œMade In The U.S.A.â€?
Comment: On Memorial Day
Last Monday, the nation observed another Memorial Day.
With the country bogged down in a war of attrition in Iraq, the American people need to think long and hard about its legacy regarding war. For what do memorials mean if the bloody mistakes of history aren’t learned?
Memorial Day--once called Decoration Day--was first observed after the end of the Civil War. Waterloo, New York—once a part of the great Iroquois Indian Confederacy —was where the first Memorial Day was observed in 1866. The holiday was first meant to commemorate the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War, then, after World War 1 it memorialized those who died in any military engagement.
These days Memorial Day is looked upon as a day to remember fallen “heroes.” Politicians give addresses filled with platitudes, while preaching “patriotism”, sometimes, amid the backdrop of miles of tombstones. All of this is done to make the people feel good, while indoctrinating them into blind national obedience. Some, like George Bush talk about the “sacrifices” that the “brave” soldiers have made for the nation. However, what has this “president” and his “base” sacrificed?
For, while they brazenly use the treasury of the people like their personal ATM, soldiers still don’t have sufficient body armor. Moreover, they continue to swindle the soldiers and their family out of health services. Does any serious person think that the neglect of U.S. Servicemen exposed at Walter Reed is but an aberration?
Also, according to the Veterans Administration on any given night there are at least 200,000 homeless veterans. In recent years, the figures have been counted as high as 500,000. Is this how they “support the troops?”
Many Americans have been taught that the wars started by their politicians are done in defense of “Democracy” and as acts of American benevolence. But does that sentiment really hold up under the scrutiny of history? No.
Since 1945 America has been involved in several military conflicts. There was North Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, Grenada, and so forth, along with two military operations in Iraq. In most of these cases the bogeyman excuse of fighting communism—terrorism is the 21st Century Red Scare—was used to a fever pitch to scare and incite the American people into supporting war.
American politicians seem to feel that they have the right to decide what forms of governments are acceptable around the world. This reality has led to tragic consequences where masses of innocent people, often women and children have been killed by bombs marked “Made In The U.S.A.”
For example, we know now with the results of the John HopkinsLancet Study, that the number of Iraqis that have been killed in this war-for-profit by the Bush White House far exceeds the “thirty thousand give or take” figure that Bush flippantly gave. In fact, the John Hopkins figures put it over half a million people. Many of whom, were no doubt just regular citizens trying to live their lives. But the humanity of the Iraqis is denied here, because their stories are largely omitted by American journalism.
After 9-11, Americans were asking “why do ‘they’ hate us?” Of course in classic denial mode the chant of “they hate us because of our freedoms” reverberated through the nation. Once again fantasy is sold as history, because, the truth is often much less than the noble tales many tell.
Some like to talk about America being largely a force for good in the world; but this is nothing more than empty rhetoric devoid of any historical basis. For America has always used her military might to protect imperial interests. And the rogues list of despots she has propped up and or protected in doing so reads like a who’s who of dictators: Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista, Guatemala’s Rios Mont, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Congo’s Mobutu, South Africa’s P.W. Botha, Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesia’s Suharto, and the Saudi Royal Family, are but a fraction of these enemies of democracy that American foreign policy has shamelessly promoted.
At the present time the nation is mired in the quicksand that is Iraq. Last November, the people gave the Democrats a mandate by bouncing Republican after Republican from office. The people are obviously fed-up with this war. However, the Democrats have just given this Administration more money for the war.
This nation was embroiled in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975. Nearly 60, 000 American soldiers lost their lives, with nearly a million Vietnamese casualties. Now a similar situation is unfolding in Iraq, because of arrogance and imperialistic greed.
What will it take for this country to realize that war isn’t a video game and that not only American lives matter? How many more have to die because of America’s romanticized view of war? Philosopher George Santayana once said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” America must ask herself why she refuses to own up to hers.
Benjamin is a member of The Black Star News's Editorial Board.
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What is the Coastal and Marine Geoscience Data System
The Coastal and Marine Geoscience Data System (CMGDS) is the single point of access for all geoscience data published by the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program (CMGP). The goal of this site is to provide a single site where the USGS CMGP data can be found.
How can I use this resource?
This site can be used in two different ways: data discovery and data access. The data access section provides links to the various ways of getting the data. This includes direct data download and a variety of web services that provide direct data access. Data discovery can be done locally by a single user or the site can be harvested by other metadata collections systems for searching using other methods. The headings of each top level bullet below represent the various methods available for discovery or access. Any links in these headings will direct you to that particular function. This site can also be accessed by other programs that are capable of using our information for metadata search or GIS display. The secondary level of bullets describe the urls that are required for use in other programs. They are not linked here as the results have no meaning unless they are utilized by other programs. The Capabilities Documents and such are linked. They will display an XML file that is used by these programs as well.
What data can I expect to find here?
The current data collection includes multi channel seismics, single channel seismics, bathymetry, and sidescan sonar.
Where do these datasets come from?
All datasets come from USGS publications. These publications are generally in the form of data releases with the data included as part of the publication.
What geographic areas do these datasets cover?
Most data results from scientific research in the coastal and offshore areas of United States, and other US territories; and in many lakes and rivers. You can see our data coverage on our global map page or our research field locations.
What are metadata?
Metadata is "data about data." It provides structured information that describes the data it is associated with. This description gives the who, what, when, where, why and how of the data being described. USGS uses the FGDC metadata format standard for all of its data. These metadata records are included in the USGS publications and are linked to from this site to provide greater details about the data being provided.
What are the terms and conditions of data use?
Most U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) information resides in the public domain and may be used without restriction. When using information from USGS information products, publications, or Web sites, we ask that proper credit be given. Acknowledging or crediting the USGS as an information source can be provided by including a line of text citation.
What is GeoMapApp and Virtual Ocean?
Both programs are Java™ applications, which permit dynamic exploration of data from a map interface and the capability to generate custom grids and maps (color, contour, shading, sun illumination). GeoMapApp is a 2D visualization tool for seismic data. Virtual Ocean is a 3D visualization tool for seismic data.
How do I load the datasets into GeoMapApp?
To access the seismic data in GeoMapApp from the top menu choose Portals>Digital Seismic Reflection Profiles then in the right panel choose USGS MCS (multichannel seismic) or USGS SCS (single channel seismic). Either select an expedition or click on a box to zoom to that dataset. It can be difficult to select the inner boxes which is why we created the field activity map in CMGDS so you can figure out the field activity id (expedition) and select it from the expedition list. Then click on a line and then click on load view 1 or 2. The tools above the profiles are pretty self explanatory (zoom in out, flip, expand contract etc). After you have loaded a profile the map will show red were the profile is being displayed. If the profile is larger then the display the portion of the line not displayed will be yellow. If you move the mouse over the loaded profile the curser on the map will show where you are on the map. There are markers and labels for where lines intersect. Click on a tool and then do the action like zoom in zoom out, the hand to move, and the pointer to select. Full instructions for using this program can be found here.
How do I access the datasets through web services in Virtual Ocean?
To access the data in Virtual Ocean the path is the same Portals>Digital Seismic Reflection Profiles then in the right panel choose USGS MCS or USGS SCS. You can load the profiles the same as in GeoMapApp. However Virtual Ocean also allows you to load the profiles as fence diagrams on top of the map. To do this choose a cruise by either method described above, click on box or select expedition. Click on a line or several. They should turn red and white. Then click and hold the right mouse button and drag it toward you and you will tilt the globe. Hold the right button down and move right or left to move in those directions. You can then zoom in with the mouse scroll ball. The default screen hides some of the fence diagram controls so detach the table and see all the controls. For most the Base Seconds will need to change to reflect the record length. Hint if you aren’t seeing anything that looks like real data chances are your Base Seconds are too small. Typing n will orient you back to north and r will put you back into map view or directly vertical.


Life is a journey full of opportunities for learning.
However, as most of us know, learning and self-development become a lot harder as we grow up. Our lives get busier, we have different priorities and maybe even kids of our own. Finding the time to pick up a new skill or hobby can seem difficult. But it doesn’t have to be. By using time management and planning, you can easily follow your interests and become proficient in something new.
In this article, we’ve compiled tips and inspiration on how to learn a new skill and keep it for life:
Ever dreamt of becoming a musician? Or would you simply love to learn to play an instrument? Music in whatever form is one of the most sought after skills, but sometimes you might be put off by the cost of equipment or the time needed to master it. Take piano. You can either learn it on a traditional piano or a digital keyboard. What’s great is that the best digital piano won’t cost you half your rent as prices have come down. If you don’t have the resources to buy your own piano, see if you can borrow from a friend or check your local community center, which may have one available.
Start by familiarising yourself with the 88-keys, and practicing easy scales and chords. You can get simple instructions online and on YouTube. Then you can begin learning sheet music or let yourself play by ear. Whichever way you choose, set aside at least 1-hour every week to practice. Before long, you will have picked up a new skill playing an instrument you love. The best part is that by learning one instrument, such as piano, it’s easier to learn other instruments too!
Getting outside will do wonders for both your body and your mind. If you’re looking to pick up a new skill in an outdoor activity, there are plenty to choose from. You might like to sign up to dance classes, join a local sports team or even learn to run.
Another great idea is mountain biking. This fun and fast-paced activity requires skill, but it isn’t just reserved for adrenaline junkies. With the right equipment, you can practice mountain biking anywhere off the beaten track. You can either choose a conventional mountain bike or go electric. Electric bikes or e-bikes are becoming increasingly popular, and there are plenty of reasons why! These smart vehicles are not only equipped with powerful batteries that will let you ride longer and faster, but they look almost identical to any modern traditional bike. To figure out which electric bike is the best fit for you, be sure to read e bike reviews before you buy.
Once you’ve got your wheels, helmet and safety gear, getting into mountain biking is easier than you think. Start with easy rides of not more than 2-hours and stick to trails that have low hill gradients. Try going out for a ride once a week. As soon as you start feeling comfortable with your bike, you’ll naturally start wanting to conquer more difficult routes.
If you’re big into computers and curious about how to build websites and edit images, learning coding will change your life. This extremely complicated digital field can be easily mastered as long as you take it step by step. A great tip is to look on your App Store to find an app that teaches coding basics using fun games and tutorials. If you fall in love with this skill you can even make a career or it or offer your services part time to earn an extra income.
No matter what skill you decide to pursue, always remain patient and take the time to learn step by step. By taking things gradually, you will be more likely to keep your skill for decades to come.
This article cannot be re-published without permission.


June 17, 2009
1 - There are several potential causes for a tree to appear to die suddenly.
Yard and Garden June 17, 2009
I have an apple tree that blossomed seemingly normally this year. We went out of town on vacation and came back to a dying apple tree. We did have substantial May precipitation compared to what we are used to here in western New Mexico. I think the tree died sometime in the latter half of May while we were gone.
When we returned from vacation, the bark had turned an orange color and the tree did not produce leaves. It seemed to be drying-up and dying. Other apples trees in the area did not exhibit this same phenomenon.
There are suckers coming from the shallow horizontal roots and they are doing quite well. Will the suckers grow to be productive fruit-bearing trees?
There are several things that could have caused the sudden death of the upper portion of your tree, but I do not have enough information to say what did it. Here are some possibilities and things to look for to determine the cause:
A lightning strike can kill a tree. It may or may not leave visible damage on the trunk (split bark, charring, etc.)
A late freeze (this happened in much of New Mexico this year) can cause damage, especially if the tree is in a low lying area where cold air will accumulate when surrounding trees are not injured. This may not kill the tree, but it may have killed buds on the twigs. Remaining buds may begin growth later in the summer. The discoloration of the bark on the tree suggests that this is not the problem and renewed growth is unlikely.
Anything that girdled the trunk of the tree (rabbit or other animal eating the bark at the base of the tree, insects boring just under the bark of the tree) may be the problem. The xylem deeper inside the trunk may have been undamaged and able to send water upward so that the tree flowered, but the phloem and cambium just under the bark may have been injured, so after the tree started to bloom, it depleted stored food reserves and died. If you suspect girdling insects, evidence to look for would be emergence holes and tunneling galleries just underneath bark that peels off easily.
Gophers can injure trees by consuming the roots of the tree without leaving visible evidence on the above ground portions of the tree. Signs of gophers in the area (mounds) would be an indication that this may have been the problem.
Fireblight (a bacterial disease) spread by honeybees pollinating the tree could cause dieback. The tree does not usually exhibit complete dieback, but as you said it was wetter than usual and that could have made the damage greater. If you think it is this, send a sample to the NMSU Plant Disease Diagnostic Lab through your local NMSU Extension County Agent.
Do any of these seem to be likely causes?
The suckers you mentioned sprouting from the roots (not consumed by gophers if they were the problem) will be a rootstock variety or seedling and may not produce the desired variety of apples. If there is no systemic disease, the sprouts can grow and replace the tree. A desired variety can be grafted onto the sprouts to produce more desirable fruit.
Marisa Y. Thompson, PhD, is the Extension Horticulture Specialist, in the Department of Extension Plant Sciences at the New Mexico State University Los Lunas Agricultural Science Center, email: email@example.com, office: 505-865-7340, ext. 113.
For more gardening information, visit the NMSU Extension Horticulture page at Desert Blooms.
Please copy your County Extension Agent and indicate your county of residence when you submit your question!


October 11th is marked each year by the United Nations to highlight and address the needs and challenges girls face, while promoting girls' empowerment and the fulfillment of their human rights.
Recently Canada showed leadership in the area of girls’ education by co-hosting a high-level UN event entitled, “12 Years to Break Barriers and Leave No Girl Behind”.
In his opening remarks, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau highlighted the necessity of accelerated action on girls’ education. “For each Malala that we know, there are thousands of others that we don’t know….We must work with them…. We must give them the ability to be successful,” he urged. The event culminated in the commitment of over 500 stakeholders -- including governments, leading multi-lateral agencies, and civil society organizations -- to take concrete action to dismantle barriers and increase access to education for girls, with a special focus on those who are marginalized. Click here to read the specifics in the joint commitment and call to action.


The saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) was once known to have frequented the waters of southern China and Taiwan, and even today the species is found in the neighboring Philippines islands.
The ancient indigenous tribes of Taiwan are Polynesian and are closely related to tribes of Papua new guinea, Australia and new Zealand with some, even claiming to be descendants of the North American plains Indians. What cannot be disputed is the amazing similarities in aboriginal art and the appreciation of nature.
The oolong Tea Company decided to use aboriginal art based on the Tao Tribe that are situated in the region of Sun Moon Lake. If you ever have the change to visit Taiwan; the Aboriginal Park is one of the best tourist attractions that we have ever visited.
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