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By *ig badMan
over a year ago
Up North :-) |
BLACK
Black is the total absorption of all colours and the absence of light. It was used for mourning by the Egyptians and Romans, and today almost all countries associate it with death and mourning. Black has also been recognized to imply humility and secrecy. It is frequently associated with witchcraft. In India and other countries in Asia, black represents the serfs and slaves. In the Hindu Upanishads, the black colour of the fire was considered to be the colour of the earth.
Daily Uses: Because black on yellow has the greatest visibility of all colour combinations, it is used frequently on street signs as well as for advertising. It is a very important pigment to the artist because it combines well with all colours. The black of night fosters a pure imaginative mood, because it provides freedom from distractions.
Colourful Phrases: Black death, Black Friday, black hand, black eye, blackout, blackballed, black magic, black as sin, blacklist, black belt (karate), blackjack, black market, in the black.
BLACK: Our reaction to colour is almost instantaneous and has a profound impact on the choices we make everyday.
Below is a quick look at general responses to the colour black based on research, historical significance of colour and word association studies. Different cultures react to colours differently.
In addition to what is below on my site Sensational Colour I have three sections that expand upon this information:
The Western Lowland Gorilla
The Western Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) is a subspecies of the Western Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) that lives in montane, primary, and secondary forests and lowland swamps in Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. It is the gorilla usually found in zoos. Adult male Gorillas are prone to cardiomyopathy, a degenerative heart disease.[citation needed] Babec, a Western Lowland Gorilla on exhibit at the Birmingham Zoo in Birmingham, Alabama (USA) was the first gorilla to receive an artificial pacemaker. Binti Jua, who resides at Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, saved a three-year-old boy who fell into her enclosure in 1996.
Western Lowland Gorilla groups travel within a home range averaging 3 to 18 miles². Gorillas do not display territorial behaviour, and neighboring groups often overlap ranges (Bermejo, 2004, Doran et al., 2004). The group usually favours a certain area within the home range but seems to follow a seasonal pattern depending upon the availability of ripening fruits and, at some sites, localised large open clearings (swamps and "bais"). Gorillas normally travel 0.3-1.8 miles per day. Populations feeding on high-energy foods that vary spatially and seasonally tend to have greater day ranges than those feeding on lower-quality but more consistently available foods. Larger groups travel greater distances in order to obtain sufficient food (Remis, 1997b). Human hunters and leopards can also influence the movement patterns.
Gorillas live in family groupings of one dominant male, five to seven adult females, children and adolescents, and possibly a few non-dominant males. Gorillas reproduce slowly because females do not begin reproducing until the age of nine or ten and usually only produce one baby approximately every five years.
The Western Lowland Gorilla is the smallest subspecies of the Gorilla. A male can stand full erectly 1.7 m (5 ft 7 in) tall and weigh almost 180 kg (400 lb).
The Western Lowland Gorilla eats plants (including bamboo) and occasionally insects. Males eat up to 9 kg (20 lb) a day.
In the 1980s, a census taken of the gorilla populations in equatorial Africa was thought to be 100,000.[5] Researchers adjusted the figure after years of poaching and deforestation had reduced the population to approximately 50,000. Surveys conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2006 and 2007 found more than 100,000 previously unreported gorillas have been living in the swamp forests of Lake Tele Community Reserve and in neighboring Marantaceae (dryland) forests in the Republic of the Congo. With the new discovery, the current population of Western Lowland Gorillas could be around 150,000–200,000. However, the gorilla remains vulnerable to Ebola, deforestation, and poaching.
Zoos worldwide have a population of 550 Western Lowland Gorillas.
As ice in the arctic.
The Arctic has changed dramatically since explorers first began to map its geographical features. Regions which were for centuries unapproachable by ship can now be reached with little difficulty in summer. Literally hundreds of men died trying to find a polar route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This year, two small ships have succeeded in traversing both the North East and North West routes in a single season and are well on the way to completing a full circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean.
The September sea ice minimum of 4.6 million km2 reported by NSIDC was not only the third lowest in the (post 1978) satellite record. It was not only the third lowest in living memory. It was, as far as I am able to establish from historic records, the third lowest in recorded Arctic history. Not only is extent remarkably low: the NSIDC report states that at the end of summer 2010 less than 15% of the remaining ice was over two years old.
The Cryosphere Today site has a graph of seasonal northern hemisphere sea ice extent from 1900 to 2008. Their figures are calculated differently from the NSIDC extents. I have taken their data from 1870 to 2008 and compiled a comparable graph, posted below. I have extrapolated the end of summer data to include 2009 and 2010, modifying the NSIDC data to conform approximately to the CT data, for purposes of illustration: the 3 data points in the green graph.
The history of Arctic exploration and discovery is recorded in many books, journals, newspapers, magazines, ship's logs and other printed or written materials. Old maps and atlases often show Arctic ice limits as far as they were known at the time. What is clear from this historical data is the gradual ability of ships to travel ever further north over a course of a few centuries. This progress was partly due to the building of stronger ships, each more capable than the last of enduring in pack ice. However, one simple fact stands out from the reading of historical materials: the Arctic sea ice has been reducing in extent and volume at an increasing rate since the beginning of the industrial era. Since about 1950 the rate of sea ice loss has accelerated further.
This next map, scanned from the 17th edition of Philips' Handy Volume Atlas of the World, 1930, shows the spring ice extent recorded up to 1929. This map gives some intuitive meaning to the data in the graph above.
Open Water
On the sort of site which doesn't deal with real climate science, much is made of the idea of 'open water' in the Arctic. The suggestion is that open water is not an unusual occurrence. That is true, but it must be remembered that the term 'open water' is ambiguous: it is entirely indifferent to area. The term 'open water' is applicable equally to a small polynya or the great expanses of open ocean seen in this, the 21st century.
The Arctic ice has always been mobile and so has always had some amount of open water within the main pack. Pushed first this way and then that by strong variable winds, continuous ice tends to form cracks called leads. These can be just wide enough for a kayak or wide enough for a very large ship. A lead can stretch for a few meters or for many kilometers. In winter, leads and polynyas are likely to freeze at the surface.
Almost any report of Arctic exploration will make reference to 'open water' at some stage. In a region where close-packed thick ice is everyday fare, it is only the extremely unusual discovery of a fairly large stretch of open water that is worth reporting. Unless, perhaps, the explorer is in a submarine, in which case even the tiniest amount of open water is of interest. In his book "Surface at the Pole", Commander James Calvert, USN remarked of the 5th polyna found in 1959:
I could see through the periscope two small black spots on the underside of the thin ice. Suddenly I could make out ripples in them. It was the first open water we had seen on the cruise. The puddles, about 2 feet in diameter, showed that the ice in this lead must be very new.
That 'open water' was found in March 1959, about 100 miles from the New Siberian Islands, a few days after surfacing at the pole. Previously, having found no open water, the USS Skate had surfaced at the pole through a frozen lead on March 17th. The ice was so thick that it did not obstruct the conning tower with fragments as previous thinner ice had done. Not only was the ice thick, but it was hummocked to a height estimated at 18 feet, "... the tallest we had yet seen in the Arctic."
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