Archive for May, 2007

South Africa has the fame of being home of enormous numbers of elephants (to the point that the question of culling is open for discussion in South Africa, to try and protect against the ecological pressure they create on the environment and the other herbivores). We have been lucky to approach a few nice big animals:

Hyenas, females


Hyenas, youngs by night


Hyena, female


Hyena


Hyenas, females


Hyenas, females


Hyena, female


Hyena
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

Buffalos are continuously shrouded in a cloud of mosquitos and flys. To protect themselves they take mud baths as often as necessary:

Buffalo, still clean, before the bath


Buffalo (mud bath)


Buffalo (mud bath)


Buffalo after the bath


Buffalo after the bath
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

Chinese authorities have placed Tibet under their jurisdiction in 1950. Since then, the country has been submitted to a regime that, even compared to the usual Chinese standards, can be considered extreemely hard. Today, we learn that 250,000 Tibetans (1/10th of the Tibet population) have been relocated to new villages of the “comfortable housing program“.

It seems that the Chinese government will stop at nothing to install Chinese people in Tibet, crush the Tibetan language and the Tibetan culture, to reduce even the Dalai Lama (71-year old) to an exiled intellectual authority that can be ignored from the country itself.

Source: McClathy.

There is certainly not as much titles as on LibriVox that we previously presented you here on Roumazeilles.net, but SimplyAudioBooks compensates with the perfectly professional quality of the recordings. You will find there English litterature reference works read by pros.

Print on Demand (POD) has become a very affordable solution for people willing to publish their own books. Previously, you had to convince a publisher to invest in printing hundreds if not thousands of copies of your book; then, you hoped for success and -usually- failed.

With Print of Demand, the cost becomes so low that you can actually print one copy for you and one for your mother. Then, you print whenever you find a customer. This is still affordable and it works.

In this context, I wanted to help a friend interested in this and I started looking for a good solution. So, here are my rants and raves about publishing solutions I could find.

Best Print-on-Demand solutions

(more…)

We have been meeting a group of nearly 200 buffalos. Impressive animals:

Jeune buffle


Buffle
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

The Galapagos islands have earned years ago the inscription to UNESCO’s World Heritage. You have to admit that their unique situation (recognized ince the founding travel of Charles Darwin and confirmd by innumerable TV documentaries like those from Cousteau) was quite understandable. But New Scientist tells us that this privileged status may be lost to the intensive tourism that is slowly degrading the location and its flora and fauna.

On the contrary, the same New Scientist also tells us that there is hope for Lonesome George. He is the last male from the local Giant tortoise species. Now, there is the faint possibility that he could reproduce with a giant tortoise from Isabella Island which could have sufficient genetic proximity with Lonesome George to allow reproduction. Let’s wait for the scientific community to confirm this.

South Africa has the fame of being home of enormous numbers of elephants (to the point that the question of culling is open for discussion in South Africa, to try and protect against the ecological pressure they create on the environment and the other herbivores). We have been lucky to approach a few nice big animals:

Elephant


Elephant


Elephant


Elephant


Elephant, old male


Elephant
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

I just installed a WordPress plugin to make Roumazeilles.net usable from a mobile phone (WordPress Mobile). If you want to test and tell me about problem, you’ll be thanked.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo was the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), where in 1971 in a fake environment students experiemented with the influence of the environment on the apparition of behaviours that are considered as highly anti-social (quite normal graduate students played the roles of guards and prisoner, and quickly -in 6 days- derailed into extremes -like sexual abuses and emotional breakdowns).

Guy Kawasaky has on his very blog “How to change the world” a interesting interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo looking back at the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and what it tells us about ourselves and today’s issues (including in relation with the Abu Ghraib incidents).

When you want to make a screenshot, you usually end up with a rectangular copy of your computer screen. Did you dream to be able to do more? RumShot is here for you. It allow to post-process your screenshots inside what the developer named themes.

Uncommon result, isn’t it?

Thankfully, they provide theme packs.