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Early Man in Motion Picture

There is a period of time we are familiar with acronym "BC". It stands, of course, for "Before Christ", the period before the famous tale about origin of Christian religion. But this time goes far behind Jesus. Far beyond origin of all monotheistic religions. It goes even before the eons when our ancestors knew gods in plural and to the ages when modern humans started their everlasting and ongoing endeavors. The time in prehistory occupied with endless wonders of surrounding nature without firm beliefs but surely filled with many invisible divine spirits and mysterious stars. Due to illiteracy of the period there's almost nothing tangible we could use to gain full knowledge of how early society really looked like and even though we know great deal about those times only by analyzing cave walls, fossil record and DNA samples, in order to describe one early settlement we still must use lots of imagination and scientific guesses. Personally and definitely c...

Anthropocene of Movies

There is a debate whether or not Holocene, the latest geological epoch is already finished with ultimate human impact on Earth's ecosystems, which started along with industrial and technological maturity in recent past. Many of us believe that new era, suitably named Anthropocene is what we are living in already. With technology rise, it looks like humans already changed fundamentally to the point of incompatibility with our distant ancestors. Perhaps we are indeed heading toward rapid evolutionary change, like in the latest Dan Brown's novel " Origin ", but this premise is way more suitable for another science fiction I have just watched (for the second time). I am sure that for all of you who like intelligent movies , a long anticipated sequel for "The Man from Earth" finally came and it, without a doubt, opened the Holocene-Anthropocene transition for John Oldman, a 14000 years old man, who also, like entire humanity, seemed to be going through the change...

Interview With an 'X'

The 'X' is definitely one of the most important letters in the alphabet. Not only that it is the most valuable variable in all math equations and scientific chase for the unknown, but in the entire history of human riddles, and I mean not always related to math, it always marks the most interesting spot. Sometimes the one with the treasure. It was not coincidence that old Romans used it for the most important number of them all. 10. The very base of our widely used numeric system. But we are not here to talk about mathematics or treasure hunting per se. It will be more about age. Of ten. My son Viktor is turning this magic number on this year Earth Day (April 22nd) and I decided, in addition to our previous topic and post Interview With an Expert , to fire another set of questions for him to answer. This time more general and within various realm of life and .. well .. stuff... So let's start with favorites. I guess they say a lot about personality. And they don...

Power of Music

YouTube is really one great service. Probably one of the best online tools there is. But it is not without issues and glitches. Recently, after our vacation I uploaded a video I took on the Lichadonisia beach with our guide and our Greek hosts teaching our (mostly female) group to dance with syrtaki (Greek: συρτάκι) music and even though the music clearly came from the beach-bar loudspeakers, YouTube 'found' that I was using protected and copyrighted content and the video clip was blocked in one country and you will never guess which - Germany. I am still laughing and endlessly trying to find logic behind this silly automation. Nevertheless and ever since then I am not embedding music background by myself anymore and rather using YouTube's selection instead. With today's video I played with two combination and got extraordinary result. First video is accelerated and embedded with horror-typed tune. For the other I used the most cheerful music I could find and with sa...