Jean and I were looking for something to watch on Wednesday evening and, as is our want, took a browse through the latest films on Top Documentary Films.
There was an intriguing title under the recently added list – People in Motion.
This was how the film was described.
We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, the ocean and the sky.
Today we go about our business, unencumbered by the frontier. Society guides us, it gives us permission to drive on roads, to stop at red lights, and go on green.
But something is not right.
It often feels as if something is missing. As if the life society has allowed isn’t quite enough. We spend so much time planning for the future it seems we’re forgetting how to live in the moment. How to feel deep and profound satisfaction with life.
It was this feeling that led us to watch people in cities, trying to understand what drives them. They typically did the same three things: walk, sit and shop.
People in Motion is a film showcasing the potential people have to move through time and space. The film is shot in true slow motion edited using a composite technique which illustrates stretches of time in an instant.
Now before you watch the film, and I really hope you do, just reflect on our closest animal companion; dogs. As is stated on the home page of Learning from Dogs,
Dogs live in the present – they just are! Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have.
One of the many wonderful ways that dogs enjoy the present is through play.
Rain had raised the flow of water in our creek and earlier on that Wednesday we had given the dogs a run in the rain. Of course, they went immediately to the creek to play in the rushing waters. The top picture shows Sweeny doing just that, Pharaoh equally having fun as below.
The simple joy of playing in the water.
Play is so important for humans as well as dogs.
Now watch the film and be amazed – the music is pretty cool as well.
Published on Dec 31, 2012
Music by…
* Lindsey Stirling:
** songs: Crystallize, Transcendence
* Niklas Aman:
** songs: Stirred Up, Momentum, Up A Storm
* Michael Marantz:
** song: Earth – The Pale Blue Dot
Directed by: Cedric Dahl
Produced by: Bennett Hoffman
Staring: Paul Whitecotton, Brian Orosco, David Agajanian, Lonnie Tisdale, Jacob Siel
Finally, after you have watched the film you will enjoy this interview with film director Cedric Dahl. But watch the film first!!
This beautiful story recently sent to me from Cynthia.
Soldiers in Belarus found a little squirrel and brought it to their Warrant Officer. The squirrel was very weak and close to death. Remarkably, the officer took care of it, feeding it like a baby every four hours.
Now he has left the army and works as a humble taxi driver. But his reward for saving the squirrel is beyond measure, as the following sequence of photographs show so clearly.
Something each and every one of us has to absorb – but without going in to space!
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.“
So said Albert Einstein. As with so many wise men from all times, what gets uttered strikes as such obvious common-sense. But it took a wise person to utter it!
We need a change of consciousness. About the world we live on. This single, fragile, vulnerable rock in space that was featured in last Sunday’s post, Just a small white dot, and in yesterday’s post about Carl Sagan.
Climate Crocks, a ‘must follow’ blogsite for those that are concerned about the state of our planet, recently published a post that revealed how astronauts upon viewing the Planet Earth from Space had a profound Consciousness Change. Take this example;
“I think you start out with this idea of what it’s going to be like…and then when you do finally look at the Earth for the first time…you’re overwhelmed by how much more beautiful it really is, when you see it for real.
It’s just like it’s this dynamic, alive place, ..that you see glowing all the time..”
-Nicole Stott, Shuttle, ISS Astronaut
Or this from Ron Garan;
“When we look down on the Earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet, ..it looks like a living, breathing organism..”
– Ron Garan, Suttle, ISS Astronaut
Wonderfully, that Climate Crocks piece quickly led to a new organisation called Planetary Collective.
Planetary Collective is a group of filmmakers, visual media creatives and thinkers who work with cosmologists, ecologists, and philosophers to explore some of the big questions facing our planet at this time.
Embracing a multidisciplinary, multi-media approach, we brings scientists, philosophers, and researchers together with designers, coders, and creatives to bring new perspectives to audiences around the world in fresh and innovative ways.
It was this group that last December released the short, but incredibly powerful film, Overview. Here it is:
Released 7th December 2012
At the end of 2011, we filmed a short documentary called OVERVIEW about astronauts’ experiences in space, due for release in the last quarter of 2012. The film is both a stand-alone short film and a prelude to CONTINUUM, introducing many of the key ideas expanded upon in the feature documentary.
SYNOPSIS
Astronauts who have seen the Earth from space have often described the ‘overview effect’ as an experience that has transformed their perspective of the planet and mankind’s place upon it, and enabled them to perceive it as our shared home, without boundaries between nations or species.
OVERVIEW is a short film that will explore this perspective through interviews with astronauts who have experienced the overview effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for humanity as a whole, and especially its relevance to how we meet the tremendous challenges facing our planet at this time.
That film release date of the 7th December, 2012 was the 40th anniversary of the most famous photograph of Planet Earth taken on the 7th December, 1972: The Blue Marble.
The Earth seen from Apollo 17.
Original caption: “View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap.
This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is Madagascar. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast.”
The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, at a distance of about 45,000 kilometres (28,000 mi).
The snapshot — taken by astronauts on December 7, 1972, at 5:39 a.m. EST (10:39 UTC) — is one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence.
The image is one of the few to show a fully illuminated Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. To the astronauts, Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble, hence the name.
Back to that Overview film. Slightly confusing is the fact that the Planetary Collective website, where that Overview film is highlighted, is a different one to the associated Overview Institute website, from where one can read this Declaration:
A Critical Time
We live at a critical moment in human history. The challenges of climate change, food, water and energy shortages as well as the increasing disparity between the developed and developing nations are testing our will to unite, while differences in religions, cultures, and politics continue to keep us apart.
The creation of a “global village” through satellite TV and the Internet is still struggling to connect the world into one community. At this critical moment, our greatest need is for a global vision of planetary unity and purpose for humanity as a whole.
And to my mind the greatest need, the ONLY need, for that global vision is to move rapidly beyond our industrial and materialistic way of life to one where we live in harmony with our planet.
To pick up on what Ron Garan was quoted as saying, Planet Earth is a living, breathing organism. If the species man and thousands of other non-human species are to stand a chance of remaining on this living, breathing organism then You, Me and every other person out there, has to have a change of consciousness about the one and only place we live on.
So don’t flick over from those last words to the next thing in your life. Go back and look at the picture of our home, taken from Apollo 17. Make sure that you ask as many as you can to watch the Overview film above.
Finally, you be a person who makes a change in your consciousness. The rest is easy.
Back to dear old Albert E.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.“
How very precious, vulnerable and fragile is this precious place we call home.
Today’s consciousness perambulation is the fault of Mr. P., as I like to call him. I refer to Pendantry as he is on his blog, Wibble.
You see on Sunday he added a comment to my post Just a small, white dot! that included the beautiful and awe-inspiring film made by the late Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot.
Like millions of others, I came to admire Carl Sagan through watching the fabulous, the truly fabulous, television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.(NB. All the episodes are on YouTube, Episode One is at the end of this Post, Ed.) Here’s how WikiPedia opens their reference to Carl.
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.
He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.
He died far too young and was a tragic loss to humanity. The Carl Sagan web portal is here.
That 3:30 minute video Pale Blue Dot has, likewise, been seen by millions. If you or someone you know hasn’t seen it, then you must pause now …
It’s practically impossible to watch that video and not embrace the central message from Mr. Sagan. Here’s the transcript:
Our home from 6 billion kilometres. A very tiny dot against the vastness of space.
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different.
Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Tomorrow, I will stay with the theme of our beautiful planet. Hope you can join me.
Now spoil yourself and watch Episode One of Cosmos.
Does rather serve to remind us of our place in the scheme of things.
This stunning image was taken by the Cassini-Huygens probe. Many of the images taken by NASA are available for download from the DVIDS website, which is where this one was found. (But also do visit the Ciclops website.)
The title of the photograph is:
A View of Earth from Saturn
Although the Earth Observatory typically reserves ”Image of the Day” space for publishing data and images acquired by Earth-observing satellites, we are sometimes so enthralled by the spectacular images acquired by spacecraft observing other parts of the solar system that we want to share these ‘otherworldy’ views with our visitors. And if you are looking for remotely sensed images of the Earth, this view is the most remotely sensed image we have ever published!
This beautiful image of Saturn and its rings looks more like an artist’s creation than a real image, but in fact, the image is a composite (layered image) made from 165 images taken by the wide-angle camera on the Cassini spacecraft over nearly three hours on September 15, 2006.
Scientists created the color in the image by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared, and clear-filter images and then adjusting the final image to resemble natural color. (A clear filter is one that allows in all the wavelengths of light the sensor is capable of detecting.) The bottom image [the one above. Ed.] is a closeup view of the upper left quadrant of the rings, through which Earth is visible in the far, far distance.
On this day, Saturn interceded between the Sun and Cassini, shielding Cassini from the Sun’s glare. As the spacecraft lingered in Saturn’s shadow, it viewed the planet’s rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world. Seen from more than a billion kilometers (almost a billion miles) away, through the ice and dust particles of Saturn’s rings, Earth appears as a tiny, bright dot to the left and slightly behind Saturn.
Although it might appear that Earth is located within Saturn’s outermost rings, that positioning is just an illusion created by the enormous distance between Cassini and Earth. When Cassini took this image, the spacecraft was looking back at Saturn from a distance of about 2.2.million kilometers (about 1.3 million miles). The Sun was millions of additional miles beyond, hidden behind Saturn. On September 15, Earth’s orbit had brought our home planet to a location slightly behind and to the left of the Sun from Cassini’s perspective. The Website of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) provides more detailed information about this image. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency.
Trying to find that faint image of Planet Earth in the above photograph is a challenge, even for those with much younger eyes than mine.
However, with a little bit of jiggery-pokery I was able to crop and enlarge the photograph, see below:
Planet Earth is in the ’10 o’clock’ position in the photograph, about half-way from the centre of the enlarged segment towards the top-left corner of the picture, just outside the outer white ring.
That’s us. All that we have ever been. All that we ever will be. Just that small white dot.
The widely reported story of a dog ‘adopting’ a baby chimpanzee.
(With big thanks to Chris Snuggs for sending me the pictures)
As a quick Google search finds:
Two years ago in a Russian zoo a female chimpanzee for some reason repudiated and abandoned her baby chimpanzee. When one of the employees of the zoo took the little chimpanzee home it never crossed her mind that her dog, a mastiff, would become a mother for the orphaned chimpanzee and treat the baby as her own child.
Judging by the look on her face at times, she is not quite sure why this particular offspring has hands to grab her with!
The unconditional love of a dog.
Fascinating example of the power of upbringing.
What is so wonderful, and amazing, is how ‘mother’ accepts this strange looking and strange smelling creature as it’s own. Think how important smell is to dogs!
Words add nothing to the beauty of this photograph.
You can see the huge difference in body mass between these two. One swipe, one bite and the little chimp would be toast! The dog’s love for the chimp overrides all!
Just beautiful.
Mummy, what’s that on the wall?
Mummy, your feet are so big …. and not at all like mine!
oooOOOooo
Dear Chris, thank you so much for sending me these pictures. It’s a privilege to share them with LfD readers. It reminds us that in this difficult era, with so many challenges facing us, that there’s nothing that can’t be solved with love, compassion and understanding.
Back on the 14th January in a post called Now we are seventeen, I introduced the two miniature horses, Dancer and Grace, that came to be with us. In that post I mentioned,
Ready to leave
Jean is holding Dancer while Grace is waiting by the fence. Our original plans had been to take Dancer’s sister’s foal Allegra, but she was too stressed to leave her mother so soon; she is just six months old. As an interim, we borrowed Grace, Dancer’s last foal, until Allegra is ready to move homes.
Well yesterday Allegra was ready and came over to join Dancer while lovely Grace returned to neighbour Margo. Just wanted to share some pictures from yesterday.
Margo, her arm on Allegra, and her husband, Clarence, holding Allegra’s mother Keepsake. The two horses had come over together so as to offer comfort to young Allegra, now just 7 months old.
Allegra is on the left getting to know her new grounds. On the right is Aunt Chloe who came to spend the night here with Allegra to minimise any separation anxiety.
Close up of Dancer’s nose!
Don’t believe it! Another horse!!
I’m sure Pharaoh is wondering how long it will be before there are more horses than dogs!
Learning from Dogs 