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SMALL ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!  

Hey!!

I made a few changes to my setup blog, realy quite small XD

My new profile pick, it's a lil hamster.

i have a some prints made from the gifs at InPrint , if you have one you'd like and don't see it in the selection, just talk to me.

Also I'm on Instagram now!!!

 
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Sacred Geometry  
Sacred Geometry  
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Parcours on Behance  
Parcours on Behance  
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I Like It Wild And M  
I Like It Wild And Mysterious...Always From Micro To Macro Cosmos…  
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bigblueboo: “ unruly  
bigblueboo: “ unruly concavity ”  
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Extra upload today!!This is my first gif made with processing!!!  

Extra upload today!!

This is my first gif made with processing!!!

 
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The Write Questions: Advice From The Wrong Side Of The Lens  

Photo by Rhododendrites (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I am unashamed to admit it: I am terribly proud of my people.

To what "people" am I referring here? To doctors? To scientists? To astronauts and aspiring astronaut-types? I'm surely proud of all those people. Today, I'm referring to another group to which I belong; to something I've done on and off for more than half my life; to one of the most important things I've ever done, as well as one of the most important things that occurs in a truly free and democratic society. I am referring, of course, to the press.

My people - journalists - are amazing. We bust in doors behind which lie nefarious activities that undermine the basic tenets of our civil liberties. We point the spotlight on violations of human rights. We call "foul" when justice isn't being served and, in that sense, are our own sort of justice. Therein lies the agony and the ecstasy of the media: with words, sounds, and images, we convene trials, summon the accused, calls witnesses, and cause judgments to be made. Like an outstanding attorney, an excellent journalist solicits input from relevant experts and arranges concrete evidence in such a way that the jury - our audience - can make an informed decision. In outstanding journalism - not editorial, just plain ol' features about life and the people who live it - there's no need to prosecute or to defend. The facts, well-presented, do that for themselves. The facts, poorly presented or not presented at all, twist and maul the truth and raze our ability as professionals to educate, empower, and vouchsafe civilization.



Photo By Txbeaker [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


These days, both facts and the way in which they are presented are more malleable than ever. When I first got into the field, it wasn't so. Back then, I inked an honest-to-god press. The thing was a behemoth - a giant born from the black depths of global mechanization. You basically had to wrestle it in order to get your paper out. Every word you fed into that thing you thought about. Then you thought about it twice and twice again, because lord knows you didn't want to go more rounds with that infernal machine than was absolutely necessary. My summer at The Otter Valley News and Views is witnessed by the ink particles still embedded deep within the lining of my lungs.

Photography used to follow a similar plodding, dedicated to-the-point-of-cultish course. At The Daily Californian, we photographers rolled our own black-and-white film, ran up and down at sporting events at nearly the same pace as the players, and worshiped the smell of fixer in the morning- or at least pretended to, because what we sweated (and sometimes bled) for mattered. Our shots were a critical part of the process. They provided more than just meaning and context. Photographs printed on paper drew people in: they gave the words our colleagues penned the opportunity to inform readers and transform the world for the better. That was before I graduated from college, before I built something that flew into space, before I ever laid hands on a patient. Long before I ever saved someone's life, through journalism, I was able to have a significant, positive impact on the lives of my fellow human beings. And also: really great calves.

So here I am, 18 years and several degrees later, dealing first-hand with journalism from the far side of the lens. A lot has changed. For one, the cameras are now in my face, not hanging about my neck as they ought to be. The questions will be coming my way. In 48 hours, my exit from "Mars" will be attended by 55 members of the media (and my brother, who has promised to heckle me "like a reporter"). On either side of me will be five very nice, very smart, very tired innocent bystanders: my crewmates, who have born a ceaseless onslaught of media for the last 12 months with an impressive amount of grace.

In return for our patience, we've had some outstanding coverage. My most sincere thanks to VICE, The History Channel, The Surge, BBC Stargazer, The University of Rhode Island, The British Journal of Medicine, Radio New Zealand, Voices from L5 and many others for your thoughtful, thorough, and accurate pieces. We've also had our share of "What the heck is this? We don't play xBox! No one has actually been chosen to go to Mars! As for sending robots ahead of time to build our shelters for us... it's a cool idea, but not, as some people would have you think, "a done deal." Those last two informational travesties resulted from what increasingly passes for reporting: taking a story written by someone else, distilling it (badly), sprinkling it with Googled facts, and passing it off as news.*

Here we arrive at something else that's changed since that fateful day when I talked my way into a job shooting mayoral candidates, house-fires, extra softball innings, and other natural disasters for a living: As much good journalism as there is (more than ever, really), really bad media abounds.

What's the disparity between good journalism and...not? Here's my view: a journalist gathers and contextualizes information such that readers can imbue it with social relevance and personal meaning. Making up facts, distilling other peoples' articles without adding value, and lifting quotes from blogs posts rather than conducting interviews is not journalism. It takes up space in news feeds, but it isn't news. Predigested and filling, it lacks mentally nutritional value while giving readers a serious case of brain gas.

True, there's always been fluff out there. Also true: like the scarlet letter, sensationalism used to be highly visible from a distance (and for the same reason). Clearly marked by cheap newsprint yellowing before it even hit the stands or by super-glossy covers with garish titles, these tabloids practically glowed when held against a dark background. If you wanted news, you had to pluck off your doorstep or out of a metal box at a busy intersection.

These days, good journalists and bad media are jammed into the same space. No books, no covers: just the great equalizer of pixels on a screen. In the digital age, the friendly labeling we once counted on to help us discriminate between medicine and poison - between information and aggrandizement - has faded away. A text from your mother and a text from a scammer claiming that your mother is in the hospital and needs $10,000 for a procedure appear exactly the same way on your phone's LCD. An opinion piece written on an iPad on the way home from work may look as, or more, legitimate than a Pulitzer-winning piece of investigative reporting. On the surface, these two often appear the same.

That's one major change since I got into this business in 1996. The other is that properly trained, properly-paid journalists are vastly outnumbered by people under deadline to write click-bait.

So: what's a simulated astronaut to do?

Fundamentally, my job, whether I'm an astronaut or a reporter or a doctor, is to make things work: to take the limited resources at hand and deliver a victory for the home team. Ship me anywhere in the 'verse. Make the delay 20 minutes, 200 hours, or 40 days and 40 nights. Whatever the apparent barriers, I won't abandon my people - many of whom are or could be good writers who aren't given the time or training to make their product what it rightfully should be. I can't change that right now, but I can help even the odds stacked against us all by expediency, mediocrity, and inertia.

On 8/28 you will be able to ask us any question in the world. To help even the odds, here's a list of questions we've already answered many, many times:

• What have you learned?
• 
  
• What do you miss?
• 
  
• What did you eat?
• 
  
• Have you seen The Martian?
• 
  
• How did it feel to not have the Sun and the wind in your face for a year?
• 
  
• What's the first thing you're going to do?
• 
  
• What's been the biggest challenge about being on Mars?
• 
  
• Do you guys argue? How do you deal with conflict?
• 
  
• What do you do if someone gets sick?
• 
  
• Have there been any disasters during the mission?
• 
  
• Do you really want to go to Mars?
• 
  
• Did this mission - do any simulations - help pave the way for the human exploration of Mars?
• 
  
• How is this simulation different from Mars?
• 
  
• How did your families react to your decision to go into isolation?
• 
  
• Did you always want to be an astronaut?
• 
  
• Have you ever felt like quitting?
• 
  
• What will be the hardest part about coming back to Earth?
• 
  
• Would you do it again?
• 
  
• Are any of you signed up for the one-way trip?

We're very glad that people are curious enough about our mission to ask any question that comes to mind. At the same time, anyone locked in a box with no direct access to the outside world, no fresh food except the small amount that they can grow in whatever space they aren't sleeping on, and only five flatmates can easily imagine what they are going to miss: more friends, family, sunshine, wind, flowers, pineapple, sushi, long walks in the woods, and tailgating at Cal games (go Bears!). If "What do you miss?" was a mystery, thanks to the power of Reddit, six crew blogs, and countless news articles, that mystery has been solved.

To my fellow journalists out there: there are much better questions to be asked and answered. For the record, the questions that were truly mysterious until I arrived on "Mars" and have never/rarely been asked by the media are:

1. What turned out to be replaceable? What foods were replaceable, or even better/easier to make? What new favorite food took the place of the old one that you can't have?
   
   
2. You can't talk directly to your family - how well do the other things that you can do compensate for that? And how well does your new family, your crew, compensate for it?
   
   
3. While nothing can replace sunshine and wind, how well do the new adventures that you get to have compensate for their temporary loss? How well does the new filter between you and the world function to give you a sense of peace and the ability to accomplish things that you would struggle to accomplish otherwise, with the world knocking at your door?
   
   
4. Now that you have been there for a year, what message do you have for the people of Earth about their planet?
   
   
5. What message do you have for the folks designing the human Mars missions?
   
   
6. Name one total disaster - suits, radios, experiments, food recipes - and how, if you were able to salvage something from it, you did.
   
   
7. Name an epic win and how you accomplished it.
   
   
8. How is human society going to have to change to survive and thrive on Mars?
   
   
9. What do you expect will be extremely challenging for you when you return to Earth and what's your plan for overcoming that challenge?
   
   
10. What do you think will be the thing that you remember most - the dreaded memory and the cherished memory?
    
    
11. What's the weakness that could have torn this mission apart? What's the strength, or strengths, that saved it?
    
    
12. Did you find all the media attention flattering or annoying? How weird is it to be a journalist inside a Mars mission?
    
    
13. Did any of you get sick or get hurt? If that had happened on Mars would you have been alright?
    
    
14. Do you think that six people will be enough - or too many?
    
    
15. Did you get enough support from the people of Earth? What else could we have done to help this mission?
    
    
16. Do you plan to drive right away, or will you be re-integrating back into the operation of heavy machinery slowly?
    
    
17. What advice do you have for choosing the next crew?
    
    
18. Would you have tried to vote from space? How do you think that future Mars crews should handle the political process?
    
    
19. We talk a lot about the science of these missions - what the role of art, music, entertainment during these long voyages?
    
    
20. In a place where there's no money and nothing to buy, what do you value?

When we ask the right questions, we get people thinking, challenging assumptions, and pushing the boundaries of what ought to come next. These are free from me to you. Go to!

We Martians are ready to meet the press. We've been getting ready all year. All that we ask in return for the time that we're giving you the minute we hit dirt - I have to let you photograph me before I can so much as hug my husband - is this: be journalists. Be the truth-advocates who held this country together for hundreds of years. Adventurers like us are always good for a story. We scientists have been keeping things interesting for the last few centuries. Astronauts - bright and shiny! - are the new kids on the block when it comes to popular coverage, and deservedly so. We've faced dangers and made sacrifices for twelve long months, and we thank you for your attention. So please, come one and come all to the show. And when you come, bring the right questions. When the hatch opens and we finally present ourselves to you, that's the signal: It's YOUR turn to be the hero. To write our way into the future. To find the facts, solicit the opinions, and frame the stories that will make the last year - our lives in service to science and Earth and all of humankind - meaningful. To make the fact that I waited 366 days PLUS 10 minutes to hug my husband worthwhile. So let's do this, people. We scienced the heck out of this. Now, let's write the heck out of this.

You ask. We'll answer. Make me proud.


Courtesy of Wikimedia commons, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=197374

*Corrections were requested to all of these articles.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
science  

%feed  
http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fsheyna-e-gifford-md-ma-ms%2Fthe-write-questions-advic_b_11727068.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dscience%26ir%3DScience&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
The Write Questions: Advice From The Wrong Side Of The Lens  

Photo by Rhododendrites (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I am unashamed to admit it: I am terribly proud of my people.

To what "people" am I referring here? To doctors? To scientists? To astronauts and aspiring astronaut-types? I'm surely proud of all those people. Today, I'm referring to another group to which I belong; to something I've done on and off for more than half my life; to one of the most important things I've ever done, as well as one of the most important things that occurs in a truly free and democratic society. I am referring, of course, to the press.

My people - journalists - are amazing. We bust in doors behind which lie nefarious activities that undermine the basic tenets of our civil liberties. We point the spotlight on violations of human rights. We call "foul" when justice isn't being served and, in that sense, are our own sort of justice. Therein lies the agony and the ecstasy of the media: with words, sounds, and images, we convene trials, summon the accused, calls witnesses, and cause judgments to be made. Like an outstanding attorney, an excellent journalist solicits input from relevant experts and arranges concrete evidence in such a way that the jury - our audience - can make an informed decision. In outstanding journalism - not editorial, just plain ol' features about life and the people who live it - there's no need to prosecute or to defend. The facts, well-presented, do that for themselves. The facts, poorly presented or not presented at all, twist and maul the truth and raze our ability as professionals to educate, empower, and vouchsafe civilization.



Photo By Txbeaker [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


These days, both facts and the way in which they are presented are more malleable than ever. When I first got into the field, it wasn't so. Back then, I inked an honest-to-god press. The thing was a behemoth - a giant born from the black depths of global mechanization. You basically had to wrestle it in order to get your paper out. Every word you fed into that thing you thought about. Then you thought about it twice and twice again, because lord knows you didn't want to go more rounds with that infernal machine than was absolutely necessary. My summer at The Otter Valley News and Views is witnessed by the ink particles still embedded deep within the lining of my lungs.

Photography used to follow a similar plodding, dedicated to-the-point-of-cultish course. At The Daily Californian, we photographers rolled our own black-and-white film, ran up and down at sporting events at nearly the same pace as the players, and worshiped the smell of fixer in the morning- or at least pretended to, because what we sweated (and sometimes bled) for mattered. Our shots were a critical part of the process. They provided more than just meaning and context. Photographs printed on paper drew people in: they gave the words our colleagues penned the opportunity to inform readers and transform the world for the better. That was before I graduated from college, before I built something that flew into space, before I ever laid hands on a patient. Long before I ever saved someone's life, through journalism, I was able to have a significant, positive impact on the lives of my fellow human beings. And also: really great calves.

So here I am, 18 years and several degrees later, dealing first-hand with journalism from the far side of the lens. A lot has changed. For one, the cameras are now in my face, not hanging about my neck as they ought to be. The questions will be coming my way. In 48 hours, my exit from "Mars" will be attended by 55 members of the media (and my brother, who has promised to heckle me "like a reporter"). On either side of me will be five very nice, very smart, very tired innocent bystanders: my crewmates, who have born a ceaseless onslaught of media for the last 12 months with an impressive amount of grace.

In return for our patience, we've had some outstanding coverage. My most sincere thanks to VICE, The History Channel, The Surge, BBC Stargazer, The University of Rhode Island, The British Journal of Medicine, Radio New Zealand, Voices from L5 and many others for your thoughtful, thorough, and accurate pieces. We've also had our share of "What the heck is this? We don't play xBox! No one has actually been chosen to go to Mars! As for sending robots ahead of time to build our shelters for us... it's a cool idea, but not, as some people would have you think, "a done deal." Those last two informational travesties resulted from what increasingly passes for reporting: taking a story written by someone else, distilling it (badly), sprinkling it with Googled facts, and passing it off as news.*

Here we arrive at something else that's changed since that fateful day when I talked my way into a job shooting mayoral candidates, house-fires, extra softball innings, and other natural disasters for a living: As much good journalism as there is (more than ever, really), really bad media abounds.

What's the disparity between good journalism and...not? Here's my view: a journalist gathers and contextualizes information such that readers can imbue it with social relevance and personal meaning. Making up facts, distilling other peoples' articles without adding value, and lifting quotes from blogs posts rather than conducting interviews is not journalism. It takes up space in news feeds, but it isn't news. Predigested and filling, it lacks mentally nutritional value while giving readers a serious case of brain gas.

True, there's always been fluff out there. Also true: like the scarlet letter, sensationalism used to be highly visible from a distance (and for the same reason). Clearly marked by cheap newsprint yellowing before it even hit the stands or by super-glossy covers with garish titles, these tabloids practically glowed when held against a dark background. If you wanted news, you had to pluck off your doorstep or out of a metal box at a busy intersection.

These days, good journalists and bad media are jammed into the same space. No books, no covers: just the great equalizer of pixels on a screen. In the digital age, the friendly labeling we once counted on to help us discriminate between medicine and poison - between information and aggrandizement - has faded away. A text from your mother and a text from a scammer claiming that your mother is in the hospital and needs $10,000 for a procedure appear exactly the same way on your phone's LCD. An opinion piece written on an iPad on the way home from work may look as, or more, legitimate than a Pulitzer-winning piece of investigative reporting. On the surface, these two often appear the same.

That's one major change since I got into this business in 1996. The other is that properly trained, properly-paid journalists are vastly outnumbered by people under deadline to write click-bait.

So: what's a simulated astronaut to do?

Fundamentally, my job, whether I'm an astronaut or a reporter or a doctor, is to make things work: to take the limited resources at hand and deliver a victory for the home team. Ship me anywhere in the 'verse. Make the delay 20 minutes, 200 hours, or 40 days and 40 nights. Whatever the apparent barriers, I won't abandon my people - many of whom are or could be good writers who aren't given the time or training to make their product what it rightfully should be. I can't change that right now, but I can help even the odds stacked against us all by expediency, mediocrity, and inertia.

On 8/28 you will be able to ask us any question in the world. To help even the odds, here's a list of questions we've already answered many, many times:

• What have you learned?
• 
  
• What do you miss?
• 
  
• What did you eat?
• 
  
• Have you seen The Martian?
• 
  
• How did it feel to not have the Sun and the wind in your face for a year?
• 
  
• What's the first thing you're going to do?
• 
  
• What's been the biggest challenge about being on Mars?
• 
  
• Do you guys argue? How do you deal with conflict?
• 
  
• What do you do if someone gets sick?
• 
  
• Have there been any disasters during the mission?
• 
  
• Do you really want to go to Mars?
• 
  
• Did this mission - do any simulations - help pave the way for the human exploration of Mars?
• 
  
• How is this simulation different from Mars?
• 
  
• How did your families react to your decision to go into isolation?
• 
  
• Did you always want to be an astronaut?
• 
  
• Have you ever felt like quitting?
• 
  
• What will be the hardest part about coming back to Earth?
• 
  
• Would you do it again?
• 
  
• Are any of you signed up for the one-way trip?

We're very glad that people are curious enough about our mission to ask any question that comes to mind. At the same time, anyone locked in a box with no direct access to the outside world, no fresh food except the small amount that they can grow in whatever space they aren't sleeping on, and only five flatmates can easily imagine what they are going to miss: more friends, family, sunshine, wind, flowers, pineapple, sushi, long walks in the woods, and tailgating at Cal games (go Bears!). If "What do you miss?" was a mystery, thanks to the power of Reddit, six crew blogs, and countless news articles, that mystery has been solved.

To my fellow journalists out there: there are much better questions to be asked and answered. For the record, the questions that were truly mysterious until I arrived on "Mars" and have never/rarely been asked by the media are:

1. What turned out to be replaceable? What foods were replaceable, or even better/easier to make? What new favorite food took the place of the old one that you can't have?
   
   
2. You can't talk directly to your family - how well do the other things that you can do compensate for that? And how well does your new family, your crew, compensate for it?
   
   
3. While nothing can replace sunshine and wind, how well do the new adventures that you get to have compensate for their temporary loss? How well does the new filter between you and the world function to give you a sense of peace and the ability to accomplish things that you would struggle to accomplish otherwise, with the world knocking at your door?
   
   
4. Now that you have been there for a year, what message do you have for the people of Earth about their planet?
   
   
5. What message do you have for the folks designing the human Mars missions?
   
   
6. Name one total disaster - suits, radios, experiments, food recipes - and how, if you were able to salvage something from it, you did.
   
   
7. Name an epic win and how you accomplished it.
   
   
8. How is human society going to have to change to survive and thrive on Mars?
   
   
9. What do you expect will be extremely challenging for you when you return to Earth and what's your plan for overcoming that challenge?
   
   
10. What do you think will be the thing that you remember most - the dreaded memory and the cherished memory?
    
    
11. What's the weakness that could have torn this mission apart? What's the strength, or strengths, that saved it?
    
    
12. Did you find all the media attention flattering or annoying? How weird is it to be a journalist inside a Mars mission?
    
    
13. Did any of you get sick or get hurt? If that had happened on Mars would you have been alright?
    
    
14. Do you think that six people will be enough - or too many?
    
    
15. Did you get enough support from the people of Earth? What else could we have done to help this mission?
    
    
16. Do you plan to drive right away, or will you be re-integrating back into the operation of heavy machinery slowly?
    
    
17. What advice do you have for choosing the next crew?
    
    
18. Would you have tried to vote from space? How do you think that future Mars crews should handle the political process?
    
    
19. We talk a lot about the science of these missions - what the role of art, music, entertainment during these long voyages?
    
    
20. In a place where there's no money and nothing to buy, what do you value?

When we ask the right questions, we get people thinking, challenging assumptions, and pushing the boundaries of what ought to come next. These are free from me to you. Go to!

We Martians are ready to meet the press. We've been getting ready all year. All that we ask in return for the time that we're giving you the minute we hit dirt - I have to let you photograph me before I can so much as hug my husband - is this: be journalists. Be the truth-advocates who held this country together for hundreds of years. Adventurers like us are always good for a story. We scientists have been keeping things interesting for the last few centuries. Astronauts - bright and shiny! - are the new kids on the block when it comes to popular coverage, and deservedly so. We've faced dangers and made sacrifices for twelve long months, and we thank you for your attention. So please, come one and come all to the show. And when you come, bring the right questions. When the hatch opens and we finally present ourselves to you, that's the signal: It's YOUR turn to be the hero. To write our way into the future. To find the facts, solicit the opinions, and frame the stories that will make the last year - our lives in service to science and Earth and all of humankind - meaningful. To make the fact that I waited 366 days PLUS 10 minutes to hug my husband worthwhile. So let's do this, people. We scienced the heck out of this. Now, let's write the heck out of this.

You ask. We'll answer. Make me proud.


Courtesy of Wikimedia commons, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=197374

*Corrections were requested to all of these articles.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Obama's Hawaiian Marine Preserve: Massive Potential, Monumental Challenges  
By Char Miller, Pomona College

The endangered Hawaiian monk seal is one of the 7,000 species that gained a measure of protection.U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, CC BY

President Obama's environmental record just went big. On August 26, he quadrupled the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the center of the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Hawaii. Whatever other conservation actions he takes in his final months in office, Papahānaumokuākea will be hard to top.

The new monument is also outsized in the interrelated issues that it will address - and generate. In Papahānaumokuākea, biology, politics and policy converge and collide in revelatory ways.

For those of us who study the intersection of environmental history, policy and politics on sea and land as I do, it's clear the creation of this gigantic marine monument is a huge step forward for conservation and for helping ecosystems adapt to a changing climate.

But it also poses such significant management, budgetary and political challenges that I fear Papahānaumokuākea will complicate, if not submarine, President Obama's ambitious environmental agenda.

Human and natural challenges

To understand the challenges Papahānaumokuākea will pose, start with the site's remoteness - it is a far remove even from the main Hawaiian Islands, never mind the West Coast. Add, then, its vastness: President Obama added more than 440,000 square miles to boost the already designated monument to a staggering 582,578 square miles. Note: These are square miles, not acres. So gigantic is this national monument that it is larger than all the U.S. national parks and national forests combined; it's not much smaller than Alaska.

The conservation mission of Papahānaumokuākea, which is now the largest blue reserve on this blue planet, is also a tall order. Significantly, it prohibits fishing and other resource exploitation so as to protect such endangered species as the short-tailed albatross and the remaining population of Hawaiian monk seals, as well as the long-living black coral (some of which are estimated to be 4,000 years old). So little of its flora and fauna have been studied that it is highly likely that the 7,000 species known to inhabit the region are but a fraction of those actually there.

Finally, the national monument comes with a social justice commitment: The state's lead indigenous rights agency, the Department of Hawaiian Affairs, will help supervise archaeological and sacred sites, an innovative co-management initiative. By any calculation, Papahānaumokuākea is astonishing.

But it precisely the national monument's massive proportions that make its effective management so daunting.

Consider that the first generation of forest rangers on the U.S. national forests had to control only one million acres in the remote western mountains, and yet understandably they were baffled how they and their horses could steward their new domain. Imagine their modern counterparts trying to survey a waterscape 100 times that extent, even with airplanes and satellites; Papahānaumokuākea dwarfs our faith in management by technology.

Now add budgetary constraints to the vastness of Papahānaumokuākea: The National Park Service's funding has taken a hit recently at the same time that the number of properties it supervises has mushroomed, thanks to President Obama's rapid-fire creation of 26 new national monuments (with even more anticipated).

I understand why the chief executive is moving with dispatch (a mash-up of legacy building and opportunity knocks). But I worry that the speed with which these sites have been designated, and their disparate fiscal demands, has outstripped the executive branch's capacity to underwrite them. My worry is magnified given the strong opposition in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to the president's ready use of the Antiquities Act.

Papahānaumokuākea will be a major test of the federal government's stewardship, then, not least because in the run-up to its expansion the National Park Service held a series of raucous public meetings in which the industrial and longline fishing industry, along with native organizations, opposed the designation.

Preservation of marine life, they argued, is in direct competition with their long history of harvesting food from these very waters. How the National Park Service manages these fraught human dynamics will be every bit as critical as its stewardship of the marinescape's threatened biodiversity.

Building on Bush's legacy

At the same time, I am buoyed by the national monument's oddly bipartisan political history: It owes existence to two very different presidents, one whose administration downplayed emerging climate change science, the other who has been at the forefront of world leaders responding to the threats climate change poses.

In 2006, after a White House screening of Jacques-Michel Cousteau's documentary "Voyage to Kure," which details human damage to the islands' ecosystems, President George W. Bush was moved to action. Using the 1906 Antiquities Act, he set aside Papahānaumokuākea - the first of four oceanic parks he would create in the Pacific. Time magazine dubbed this collection of sites Bush's last acts of "greenness," while a legion of environmental critics suggested they were his first and last; no president had used the Antiquities Act less than Bush did.

Moreover, given how far away these sites were from the continental U.S., their very isolation dampened any controversy. Still, as Time magazine noted, these "marine monuments will mean that President Bush - perhaps the least environmental president in U.S. history - will have protected more of the ocean than anyone else in the world."

President Obama has blown that claim out of the water. But he did so in a more calculated, less cathartic manner. As part of his 2009 commitment to address climate change, his administration has sought projects that would enhance landscape resilience to the effects of climate change.

In 2014, Obama added roughly 300,000 square miles to the Bush-inaugurated Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (now totaling 490,343 square miles), a stretch of remote Pacific islands south and west of Hawaii. When he did so, he justified its expansion as a way to strengthen Pacific ecosystems. The same rationale was deployed in support of Papahānaumokuākea National Monument.

These two mega monuments, when combined with the 126 other (and smaller) U.S. marine sanctuaries, now account for about 26 percent of the nation's waters, meaning that collectively they are giving oceanic species a fighting chance to survive as the climate-charged seas warm and rise. They also make the president's latest action in the Pacific more than a grand gesture. It just might be a planetary life preserver.

Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis, Pomona College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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A Science-Backed Guide to Taking Truly Restful Breaks    

When deadlines are looming, the phone keeps ringing, and your inbox is overflowing, the idea of taking a break seems faintly ludicrous. The only option, you tell yourself, is just to plough on. Understandable, but shortsighted you'll end up paying a heavy price in the long term.

Just as you need to refuel your car and recharge the batteries in your cell phone, it's important to give yourself the chance to recoup your energy levels throughout the workday. In fact, the more demanding your day, and the less time you feel like you have to take any breaks, the more crucial it is that you make sure you do take regular breaks to prevent yourself from becoming exhausted.

But not just any kind of break will do. Psychologists and business scholars have recently started studying the most effective ways to relax during a workday  they call them “micro breaks” and their latest findings point to some simple rules of thumb to sustain and optimize your energy levels through a grueling nine to five. We've crunched the data into the following three-step process to reach peak restfulness.   

Step 1: Fully switch off

It's extremely tempting, especially when we're tired, to spend breaks doing things that are convenient, but aren't truly restful. This might be internet shopping, browsing the latest news, or skimming an industry magazine. However, studies show that brief work breaks are only genuinely rejuvenating when they give you the chance to fully switch off. By contrast, any kind of activity that involves willpower or concentration, even if it's not in a work context, is only going to add to your fatigue levels.

Consider a study published this year by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University that involved nearly a hundred Korean office workers keeping a diary for ten work days, in which they noted how much work pressure they had after lunch and what they did during any work breaks. Each participant ultimately noted how fatigued they felt at the end of the day. The researchers coded the work break activities as relaxing (such as daydreaming or stretching), as nutrition-based (grabbing a coffee), social (chatting with colleagues), or cognitive (reading newspapers or checking emails).

As you'd expect, feeling that work demands were more intense around lunch time went hand in hand with feeling more end-of-day fatigue. Crucially, the right kind of break provided a protective buffer against this link between work demands and fatigue. Which kind of break was this? Only relaxation and social break activities had any benefit. Cognitive activities during work breaks actually made fatigue worse, likely because reading websites or checking emails taxes many of the same mental processes that we use when we're working.

Another related study, published this year by a pair of researchers at Ajou University in South Korea and the Korea Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences, found that workers who spent their lunch break using their smart phone, as opposed to chatting with friends, felt like they'd enjoyed as much distraction from work as the sociable folk, but they actually ended up feeling more emotionally exhausted in the afternoon.

There's a popular theory in psychology that says our concentration and willpower levels are like fuel in a car  the more you use them in one activity, the less you have left over for other tasks. The theory has recently come under criticism for being overly simplistic, but if nothing else, it provides a useful analogy to make sense of the new research findings on workday breaks: As your energy reserves get gradually depleted through the day, you're only going to allow these reserves to replenish if you genuinely relax in your break times.

Step 2: Take short breaks early and often

A key insight from the research is that it makes a difference when you take breaks. Most of us feel more energetic in the morning than in the afternoon, and it can be tempting to wait until we're flagging later in the day before allowing ourselves a short break. However, findings suggest that we actually respond better to breaks in the morning  it seems you need to have some fuel in the tank to benefit from a re-fill.

This was one of the main findings to come out of a study of 95 employees at Baylor University across five days, in which they filled out brief surveys about how they were feeling after each break they took. Breaks taken in the morning were much more beneficial, in terms of the improvements in how the workers said they felt afterwards physically and mentally.

A related detail from this study was that if you take frequent breaks, then they don't need to be as long to be beneficial  a couple of minutes might be enough. On the other hand, if you deprive yourself of many breaks, then when you do take one, it's going to be need to be longer to have any beneficial effect.

Of course, when you're embroiled in a complicated creative project, the idea of breaking off for 30 minutes or an hour can seem unappealing and impractical and so you end up wading on, meaning your performance is likely to suffer. Crucially, if you remember and have the self-discipline to take breaks early and often, you won't be faced with this dilemma later in the day  you will be less fatigued, and any breaks you take at this later juncture needn't be as long and disruptive.

Step 3: Get out of the office

For creatives who work in a large office building, it's easy to find yourself spending whole days indoors  you might take breaks to the water cooler or the staff canteen, but nothing beats getting outside and away from the work environment. One problem with staying in the office, is that even if you take a decent lunch break and chat with colleagues, there's still that pressure to maintain a good impression and you often end up talking shop.

When researchers led by John P. Trougakos at the University of Toronto recently studied the effect of different lunch break activities among nearly a hundred university workers, they found that staff who socialized at lunch or did any work-related activities at lunch were rated as more fatigued by their colleagues at the end of the day. This was especially the case if the socializing was imposed by management  something to bear in mind for bosses who try too hard to foster camaraderie in the work place.

If you can get outside, even if it's just a five minute walk around the block, you potentially depending on where you're located also get to benefit from a rejuvenating dose of nature. Countless studies have shown how a green environment gives us a mental recharge, and what's really encouraging is that recent work has shown that this doesn't have to be a tropical rainforest. A modest urban park is all it takes. 

Coda

There's a work zeitgeist today that says you have to be constantly busy to succeed. If you've got time to go for a short walk, you're obviously not consumed by drive and ambition, so the mistaken ethos goes. The psychological reality is that your mental and physical reserves are limited and it is only by taking frequent short breaks of a truly restful nature that you will fulfil your true potential.

A final thought  you might have the view that you'll push yourself relentlessly during the day, squeezing every minute for what it's worth, and then completely flake out after dark. This strategy of extremes might work for a robot, but not a human. Psychology research from the University of Konstanz in German and Portland State University shows that over-exhaustion at the end of the day makes it even more difficult to recuperate after work hours. In other words allowing yourself proper breaks during the day will make your out-of-hours recovery more effective, ultimately boosting your productivity and creativity in the weeks and months ahead.

 
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n-lite: “ ミスタークール ”  
n-lite: “ ミスタークール ”  
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366As i sayd, I'm gonna keep going :)  

366

As i sayd, I'm gonna keep going :)

 
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It's been a full year!  

Hey, We've reached the 365th gif!!!! A full year of this!

When i started i didnt relly expect i'd last this long; this was just a bit of a crazy idea, just so I'd start to do something, i honestly wasn't really expecting to go for more than one maybe 2 months but you guys started to like my work, and that keept me going. And for that i must say, Thank you.

So, the question of the moment! What now?

So, When i started this a year seemd like a crazy amount of time to do, but now that i'm here… I don't think i'm done yet. There are still things i want to try, and goals I haven't reached. And I wanna keep going, so I'm gonna :)

And here's an extra something,

I've opened up a store with some prints made from the gifs's i've made. These are soome that I thought worked well as still images, I want to give you guys the oportunity to acctualy have some of these gifs, as actual objects.

Inprint

 
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4 days to go! What are you going to do?????  

I'm gonna keep going. 

This project started out as a way for me to learn how to use new software and create new things, and it's gonna keep going in that same direction. 

I don't think I'm done with this project.

So, here's what you can expect out of me and this blog, 3d stuff, Iv'e been postponing this because… well… laziness. Generative art, I'm gonna get a massive amount of tea herbs so the massive headache I'm gonna get, doesn't seem so bad, when I try and do some coding stuff.

I am preparing a small surprise for you guys, hopefully you'll like the idea.

 
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My contribution to t  
My contribution to the 9 squares project, checkout the full panel…  
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IT'S ALMOST THERE  

Hey!!

hum… today i posted the 356 gif… it's been almost a year, and the 365th gif is almost here…

Still not sure if i should keep going after reaching this goal… its been the whole thing, a year of gifs…

 
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Eighty three - Logo animation [gif]  
 
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La Flor de La Vida…  
La Flor de La Vida… la estructura de todo lo creado.  
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Ever thought about posting a video on how you make some of these amazing gifs? What software do you use?  

Hey! Sorry it took so long to answer, you made me think… a lot :)

I've thought about doing something like that, i just dont feel like i've got enough to share atm. For the most part I use After Effects, but i want to mess around with 3D a bit.

 
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colores #animatedgi  
colores #animatedgif  
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Scroll it™  
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The Wonder Garden —  
The Wonder Garden — angulargeometry: T1000.  
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Let me get me - Logo animation [gif]  

Hey there!
I've made logo animation for service called "Let me get me" which helps you to get best proposal in shops around you.

 
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ПЛАВНИК  
ПЛАВНИК  
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Stay High  
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Stay High  
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DMT  
DMT  
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Untime - Logo Animation [gif]  

Hey guys!

We've made rebranding couple weeks ago and currently we're working on other assets of our identity.
Here is our new animated logo and I'm really excited to share it with you.

You can find some design processes here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/38748657/Untime-Rebranding

 
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its worth the wait :)  

^^this person :)

 
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I Lik It Nice And Ma  
I Lik It Nice And Magical...Always From Micro To Macro Cosmos !... samissomarspace.w...  
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Sacred Geometry Torus | Tumblr  
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http://borrachas.tumblr.com/post/146564911229  
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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/147563325270048530/  
Pink Floyd The Wall  
Pink Floyd The Wall  
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