Istanbul - Turkey (by Tom Walk)

Love Begins
hello vonnie

Origami Around

★
styofa doing anything
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One Nice Bug Per Day
Mike Driver
Not today Justin
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occasionally subtle
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

if i look back, i am lost
Monterey Bay Aquarium

oozey mess
RMH
d e v o n
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Istanbul - Turkey (by Tom Walk)
Breakfast far above the clouds, Pokut, Turkey
The Genkoan Temple, a Zen Buddhist temple with a tranquil garden & legendary ceiling with wood reclaimed from a castle. The ceiling of the main hall is called the “bloody ceiling,” which was made using floorboards from the disassembled Fushimi Castle where soldiers were defeated, killed themselves and left bloodstains on the floor in 1600. (Source)
Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Anatolia, Turkey. Third largest library in the ancient world, able to store 12,000 scrolls. Built as a library and a mausoleum for the Roman Senator Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus.
Roman, c. 114 – 117 AD
The Seeds of Unified Physics go back a long way in the history of scientific theory. In some of the earliest historical records of human culture we find civilizations around the world that believed in the Presence of a Unifying Field of Energy that surrounds and permeates all things. This Dynamic Energy Field provided an underlying organizing framework and was considered by some to be the Source of Life Energy within biological systems, being given such names as Chi (China/Asia), Ki (Japan), and Prana (India). In the early pursuits of Science and Physics (going as far back as Plato) it was often referred to as the Aether and was proposed to be the Medium through which Light travelled. Though it was eliminated from the general scientific paradigm in the early 20th century, the indications for an Underlying Field persists as being inherent in the Fundamentals of Physics.
Unveiling the Mandelbrot Set. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, mathematicians working in an area called dynamical systems made use of the ever-advancing computing power to draw computer images of the objects they were working on. What they saw blew their minds: fractal-like structures whose beauty and complexity is only rivalled by Nature itself. At the heart of them lay the Mandelbrot set, which today has achieved fame even outside the field of dynamics. The Mandelbrot set is a fractal. Fractals are objects that display self-similarity at various scales. Magnifying a fractal reveals small-scale details similar to the large-scale characteristics. Although the Mandelbrot set is self-similar at magnified scales, the small scale details are not identical to the whole. In fact, the Mandelbrot set is infinitely complex. Yet the process of generating it is based on an extremely simple equation involving complex numbers. The Mandelbrot set is an incredible object that equals infinity. It’s really amazing that the simple iterated equation Z = Z^2 + C can produce such beautiful works of mathematical art.
If you take each of the Platonic Solids and encase each perfectly within a sphere, and then nest them all inside of each other, they produce six layers that correspond to the relative planetary orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Here are drawings representing the path of planets coupled together over several year periods, illustrating their geometric dance relationship in patters that look very similar to those made in Cymatics.
“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.”
— Mark Twain (via philosophyquotes)
A detailed analysis of American ER bills reveals rampant, impossible-to-avoid price-gouging
For more than a year, Vox’s Sarah Kliff has been investigating hospital price-gouging in America, collecting hospital bills from her readers and comparing them, chasing up anomalies and pulling on threads, producing a stream of outstanding reports on her findings.
In her latest installment, Kliff digs deep into the famously bizarre world of ER bills and points out some of the most egregious ways in which these are rigged.
For example, if you are injured and also financially precarious, you might travel to a more distant ER just to be sure that the hospital you’re visiting is in-network for your insurer, but that means nothing. “In-network” ERs often staff “out-of-network” doctors, and there is no way to find out whether the doctor treating you is covered by your insurer until you get the bill: one of Kliff’s readers got bills for $8,000 from an out-of-network surgeon who treated his broken jaw at an in-network hospital.
And much of the care you receive at an ER is subject to bizarre price gouging: one of Kliff’s readers was charged $238 for two drops of the generic eyedrop ofloxacin which retails for $15/vial; the routine pregnancy test that ERs administer to women of childbearing years can cost up to $465, enough to buy 84 pregnancy kits at the pharmacy; and one Seattle hospital charged $76 for a squirt of generic neosporin. Not all hospitals gouge on all drugs, and many of these drugs are not being administered for urgent health problems – a halfway honest hospital could advise a patient, “We charge $238 for this eyedrop, why don’t you pick up a bottle for $15 next door and administer it yourself?”
Finally, Kliff uncovers wild variability in the “ER facility fee,” which is a cover-charge you’re assessed just for walking in the door at an ER. One of Kliff’s readers paid $5,751 for sitting in a hospital waiting room with an ice-pack and a bandage while waiting to see a doctor, but who left because she was feeling better and didn’t need care after all. Kliff’s work reveals that these “facility fees” are rising at twice the rate of other health charges, with no rhyme or reason.
All of this refers to people who come into the ER under their own power, out of an abundance of caution – for example, my daughter recently broke her collarbone, but we didn’t know that until we went to the ER for an X-ray, and if we’d less prudent, we could have iced it and made a regular doctor’s appointment for the next day, leaving her untreated and undiagnosed. But of course, ERs treat large numbers of people who are unconscious or in agony when they arrive, either on their own or on an ambulance gurney. These patients can’t possibly be expected to shop around, to demand to know whether their medicines are medically necessary (I once had a small eye injury that I went to get checked out on a Sunday just in case and had to stop the nurses from pumping me full of IV dramamine just in case it turned out I would need neurosurgery!), to evaluate whether the doctors are in- or out-of-network, and so on.
(We ended up paying $2,400 out of pocket for our daughter’s ER visit, including $2.50 for a generic tylenol, despite having gold-plated insurance from Cigna)
Kliff’s work reveals the whole story of “market based medicine” to be a fiction. Markets are regulated zones where consumers compare the offerings of producers and make purchase choices based on their information. To call being wheeled unconscious into an ER and raced into an operating theater and then presented with a bill months later a “market transaction” is to make a terribly, grisly joke.
It’s as good an argument for Medicare for All and single-payer health care as you could ask for.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/14/grifters-in-gowns.html
Article is from March 2019
Remember that hospitals around the world exist without this price gouging. This goes entirely to line the pockets of healthcare executives.
The Queen of the Night reconstruction —by Trustees of the British Museum • Bibliothèque Infernale on FB
Baked clay relief panel, ca.1850 BC; British Museum: a depiction of Lilitu or Inanna/Ishtar • Bibliothèque Infernale on FB
In Mesopotamian demonology, a lilu or lilû —related to Alû: a demon– were hostile night spirits that attacked men.
In Jewish mythology Lilin is a term for black spirits. In Esther 1:3 King Solomon had lilin dance before him. Lilith is also considered by older Jewish tradition to be Cain’s wife.
Ishtar is the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, war, sex and power.
She also symbolizes love, including that between human and animals; its power, and its danger.
“The Death of Messalina” by Georges Rochegrosse is gorgeous on so many levels. Great use of space, very dark and dynamic. It really sucks you into the scene. The guy did his research too, with the scenery and costumes, but it doesn’t feel stagey or dry like a lot of Victorian academic work.
I especially love the expression on the guy looking down on Messalina.
Sequoia National Park - California
Good night.
The Roman Baths were stunning. (Yes, the water is really that green 😷) Walking the same paths the people of the time walked, it felt as though I was a part of something so, so much bigger. There is so much history, so much I do not know. I never want to stop learning new things and seeing new places.
Temple of Augustus, Pula, Croatia. One of the two most complete Roman monuments outside of Italy.
Roman, c. 27 BC - 14 AD