remko caprio


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Help Me To Raise Um

Helmut stood on the navigation deck of the cargo freighter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and peered out at the horizon and the vast surface of the ocean that was all there was to be seen. His wrinkled skin had darkened from months of salty wind and sun, obfuscating the blue lines of the tattoo on his right shoulder depicting an anchor. Cumulus clouds drifted by in the sky above and sank behind the horizon in the distance. Several illuminated spots on the dark water surface reflected the openings in the cloudy heaven and beams of sun light were clearly visible falling through them. Helmut stared at the endless number of crests that formed on the waves. His attention was caught by a sudden black movement on the surface. The constant change in surface pattern interrupted the trance of Helmut’s thoughts induced by the endless sight of repetitive patterns of waves, crests, that rose and fell, disappearing in the mass of water again. Every now and then, he thought he saw a dolphin jump playfully out of the water, or the vague shower of vapor of a whale’s exhalation sprout into the air, but then again he thought he had mistaken himself. As a sailor in the German navy Helmut had sailed the world for four years, from 1954 to 1958. Ever since he had not been back to the sea and had lived on a farm in Westfalen. He enjoyed listening to songs from his favorite shanty choirs and retold adventures with his comrades from the navy. When he retired last year, his children had offered him a ticket around the world on the Rickmers Singapore. But his memories had betrayed him. Even on board this German ship from the most prestigious German shipping company no body spoke German, and no sailor played the accordion to sing a shanty like they used to. For months, all day Helmut stood here in the sun, on the navigation deck, and stared into the distance.

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Estuaries

Chapter 7, Estuaries, in: Introduction to the Biology of Marine Life (9th Edition)

The Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay, Great South Bay, Tampa Bay, Puget Sound, and the Mississippi River Delta, the Hudson River Bay, Columbia River and Willapa Bay in Oregon, are among 100 bodies of water designated as estuaries in the US. Over 1/3 of the US population lives within the drainage basins of these estuaries.

Types of estuaries:
a. Coastal plan estuaries;
b. Bar built estuaries;
c. Coastal lagoons;
d. Deltas;
e. Tectonic estuaries;
f. Fjords.

Because of the patterns of freshwater and seawater mixing, there is an inward flow of nutrient rich seawater along the bottom of th estuary and a net outward flow at the surface, creating an estuarine upwelling. The time necessary for the total volume of water in an estuary to be replaced is called the flushing time.

The body fluids of osmotic conformers fluctuate to remain isotonic with the water. Most estuarine animals are stenohaline, tolerating exposure only to limited salinity ranges. A few species are euryhaline, capable of withstanding a wide range of salinity. (more…)

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The Death of Literature
Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.

Der Zauberberg (1982)
An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).

Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature. Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.

Solve Puzzles for Science - Fold.it
Solve puzzles for science with Fold.it. Crowd-sourcing scientific problems.

The Master and Margarita - Russia TV
The Master and Margarita – Russia TV Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1 This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...

Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Eternity, Coined the Term 'Fractal'
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85 Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

Comparative Democracy
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...

The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.

Litarary Word Comparison
Introduction This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts. Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...