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In old Serbian folklore there was one very interesting fairy tale with one very unusual character for the time it was first told. In short it goes like this: "Once upon a time, there was a king who ordered his three sons to get married in most unusual way. All three of them were supposed to shoot arrows and from where they landed, the emperor would pick the most beautiful girls to be their brides. Needless to say the youngest's arrow ended far away from the city and flew right into the old well just next to the ugly greenish frog. Well, the deal in fairy tales always goes all the way and not surprisingly the frog soon became his wedding wife." "And just like in typical fairy tale, the frog eventually turned into the most beautiful girl in the entire kingdom and almost immediately became the person of envy for all royalties, especially the queen and all the other princesses. This never went well in old stories and soon after the young prince was given the most i

There is a period of time we are familiar with acronym "BC". It stands, of course, for "Before Christ", the period before the famous tale about origin of Christian religion. But this time goes far behind Jesus. Far beyond origin of all monotheistic religions. It goes even before the eons when our ancestors knew gods in plural and to the ages when modern humans started their everlasting and ongoing endeavors. The time in prehistory occupied with endless wonders of surrounding nature without firm beliefs but surely filled with many invisible divine spirits and mysterious stars. Due to illiteracy of the period there's almost nothing tangible we could use to gain full knowledge of how early society really looked like and even though we know great deal about those times only by analyzing cave walls, fossil record and DNA samples, in order to describe one early settlement we still must use lots of imagination and scientific guesses. Personally and definitely c

My first encounter with Intelligence Quotient, aka IQ, was 25 years ago during my preliminary exam for the mandatory military service. In those years Serbia was part of a former socialist federation of Yugoslavia along with couple of more countries and avoiding army service was impossible. Everybody had to go to serve the "time" for one whole year and they used those preliminary tests to better fit you into suitable unit and doing a form of an IQ test was part of it. They didn't give us the result, but I probably did it pretty well since they put me to be main operator of a ground-to-ground missile unit. At least my little bit higher intelligence than average "soldier" spared me from the mud, dirt, long marches, carrying heavy weaponry and other meaningless activities of the service. So I spent most of the time in a classroom surrounded with state of the art simulators, playing video games made specially for practicing real time guidance of the missile in simula

There is a debate whether or not Holocene, the latest geological epoch is already finished with ultimate human impact on Earth's ecosystems, which started along with industrial and technological maturity in recent past. Many of us believe that new era, suitably named Anthropocene is what we are living in already. With technology rise, it looks like humans already changed fundamentally to the point of incompatibility with our distant ancestors. Perhaps we are indeed heading toward rapid evolutionary change, like in the latest Dan Brown's novel " Origin ", but this premise is way more suitable for another science fiction I have just watched (for the second time). I am sure that for all of you who like intelligent movies , a long anticipated sequel for "The Man from Earth" finally came and it, without a doubt, opened the Holocene-Anthropocene transition for John Oldman, a 14000 years old man, who also, like entire humanity, seemed to be going through the change

History of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge who among others were the first to take several images per second in one effort - all in scientific purpose back then - to study locomotion of birds, animals and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first who took series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less in the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun shaped camera capable with one trigger pull to capture 12 images in a row within one single second and store them all on the single 90mm film. He used his gun to study various motion of animals, fish and insects within his so called 'animated zoo', including dropped cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet. ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera It was not long after initia

DNA is a fascinating world. That single molecule of life contains all the information about individual living being. Any bacteria, plant, insect, algae, fish, animal or human grows from that one molecule seed. Probably even some alien form still waiting to be discovered on some moon orbiting Jupiter or Saturn. In one way or another, the same could be true with all life in the universe. All of us are grown from that single instructions manual inside the single DNA set of written directions. And there are no two identical DNA in existence, even if we could mix the same two identical human egg and sperm cells several times, similar but different resulted DNA would always be the outcome. We are surely still not mastering the DNA and bio-engineering - it is still young science and even though one giant molecule of life was hinted by various scientists and scholars more than century ago, it was only in early fifties of 20th century when James Watson and Francis Crick created the first double

"It is unwise from some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth - chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than we would go the next level and use it for peaceful exploration of solar system and beyond." - What is Intelligent Life? As promised in my last post story about one grim political view of the last forgettable year , please behold another glimpse to the humanity from another angle. Let's move today from raw reality to the reality-inspired fiction and make a little peek into three science-fiction masterpieces. Two of them, product of current almost expired year, that if you ask me, are making this forgettable year, well, little less forgettable. But before Daniel Abraham's and Ty Franck's "Babylon's Ashes", sixth book of The Expanse and "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", Star Wars sequel, I think this is a perfect moment for me to start the review with another classic, in the most genuine meaning of

Have you ever thought about what you would be or do if you were born in different ages? Well, the future is uncertain but even so I would most likely do some technical and innovative things. For example, if society evolved into living in the void of space I would definitely try to find a place aboard some research ship or orbital station. In plausibility of some, futuristic global society my place would be not so different than today, only my programming skills would probably be diverted from preposterous business projects into something more substantial and useful in science or engineering. But in the spirit of today's post, lets travel to the past and check several old ages. Two centuries ago in the dawn of industrial revolution I would most definitely be involved in machine invention process. Couple of centuries before that, in Leonardo's time, I would probably be hunted by church for my free-thinker ideas that would, most likely, contradict the main belief and dogma. Year

People are asking me these days what is "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself into entire story of our pioneer film making project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play - it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series' so in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into real short movie and after little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious. In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor a

There are numerous ways of how our civilization might end. I said plenty in the past about real threats, either from heavens or from within the Earth or ourselves. It was the main theme in the second half of 2012, around the Mayan's doomsday date and I contributed with several posts related to this, including Doomsday , Biodiversity and The Apocalypse Aftermath and in all those stories I was mainly focusing on the mother nature and catastrophes we can do little or nothing about. It was either some wrath from the distant universe in form of deadly gamma rays and supernovae implosions or some judgment day originated from our own Sun or asteroid impacts or even the ultimate rage from our planet by some super volcanic or tectonic disaster. But I only timidly mentioned all those man made events I referred as 'other human stupidities', including nuclear holocaust and biological hazards. So perhaps now is the time to continue the thread and glimpse into two great stories behind