The open Southern Ocean is 8 million square miles of nutrient. rich water, fed by the most Vigorous upwelling currents in the world, with temperatures no colder and sunlight no fainter than near the coast, but for lack of iron the phytoplankton do not bloom. Yet as Martin soon found out, that was not always true in the past. Not long before Martin had gotten interested in the subject, French and Russian researchers had extracted a two-kilometre-deep core from the Antarctic ice a frozen record of Earth’s atmosphere through the last ice age and beyond. That core showed, as had previous ice cores, that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere had been much lower at the peak of the last glaciation, 18,000 years ago: only 200 parts per million, compared with 280 parts per million in the preindustrial nineteenth century and 360 parts per million today. At the same time, though, the amount of dust falling onto Antarctica was between 10 and 20 times greater. The world was drier during the ice age, with vast tropical deserts and stronger winds that carried dust off the deserts and out over the sea. Along the whole length of the ice core, Martin noticed, atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric dust fluctuated in counterpoint; one went up when the other went down.
For Martin the explanation was simple: whenever a lot of ironrich dust had fallen out of the atmosphere, the Southern Ocean phytoplankton had been cured of their anaemia, and the massive blooms that ensued had drawn carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That is what made the world colder during the ice age: the phytoplankton did it. By blooming to their full potential and converting all the available nitrate into organic matter, they drew two billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the surface water, which drew it out of the atmosphere.
Mapping the Deep - Robert Kunzig

Casablanca Lounge Bar, Praia da Vagueira face

The fact, simply, is this: apples don’t “come true” from seeds-that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible-“sour enoug ,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider-and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.
The Botany of desire - Michael Pollan

Praia da Vagueira wiki

Mr. Sen’s major finding is striking: The world’s worst famines are not caused by crop failure; they are caused by faulty political systems that prevent the market from correcting itself. Relatively minor agricultural disturbances become catastrophes because imports are not allowed, or prices are not allowed to rise, or farmers are not allowed to grow alternative crops, or politics in some other way interferes with the market’s normal ability to correct itself. He writes, “[Famines] have never materialized in any country that is independent, that goes to elections regularly, that has opposition parties to voice criticisms and that permits newspapers to report freely and question the wisdom of government policies without extensive censorship.” China had the largest recorded famine in history; thirty million people died as the result of the failed Great Leap Forward in 1958-61. India has not had a famine since independence in 1947.
Naked Economics - Charles Wheelan

Green Hairy Mushroom link

“There is an old fable,” said Hardin, “as old perhaps as humanity, for the oldest records containing it are merely copies of other records still older, that might interest you. It runs as follows:
“A horse having a wolf as a poWerful and dangerous enemy lived in constant fear of his life. Being driven to desperation, it occurred to him to seek a strong ally. Whereupon he approached a man, and offered an alliance, pointing out that the wolf was likewise an enemy of the man. The man accepted the partnership at once and offered to kill the wolf immediately, if his new partner would only co-operate by placing his greater speed at the man’s disposal. The horse was willing, and allowed the man to place bridle and saddle upon him. The man mounted, hunted down the wolf, and killed him.
“The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man, and said: ‘Now that our enemy is dead, remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.’
“Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, ‘Never!’ and applied the spurs with a will.”
Foundation - Isaac Asimov

maré vazante, viveiros ria Aveiro

Not long ago, researchers for the first time connected oxytocin with why some animals are naturally monogamous and others are not. Only about 3 percent of nonhuman mammals form monogamous bonds; the majority mate with many different partners. Some species of prairie voles form long-lasting pair-bonds (sometimes for life). They share nests, avoid meeting other potential mates, and rear their offspring together. Closely related to the monogamous prairie voles are the montane voles, which display a very different mating style. They do not form pair-bonds, and the males are uninterested and uninvolved in parental care. Female montane voles are not exactly devoted parents either-they abandon their of spring shortly after birth.
Given that these two species of voles share 99 percent of the same genes, making them very genetically similar, why do they behave so differently? As it turns out, the voles differ greatly in how they produce and process oxytocin and vasopressin. The attachment-prone, faithful prairie voles have a lot more of these bonding hormones and have a denser supply of receptors in the brain that can detect and use them.
Why women have sex - Cindy M. Meston

Pontão Vagueira

When last we saw the Apaches, they were dominating the Southwest. The Spanish tried in vain to control them, and the Mexicans who followed had no better luck. When the Americans took control of the region, they too foundered. In fact, the Apaches remained a significant threat well into the twentieth century. But then the tide turned. The Americans prevailed. [..] Here’s what broke Apache society: the Americans gave the Nant’ans cattle. It was that simple. Once the Nant‘ans had possession of a scarce resource-cows-their power shifted from symbolic to material. Where previously, the Nant’ans had led by example, now they could reward and punish tribe members by giving and withholding this resource.
The cows changed everything. Once the Nant’ans gained authoritative power, they began fighting each other for seats on newly created tribal councils [...] Tribe members began lobbying the Nant’ans for more resources and became upset if the allocations didn’t work out in their favor. The power structure, once fiat, became hierarchical, with power concentrated at the top. This broke down Apache society. Nevins refleets, “The Apache have a central government now, but I think personally that it’s a disaster for them because it creates a zerosum battle over resources between lineages.” With a more rigid power structure, the Apaches became similar to the Aztecs, and the Americans were able to control them.
The Starfish and the Spider - Ori Bradman, Ron A. Beckstorm

Mr. Duncan, who told our class about how the Roman Empire swept across southern Europe. He recounted in hushed tones how the Romans built hierarchical social and political structures and heavily centralized systems for managing their vast empire. The boundaries between the different classes were strict and legally enforced. Members of different classes even dressed differently. Only the emperor was allowed to wear a purple toga, while senators could wear a white toga with a broad purple stripe along the edge, and equestrians, who ranked just below the senators, wore togas with a narrow purple stripe. The class of the person was therefore noticeable at first glimpse. So a first historical point is that the countries that fell under the influence of the Roman Empire (including Spain, Italy, and, to a lesser degree, France) tend to be more hierarchical than the rest of Western Europe. Although your Italian boss is unlikely to wear a purple toga, invisible and subtle remnants of these attitudes still remain today.
The second clue relates to a much later European empire, one that dominated the northern part of the continent to almost as great an extent as the Roman Empire dominated the south. When you think of the Vikings, you may think of hulking muscular men With long walrus mustaches and hats with horns, riding big ships and waging bloody wars. What you may not know is that the Vikings were surprisingly egalitarian. When settling in Iceland, they founded one of the world’s early democracies. The entire community was invited to the debating hall to thrash out the hot topics of the day, followed by a vote, with each person’s opinion carrying equal weight. Legend has it that, when the Prince of Franks sent an envoy from southern Europe to negotiate with the Vikings, the puzzled envoy returned confused and disheartened, complaining, ”I couldn’t figure out who to talk with. They said they were all the chiefs.”
The countries most influenced by the Vikings consistently rank as some of the most egalitarian and consensus-oriented cultures in the world today. So it is no surprise that, even today, when you walk into a meeting room in Copenhagen or Stockholm, it is often impossible to spot the boss.
Our third historical clue relates to the distance between the people and God in particular religions. Countries with Protestant cultures tend to fall further to the egalitarian side of the scale than those with a more Catholic tradition. One interpretation of this pattern is that the Protestant Reformation largely removed the traditional hierarchy from the church. In many strains of Protestantism, the individual speaks directly to God instead of speaking to God through the priest, the bishop, and the pope. Thus, it’s natural that societies in which Protestant religions predominate tend to be more egalitarian than those dominated by Catholicism.
The Culture Map - Erin Meyer

Such an atmosphere, with its multiple sources of unreliable information, stoked by fear and hatred, bred rumours of the wildest and most arcane variety. Plague was part of a sinister evangelical plot, some claimed, evidence of a government bent on ‘destroying caste and religious observances, with the ultimate design of forcing Christianity on the natives of India’. Others pointed to ‘proof’ that the government was in the process of poisoning the people: according to one newspaper report, ‘six bags of snakes and other worms have been ground [up] and dissolved in the water-pipe at Cawnpore to bring on plague among consumers’. Inside the scrubbed-white wards of plague hospitals all manner of horrors were said to be perpetrated: workers at the Arthur Road Hospital were quoted in one article as believing there to have been ‘something diabolical’ about a hospital ‘which claimed so many victims’: patients, it was said, were bled to death through the soles of their feet. There were even rumours that under every hospital bed was an ‘oil mill’ to grind the patient into ointment for use on Europeans: the plague inspection sheds at railway stations housed, by logical and paranoid extension, ‘big machines’ for compressing this valuable medicinal ooze from the bodies of innocent Indians.
The Plague Race - Edward Marriott

Paredão Aveiro

That first map was only of the gravity field but to anyone who had ever seen a map of seafloor topography, its broad outlines looked familiar. That should not be surprising: insofar as mountains tend to have more mass than valleys, topography generates gravity, “If you put a mountain on the seafloor,” explains Smith, “the extra material represented by the rocks in that mountain add their ovm gravity to the overall field. If you’re right above the mountain, the added gravity pulls down in the same direction, and so it adds to the magnitude of gravity. But if you’re off to one side of the mountain, the gravitational field of the mountain pulls toward the mountain, and so the effect is to change the direction of gravity 3 little bit.” The sea surface, acting as a carpenter’s level, follows these changes; it becomes like an attenuated visual echo of the seafloor, piling up over mountains, dipping down over trenches.
Mapping The Deep - Robert Kunzig

Statsraad Lehmkuhl link Santa Maria Manuela link Caravela Vera Cruz link Creoula link
Ílhavo Sea Festival

Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientihc cultures. Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences-physics, chemistry, and biology-humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep, shadowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.
Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived.
Consilience - E. O. Wilson