Whoa, Whoa Dude!

The Katskhi Pillar - The Pillar of Life

 

Also referred to as the Stairway to Heaven

A mystery still remains about the Katskhi Pillar, located at the village of Katskhi in western Georgian region of Imereti, about 7 miles or so from the town of Chiatura. What we do know is that it is a stand-alone rock of natural limestone and is about 130-140 ft high, overlooking the river valley of Katskhura. The mystery surrounds the medieval monastery that was built atop. The people of Katskhi, revere it as The Pillar of Life. The structure was researched and ascended for the first time in 1944 and since has peeked the interest of many. That most current findings and reports can be easily researched online. I have found countless articles simply by typing Katskhi Pillar in my search engine.

Here's a link that is packed with information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katskhi_pillar

What I personally found most interesting was the architecture of the structures themselves, which consists of
 a church,  a crypt or burial vault, three hermit cells, a wine cellar, and a curtain wall on the uneven top surface of the column. Unfortunately, I have not yet found any interior photos. I am anticipating my finding a documentary.

Stingray City is located in the shallow waters of the northwest corner of Grand Cayman's North Sound. It's just inside a natural channel which passes through the barrier reef. That's important to know, as it explains not only where Stingray City is, but also why it is.
Stingrays are bottom dwellers who feed primarily on mollusks and crustaceans, for which they dig in the sand, and on the occasional small fish. Stingrays naturally like shallow, sandy bottoms such as that found at this channel because that's where they find their food.
Fisherman used to duck in here, behind the the reef, to find calm water before returning to the dock. Rather than spill their beer and have sharp knives and fish guts flung about the boat while on open water, they naturally waited to return to the sound to clean and fillet their catch. Disposing of the offal was easy, toss it overboard in the shallow water, there's no one out here and the fish will eat it! It was fat city for the rays!
Well, years went by, and eventually some local divers realized that, not only were there were a lot of rays out there but you could get in the water with them and feed them by hand  (Divers will try most anything, given enough time and air!).  Then in 1987, Skin Diver Magazine found out about it, sent Geri Murphy down to do a story on the whole thing and the rest was, as you say it, history!
Now, over ten years later, Stingray City and a second site near Rum Point Channel, called Sandbar, have hit the big time. Known throughout the world, featured on prestigious television documentaries, and seen as underwater advertising backdrops for everything from automobiles to 9v batteries, Stingray City and Sandbar are no longer quite undiscovered.
But for every diver or snorkeler who dares get in that water for their first time this year, with these prehistoric looking creatures lurking just below their toes, the adrenaline still flows and the heart still pumps. It is still a world-class experience.
This is not a penned up, artificial, man-made aquarium setting with captive rays like they setup in the Bahamas in 1995. This is the real thing, this is the real ocean with real animals who are free to come and go as they choose, and they choose to be there because they hope that you might just come down there and feed them. Makes sense, when you think of it, who really wants to have to grub in the sand for a living?
How to survive it all:
There really isn't that much to actually have to survive out there (other than that bright sun directly overhead, burning into every exposed part of your body). Thousands and thousands of folks have visited these two sites in the past ten years without being ripped to shreds by killer, man-eating rays. You'll probably survive it as well.
If you are going to get in the water, here's a couple of hints for a more pleasurable experience.
If you dive or deep snorkel, wear a "skin" or light wet-suit to protect from stingray "hickies." Stingrays cannot see what they are feeding upon and they eat by sucking the food into their mouths between two hard dental plates. Sometimes they can get confused by all the feeding going on, and since they don't feed by sight, they just start sucking as they approach the food source (divers). It's not bad intent or rude manners on their part, after all they're there to feed - you're the one who's on this higher "inter-species contact" level - they're just after a free lunch!
Feeding them has been compared to feeding a horse, while underwater - watch your fingers. Your guide will probably have cut-up bits of squid or ballyhoo fish to feed to the rays and will give you a piece or two at a time to feed them. (Helpful hint to advanced divers: put a piece or two in your buddy's BC pocket for that old mysterious animal magnetism underwater.)
Remember, this isn't Fido - you can't just toss the fish up in the "air" and expect the ray to jump and catch it. Also remember, the ray hunts by sense of smell so you can lead a ray around for quite a while with just one piece of bait - actually just long enough to get bushwhacked by another ray coming in from another angle. When you finally decide to feed a ray your piece of bait, hold it in the palm of your hand with your fingers pointed away from your hand so that your palm is very flat or bent back. The ray will come in and just vacuum that bit of fish right up.
Many folks just let go of the bait the first time or two - the ray misses the fish and it gets taken by one of the ever-present Cayman Piranha (Sergeant Majors and Yellow Tail Snappers). These fish are actually the real threat here, they can come and give you a rather sharp bite on the finger to help encourage you to give them the bait.
If you don't want to feed the rays, keep your hands to yourself. If you get nervous, just fold your arms across your chest and cover each hand with your opposite arm. You should understand that sometimes the rays are rambunctious and can actually bump into divers in attempting to get fed. Remember that they live on the bottom and hunt by smell, so you can either just back off from the group who's feeding them and observe from a distance or go back up to the surface and watch from up there for a bit.
Be sure not to wear dive gloves while diving or snorkeling with the rays. The fabric of the gloves can easily strip off the layers of protective mucus from the ray's skin and expose it to potentially deadly infection. There is absolutely no reason or need to wear gloves at Stingray City or Sandbar.
Keep in mind that these are wild animals and will not take kindly to folks trying to ride them or pull their tails. They are capable of inflicting a rather serious injury with the stinger on their tail if you attempt to ride or harass them physically. On the other hand, while rather forward in their feeding habits, they are not aggressive animals and will not try to ride you or pull your tail.


FROM WIKI

Stingray City is a series of shallow sandbars found in the North Sound of Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands. It is a tourist attraction, where southern stingrays are found in abundance and visitors can pet and interact with the animals.

Contents 1 Location 2 History 3 Getting there 4 References

Location

Southern Stingrays passing each other at Stingray City Sandbar off of Grand Cayman Island

Stingray City is in the shallow waters of the northwest corner of Grand Cayman's North Sound. It is just inside a natural channel that passes through the barrier reef and consists of a string of sandbars crossing the North Sound from Morgan Harbour to Rum Point.

History

It may be that stingrays began gathering in the area decades ago when fisherman returning from an excursion, navigated behind a reef into the sound, and cleaned their fish in the calm water of the shallows and sandbar area. The fish guts and squid were thrown overboard and the stingrays eventually congregated to feast on the discarded guts. Soon the stingrays associated the sound of a boat engine with food.^[1] As this practice turned into a tradition, divers realized that the stingrays could be fed by hand.
Today, tour and excursion boats, along with private watercraft, gather at Stingray City in large numbers. Passengers disembark and enter the chest-high water to interact with the stingrays. The boats' proprietors bring along with them pails of chunked-up squid meat, which they dispense by hand to the animals, thus attracting dozens of the creatures to the feeding spot. Visitors can visit Stingray City and pet stingrays, while standing in only 3 feet of water.^[2]

Getting there

Stingray City

Each method involves a short boat ride to the sandbar area at the North Sound.

• A snorkeling trip, which normally occurs in the heart of the sandbar where the water is only 3 to 5 feet deep.
• As a scuba diver. Dive groups consist of ten to twenty divers, wearing no fins as they may hurt the congregating stingrays. The divers are over-weighted, which keeps them on the bottom. The dive master swims between divers dispersing diced squid and fish pieces. Stingrays quickly surround them.
• Using a glass bottom boat, an alternative if the weather is too windy for snorkeling.
• Riding a jet ski, and then tying it to another jet ski that is anchored on the ocean floor.

Grumpy Cat, aka Tardar Sauce

 

Grumpy Cat (born April 4, 2012), real name Tardar Sauce is a female cat and Internet celebrity known for her grumpy facial expression. Her owner Tabatha Bundesen says that her permanently grumpy face is due to feline dwarfism.Grumpy Cat's popularity originated from a picture posted to the social news website reddit by Tabatha's brother Bryan on September 22, 2012.It was made into an image macro with grumpy captions. "The Official Grumpy Cat" on Facebook has over 912,000 Likes. Grumpy Cat stars in Lil Bub & Friendz, a documentary directed by Andy Capper and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 2013.

The Bundesens say that Tardar Sauce's face is due to feline dwarfism and an under bite.She and her brother Pokey were born to normal parents with "a flat face, bubble eyes, and a short tail. Grumpy Cat is undersized and has hind legs that are a bit different. Ironically, Grumpy Cat is calm and Pokey has a grumpy personality.

For more information and fact references go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumpy_Cat

Negative Afterimages

Negative afterimages- Illusion?

By staring at the photo for so long in one place, the light from your monitor temporarily makes an impression within your eye on the light receptors. When you look up and blink at the wall or ceiling, the image becomes more clearly visible to you in a negative form. Since it was a negative image to begin with, you have reversed the image back into a positive. No Red dot is necessary, just focus on the center of the image.

Try it with your own photo! By opening your photo in almost any photo editing software (like Paint, for example) you can click the adjustment setting and select "invert Colors". and Voila! you are now an optical illusion.

Here's a more formal and detailed explanation;

Negative afterimages are caused when the eye's photo-receptors, primarily those known as cone cells, adapt from the over-stimulation and lose sensitivity. Normally, the eye deals with this problem by rapidly moving small amounts (see: microsaccade), the motion later being "filtered out" so it is not noticeable. However if the color image is large enough that the small movements are not enough to change the color under one area of the retina, those cones will eventually tire or adapt and stop responding. The rod cells can also be affected by this.
When the eyes are then diverted to a blank space, the adapted photo-receptors send out a weak signal and those colors remain muted. However, the surrounding cones that were not being excited by that color are still "fresh", and send out a strong signal. The signal is exactly the same as if looking at the opposite color, which is how the brain interprets it.

"When all wavelengths stimulate the retinal region adapted to green light, the M and L cones contribute less to the resulting percept because their photopigments absorb less light than the S cones. Thus, trichromatic theory can not explain all afterimage phenomena, indicating the need for an opponent-process theory such as that articulated by Ewald Hering (1878) and further developed by Hurvich and Jameson (1957). Afterimages are the complementary hue of the adapting stimulus and trichromatic theory fails to account for this fact." (David T. Horner, Demonstrations of Color Perception and the Importance of Contours, Handbook for Teaching Introductory Psychology, Volume 2, page 217. Psychology Press, Texas, 2000)

Ewald Hering explained how the brain sees afterimages, in terms of three pairs of primary colors. This opponent process theory states that the human visual system interprets color information by processing signals from cones and rods in an antagonistic manner. The opponent color theory suggests that there are three opponent channels: red versus green, blue versus yellow, and black versus white. Responses to one color of an opponent channel are antagonistic to those to the other color. Therefore, a green image will produce a magenta afterimage. The green color tires out the green photoreceptors, so they produce a weaker signal. Anything resulting in less green, is interpreted as its paired primary color, which is magenta.

For more information go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

 
How does the Jesus optical illusion work?

 Again, by staring at the illusion for so long in one place, the light from your monitor temporarily makes an impression within your eye on the light receptors. When you look up and blink at the wall or ceiling, the image becomes more clearly visible to you in a negative form. Since it was a negative image to begin with, you have reversed the image back into a positive.

To prove this theory, I opened the image in a photo editing program and selected "invert colors" from the drop down menu...
                                   Before                                                                      After