Interview With a Teenager

There are many periods in one person's life. To me, they all seem distinct from each other. Referring to those farthest in the past, in my mind, it was almost like they didn't really happen to me. Some of the choices I made before, from this perspective, looked like some other person made them on my behalf. Especially in the first couple of decades. But that's the point of growing up and all the changes that happen from early youth to adulthood. Later, we are left with tons of memories that we look back on most of the time with a smile on our faces, sometimes with a little sadness or shame, and once in a while with a confused look as if it happened at all. But one thing is certain: everything that happened, exactly how it happened, defines us as we are today.

Viktor, testing the drums before 'Some Like It Hot,' theatrical play

Of them all, no single period in life compares to the one called the teenage years. I remember those years. Vividly. If I could choose just one phrase to describe all that's happening during those seven years, it would definitely be 'trial and error'. It was just like tasting the life that was thrown at me for the first time. Understanding it. Embracing it. Maybe a little changing it on the way.

But enough about me; the rest of this post is about my son Viktor and the continuation of the 'Interview' series, started with him being seven and ten years old in 'Interview With an Expert' and 'Interview With an X'. Anyway, these are 15 questions for his 15 years I selected to ask him today. I'm really proud of all his answers and his way of thinking. 

Describe yourself in 5 words or less.
Determined, ambitious, loyal, generous, and honest.

What's the best part of your day at school? Why?
P.E. and all of the breaks in between subjects. Because I get to talk to my friends normally and rest a little bit.

If you could invite three people, living or dead, to your birthday party, who would you choose? What would you talk about?
Einstein, Jesus, and my father. We would question Jesus.

Imagine you’re the president, and you need to have 3 people to assist you. Who would you pick and why? 
I'm not really into politics, so I don't know whom to pick.

What have you learned in life that you feel will be the most useful?
Motivation isn't real, but discipline is. Try to be as optimistic but as realistic as possible. Never give up.

If you could change anything in the world and make it idealistic, what 3 things would it be and why?
I would get rid of all the governments; there would be no more countries, and everyone would speak the same language.

How would you explain Earth to aliens?
I think there is a lot of diversity to this question, but let's say in the case that we come to them. I would most likely try in some way to use physics, math, and chemistry to explain Earth.

Do you think it's better to have one great skill you're an A+ at, or many skills you’re a B at, and why?
This question is very easy because if you had only one skill that you are A+ in, then the rest of the skills would not be so great... So that is horrible... I would rather have many skills that I'm a B at. I could easily improve in skills that I like. And I also have a lot of options if I ever change my mind.

Imagine you're the teacher tomorrow at school. What are 3 things you'd teach that you think would help make school better?
Self-defense, how to be a better person, and showing the kids the real world.

How would you explain the word 'love' to someone without using the word 'love'?
Umm... Make this with my hands. 🫶

What is the most important thing you learned in school NOT taught by a teacher?
The world isn't black or white. It's gray.

If you could travel back in time 3 years, what advice would you give yourself?
Make me proud.

If you could grow up to be famous, what would you be famous for?
I would be famous for motivating other people to become the best version of themselves and showing how to really be successful.

If you had enough money that you never had to work, what would you do with your time?
There is no money in this world that would make me not work.

What do you think your life would look like 10 years from now?
I hope I will be successful in the future and be more capable.

So there you go. When selecting the questions, I knew they should not be too detailed or too serious. Nevertheless, they were supposed to be appropriate for the age, and to make sure, I performed a little research first to find the right ones, which I thought were the most suitable. Sometimes, even the shortest answer to an apparently entertaining question shows a lot.

I wonder, if I had a chance, how I would answer them back then. Hopefully not too different.

Reality of Double-Slit Experiment

More than two hundred years have passed since Thomas Young performed the famous double-slit experiment as a demonstration of the wave behavior of visible light, and still its revelation has puzzled our sanity ever since. In short, if we shoot a beam of light at a panel with two small slits (less than a millimeter apart), the photons—elementary particles that light is made of—have to figure out how to get through the slits to radiate out the other side. If they were truly particles, like in the macro world, they would project a solid image of two piles on the background wall behind the slits. If they travel similarly to the waves, like water does in the macro world, the image would resemble a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles leave a mark on the wall.

Thanks to the outcome of the experiment, we know that light is capable of doing both. It always travels in a wavelike fashion, even if we shoot photons in a row towards slits, one after another. The quantum mechanics explanation is that photons are in superposition, meaning they can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. The weirdness comes 'only' if we try to tag particles with pass-through detectors in order to detect which slit they are choosing to go through. At that instant, they break superposition and continue to travel as macro-objects, just like bullets.

This is very similar to the coin flipping or well-known Schrödinger's cat from the macroworld analogy. If we use quantum terminology, these two are in a simple binary superposition; they both have only two outcomes, the coin ending either head or tail or the cat's version being either dead or alive. Superposition in a double-slit experiment is way more complex as far as the photons being in multiple places at the same time between the slits and the detection wall.

However, the weirdness is only present at the quantum level of the microworld, and in the case of light in the double-slit phenomenon, the puzzle is not the nature of how light travels but rather why it behaves the way it does in the moment of being observed. Certainly, it creates profound questions for which we still have no definite answers. The most interesting one is, did we find the puzzle here that shows us how nature really works? What is the reality behind the engine in the quantum world? More important is even the question: is this reality objective throughout the universe, or is it subjective and created for the observer only?

Let's think about the reality problem for the moment first. This behavior of breaking superposition for the sake of the observer is very reminiscent of graphically demanding video games in which the reality is never objective—the scenes are always rendered for the gamer's sensory inputs. If you play those kinds of games and decide to enter a closed room through the door, the room and everything in it don't exist at all until you open the door. Only then does the CPU start creating it for you, and there's a certain superposition of the room and your actions in it that breaks to only one outcome, depending on what you do.

Now, double-slit is too complex to test it this way, but binary superposition could be simple enough to create in the lab in quantum equivalent and monitor what happens. This is what the experiment made by Massimiliano Proietti and his team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tried to perform on a small-scale quantum computer made up of three pairs of entangled photons. The idea is to experimentally test Wigner's thought experiment of an observer of the quantum outcome being also observed by a second observer. The resulting statements of the two observers are that their interpretations of the outcome contradict each other. The same happens in the lab, with entangled photons in the role of non-conscious observers—the inequality in the data is definitely violated, which points in the direction that quantum mechanics might indeed be incompatible with the assumption of objective facts. To put it simply, multiple observers of the same event can have different outcomes as the process in superposition breaks in different patterns. Just like in video games, the reality of nature could also be subjective and rendered for the observer's eyes only.

Of course this raises more questions, and the main one is what "observation" and "observer" really mean. In quantum mechanics, an observation is defined as the interaction of two quantum states that can collapse each other’s probability wave function. In one way or another, this also means that by observing something, we disturb it to the point of ruining the process we are trying to understand. If we add a philosophical point of view, we can also ask ourselves, does consciousness play a role in the observation process? There's an interesting philosophical thought experiment starting with the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" followed by "Can something exist without being perceived by consciousness?"

Well, if you ask me, consciousness or not, if we go this path with reflection to the original double-slit experiment, it is all going toward the direction that the unobserved world only exists in a sort of superposition state, all possibilities of all possible outcomes only waiting for an observer to disrupt it to the point of the ultimate collapse as the result of the reaction between the two processes and the observer. The light is no different; its wave-like behavior is its own superposition, only waiting for somebody to play with. Preferably with lasers and Lego cubes, just like in the above YouTube video. Science is fun, perhaps because it is so mysterious from occasion to occasion. I know I had tons of fun creating this video with my son a couple of years ago. Please find more stories within the physics thread of the blog in the below link.

Strange world of physics at MPJ:
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/physics

Science refs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h75DGO3GrF4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-physics-reality-doesnt.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080

In the Footsteps of Pino Lella

It doesn't happen often that after reading a book, you can compare most of the places and some of the portrayed characters with real sites and buildings along with real protagonists from the historical story. Actually, this never happened to me before, and after I'd reached the last cover of 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky', a novel written by Mark Sullivan, published in 2017, I saw the rare opportunity of visiting the city where it all happened and where all the sites still stand today. Not much later, and after my entire family read the novel or at least got familiar with the story, we packed our backpacks and hit the road. In the aftermath, the result is this blog post along with an embedded video story as a documentary of the half-day walking tour of Milan in Italy, where everything happened more than 70 years ago. In the spirit of a fair warning, I advise you to read the book first before watching the video since it might spoil the reading for you or to wait for an upcoming series or movie with Tom Holland in the lead role.

The novel is based on the true story of an Italian teenager, Pino Lella, who lived in Milan during the second world war and, within the last two years until the very end of WW2, helped many Jewish people escape to Switzerland over the Alps and, in the final year, acted as a spy for freedom fighters while being a personal driver for General Hans Leyers, Adolf Hitler’s left hand in northern Italy. Pino survived all the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation and deeply fell in love with Anna, a girl he met on the streets of Milan on the day of the first bombing of the city. He constantly dreamed about the future they would one day share.

This book tour would not be possible at all without fantastic Valeria Andreoli from BellaMilano, who guided us throughout Milan beautifully for almost five full hours! It was amazing to mix the real streets, all the buildings, the castle and the cathedral, hotels, the train station, and even the monumental cemetery with our vividly built images of all the places we already formed from the book and Mark Sullivan's amazing narrative.

Undoubtedly, spending three days in Milan for us provided lots of more opportunities for visiting the history back to the time all the way to Leonardo da Vinci. Around the year 1482, he moved to Milan to work for the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, as an engineer, sculptor, painter, and architect. Until 1499, when Milan was invaded by the French, he left behind the 'Last Supper', a famous mural painting of Jesus and the twelve apostles; many paintings, including 'The Virgin of the Rocks', Milan's Narvigly, the system of navigable canals to ferry people and merchandise in and out of the city, 'Leonardo`s horse', an uncompleted equestrian sculpture; and many more.

We were especially interested in Leonardo's engineering projects and his machines, models, and sketches displayed in 'Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia—Leonardo da Vinci' and within a new exhibition dedicated to this amazing man called 'Leonardo3' stationed in 'Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II', another Milan landmark from the 19th century. This second video log of Viktor's shows a glimpse of what we managed to visit and learn.

(Un)expectedly, at the end of our first visit to this great city, we have left with much more footage from what we initially planned to make with Pino Lella's and Leonardo's stories. All these are now packed in this third video embedded above, and if you like to see more of Valeria and stories hidden behind Leonardo's paintings, especially the ones he did in the Sforza Castle, if you want to learn what you need to do if you are in search of a good luck charm during your first visit to the legendary 19th-century shopping mall, or if you are eager to check out one great Italian restaurant along with a couple of more places we managed to visit, this is the video definitely worth clicking on.

As for us, I am more than sure that Milan definitely didn't see us wandering its streets for the last time. The rest of Italy too.

The book references:
https://bellamilanotours.com/footsteps-pino-lella/
https://marksullivanbooks.com/

Beneath a Scarlet Sky:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32487617-beneath-a-scarlet-sky (en)
https://www.newtoncompton.com/libro/lultimo-eroe-sopravvissuto (it)
https://www.knjizare-vulkan.rs/istorijski-roman/44294-pod-grimiznim-nebom (srb)

Museums:
https://www.museoscienza.org/en
http://www.leonardo3.net/en/

What Jupiter and Mercury Have in Common?

Before we jump to premature conclusions with easy answers such as 'nothing at all' or 'at least they are both orbiting the Sun', perhaps we could do some quick research, just in case... With Jupiter's equatorial radius almost thirty times bigger than the same property on Mercury, the obvious composition difference between one gas giant and a small rocky planet and all the other major differences in mass, density, temperature, orbital inclination, and orbit period, and with almost everything we could compare the two, it is very hard to find the slightest similarity. Not to say that Jupiter in its arsenal is in possession of moons equal to or even bigger in size than the smallest planet of our solar system.

However, within the past couple of seasons, what they had in common was the fact that they were under the spotlight of all of us who, from time to time, enjoy gazing at the sky with our naked eyes or through modest telescopes with a strong feeling of being the witnesses of our own solar system at work. It all started at the end of last year with a rare Jupiter-Mercury conjunction when two planets came close to each other to the size of two moon-diameters. It was easily observed without any optical aids just after the sunset on December 21, 2018.

Even better, the show was on June 12, 2019. On that day, the giant planet was closest to Earth during the celestial event known as Jupiter’s opposition. At its closest point, it came to within 641 million km from Earth. We took the chance to point the telescope and observe the mighty planet and its four largest Galilean moons: IO, EUROPA, GANYMEDE, and CALLISTO. If you watch the video, you'll find the entire story of the event and more facts about the history of the most famous moons, along with short footage from the Sky-Watcher and references in the video's description.

Culmination in our amateur astronomy happened a couple of days ago on November 11, 2019, with the celestial transit of Mercury over the face of the Sun. It was the last transit of the small planet for a while, and the next time it is going to 'eclipse' the mother star again will be in 2032! It was hard to take the photo of the event since it was fuzzy and cloudy with the sunset approaching rapidly, but we made it at last, and it was worth all the efforts.

Stay tuned for more celestial events in the future and maybe some more stories and photos from the active heavens, along with our first long-exposure astrophotographs from outside the solar system.

Adventurous Travels for 6th Graders

Geographically lying in the heart of the Balkan peninsula, the small town of Svrljig is acting as the capital of a relatively small Serbian land surrounded by exactly 38 villages that are, demographically speaking, living their lives on the edge of extinction. In just half a century, the human population of the area is more than halved, with more and more 'haunted-like' villages containing more empty houses than those with smoked winter chimneys, in which more people die than are born. The past of the area went through numerous changes over time and was pretty colorful, to say the least. Like everywhere else, ever since the written literacy spread its wings only a millennium ago, the history of Svrljig is pretty well documented ever since the great Schism of the 11th century, and we pretty much know what it was like to live here down to that time.

But history goes even further in the past—to those times we know little about, and all we have are a ruin here and there we can try to understand and build a time frame and story behind it. If you want to explore such sites and build a speculation or two standing in the middle of a stone pile that once was a dignified wall of an ancient villa or a military tower of thermae, Svrljig is a perfect place to start with. Moreover, if you want to experience nature at its greatest and to stumble upon sites of pure beauty just next to the modern ruins of almost empty villages and barely standing houses in contrast, you are just where you want to be. If you are a 6th grader with your own Indiana Jones hat and modern GoPro camera, even better.

Historically and in every way considered, the grand jewel title of all the Svrljig adventurous travels goes to the gorgeous Niševac gorge. This was the prime location of ancient life, lying just next to the Roman main road connecting the Adriatic Sea and Danube River, wide enough to carry a luxury chariot without heavy disturbance from the built stones and strong enough to support the passage of the heaviest army of the time (there's evidence of the First Cohort of Cretans stationed around here). The gorge was an ancient spa once with strong mineral springs with healing properties perfect for a settlement that once existed and was named Timaco Maiori (Timacum Maius). The road and the town were recorded by Tabula Peutingeriana, an ancient Roman road map with its seventh section along the way of the ancient cities of Lissus, Naissus, and Rataria. The mineral springs and wellheads no longer exist today due to violent geological events in previous millennia, or they are just depleted by now, but the beauty of the ancient site is still alive, and it is not hard to imagine what it once looked like.

The ruins go even further in time in this area with archaeological evidence of Paleo-Balkan tribes. Before the Romans, this area was once home to the Triballi, a Thracian tribe that lived in the same times as the Celts, Scythians, and Illyrians in the prehistory of Southeastern Europe. Along with all the other extinct Indo-European people and their languages of the Balkans, Triballi fully dispersed during the Hellenization, Romanization, and Slavicization of the region over the eons. It's maybe harsh to say, but most likely Triballi, just like other people who lived here and built their settlements ever since the Neolithic, are now only part of our genes and heritage; we have no substantial knowledge of.

But to get back to the travel itself, we had luck this summer since the railway was closed and traffic-free due to maintenance and rail replacement, and while hiking Niševac gorge, a 1.5 km-long canyon carved in calcium carbonate rocks from the Mesozoic period, we took the chance and stood on the Milutin Milanković bridge, 15 or so meters above an ancient river, designed at the dawn of the first world war by one of the most famous Serbian scientists.

The river name originated back to the Triballi people, who were the first to name it Timahos, which is just one of the words from an extinct Indo-European language that more or less means 'black water'. This particular stream is just one of five rivers that bind together into one of the biggest tributaries of the mighty Danube. The Romans used to call it Timacus or Timaco, and the name stayed until today with the Serbian version of Timok. Our next stop on this summer's travels was exactly 25 kilometers upstream, not far from the spot where the river springs into life. The place is called Pandiralo, and it is literally one of a kind natural phenomena where Timok sinks into a cave and appears again about 750 meters later with around 30 meters of difference in altitude. The legend says the cave goes even further under the mountain and connects other streams as well, but this is still unknown to this date. It was also a one-of-a-kind opportunity to create three messages in the bottle, which Viktor threw into the pit, and hopefully, when the water rises, they will sink with the river, and maybe somebody will find them in the future. Who knows, maybe they will appear somewhere unexpected.

Finally, and unrelated to the river, we also had a short trip to the Samar cave entrance (Milutin’s Cave in the village of Kopajkošara on the slopes of the Kalafat mountain, some 15 kilometers west of Svrljig) and the natural Popšica pool close by. The cave earned its nickname after Milutin Veljković, a well-known Serbian speleologist in his time, who, starting in the year 1969, spent 464 days in the cave, breaking the world record in bivouacking in an underground space. While we didn't enter the cave, as it requires special equipment and guided help, we still had a unique experience of the site, which we are hoping to visit again for a more thorough investigation, including passing through the entire cave from end to end, but I am afraid this is a little bit above the pay grade of 6th graders, and we will have to wait for a year or two. Or three. Or even more.

Svrljig neighborhood and the town itself are one of those inspirational destinations with the power to hook you for years of returning trips, and the beauty lies in the wilderness of the whole experience. There are no fences or limited areas here, and the only guide is yourself and your wanderlust gene. The food in restaurants is divine, and the mountain air comes with healing abilities if you stay long enough. The Svrljig area extends to the east to the famous Balkan mountains, the backbone of the largest peninsula of southern Europe, with more sites that come naturally enriched with a variety of elements, including uranium ore.

I am definitely affected by the Svrljig geography and history as well, to the level that one of my science fiction stories included this particular area as the main plot for Arty's adventure. If you are eager to explore the story, it is based on "Serbian Kryptonite", the Jadarite mineral with a chemical formula similar to the formula invented for the fictional substance kryptonite in the 2006 film 'Superman Returns'. The story is the final chapter of the FAR-T1 novel you can find on the blog.

Location and Character of Timacum Maius
https://www.academia.edu/5901475/.../Location_and_Character_of_Timacum_Maius

Traces of the Roman Naissus–Ratiaria Road
http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/

Milutin Milanković
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milutin_Milankovic

Tabula Peutingeria
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Extends_of_the_Tabula_Peutingeria.png

Tabula Peutingeriane VII (nowadays Serbia)
https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana_Serbia.jpg

The First Cohort of Cretans, a Roman Military Unit at Timacum Maius
https://www.academia.edu/.../The_First_Cohort_of_Cretans

Samar Cave Adventure
https://naturetraveloffice.com/en/avanture/caving/avantura-samar/

Samar Cave, a forgotten jewel worthy of Guinness record
https://www.itinari.com/samar-cave-a-forgotten-jewel-worthy-of-guinness-record-knx9

The World of Extraordinary Apps

Smartphones in this touchscreen form have not been among us for a very long time. Even though before the year 2007 the origin of app-based mobile phones existed within a variety of BlackBerry brand models and prototypes in Nokia and NTT DoCoMo labs, only after capacitive touchscreens matured enough to be industrialized and embedded into popular handheld devices did they start to be really interesting and competitive. Today, after only a decade, the smartphone market is one of the most valuable on the planet, and app stores have reached the limit of 2 million per platform. There are literally zillions of apps out there, and browsing the app libraries became the real effort.

Anyhow, today, and a dozen years after the first touchscreen smartphones (LG Prada and iPhone) hit the stores, Viktor and I decided to film/write about a dozen apps that are a little bit unusual and extraordinary compared to those that are used on a daily basis by most of us.

To start with, let's first present the latest video from the zViktor22 channel and our recent collaboration. I hope you would like it, even though it ended pretty long, almost half an hour in length, and if you haven't heard of some or all of the apps we were testing within, it could be entertaining and educational. If it proved that way, you know the drill; please like and subscribe and/or add some comments at the end. It would mean the world to us.

Before I add a word or two to describe screenshots from the apps, it is only fair to mention one more app that we tested with this video creation. Suitably for this title, this entire video is edited in an app as well. The name of this really great app is Animotica, designed for Windows 10, and all I can say is that it is a valuable competitor for the Movie Maker and Shotcut desktop applications we were using regularly for Viktor's channel so far. Only a couple of features were missing for this amazing app to become a worthy rival, even for software with the suffix "pro" in their titles.

The smartphone applications we were testing were all Android editions, but I am sure for most of them, if not all of them, they could be found within the other two major operating systems as well. We started first with apps designed for the outdoors. For this occasion, we chose "GPS Compass Navigator", "Last Survivors", and "CycleDroid". Like Viktor said in the video, the first two could become handy if the apocalypse strikes, especially the second one, which is one great offline database of survival skills. For the GPS compass, it might not be really useful in such an event as it requires operational GPS satellites, but it was one of the best compass-related apps with maps in overlay included, which is ideal for camping.

CycleDroid is one of those few apps that we are using on a regular basis. It is basically tracking you while riding a bike and saving database entries of all cycling details, including maps. The biking map files are using recognizable formats and could be easily imported into Google Maps, for example. Sometimes it could be extremely fun—like in the above screenshot from the app, one of our cycling trips in the past accidentally painted a "sitting bear" shape on the map. We probably couldn't do it in such detail if we tried painting with streets on purpose.

The next three apps from the above screenshots belong to scientific experiments you could do with your smartphone. Perhaps the most interesting is the one in the middle—the app that can play a continuous beep by choosing frequency and amplitude. In our case, 1400 Hz was able to put out the flame of a candle! Of course, peeking into the microworld is always fun, and the first app on the list was able to take images from an external camera, in this case a digital microscope equipped with a powerful LED light. If you want to learn more about it, hop to Smart Microscope story from an earlier post or the Digital Microscope video from Viktor's channel.

Surely, the biggest power from the smartphone is the global network, the internet coming either from the mobile network or wireless receiver. However, we are taking it too much for granted, and even our smartphones can't operate in full capacity without the mighty internet today. Smartphones are able to communicate even without it just by using their network parts. Just like 'Walkie-Talkie' from the previous century, by using extraordinary apps like "Walkietooth", "Offline Chat", or "FireChat", we can pair two or more smartphones into a private small wireless mesh network and use it in the wireless range. The video shows how to do it in much greater detail.

For the next section, we are going outdoors again with two amazing games. "Street Hunt" and "Pokémon GO" are great representatives in the mobile gaming industry. While you probably know a bit or two about catching Pokémon in your favorite parks, hunting a secret location is also extremely fun and yet as simple as one such app can be. Simply put, it chooses a nearby location from Google Maps, and your task is to hunt it down. If you want to play it with friends, unlike "Pokémon GO", there are no rules but those you create yourselves.

The last section and final two apps belong to the educational realm. I left these two for the end simply because I liked them the most. I have to admit that I learned about "iNaturalist" while I was researching the apps for this collab. This is sort of a social network that helps with identifying species. The idea is simple—just photograph an unfamiliar plant, insect, or animal, send it to the app and an automated algorithm, and people will identify it for you. Last summer, one strange bird landed on the high branch of our birch tree. Viktor and I took the photo, and to test it, we uploaded it to iNaturalist for identification. Only a couple of hours later, we got three matching recognitions. Common Wood-Pigeon. 100% correct. Amazing!

The last, but not the least, comes "Star Chart". The app that uses all the orientation sensors from the smartphone to identify its position in 3D space and, with the addition of GPS coordinates, creates an augmented reality view toward the stars and all the visible and invisible stellar objects known to man. If you own a small educational telescope, you need to know where to point it. It served me well before when I wanted to show Viktor's friends Jupiter's moons, the most famous constellations and stars, Mars' redness, and Saturn's rings, but even without the scope, its educational value is priceless.

At the very end of the story about extraordinary apps we found exciting, useful, or just fun, I am enclosing the links for all the apps from the post and video. Hopefully you will find a home for some of them on your smartphone as well, or at least inspiration to search for more.

Mobile Outdoor Games:
Throwy Phone Extreme! | Street Hunt | Pokémon GO

Experiments and Science:
MScopes for USB Camera | Spectroid | Yet another Air BLOwer: YABLO

Offline Audio/Video/Chat:
FireChat | Walkietooth | Offline Chat

Education and Space:
iNaturalist | Star Chart

Tools and Outdoor:
Army Knife | GPS Compass Navigator | Last Survivors | CycleDroid

Retro Games

I am not absolutely sure that 'Retro Games' is the correct title here; after all, in the realm of video games, what is today ultra-modern and state-of-the-art within the current level of GPUs and gaming consoles, literally tomorrow we can start considering retro. On the other side, the imagination of people in the gaming industry is never old, and some games from the past, despite obsolete graphics, will always be on the top shelf of mine. Not to mention those familiar nostalgia moments when I stumble on some vintage and familiar screen that always reminds me of some happy moments from the past.

To cut the story short, one of those vintage moments triggered the idea for Viktor's and my new blog-vlog collaboration to explore a couple of old games for his channel and this small cover story. We made an easy deal and divided tasks for me to choose the games and for him to play them in front of the camera. It was interesting enough to see how a 12-year-old reacts to the old graphics and different nature of old games compared to nowadays, not only to the superb visual effects and large screens but also to the new way of gaming, which includes an amazing 3D environment along with a networked gamer's world with other players from around the globe participating in the same game in real time.

Surprisingly, he liked almost all of the 12 games I chose for the event and even installed one of them for later entertainment. The selection was not easy; there were tons of games to choose from various consoles and home computers from the 20th century, and it was hard not to be subjective. However, it was not possible to avoid some of the classics, so in the first group I chose games that are considered to be the first commercial games invented and put into production, including "Spacewar!" and "Computer Space", which originated from the DEC PDP-1 showpiece application and transferred to the first mall game console ever in 1971. It triggered a new industry race, and the very next year came PONG, the second extremely popular game that soon after occupied first home consoles as well. I also had one in the late seventies when I was even younger than Viktor today, and it was spectacular, with almost outworldly experience every time I plugged it on and connected to our old CRT television set!

The following group of unavoidable games were certainly real classics. Games that everybody was familiar with and games that still, even though not played with like before, experience media exposure, especially in movies, YouTube, and TV shows. The three games I chose were Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Super Mario Bros. At the end of the century, you could find them everywhere: malls and game shops, home consoles, and personal computers. Now, they live their second life in browser emulators and smartphone apps. They are not super popular, but they are still here with all of their successors and game-alike applications.

Somehow, at the same time these classics achieved the medal of popularity, home computers replaced game machines and playground shops, and I chose three of those with three game representatives that were very popular in their time. Europe's number one home computer came from Sir Clive Sinclair Labs, and his ZX Spectrum won people's hearts almost instantly. Mine too. This was my first home computer, I already wrote about on the blog, and of all the games I owned on audiotapes, perhaps the most memorable was "Jumping Jack", which Viktor liked a lot. During my high school and early university days, the CPU Z80 was the one I wrote my first machine-assembly code for, including an emulator for assembly language. Great days they were. But to conclude with this block of games, I also included "Mission: Impossible" from the equally popular Commodore 64 and "Prince of Persia" from the first PCs and their DOS environment.

The remaining three games from Viktor's video were also unavoidable: 'Space Invaders' and "Galaga" for their representative, "Tetris" for the choice of the most popular game from the first-hand consoles, and of course Atari 2600's E.T. to represent the officially worst game ever. I had to stop there; otherwise, the YouTube video would be too long, and even with these twelve, it broke the 30-minute limit I had in mind. Even though it's long, it goes without saying that I warmly recommend watching the embedded video. If you belong to the old school like me or the new one like Viktor, this story has the potential to bring your old memories back to the surface or trigger a perspective of how games looked back then in the beginning, and I promise you if you follow some of the included links to their browser emulators, the gamer's joy will emerge, if not once again, then only for a brief moment of guaranteed entertainment.

References and links to the game emulators:

Spacewar! and Computer Space (DEC PDP-1 computer from 1959 with first game in 1961 and portable console from 1971 influenced by original PDP-1 game)
https://www.masswerk.at/icss/

Pong (aka 'Table Tennis for two players' from 1972)
http://www.ponggame.org/

ZX Spectrum (1982)
http://torinak.com/qaop

Commodore 64 (1982)
https://c64g.com/games/
https://c64emulator.111mb.de/index.php?site=pp_javascript&lang=en&group=c64

DOS Games (1981)
https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/

Online emulators (Atari 2600 from 1977)
https://virtualconsoles.com/online-emulators/

Pacman (1980)
http://www.pickychicky.com/pacman/pacmanfs.html

Donkey Kong (1981)
http://arcade.modemhelp.net/full-5448-Donkey_Kong_Classic.html

Super Mario (1983)
http://www.uta.edu/utari/acs/ASL_site/Homepage/Misc/Mario/index.html

Prince of Persia (1989)
https://classicreload.com/prince-of-persia.html

The Oldest Pictograph for Copper

Last year, during our visit to the Cretan site of Knossos and their wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated in large part to one of the greatest peaceful periods in human history, I didn't hide my admiration for the old Minoans and their way of life. I even said I would move to Crete without second thoughts if I had a time machine, mainly to avoid the hostility of the world order we are currently living in today. At the time, considering only the European continent, I was under the impression that cultures like Minoan were rare and the Bronze Age society we glimpsed on Crete was maybe walking on the edge of being the only one in the history of mankind. To say the least, I couldn't be more wrong.

Only a couple of millennia before the late Neolithic period, known as the Chalcolithic or simply the Copper Age, there was an old European society that lived for centuries and also flourished in peaceful harmony and perfect equilibrium with nature, themselves, and their immediate land, where they built large settlements with big houses, streets, and infrastructure. And one of their major cities, by using vocabulary for describing settlements built 7000 years ago, existed almost next to my backyard. So to speak.

Prehistoric Europe, probably like everywhere else in the world, has experienced a civilization boom after the Neolithic revolution and invention of agriculture, along with the domestication of wild animals. That also included a boost in population and ways of living, and in these parts of the world, for almost eight centuries, if not longer, rose a civilization that belonged to the well-known Turdaș-Vinča culture. Many archaeologists today consider this early civilization for the throne of being the first independent and distinguished modern humans and true civilization cradle.

More than ten major settlements were found, and most of them were in the process of excavation throughout Serbian territories, with the addition of several more within neighboring lands, especially Transylvania in central Romania. These people not only perfected agriculture but also were the first to initiate the Copper Age in world history. The art of pottery was their hallmark, and many alien-shaped figurines triggered a wave of 'ancient astronauts' theories, and I will only quote one of the referenced articles: "The appearance of these figurines is striking. Many depictions of extraterrestrials in ancient literature and art reference the same oval-shaped heads, enormous almond eyes with dark pupils, and small noses and mouths". Whether or not this is evidence enough to conclude that Vinča people were in contact with extraterrestrial beings who helped them to achieve a higher level of life, I will let you conclude or ignore, but one thing is for sure: these people, along with their way of clothing and decorating, early metallurgy, and the functionality of their large, for the time, houses and settlements, were almost on the same levels of civilization as the old Minoans who lived and flourished three millennia later.

If you add to the facts that pottery was practiced at the household level with artifacts clearly created and shaped by children, along with evidence that women's clothing included mini-skirts and trousers, it is really fascinating. All vanished civilizations from ancient times earned their place in the evolution of humanity, but those of them who practiced or invented something for the first time and what we today take for granted represent our true and genuine heritage. Within the humanity tree, Vinča people deserved a very special place for two very important things in our evolution as a species.

They developed one of the earliest forms of proto-writing, which still waits for definite evidence of whether or not it overgrown simplicity over centuries and became the true representation of their spoken language. The second achievement is indisputable for most scholars. This culture was the first one, in the current knowledge and archaeological evidence, to learn how to smelt copper ore. They were the pioneers who took the big step toward the end of the Stone Age.

Vinča-Turdaș symbols were found practically everywhere engraved on artifacts excavated in Serbia and Romania. Hence the name by which it is known; like with Cretan civilization, we don't know how they called themselves. Most of the inscriptions are on pottery, and the vast majority of the inscriptions consist of a single symbol. This indicates that symbols are used similarly to what we are familiar with today as "icons", and lots of different pictographs are probably designed to identify the object they are engraved on, the content of it, the owner, value, and measure, perhaps even the ancient logo of the household or manufacturer. Most likely the names of individuals as well. For example, the name Cochise of Native Americans' Apache means "oak wood", and one of the Vinča symbols most definitely means the same thing. No doubt there were a series of pictographs related to copper and whatever they made out of it.

However, over the time of civilization's existence, the script probably evolved along, and these three tablets in the image above, found at a site in the village of Tărtăria, indicate more complex writing that most likely represents words of their language. So far, no "Epic of Gilgamesh" alternative has been found, but lots of work on sites is still ahead, and I am sure many other sites are still waiting to be found. Even so, Vinča symbols predate the earliest Sumerian cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the first Minoan writing by far.

To me, the Vinča-Turdaș script most definitely resembles all other linear scripts, which means by using the symbols it is possible to write complex lines and sentences, but I am far from being the expert in the field. However, this suggestion is sound, and lines of text dated to the period and found in two locations in Bulgaria and Greece support the hypothesis. For the theory to become proven or disputed, cracking the ancient code must be done first, but for all lost languages, this is not easy. For example, old Minoans used a "Linear A" script that is still a mystery even though it is related to its solved big brother, "Linear B". Its amazing that these three scripts are possible to download in the form of TrueType fonts, and just for fun, I used them in this image to print "Milan's Public Journal" in Vinča, Minoan, and Mycenaean. This is rubbish, of course, and all these people from the past would need very different keyboards to write their languages (letters of the alphabet would not do any good for their symbols), but still, it was fun to play with.

While the writing puzzle is still not solved, Vinča people who lived nearby natural deposits of copper ore very quickly developed a process to extract the metal from the mineral and to build various tools and weapons used only for hunting. One of such sites is the one from my neighborhood. Only an hour of driving to the south is the archaeological site of Pločnik, probably the first ancient city in the world where copper smelting was industrialized. We visited the site last weekend, where we found amazing replicas of Vinča people's homes and also a nearby museum in the city of Prokuplje with lots of excavated items from the site and lots of stories from the excavation itself.

Even today, there are deposits of malachite and azurite in the wide area where the site is located, and our guide hinted that in the past they were probably able to find them in the river as well. Both are common copper minerals that are melted at 700 °C. Campfires are about 200° short of the temperature needed, so they built square-shaped furnaces stored in larger buildings with pipe-like earthen blowers with hundreds of tiny holes in them used to blow compressed air directly into fire. Whether people, like Viktor in the above video, were manually blowing the air or they had some sort of leather bellows is still unknown.

The place is very big—more than 100 hectares. The ancient city was large and populated from 5500 to 4700 BC in a row until it was destroyed in a big fire by probably intruders from afar. What happened with survivors and where they moved after is also not known. Like Minoans, no peaceful society ever survived hostile events and probably ceased to exist entirely or fully dispersed among the newcomers. Anyhow, we were all carrying lots of impressions from the last weekend trip to the history of our own neighborhood, along with a piece of pottery, 7000 years old, we received as a gift from the excavation park. No words could describe all of our gratefulness, especially Viktor's, when he had to choose a piece that maybe once belonged to his peer from the early Copper Age.

The Minoan Legacy:
https://www.mpj.one/2017/07/the-minoan-legacy.html

Stone Age of Iron Gates:
https://www.mpj.one/2015/08/stone-age-of-iron-gates.html

Cyclops of Peloponnese:
https://www.mpj.one/2016/08/cyclops-of-peloponnese.html

Image & Video refs:
https://www.disclose.tv/the-danube-valley-civilization-script-is-the-worlds-oldest-writing-313756
http://korzoportal.civcic.com/julka-kuzmanovic-cvetkovic-plocnik-kako-doziveti-neolit/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ

Refs:
http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/serbiavinca.htm
https://cogniarchae.com/2015/10/29/tartaria-connection-between-vinca-and-proto-linear-b-script/
https://www.disclose.tv/mysterious-vinca-statuettes-evidence-of-extraterrestrial-contact-313094
http://www.ancientpages.com/2015/09/30/mysterious-ancient-vinca-culture-undeciphered-script/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinca_culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinca_symbols
https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/civilisation-script-oldest-writing
http://www.ancientpages.com/2018/02/17/7000-year-old-inscription-undeciphered-vinca-script/
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/vinca.htm
http://vrtoplica.mi.sanu.ac.rs/en/section/58
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting#Copper_and_bronze
https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/17456/pdf
https://www.behindthename.com/names/usage/native-american

Serbian refs:
https://sr.wikipedia.org/sr/Плочник_(археолошки_локалитет)
https://www.serbia.com/srpski/posetite-srbiju/kulturne-atrakcije/arheoloska-nalazista/vinca/
http://muzejtoplice.org.rs/index.php/en/muzejtoplice
https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Civilization-Museum/Arheo-park-Pločnik

Fiction and Reality of Mount Olympus

I was very young when I visited Olympus for the first time. It happened during our yearly vacation in the region back then, in the eighties of the previous century. I vividly remember there was a dangerous dirt road with not much room for two vehicles to pass by, ending near one of the mountain homes with an embedded small tavern, which can really print on its portfolio that it was built on the top of gods' heavenly entrances. For some fairly strange reasons, Coca-Cola and souvlaki on the tavern's terrace felt really tasty, just as the pure and clean water from the water stream just next to it. Unfortunately, and despite all of my efforts, I couldn't see or find anything divine, out-of-worldly items, or even a glowing, shiny rock. There were no gods whatsoever. Or naked muses. Or beasts with snakes instead of hair. Or horses with wings. Or mighty heroes. Nothing. Well, I was only 10 years old. What did I know... Maybe that pair of hawks we saw flying around the highest rock across the tavern and screeching in high tones were actually Apollo and Artemis arguing about something.

On the other end, it might be that I visited Olympus during the gods' withdrawal. Way too early...

But, before I continue with the actual glimpse into modern Olympus fiction and short reviews of one hilarious book and one extraordinary comic, I think I need to write a word or two about the photo I embedded above, which might be interesting to read. This is in fact Mount Olympus (just like the highest peak shown from the air in the post header). The most famous mountain in the entire world. The mighty one. It is not the highest of them all—just slightly lower than 3K meters and not even the highest in the entire Balkans—but it was the one chosen by gods to build their own abode during the ancient times. Sitting just next to the Aegean Sea, it is the first sight you see when you travel from Thessaloniki to Athens in modern-day Greece. I took this image in 2010 from the beach in the sea resort of Leptokarya, described by Wikipedia as "the former seat of East Olympos municipality, which is part of the municipality of Dio-Olympos". During my countless visits to northern Greece in the past several decades, all of them during summer holidays, believe it or not, all of my Olympus photographs ended with a similar heavy stream of clouds above mountain peaks. It is like Olympus is always hidden in clouds for some weird meteorological reasons. Well, that was not entirely true, as I have seen Olympus naked on an occasion or two, but still, it was not often. It's like Olympus is attracting the clouds and capturing them to stay and hide its peaks.

This summer, almost forty years after my first excursion to the famous mountain, we took the perfect opportunity to board a tourist bus and venture their Olympian route, following new paved roads carrying people to the multiple resorts within the mountain base and visiting Olympus' main attractions. At least to the point where the road limits heavy buses from proceeding. The tour included the town of Litochoro, the famous Bath of Zeus, Agios Dionysios Monastery, and Old Panteleimon, a picturesque mountainous village on the slopes of the mountain. Surely seeing the sites with your own eyes has no alternative, and the next best thing is to check a couple of those travel guides and stories you can stumble on online, but as far as this post is concerned, I will leave it to my son Viktor to tell you all about it in his channel's video log we both filmed this August. If you find it pleasing, you know the YouTuber's drill—please like and subscribe... ;-)

The mountain definitely contains a beautiful charm of its own, but we all know that Olympus is best known for its part in Greek mythology, and with all its ancient fiction, it has inspired writers all over the world ever since. With some of them, the thin line between fiction and nonfiction is not really visible at once, but in the case of Michael G. Munz's amazing novel called 'Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure' one would say it is all about fiction and laugh-out-loud (LOL) moments. The gods in this comedy returned from their withdrawal after more than two thousand years with all of their entourage and got back to the active and mutual life with mortals. And they returned with a twist.

What is most interesting about the old Greek gods, compared to all of the modern religions of today, is that their godhood was not that estranged from their creation, like it is now the case with all of those Jerusalem monotheistic beliefs. Greek gods loved to mingle with mortals. And by mingle, you know what I mean, which is especially true with Zeus (probably Dionysis too). In fact, within the opening chapters of the novel, Apollo defined it best when he said that "gods are just like mortals, only... better." And that means with everything that we can use to describe ordinary people, including conspiracies, hatred, intelligence, stupidity, love, sex, affairs... It's like the Greek gods possess everything good and bad we mortals experience on a daily basis; only theirs is enhanced and powered off the charts. And of course, they could change appearances into hawks... and do other magical stuff. So, by establishing that, we can safely say that all the gods in "Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure" are more than just divine creatures. They are active characters in the story, and along with amazing Michael's narrative, which is playing with the reader on numerous occasions, it is something that gives this book, at least for me, the originality I have never experienced before. The humor is everywhere, especially in the narrative, which on many points requires a fair amount of the reader's geekery and knowledge of ancient mythology. I'll stop here with no further spoilers and only my warm recommendation.

As for the other media dealing with Olympian myths, there are numerous movies, among them "Clash of the Titans" and "Wrath of the Titans", with Perseus played by Sam Worthington and Liam Neeson as Zeus. They were not that bad movies at all, despite all my reservations, and best of all, the script of the second movie offers the answer to the ultimate question of how and why gods from Olympus ended their presence on Earth. Of course, Henry Cavill as Theseus in "Immortals" was also one of the visually great movies, with heavy usage of old Greek myths and Olympian gods in main roles.

On the other hand, the world of graphic novels never disappoints, and Rick Riordan's novels with Percy Jackson adventures recently, after debuting with two motion pictures, transferred into extraordinarily enjoyable comics. The world of demigods in the two graphic books so far looks very nice and, I have to admit, much more appealing than in movies. Perhaps because reading comics was my first love from early childhood and/or maybe because these two books were my first comics reading with the Kindle way of presenting graphic novels, but nevertheless, if you are into Olympian myths and love great fiction that emerged from old tales, my recommendation for Riordan's "Heroes of Olympus" series with "The Lost Hero" and "The Son of Neptune" goes without saying.

zViktor22 YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ

Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure
http://michaelgmunz.com/books/zeus/

The Lost Hero: The Graphic Novel
http://rickriordan.com/book/the-lost-hero-the-graphic-novel/

Smart Microscope

Most of the popular digital and DSLR cameras are perfectly equipped for macro photos. Taking a great photo by zooming to the scene no farther than 20-30 centimeters is a little effort and requires only clicking the shutter button and leaving all the technicalities to the camera's automated software. Even the cheap lenses can do that without a problem. A while ago I collected some of those photos and wrote a little about macro photography and how to record all the close objects not very distant from our nose.

But can we do closer than that? Can we take a photo of an object like the top of a pencil as close as a couple of millimeters away from the lens, for example, like the one in this photo:

Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot

Well, not with a consumer camera, not without specialized optics. However, "augmenting" our smartphones to do the magic is just a little effort. And yes, I took the above photo with only my smartphone, an additional plastic lens I taped to its camera, and... lots of patience.

To be completely honest, taking a photo of an insect, small in size, like a hair louse that is erratically running and jumping in your small zooming window, is not little effort per se, but it can make your day and everything else is just a piece of cake. All you have to do is strip one of those laser pointers and rip out its lens. Perhaps the better results you can get are with a laser pointer equipped with a lens made with greater optical quality, but for starters, anyone can do it. So, like in the left image, or if you click on the bottom reference link, when you take out the lens, all you have to do is tape it to your camera lens on the back of your smartphone, and the rest is your imagination. If you follow the image story, the goal can be even bigger—the end result can be one of those microscopes you can find in toy stores with quality lenses, capable of taking a photo or even a video clip of a microworld with up to the cellular level. Complete instructions on building such a device you can find within the Turn Your Smartphone Into a Digital Microscope! YouTube page.

Of course, taking microphotos means you have to get close to the scene, and your smartphone will block most of the useful light, so you have to think like an ordinary microscope. You bring the light with you and position it just below or next to the "set". I recommend one of those LED flashlights that are very small in size that allows you to carry them along with your phone. I used one of those book reader LED lights with a flexible handle with just one LED source on the top. That way you can fit both in your hand—the light and the phone. The other hand will be responsible just for zooming and the button. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is how it looks in action.

I didn't play too much time with this, but I am sure the following summer will bring lots of more microphotos when all of that microbiological life emerges, but it is amazing what exactly you can stumble upon in your front yard or balcony in just a couple of hours. In the image below to the right, when I pointed the lens toward the rose's stem, I thought I would get only some sort of reddish plant spores, but instead my memory card was filled with tiny and not too adorable rose lice. In other words, if you make this, prepare to be surprised at what exactly you might find in there.

Therefore, I advise practicing first with non-live objects in your own household, like in the above example of pencil tops, and believe me, exercising is what you really need to do, simply because zooming out of focus is just one tiny move of your finger or even a significant breath or hesitation. Anyway, I will be adding more images to this gallery in the future, and besides the embedded images in this post, there are more in the web gallery.

In today's update, the story goes further into the microworld, and this time with a cheap 'consumer' digital microscope. I bought one for Viktor's 11th birthday earlier this year, and during this entire spring we played with it a lot. In quality and zooming, it was more or less in the realm of the DIY smart microscope I made and described in the post. However, it brought to the scene its own powerful LED lights, and with its pencil-like shape, it was more controllable and applicable. The downside was that it was far beyond smartphone camera quality, and the number of pixels was not too high to capture quality videos, but still, its educational value was out of the question.

This new addition to the post imagery was actually a video from Viktor's YouTube channel, zViktor22, where he tested the microscope with various plants, food, money, fabrics, insects, and more from our country village, household, his 5th grade herbarium, and our front yard. I also included our old smart microscope photos and the caterpillar video from the initial post to complete the story about what it's possible to do with little effort and cheap technology.

Original post: May 2014, Update: June 2018.

Smart Microscope:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TNng7utQTw1zb3GK8

The Minoan Legacy

Often, I found myself giving a glimpse of thoughts of where I would move on this world in order to acquire at least a little bit better life compared to what we currently have. Or when. Has there ever been a time in history when there was a civilization with a more dignified style of living? With society built with a more honest foundation toward themselves and their neighbors. With equality among people, genders, colors, skin, and different cultures. With not at all or just a hint of superstition and religiosity. With no temples higher than schools and people's homes. With cities without strong police keeping order and without military of any kind. Was there a country without fortifications, both real and metaphorical? With no or just a bearable hostility toward others...

There is definitely no such idealistic settlement in this world. Not now. But there was one before. More than three thousand years ago on the island of Crete. The first civilization in Europe and perhaps the first and last one that fits this description. The place where I would time travel without hesitation if I could.

We know them in our history books as the Minoans, but that wasn't their real name. What they called themselves we don't know. We don't understand their letters and can't read their tablets. They built marvelous settlements with almost all the modern infrastructure we are familiar with today. Glorious city-palaces with paved roads between them. With main squares where they preferred practicing sports and arts instead of going into temples to pray. They were people who invented and lived one idealistic, peaceful life and based their wealth on trades among themselves and all the others across the sea.

Unfortunately, after several attempts throughout eons, human nature and natural catastrophes destroyed Minoan civilization, and these people at the end dispersed fully, and their way of life faded away for good. Among neighboring civilizations and their saved documents, as well as with the Bible, their names were probably either Keftiu, Kaptarians, Caphtor, or Kabturi. Or if you like, we can even call them Atlanteans if we connect Plato's story with the Minoan volcanic eruption that reshaped the island of Thera in the middle of the second millennium BC. Perhaps we should wait for their Linear A script to be revealed by maybe another Rosetta Stone, but until then, Sir Evan's label for Minoans based on the old Greek mythology is the best we've got. Nevertheless, this blog post is not really history research, and more stories about related old times I tried to list below in the references, but one thing is for sure. The end of Minoan culture, which started with earthquakes and at least one cataclysmic volcanic eruption, faded and dispersed during the final couple of centuries of the second millennium with hostile raids and occupations over time from both directions: mainland Greece in the face of old Mycenaeans and ancient invaders from the direction of the Middle East.

However, their life based solely on manufacturing goods and food, honest trade, sports, arts, and all the non-hostile human activities was once indeed possible and flourishing. Unfortunately, their legacy is, as it seems, lost for good, and after more than three and a half thousand years, we are living in a world filled with fear of self-destruction with little hope for humanity to survive the next three millennia. Anyhow, the road, or to better say, the airplane, took us this summer to the island of Crete, and we landed at the Chania airport, which is also the military base that hosts both air and nearby naval forces. The sight of supersonic fighters constantly flying above the beaches, heavy military aircraft parked next to the civilian runway, and large destroyer ships anchored in Souda Bay was definitely not something old Minoans would evolve into if history played the cards differently. After visiting the Knossos archeological site and the wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated to these ancient people, I am certain of it.

Caused by the city's amazing scope and Minoan fascination for bulls, centuries after the fall of civilization, Greek mythology created one of the most famous stories with characters as strong as Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Theseus, and, of course, the Minotaur captured in the center of the labyrinth. On the other side, the most plausible truth of why Knossos was built the way it was built is simply because Crete was positioned on top of the movement of the African tectonic plate under the Eurasian plate. This is causing lots of earthquakes, small and big, and results from the complex geological process; the entire eastern side of the island is sinking while the western part is rising. The ancient builders purposely made the palace in this way in order to sustain constant ground shake, with buildings and chambers literally supporting each other from all directions.

It probably goes without saying that I am fascinated with Greece and the Greeks. Their amazing history and all the contributions their ancestors gave to the rest of the world are enormous. With this summer trip, I rounded out walking the lands of all three main stages of ancient Greek times. Classical Greece that belongs to the mainland north of Sparta, the Mycenaean epoch that precedes them in the time of Agamemnon, and now the ancient civilization of Minoans that precedes them all. Surely, there are many more sites to see, but somehow I felt today that I fulfilled the genuine urge to visit all the main places and to walk the same paths where stories from history (and mythology) took place.

Our prime vacation time this summer was in Agia Marina, a cute little place several kilometers west of Chania, where we spent a wonderful ten days exploring local beaches and took an excursion to the old Venetian harbor in the old city and its nautical museum with an exact replica of the Bronze Age Minoan ship. The second trip to Heraklion and Knossos completed our travel through the history of the island, and the following day-by-day travel video clip Viktor and I made hopefully will show you more than still images could, especially if you have never visited Crete before.

Surely, summer vacations are never about visiting museums and the history of the area. It is also about the present, and in the most hedonistic fashion, we also visited the Balos Lagoon, one of the greatest beaches in Europe, and, most of all, tried to enjoy the time by meeting local people and visiting local sites and the neighborhood. It is hard to say what we liked the most, and I guess the best thing is to say that Crete is an exceptional place to visit. Something we will definitely try to do again. Many thanks to all the good people we met this July, especially to the crew of Fly Fly Travel and their great guides, Nebojša and Dobrivoje, for all their super-professional work and help.

Image and video refs:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tp8ugeNBg07zE9q52
https://www.greecehighdefinition.com/greece/

Refs:
http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/knossos/articleKnossos01.html
http://paleoglot.blogspot.rs/2010/01/minoan-name-for-minoa.html
http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Minoan_Science.php
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22527821
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knossos
https://www.timemaps.com/civilizations/minoan-civilization/
http://ancient-greece.org/history/minoan.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/.../HIST101-2.3.2-MinoanCrete-FINAL.pdf
http://www.ancient.eu/Minoan_Civilization/