Photos

marjan (6093) 2007-02-19 14:39

hi henry, wonderfl shot, nice coloures and excelent POV.
Marjan

stego (22448) 2007-02-21 11:26

Salut Henry,
Pov impressionnante, une belle carte postale d'un endroit très romantique. Luminosité et définition excellentes.
Très, très beau, je l'aime beaucoup.
TFS, Amicalement, José.

batalay (21193) 2007-02-22 19:54

Hello Henry,

As I was just working up on the list of TE friends whose works I was reviewing, I saw yours come in. First this magnificent shot of Rosary Quay (perhaps a canal) appeared. The photo is absolutely first rate. I hope my wife and I can see Brugge in the next year or two. You've made the city utterly compelling! The light and colors, the composition and exposure — superb. It is a bit evocative of the landscape photos of two admired TE members Jaap Polak (carper) and John Maenhout (jhm).

But what really grabbed my interest is your mentioning 1665 as the 'Year of the Plague,' in England. This is a subject that is very close to my heart. When the plague crossed the English Chanel and began to ravage the population of London, the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge were disbanded, so that population gatherings would be reduced. It was that year that the incomparable Isaac Newton, not quite 23 years old, left Cambridge and went home to Woolsthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire. Sixteen months later,when the plague had subsided, he returned to Cambridge, with a list of his "mental inventions." He had formulated the "binomial theorem," and applied it to find the slopes of continuous curves ("fluxions," he called it); he studied optics and found that light passing through lenses could be "separated into its refrangibilities" (refraction); he returned to mathematics and invented "fluents" or inverse fluxions. In the process, he had invented differential and integral calculus, making him the greatest mathematican in history. But he had many more months to go, so he came up with his three laws of motion. (The third starts with the words, "For every action, . . ." Then he had formulated the crowning glory of all his work, he had asked "What is it that keeps the moon in its orb? And he had attacked the problem by computing the distance the moon falls out of a straight line (1/19 inch) in the first second, which he compared with the distance an apple falls in the same first second 16 feet (4.9 meters), and arrived at the inverse square law force. Of course, he also designed and built the reflecting telescope, after all, sixteen months is a long time, if you are Newton. In the history of science, this is called the 'Annus Mirabilus' or the "miracle year." The only comparable period came in 1905 when Albert Einstein had a miracle year.

Your comment on my Sante Maria della Salute launched this essay. I apologize for bending your ear.
Warm regards, Henry,
Bulent