In the 1970’s the various Apollo missions took a number of highly detailed photographs of the moon which have been seen only by a handful of scientist. For three decades these photographs have been preserved in a freezer, but now Arizona State is making these images available through the web.

The photographs are being scanned at a 14 bit resolution, meaning that digital versions of the these black and white images have about 16,000 shades of gray, there are also a few highly detailed color images. The high resolution will allow for maximum conservation of detail, and accurate geometric fidelity.

NASA expects to gather many more images of the moon with their 2008 lunar reconnaissance mission. You can see some of the Apollo images at The Project Apollo Image Gallery (although they aren’t very well labeled); or try Google Moon.

You can read an article on the subject from the BBC here.

Image from The Apollo Image Gallery.

For some years now more and more initiatives are being created to help out poor women develop industries and help communities pull themselves out of poverty. The main belief behind this approach is that lending money to women will be spread out more evenly throughout the community; in general women tend to invest in three areas, health, their children, and their home, all areas that in the long term will benefit the community at large.

A lot of the business that poor women want to develop require relatively small amounts of money to get started, which usually means that banks are not likely to consider them for regular loans, or will do so with conditions that are very unfavorable to them,

This concept of microlending was made popular by Bangladeshi banker and economist Muhammad Yunus (his website), who in 2006, was awarded a Nobel Peace Price with Grameen Bank for helping finance the poor.

Today there are is a growing number of institutions which strive to help promote women headed businesses, some of these are Women’s World Banking, WAM international (Women Advancing Microfinancing), Financial Women’s Association, and the UN’s IFAD (International Fund for Agriculture and Development) among many others.

You can read more about microlending to women from an article in the BBC.

Image info here.

Earlier this week I was in NYC to witness the auction of a portion of a collection I helped inventory about two years ago. The collection was pieced together by Maury Bromsen, a rare book collector based in Boston, who passed away in 2005, bequeathing the entire collection to the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence Rhode Island. The Bromsen collection originally included material by and about Simon Bolivar, which had already been donated to the JCB, along with material mostly, but not exclusively, from the 18th, 19th and 20th century spanning the length and width of Latin America. Among the material I inventoried were original proclamations of the Mexican independence, along with entire collection by Andres Bello. There was also material on tourism, politics, novels, memoirs, cookbook, and all kinds of other literary pieces emerging from the region.

The auction, which took place at Swann Auction Galleries, included 68 lots from the original Bromsen collection, all of which were sold in about an hour. This sale was set up as a shelf sale, meaning that everything had to sell, regardless of the price; this would be in contrast to a catalog sale where the seller set a minimum price, and items will be kept if there are no buyers willing to pay this price.

Buyers in this occasion were mainly book dealers who had to buy entire book lots to get a few hidden gems, which they would later resell individually. Someone else that was there buying and whom I got to meet was the director of the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, in Bogotá, Colombia. The fact that she came all the way from Colombia to buy books on Latin America in New York was very telling of how the flow of books works these days.

There are still thousands of book from the Bromsen collection that will be auction off sometime in the future. The next sale will likely be middle prices material, and the last one will be for all the remaining treasures.

Photograph by colombianflowers.

While it’s not entirely new to create online memorials for loved ones who have passed away, I’m just starting to realize that there are a number of websites out there dedicated to helping people create these sites, or which gather information from people who have passed away.

Gone Too Soon is a site in the UK that allows you to create a virtual tribute to someone and lets others comment and express their condolences. The site is a not-for-profit which aims at keeping their services free for all to use. Virtual Memorials is another such site, although this one reaches users all over the world. In a similar vein, mydeathspace.com is a site that is not technically associated with myspace.com, but which gathers information from people with myspace accounts who have passed away (it also includes information on account holders who have been involved or are responsible for someone else’s death). I guess the main difference between the first two sites, and this last one, is that friends and family creates sites in the first two, while mydeathspace just aggregates information that is in the public sphere. And while the Goon Too Site and Virtual Memories make every effort to keep their sites friendly, there have been a number of reported cases on mydeathspace of distasteful comments, always with the “rationalization” that in the USA freedom of expression should be paramount to everything else.

You can read more about these sites and the phenomenon in general from an article in the Guardian.

I just found a really interesting article recounting the experiences of two BBC correspondents who spent two weeks traveling the length of the USA speaking only Spanish. The aim of the project was to see what kind of experiences, stories and adventures they would encounter and to get a sense of just how prominent Spanish is in this country, even with all this talk of “English Only.”

To my delight they found Spanish speakers all along, although of course some were more fluent than others. Among the statistics they provide, 15% of people who label themselves “Hispanic” are monolingual English speakers; 25% of are monolingual Spanish speakers; the remaining, and largest portion were bilingual.

Still stereotypes abound. Along their journey they found a man with distinctly Latino name, who spoke no Spanish, and another who after 6 generations in this country, and a college degree is still ostracized and assumed to be an uneducated immigrant.

Just to put things in perspective for all those crying “English Only”; Spanish is the second most common language in the USA after English. The USA has the 5th largest Spanish speaking population in the world; Spanish is the most common language taken in schools as a second language; and besides, this country doesn’t have an official language.

I say whether Spanish is spoken by immigrants or those born and raised here, it benefits us all to know more than one language, and clearly we are going to need it as the Spanish speaking population continues to grow here, and this world continues to come closer together.

You can read the BBC article here, and take a look at the reporter’s blog here. You can also learn more about Spanish in the USA here.

A few days ago the Christian Science Monitor had an interesting article about conservation efforts for bufeos, (also known boto, pink dolphins, or fresh water dolphins). Scientist Fernando Trujillo from the Colombian based Omacha Foundation is behind a five nation project which also includes Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Their research hopes to gather information on population numbers and the current state of the species in order to help project it, and to use the bufeo as the poster child for a larger preservation campaign of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers.

Hopefully these efforts won’t be coming too little too late, as was the case just last week with the less fortunate fresh water dolphin in the Yangtze River whose extinction seems to have been confirmed. The Indus, Ganges and Mekon rivers also have fresh water dolphins, the populations of none of which are in good shape.

I’ve been lucky enough to have seen pink dolphin while drifting down the Orinoco river many years ago, but the memories are as fresh as if it had been just yesterday; they really are an impressive sight, and hopefully this charisma will help preserve them and the larger river ecosystem in which they live.

The International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest has some more information on pink river dolphins here, so does Project Boto, here. A good book on the subject is the Journey of the Pink River Dolphin by Sy Montgomery.

Boto image by Pasajero on Flickr.