Monday, November 24, 2014

Colors of the Fall

The other day I went to a funeral service in a small village near my town. The atmosphere was overwhelming, and the weather was cold and cloudy. Gray, compact, stratus clouds. A heart attack; and he was not even old. Nor young, yet not old...

On the way towards the church and the graveyard, I've noticed many colorful chrysanthemum by the fences.



In a churchyard by a river,
Lazing in the haze of midday...

While on my way back, I've shot some of them because I saw pretty colors in a gray day.













Sunday, November 16, 2014

Mr. President

Usually I stay out of politics. Only I just wrote a comment on G+ related to Ceausescu, the former Romanian communist president, which appears in the clip (at the end of the post) of a Romanian rock band, ALTAR (MIND THE VOLUME!: clicking the link opens their website, and also their audio player). I thought I should add it as a post on my blog, so here it is:

An "emblematic figure" of Romania, a living nightmare for years until the 25th of December 1989. I was almost 19 back then, and at my 18th birthday I've had not hopes for a better future till my 40s. Luckily a Wind of Change blew all over Europe, and my dream came true less than a year later!
Now, we are changed, but not as some of us have dreamed of!
There are so many Romanians to vote abroad because they did not feel comfortable at home in Romania, they had no other option for a decent living in the country they really love.
I've noticed that the majority of the voters outside Romania was made out of young people! And if you are looking at them, they are not beggars or prostitutes! I'd rather say that they have white collar jobs! Yes, Romania has this kind of people too!
And these people want change in order to come back home, to live happily together their families and to work in and for their own country, Romania, a beautiful country as one might noticed right here in my Google Photo Albums!
There's a word for the situation that these voters want to change in Romania: kleptocracy!
Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often with pretense of honest service.

Friday, November 14, 2014

Mehedinti County Roads

After a rainy summer, I thought we'll enjoy a sunny autumn. I was pretty wrong. We've had our sunny days at the beginning of the autumn, only the forest was still green. I wanted some sunny days while there are a large palette of colors in the hills towards the Godeanu Mountains in Mehedinti county, Romania.


In between the above mentioned periods of time, I saw some interesting cloud formation near my city (or is it a town?! - I was always wondered), Drobeta Turnu Severin. So I drove that way, and I wanted a better angle, then a better panorama, then a higher ground, then a view after the next corner, and the next... So I've reached a higher altitude village (430 m asl) at some 30 km away from Severin, Ciresu (the cherry tree).

The Wrong Turn
The road is winding among forests, meadows and grasslands.




Sometimes a calf is just sitting in the middle of the road like a veritable statue.


But the best pictures were the flora ones! In order to enjoy the beautiful autumnal flowers, one might want to pull over and make a few steps in the surrounding forests. He or she will be enchanted by a wide variety of colors and sounds! I leave you with the colors, and invite you to listen the sounds by yourselves!

Thistle flower

Clover flower

Thistle flower
Golden Rain

Purity or... Innocence

Little Sun



Rainy Clover

Monday, November 3, 2014

Illusion of Time


Stories within books are an illusion.
Printed images are an illusion.
Movies are an illusion.
Life is real.

How about time?

We perceive time through movement. We define time through movement. We relate time to events.
But how about the existence of time in the Universe?

We go from one point to another and we say we will reach the destination in time, or we will be late.

We tell stories about our history and we link an event to a fixed dated or period back in time. We can not change that date or that period.


We do something right now. We can change whatever we do now and do something different, but not very different, or not very far from our actual place. So we can not change time very much.

We say we’ll have a meeting at a certain date and time. We can postpone the event during the same day, the same week, or the same month... Or we can even cancel the event. So there’s a wide time margin change.

I imagine time as a long flexible blade tighten from one end until the moment that have just passed and free at the other end. The tightened end has no movement at all, the part representing the actual time has a limited movement, and the future, the far it is, the larger movement it has.


Now how about a reverse thinking: a tightened blade at the future end, and free at the opposite one?
The blade will look the other way around.

Taking those two blades and joining them together, their movement will froze. A frozen movement of time will be the equivalent of the past, or the fixed future, so there will be just moments on a scale, like coordinates on a 3D map. Time being the fourth dimension could be considered like any other dimensions. If we consider a point fixed in space, having the very same coordinates, no matter the time, the fourth dimension, time, could be tight as the previous three, so it will be like the time has stopped.

The result of combining the two blades will be a fixed blade (our conventional shape of time). Now we are looking at it like at a 2D shape from above. How about looking at it from one end? It will be a point! Yes, a point like any other 3D points in the space that we easily could imagine (with x, y and z coordinates).


What is time? Why the 20th Century was the Century of Speed? Why are we in such a hurry to solve more and more things? Is it the time, or is it all about our perception of a slippery dimension?