One hundred million votes transmitted over cell phones and the Internet have chosen seven new wonders of the world. Like the seven old wonders, they honor ancient architectures, each magnificent in its art: The Great Wall of China; Petra, the pink ruins of a Jordanian city;
Mexico’s Chichen Itza, the ruins of a Mayan city; Peru’s Machu Picchu, the remains of an Incan city; Rome’s Colosseum; India’s Taj Mahal; and the statue of Christ blessing Rio de Janeiro.
But is the measure of a world wonder more than ancient bricks and mortar? In the end, built things are ephemeral. They demand a pilgrimage to a place. Perhaps more wondrous is the pilgrimage to an idea, one that endures, sustains, and is embodied in our sense of place.
First, for me, among world wonders is the biosphere, the Earth as a breathing, pulsing planet. It alone in our solar system has a wealth of plants, animals and microbes, some 15 million species, that provide our food, fuel, fiber, and pharmaceuticals; that clean our air, water and soil; that buffer against drought and floods; that make the planet blue, looking down from space or up from Earth. The life of the planet is priceless and irreplaceable.
Second is our place in the universe. The discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein freed humans from being at the center of all things. Indeed, there is no center of all things. The Earth is not at the center of the solar system. It is in a galaxy that is hurtling away from all other galaxies. Humans are not the center of creation. Our biological origins, more than 3 billion years in the making, are shared genetically and geologically with all of life on Earth. Relativity theory tells us that gravity defines the shape of space and time. Without Earth’s mass, which induces gravity, space and time have no meaning. This sounds like magic and, in a way, it is. If humans are special, it is because we can discover this magic about the universe and our place in it.
Third is freedom of expression. In architecture, art, prose, poetry, song, symphony, dance, science, and speech, lives the freedom of the mind to think and create across the human registers. From Monet’s “Water Lilies” to Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” from Beethoven’s Fifth to gangsta rap, from Machu Picchu to Rio’s shanty town, human expression is free to be structured or unstructured, to engender beauty or revulsion, inquiry or apathy.
Fourth is freedom of communication. What made humans human is our ability to gather information, manage it, store it, make it into knowledge, and tell it to everyone else. The information age did not begin in the 1990s. It began four million years ago, ever since we sensed our environments, natural and cultural, and passed on what we learned through stories, rock carvings, print, and now the Internet. The Web is today’s ultimate democratization of knowledge, communicating what we think and what we think we know.
Fifth is freedom of equality under the law. Neither nature nor nurture can take credit for “all men are created equal,” but the law can. In fact, nature guarantees an inequality of genes among individual humans — it’s why six billion people on Earth are each different from one another.
Nurture guarantees an inequality of “memes,” the cultural and social attributes people learn from other people, beginning with their parents. The law, imperfect as it might be in practice, levels nature and nurture for rich or poor, tall or short, white or black or any color, educated or not.
Sixth is the Mayan calendar. A year should be elegant. But with 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds, it’s mathematically deranged. Same for months. Some have 30 days, some 31, and one has 28 when it doesn’t have 29. A 7-day week isn’t celestially special either. It makes for 52.1428 weeks in a solar year and 50.571 weeks in a lunar year. Lunacy. Our calendar is out of kilter because the earth’s orbit of the sun (a year), the moon’s orbit of Earth (a month), and the earth’s rotation (a day) are badly out of sync.
The solution is an ancient wonder of the world, the Mayan calendar. It has 60 six-day weeks for an even 360 days in the year. That leaves an untidy 5 days and change in the solar year after Week 60, which, if I were in charge, would be the only period allowed for electioneering.
There is no seventh wonder. Frankly, we need to be freed from the number seven. Seven has become the cardinal sum of our species, the most resonant number on Earth.
It is consecrated biblically: seven days of creation, seven years of plenty, seven lean years, seven deadly sins, seven sacraments. Geography wanders the seven seas and the seven hills of Rome.
History recounts the Seven Years War, the Seven-Day war, and the “Seven Against Thebes.” And the media gives us “Seven Samurai,” “The Magnificent Seven,” and “The Seven Year Itch.” Even the human head rests atop seven neck vertebrae. Six wonders of the world are enough.
— Leonard Krishtalka is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Biodiversity Institute at Kansas University.
Este é um blog que penso que seja da autoria da Caixa Geral de Depósitos. Parece-me interessante e como tal vou destacá-lo.
Eis um post desse site:
Eficiência Energética
Em Portugal o sector doméstico absorve 16% da energia consumida.
Numa casa, todos cometemos erros no uso que fazemos da energia. Por isso, é importante que alteremos os nossos comportamentos de forma a evitar desperdícios. Não apenas para reduzir o valor da factura no final do mês, mas também por respeito ao ambiente.
Se utilizarmos racionalmente a energia nas nossas casas estamos a contribuir para a redução das emissões de gases de efeito de estufa.
Cada um de nós pode melhorar o seu desempenho ambiental. Por exemplo: antes de abrir a porta do frigorífico, devemos saber exactamente o que queremos tirar e, se possível, devemos tirar tudo de uma só vez.
Reduzir ao máximo o número de vezes que abrimos a porta do frigorífico e o tempo que fica aberta, contribui muito para pouparmos energia, pois é no abrir das portas que está 20% do consumo global dos equipamentos de frio.
O frigorífico/combinado é líder no gasto de energia numa casa. Por essa razão, foi o primeiro equipamento a ter etiqueta de eficiência energética.
Antes de comprarmos um electrodoméstico devemos, assim, verificar a sua classificação em termos de eficiência energética. Os de classe A são os mais eficientes. Os de classe G são os que mais consomem.
Pequenas preocupações no dia-a-dia poderão contribuir para melhorar o ambiente e
O Planeta Agradece!
New contest for wonders of nature
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Article Launched: 07/15/2007 02:55:07 AM PDT
LISBON, Portugal
The contest to name the new seven wonders of the world is over, and the contest to name the new seven wonders of nature is underway.
Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer, Peru's Machu Picchu, Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid, the Great Wall of China, Jordan's Petra, the Colosseum in Rome and India's Taj Mahal were named the new seven wonders of the world July 7 at a ceremony in Lisbon.
The sites were selected according to a tally of about 100 million votes cast by people around the world over the Internet and by cell phone text messages, the nonprofit organization that conducted the poll said.
The Great Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, kept their status in addition to the new seven.
The campaign to pick the seven new wonders was begun in 1999 by Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber. His Switzerland-based foundation, called New7Wonders, received some 200 nominations from around the world and then narrowed the list to 21 candidates for the public to vote on.
Weber has now begun a new campaign to choose the new seven natural wonders of the world. The New7Wonders organization will accept nominations for the new list through Aug. 8, 2008. For details, visit http://www.natural7wonders.com.
Karina Bland
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 15, 2007 12:00 AM
My 8-year-old knows more about global warming and the disappearing rain forest than he does about the plants that grow in our backyard.
For Sawyer, living in downtown Tempe, nature is the stuff of PBS specials, not part of his daily life. He's seen a butterfly's pale cocoon growing in a box in his second-grade class, not outside.
So, every summer, we go north, leaving behind the scorching temperatures, in search of trees and dragonflies. We wade through ankle-deep water looking for crayfish and sleep with the windows wide open, listening for owls. We just booked a cabin for a few days in July.
I didn't know how important it was that we make that annual trek until my son's first-grade teacher told me to read a book called Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. I had been lamenting about fitting in twice weekly Little League practices and getting homework done.
The book makes the case for fewer structured activities and more free play outside. In February, I heard Louv speak at the Phoenix Zoo.
He said children of the digital age have become alienated from the natural world, much to their detriment. Being in nature reduces stress, sharpens concentration and promotes creative thinking. He cited all sorts of studies.
But we don't send our children out to play like our parents did, and we would disappear on our bikes until the streetlights came on. We keep our kids close to home, apprehensive of strangers and traffic.
So Louv said, "We are going to have to take our children into nature ourselves." And we have to support the kinds of organizations that bring nature to our children, like zoos, scout troops and wildlife groups.
You don't have to run off to the woods every weekend, Louv said. Start in your own backyard or nearby parks, desert trails and preserves. He said: "A little nature is better than no nature at all, and more nature is even better."
I vowed that we'd spend more time in nature. I didn't know my boy would bring it home with us.
During a hike in the woods near Flagstaff in February, Sawyer picked up a stick almost as tall as him. First, it served as a walking stick.
In the weeks that followed, the stick was a sword and light saber. He used it to prop up a makeshift tent in his bedroom and barricade the bathroom.
I ran across it in the living room, car and front porch. Exasperated, I asked Sawyer, "Can I throw this away?"
"No!" he almost shouted.
"What are you going to do with it?" I asked.
He tucked it into the waistband of his shorts and said simply, "Everything."
Bom dia,
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