To Panic or Not To Panic ?

it’s been almost 20 days since the earthquake hit Japan, and they are still counting bodies…in addition the nuclear disaster which hit the Fukushima region on the 11th of March will continue to release radioactive material in the atmosphere, soil, freshwater and seawater for months or even years.

Up to now we know almost nothing solid for the disaster, and the only information which is available to the scientists, has been gathered either by unmanned planes (drones) or by scientific models for nuclear disasters.

the following photos were taken by the Japan Air Photo Services Co.

Reactor #3

Reactor #4

radioactive steam from reactors #2 and #3

WikiLeaks and Twitter

the power of the Net… and additionally  the power of the social networking tools!

Today WikiLeaks “leaked” via Twitter

almost 250,000 secret or classified cables (mainly of US origin) on certain diplomatic terrains, such as Middle East, Far East, North Africa, the Balkans etc.

The Guardian has already uploaded some of the already 29-30 leaked documents on an interactive map …

check it out .

History in the making!

Got Oil ?

Plenty!

Everywhere…

About a month ago, an explosion caused a burst of an underwater oil well at the seabed of Mexican Gulf.

BP, which is responsible for the well and the explosion… was trying to seal the well for the past month with no success… till today!

High pressured mud and cement was used to seal the leak…

800,000 litres of oil leak to the Atlantic Ocean every day...

Tweet Preservation

the following post is taken from the official Twitter Blog and is really amazing news…

The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library’s primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.

Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets ever created. Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to understand the popular contemporaneous reaction to the retirement of Justice Stevens, the health care bill, or Justin Bieber’s latest album, you can virtually time travel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for innovation on the Twitter platform and so it seems, does the past!

Obsession …

Being obsessed with video-games is really BAD !

Green Power is needed !

According to the CNN article,

Cresting the brow of autovia A-49 in Andalusia, 10 miles outside of Seville, the world’s first commercial solar “power tower” appears on the skyline like a giant obelisk.

solar tower

Even on an overcast morning the sun’s rays are so intense they illuminate the water vapor and dust hanging in the air to create a giant lattice of white lines that appear to emanate from the eye of the tower.

how it works...

The tower itself is 115 meters high — the height of a 14-storey building — and, bathed in intense white light, the overall effect resembles nothing so much as a religious object.

religious object... ?

Valerio Fernandez is director of operations for the PS10 platform and its neighbor, PS20. That means he is responsible for the 624 giant mirrors — or heliostats — that reflect the sun’s rays into a receiver located at the top of the tower.

full article

the actual company responsible for the project

It is important to see how Greece will utilize the sun and wind power!

Fingers crossed !

My connection goes dead twice every minute…

I am not able to upload any photos or stories, because my Internet connection is going dead every minute… I will try to fix the problem and update the blog as soon as possible.

For the time being you might want to check these links, I find them quite amusing!

play  Photoplay for free
Google logos since 1998
virtual tour of Aghia Sophia
mapjack find your city
piZap your photos online
World Press Photo of the year 2009
Cool T-shirts
Samorost play
Ancient World Cultures
Facebook or Lamebook ?

I found them here

Interested in media…

media world

Since adolescence I was interested in the media sector… together with some friends we started a school newspaper, wrote several articles on local news, cooking, anecdotes and crosswords,  most of the time by copying them out of other media…

We continued our feat with printing more issues,  adding a sports section, photos and advertisements of local companies.

We finally managed to put aside enough money and used them together with other funds for a 7-day long trip to Rhodes in 1997.

Since then, I entered the digital era with the set up of a blog in google’s blogspot back in 2005 which was then left lying on the web…

Last year I started a new blog, in wordpress this time, with the name Imprim@tur, which I keep till today…

I also entered the community of twitter with the same name , which is fun only when you are in a range of a wifi connection and you are updating your twitter status by sending photos taken with a smartphone and use twitpic to send it to twitter etc…

For the last couple of months I am working on the newsletter of an NGO which works with women and preventive breast cancer screening.

january Newsletter

DecemberNewsletter

Moon Crater on the spot… ready for a photoshoot?

One thing that can be said for certain about the Moon is that it has had a rough life. Since it first formed, it has been constantly battered by asteroids, meteorites and comets, as evidenced by the massive amounts of impact craters that adorn its surface. Some of these landscape features are very important because they appear to be very young, in the sense that they were formed only millions of years ago. Such is the case with the Tycho Crater, believed to be one of the youngest on the lunar surface, which recently got a new set of images, Space reports.

Tycho Crater

Tycho is average in size, astronomers say, but it is obvious that it is very young. According to geologists, as a crater gets older, its surface begins to get covered by smaller impact marks, and its edges start showing signs of erosion. This is not the case with Tycho, as the feature still looks pristine, with no signs of newer impacts obscuring its surface. This was again proven recently, as the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) moved above the structure, and snapped a series of high-resolution images of the area. In addition to the immediate scientific value of these images, they are also important in terms of the future, planned missions to the Moon, which NASA has planned.

source

Air traffic controller … for ships…!

I found this very cool site , which shows in real time the traffic in the seas around the globe…

greek seas traffic

an archive still from the live tracking