Posts tonen met het label Europe. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label Europe. Alle posts tonen

29 juni 2014

Meat from antarctica




Whaling is the hunting of whales primarily for meat and oil. Its earliest forms date to at least circa 3000 BC. Various coastal communities have long histories of subsistence whaling and harvesting beached whales. Industrial whaling emerged with organized fleets in the 17th century; competitive national whaling industries in the 18th and 19th centuries; and the introduction of factory ships along with the concept of whale harvesting in the first half of the 20th century.

As technology increased and demand for the resources remained, catches far exceeded the sustainable limit for whale stocks. In the late 1930s, more than 50,000 whales were killed annually and by the middle of the century whale stocks were not being replenished. In 1986, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial whaling so that stocks might recover.

While the moratorium has been successful in averting the extinction of whale species due to overhunting, contemporary whaling is subject to intense debate. Pro-whaling countries, notably Japan, wish to lift the ban on stocks that they claim have recovered sufficiently to sustain limited hunting. Anti-whaling countries and environmental groups say whale species remain vulnerable and that whaling is immoral, unsustainable, and should remain banned permanently.



 

08 maart 2013

Shiny discs



In 1974, an initiative was taken within the Philips Corporation in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. A seven-person project group was formed to develop an optical audio disc with a diameter of 20 cm with a sound quality superior to that of the large and vulnerable vinyl record. It wasn't until 1977 that the directors of the group decided to establish a laboratory with the mission of creating a small optical digital audio disc and a small player. They chose the term "compact disc" in line with another Philips product, the compact cassette. Rather than the original 20 cm size, the diameter of this compact disc was set at 11.5 cm, the diagonal measurement of a compact cassette.

Thirty years later, on March 6, 2009, Philips received an IEEE Milestone award with the following citation: "On 8 March 1979, N.V. Philips' Gloeilampenfabrieken demonstrated for the international press a Compact Disc Audio Player. The demonstration showed that it is possible by using digital optical recording and playback to reproduce audio signals with superb stereo quality. This research at Philips established the technical standard for digital optical recording systems."
Sony executive Norio Ohga, who later became the CEO and chairman of Sony, was convinced of the format's commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism.

 

26 juli 2008

Elephants Dream



Elephants Dream (code-named Orange) is a computer-generated short film that was produced almost completely using the free software 3D suite Blender (except for the modular sound studio Reaktor and the cluster that rendered the final production, which ran Mac OS X). It premiered on 24 March 2006, after about 8 months of work. Beginning in September 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was later renamed Machina and then to Elephants Dream, referring to a Dutch tradition used by parents to abruptly end children's bedtime stories with the introduction of a sneezing elephant






 

15 juli 2006

Discovery of Antarctica



A narrator is a personal character or a non-personal voice that the creator (author) of the story develops to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot. In the case of most written narratives (novels, short stories, poems, etc.), the narrator typically functions to convey the story in its entirety. The narrator may be a voice devised by the author as an anonymous, non-personal, or stand-alone entity; as the author herself/himself as a character; or as some other fictional or non-fictional character appearing and participating within their own story. The narrator is considered participant if he/she is a character within the story, and non-participant if he/she is an implied character or an omniscient or semi-omniscient being or voice that merely relates the story to the audience without being involved in the actual events. Some stories have multiple narrators to illustrate the storylines of various characters at the same, similar, or different times, thus allowing a more complex, non-singular point of view



 

20 november 2002

The origine of cinematography



The experimental film Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Le Prince on 14 October 1888, in Roundhay, Leeds, England, is the earliest surviving motion picture. This movie was shot on paper film.

W. K. L. Dickson, working under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison, was the first to design a successful apparatus, the Kinetograph, patented in 1891. This camera took a series of instantaneous photographs on standard Eastman Kodak photographic emulsion coated onto a transparent celluloid strip 35 mm wide. The results of this work were first shown in public in 1893, using the viewing apparatus also designed by Dickson, the Kinetoscope. Contained within a large box, only one person at a time looking into it through a peephole could view the movie.

In the following year, Charles Francis Jenkins and his projector, the Phantoscope, made a successful audience viewing while Louis and Auguste Lumière perfected the Cinématographe, an apparatus that took, printed, and projected film, in Paris in December 1895. The Lumière brothers were the first to present projected, moving, photographic, pictures to a paying audience of more than one person.