Cocos Island
Braid
Academy
Jas.1:5 "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him."
Prov.1:2
"To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;"
"To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;"
Chess: "Cocos Island" "braid" "Academy" "hammerhead"
The Life of a Hammerhead Shark
source to this section:Hammerheads have quite a range in size depending on the species. Scalloped hammerheads are generally 5 to 10 feet long (1.5 to 3m) and weigh about 175 to 225 pounds (80 to 100 kg). Smooth hammerheads can grow a couple of feet longer, but the great hammerhead is by far the largest. These carnivores can grow up to 18 feet long (5 m) and weigh as much as 800 pounds (360 kg). The bonnethead is the smallest of the four major species of hammerhead, at an average of 3.5 feet long (1 m) and about 20 pounds (9 kg) [source: Florida Museum of Natural History].
Aside from the unusual shape of its head, hammerheads have another distinctive physical feature -- their tall dorsal fin, which protrudes high above the surface in shallow waters. Hammerheads are grayish-brown to olive on top and, like most sharks, are lighter colored on their bellies.
The hammerhead's mouth is smaller than most other large sharks and can't open as wide. Inside its small mouth are small teeth that are sharp and heavily serrated up front but larger and flatter in the back. These hard back teeth are used for grinding up tougher prey, like shellfish. Scalloped, smooth and great hammerheads feed on bony fish, small sharks, shellfish and their favorite dinnertime treat, stingrays. Bonnetheads eat bony fish, shrimp and even seagrass, but mainly feed on crustaceans like blue crabs.
The schooling tendencies of scalloped hammerheads make them unique among sharks.
Hammerheads hunt alone during the daytime like most other sharks, but scalloped hammerheads have a fascinating characteristic that sets them apart from most other species of sharks -- they hang out together in schools. We’re not exactly sure why the scalloped hammerhead schools, but we have a few clues. Most small fish school to provide numbers against predators, but since the scalloped hammerhead is a large shark, this probably isn’t the reason. Another reason fish school is to surround their prey, but the hammerhead is a solitary hunter, so you can toss this one out too. Most researchers seem to think that the scalloped hammerhead schools because it enjoys the company.
Male scalloped hammerheads are outnumbered 6-to-1 by females, making them fairly choosey when selecting a mate. Their preference? Big girls. The larger the female, the more shark pups she can carry and the more sought after she'll become. When schooling, the largest females are typically located in the center. The male then heads to the center, picks a female from the school and swims off to mate, right there in broad daylight. An older large female can have up to 40 pups, compared to a mere 12 for a younger and smaller shark. They carry the pups inside them for about eight to 10 months before giving birth in shallow waters. The pups are about 18 inches long at birth and have soft "hammers" that are bent back toward the tail to make it easier on mom. The hammer then firms up as the shark grows larger.
Hammerhead Shark Unique Characteristics
The distinctive shaped hammer head of these ocean predators is called a cephalofoil, and it has some small variations among the different species of hammerheads. The great hammerhead has a cephalofoil that's broad and nearly flat across the front, with a single shallow notch in the center. The scalloped hammerhead is arched more and has a pronounced center notch with two matching notches on either side, giving it a scalloped appearance. The smooth hammerhead is, you guessed it, smooth -- no notches and just a slight, broad arch. The bonnethead's cephalofoil is distinct from the others. It's rounded at the front and resembles a shovel more than a hammer.
But why do these sharks have such on oddly shaped head? Researchers aren't 100 percent sure why they evolved this way, but they have a few different theories, some of which hold up well under research. The first is that it acts as a lift when swimming, much like an airplane wing. Research indicates that while hammerheads have better maneuvering capabilities than other sharks, it's not likely due to the cephalofoil. They're more flexible and can therefore turn and pivot more easily with greater speed.
Another theory is that the hammerhead uses its cephalofoil to aid in trapping prey. One of the hammerhead's favorite foods is the stingray. Once a ray is located, the hammerhead pins the ray to the ground with its cephalofoil and starts eating. This theory has been observed in the wild, but it's probably a learned technique and not the central reason for the wide cephalofoil.
The most likely explanation is that the cephalofoil increases the hammerhead's ability to sense prey. All sharks have electrical sensors in their nose and heads called ampullae of Lorenzini, named for researcher Stephan Lorenzini. These sensors can detect weak electric emissions from other sea life. Because hammerheads have broad, flat heads, the ampullae are spread out over a greater surface area, giving the shark the ability to cover more ground and sense its prey easier. This theory is bolstered by the hammerhead's tendency to troll the bottom of the floor and its ability to find camouflaged stingrays buried beneath the sand.
Word of the Day for Thursday, December 4, 2008
curio \KYOOR-ee-oh\, noun:a valued, novel object; an object valued as a curiosity, often a collectible
It is tempting to think of [it] not as a novel but as a glittering artifact, something an acquisitive traveler might discover in a musty Venetian curio shop.
-- David Willis McCullough, review of The Palace, by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, New York Times, 8/1/1999
Her latest addition, a fake yellow canary that she affixed to the front door, simply canÕt be ignored. With any luck, the cat will soon mistake the curio for a real bird and that will be the end of it.
-- Ada Brunstein, The House of No Personal Pronouns, New York Times, 7/22/2007
Tensions in his parents' home in New York and summer visits to his Boston grandfather left impressions that became, over time, fragmentary memories tinged with sadness-as when he recalls, in Redburn, the melancholy longing provoked by the miniature glass ship displayed in his grandfather's curio case.by 1851, literally, "piece of bric-a-brac or art object from the far East," a shortened form of curiosity
-- Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His Life and Work
--> --> “sage” : “Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush” Mark Twain. Roughing It. Ch.3 p.15 see the wole paragraph: “It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the "sage-brush." Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic sage, and "sage-tea" made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with. The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass." The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the borders of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles--there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the "greasewood," which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little. Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush. Its trunk is as large as a boy's wrist (and from that up to a man's arm), and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk--all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
HISTORY
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be–fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, ‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self–reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures — in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further, in every fact and circumstance, — in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.
Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling. Walt Whitman.
--> Hiram Corson: Introduction to the Poetry of Browning:
The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on
`The Influence of National Character on English Literature',
remarks of Spenser: "After that dark period which separated him
from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses,
and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if,
to use an image of his own,
"`At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy ayre.'
That baptism of blood and fire through which England passedat the Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness
of life. That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation
then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman,
and tried what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation
was this for that period of our literature in which man,
the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage!
It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life,
and that human character should speak from the stage
with a depth of life never known before; but who could have
imagined Shakespeare?"
And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser's verse!
His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect,
has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature,
Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others;
but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music
out of it which Spenser drew.
INTRODUCTION.
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry
from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.
Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression
in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with
the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man,
the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought,
whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded
as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid's `Elements',
Newton's `Principia', Spinoza's `Ethica', and Kant's
`Critique of the Pure Reason', do not properly belong to literature.
(By the "spiritual" I would be understood to mean the whole domain
of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic,
the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution
of man by and through which he holds relationship with
the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal
of which the senses take cognizance.)
The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be
so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters,
on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension
in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification
of the word, "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak,
for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration;
but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to
the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal,
not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate,
effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit, --
"the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things
to the desires of the mind."
It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods
of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees
of spirituality which these different periods exhibit.
The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited
in their literatures, may show no marked difference,
while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may
very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper
is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being
always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order
of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not
well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods
of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow
of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than
by any other considerations. There are periods which
are characterized by a "blindness of heart", an inactive,
quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect
is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal,
and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody
in their literatures a large amount of thought, -- thought which is
conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself
will not constitute a noble literature, however perfect
the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense
of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature,
will not regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what
must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element
of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through
the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be
so "cabined, cribbed, confined" as not to come to any consciousness
of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize
its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and,
by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers
call the UNKNOWABLE.
To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have
passed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand,
along the generations. And first is
"the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below:
"Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."
Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit,
and it is the secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us
after a lapse of five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses,
and imparts a lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles
beneath the tissues of his thought. When we compare Dryden's
modernizations of Chaucer with the originals, we see the difference
between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and,
through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings
with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical
or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter,
that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers
of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read Chaucer's verse.
All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or analogues,
most of which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society.
Not one of the tales is of Chaucer's own invention. And yet they may
all be said to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word.
They have been vitalized from the poet's own soul. He has infused
his own personality, his own spirit-life, into his originals;
he has "created a soul under the ribs of death." It is this
infused vitality which will constitute the charm of
the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English speaking
and English reading people. This life of the spirit,
of which I am speaking, as distinguished from the intellect,
is felt, though much less distinctly, in a contemporary work,
`The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman'.
What the author calls "KIND WIT", that is, "natural intelligence",
has, generally, the ascendency. We meet, however,
with powerful passages, wherein the thoughts are aglow
with the warmth from the writer's inner spirit. He shows at times
the moral indignation of a Hebrew prophet.
The `Confessio Amantis' of John Gower, another contemporary work,
exhibits comparatively little of the life of the spirit,
either in its verse or in its thought. The thought rarely passes
the limit of natural intelligence. The stories, which the poet drew
from the `Gesta Romanorum' and numerous other sources, can hardly
be said to have been BORN AGAIN. The verse is smooth and fluent,
but the reader feels it to be the product of literary skill.
It wants what can be imparted only by an unconscious might
back of the consciously active and trained powers. It is this
unconscious might which John Keats, in his `Sleep and Poetry',
speaks of as "might half slumbering on its own right arm",
and which every reader, with the requisite susceptibility,
can always detect in the verse of a true poet.
In the interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit
is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest
to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst's `Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates', which,
in the words of Hallam, "forms a link which unites the school
of Chaucer and Lydgate to the `Faerie Queene'."
The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on
`The Influence of National Character on English Literature',
remarks of Spenser: "After that dark period which separated him
from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses,
and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if,
to use an image of his own,
"`At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy ayre.'
"That baptism of blood and fire through which England passed
at the Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness
of life. That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation
then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman,
and tried what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation
was this for that period of our literature in which man,
the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage!
It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life,
and that human character should speak from the stage
with a depth of life never known before; but who could have
imagined Shakespeare?"
And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser's verse!
His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect,
has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature,
Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others;
but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music
out of it which Spenser drew.
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