MPJ

Perhaps it's a little weird for me to begin an article with a glimpse of a romantic movie, but I can't think of a cooler way to start today's topic. When I came up with the idea to write about "Camera Obscura", the first thought that came to my mind was a movie from 1997 called "Addicted to Love". Of all the movies in this genre, only a few are at the top of my mind, and this one, directed by Griffin Dunne with Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan in lead roles, is definitely the best one I remember. In short, Sam, an astronomer who, in an attempt to win back his girlfriend, turns his astronomical tools into specific spy equipment and, by using his dark-chambered pinhole camera, manages to observe what is happening in the building across the street in real time. What he used to achieve this is a principle behind Camera Obscura—a method to project the light through a small hole and create an image on the opposite wall inside a dark room, tent, or box. Something...

The knowledge and manufacture of lenses were known since the time of the old Greeks (the word optics came from the Greek word ὀπτικά, which means appearance) and later in the old ages with Egyptian scholar Alhazen, who made important contributions to the study of optics in general. In Europe, the lenses arrived around the 13th century and immediately triggered the invention of the first eyeglasses. However, one important discovery had to wait three centuries later in order to set off a wave of new discoveries in the field of astronomy. The invention was made by Hans Lippershey, the spectacle maker from the Dutch city of Middelburg in the Netherlands, who in October 1608 tried to apply for a patent for a tool he described as an aid capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby" . It consisted of convex and concave lenses in a tube capable of magnifying objects three or four times. For strange reasons, the patent was rejected, but the new instrument immediately attracted a...

I read about a man once, and I honestly couldn't remember who he was, but in a nutshell, he returned from the tourist trip with tons of photos, and when his friends asked him why he hadn't uploaded them online yet, he said that he needed to enrich them with words first; otherwise, they would be just a pile of nice colored moments taken in time and saying very little or nothing at all about the trip and all the sites he visited. The same is with me, and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people's videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media. I am simply not impressed with many of them because they lack the story. With me, there is no point in uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explaining nothing about where you were, why you were taking that photo, or without saying a little something about the place itself. With videos, it goes even further...

Languages always change when we change. Evolutionary speaking and over a long period of time. Especially when we mix with others or change environments and move to different places. English is a perfect example—perhaps it is the only language spoken with that many variations created from country to country, all over the world, from New Zealand throughout India toward Canada and even in those places on Earth where it is not language number one. Believe it or not, there are thousands of spoken languages throughout our planet today, and with people migrating over eons, mixing multiple languages into new ones is well recorded in our history. New languages created in that fashion are well known as creoles, most of them connected to the recent colonialism when two cultures or more collided for a longer period of time. Perhaps the most known of them all (and spoken by most of their population) are Haitian, Jamaican, and Hawaiian creoles—a mixture of French (Haiti) and English (Jamaica and H...