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Posts tagged as “Nature”

Orca smokes a Great White and eats its liver.

December 29, 2011 |

Thoughts

I guess this barroom argument can be put to rest.

Info summarized from wikipedia.

Orcas: between 6 and 8 meters long, weighing in excess of 6 tons (male); between 3 and 5 meters long, weighing between 3 and 4 tons.

Great white sharks: between 4 and 6 meters long, weighing between 0.75 and 1.25 tons.

The orcas have a decent weight advantage if not a real length advantage. But we’re talking about a god damned great white shark here, not some idiot school of herring.

My favorite part of the video is that the orcas just rip the shark’s liver out and let the rest sink. Like a giant, “Fuck you, enormous predatory fish! Mammals for life!”

> Continue reading...Orca smokes a Great White and eats its liver.

Nature by Numbers.

March 30, 2010 |

About Filmmaking and Film & TV

In the past science considered nature random, disorganized, messy. They thought that only human created geometries were perfect, the square, the circle, and other various permutations of lines meeting lines. Then they discovered fractals and realized that nature is, in fact, largely based on math. It’s just that the math was more complicated than they were expecting. Go, nature.

This video is a beautifully animated piece that explores this connection between math and the natural world. Definitely worth a watch. Enjoy.

> Continue reading...Nature by Numbers.

Mannahatta, 1609

September 3, 2009 |

Thoughts

m_proj

Living here in Nueva York for some years, it is easy to forget that this city was a wild place just 400 years ago. I’ve often wondered what it looked like before Europeans landed here in the 17th century. You get a sense of it when driving even a short distance from the city into a place that hasn’t been entirely paved over. Even parts of Staten Island, particularly the southern end, still feel touched by that old wildness.

With that in mind, I found this particularly interesting.

The Mannahatta Project

The Wildlife Conservation Society has attempted to recreate the island of Manhattan as it would have looked just hours prior to the landing of Henry Hudson in 1609. Especially striking is the outline of the island now versus the outline of the island 400 years ago. Landfill has been quite a dramatic force in the reshaping of the land. It’s pretty neat to learn that much of the Upper East Side was swamp land back then. And is still today, just, you know, in a different way.

Click the link to go to the site that features an interactive map of Manhattan. I hope they do Brooklyn next.

> Continue reading...Mannahatta, 1609