Spotted from the pavement on my way to an appointment. How beautiful it looked and how I felt for it.
The variations on the original photo were made using a free online analogue film emulator, available at 29a. You can adjust temperature, grain, vignetting, vibrance, etc. and also choose from a long list of film emulations (or none).
Take a look at the Settings, where you can decide on the JPEG export quality, the quality of the preview, and whether to show advanced controls.
The Blackbird
The common blackbird (Turdus merula) is a species of thrush, which sounds strange to my ear because thrushes are similar in stature but different in colouring, with spotted breasts on a brown background.
The blackbird is also called the Eurasian blackbird, especially in North America, to distinguish it from the unrelated New World blackbirds.
It breeds in Europe, Asiatic Russia, and North Africa, and has been introduced to Australia and New Zealand.
The adult male is all black except for a yellow eye-ring and bill and the adult female and juvenile have mainly dark brown plumage.
And now for something different, and nothing to do with blackbirds except insofar that the things that men do lives after them, destroying the Earth as they go. Already I have seen fewer of many species in the years since I was a boy. Often I would leave for school and see a thrush beating a snail on the stone path, trying to crush its shell so it could eat the snail. Now, you hardly ever see a thrush.
I never thought the thrush was callous or cruel – because it was working within the plan of Nature where everything just ‘is’. One only had to look around to see it working,. Not that I knew much about nature until I had the good fortune to go to a university that was set in the grounds of a former country house. A friend showed me a robin’s nest, and suddenly the whole of nature cemented into one great vision.
Mining In The Clarion-Clipperton Zone
Did you know that the UN has granted licences to mine the sea floor over an area stretching between Hawaii and Mexico in the Clipperton Fracture Zone?
It is a geological submarine fracture zone of the Pacific Ocean, around 4500 miles (7240 km) long and covering about 4,500,000 square kilometres (1,700,000 sq mi).
To get an idea of the size of the zone, imagine if it were a square, then its sides would be over 2,000 kilometres (1,300 miles) long.
It’s big, no?
The fracture begins east-northeast of the Line Islands and ends in the Middle America Trench off the coast of Central America.
It roughly forms a line on the same latitude as Kiribati and Clipperton Island.
In 2016, the seafloor in the Clipperton Fracture Zone was found to contain a huge amount of sealife, with more than half of the species collected new to science.
So what is it to be – whether to mine, pour back all the tailings and sludge, kill all the creatures, and get the minerals – or to not do it and bring battery technology to a grinding halt for lack of materials?
Fracking Causes Earthquakes
“News: Another tremor felt near the UK’s only fracking site An earth tremor has struck near the UK’s only hydraulic fracturing site. A tremor measuring 2.1 on the Richter scale was detected at Preston New Road, near Blackpool, and was felt by the surrounding area. Cuadrilla, who operate the site, say no fracturing was taking place at the time.”
So perhaps it was just a coincidental tremor, a tremor of the kind that Britain suffers periodically? So what does the British Geological Survey recent earthquakes list page show…
Not listed there – but there is a list of Induced Seismicity around the British Isles in the last 50 days – and it did feature there, and the page contains this statement
“Sun, 25 Aug 2019 14:10:00 (UTC) This list contains seismic events for which there is strong evidence that they have been induced by human activities. It is linked to a database of seismic events and locations and magnitudes may change as events are re-analysed and revised. Background, tectonic seismic activity is reported on our recent earthquakes list.”
Fracking 2022
The latest page for Recent induced seismicity does not show anything (August 1, 2022) and that’s because fracking stopped in 2019 precisely because of these findings.
But now, geologists are saying that drilling companies should ‘try again’, and they presented their case to the Government in June this year. Then, of course, Boris Johnson, was removed as leader of the party that is in power, and who knows what his successor will decide to do.
Photograph Works 