For many, including Pythagoras, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, Monad was a symbol for God or the first being or the totality of all beings.
Sunflower Sea Star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) feeding upon Bryozoan (Heterapora pacifica) on stalks of Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), Breakwater, Monterrey, California.
The sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) is a large predatorysea star usually with 16-24 limbs called rays. It is the largest sea star in the world. Sunflower sea stars can grow to have an arm span of 1 m (3 ft.) in diameter. The color of the sunflower sea star ranges from bright orange, yellow and red to brown and sometimes to purple, with soft, velvet-textured bodies and 16-24 arms with powerful suckers. Most sea star species have a mesh-like skeleton that protects their internal organs. Easily stressed by predators such as large fish and other sea stars, they can shed arms to escape, which will grow back within a few weeks. They are part of the diet of the king crab.
Sunflower sea stars reproduce sexually and asexually. They also have separate sexes. Sunflower stars breed from May through June. In preparing to spawn, they arch up using a dozen or so arms to hoist its fleshy central mass free of the seafloor and release gametes into the water for external fertilization. The microscopic sea star larvae float and feed near the surface for two to ten weeks. After the larval period, the larva settles to the bottom developing as a planktonic form and transforming into a juvenile sunflower sea star, Juvenile sunflower stars begin life with five arms, and grow the rest as they mature. The life span of most sea stars is 3–5 years.
This little guy totally trips me out. It’s crazy how he’s born like that. I guess it keeps him safe. This is an old photo I took a few months ago when I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Candice, Mia and Rachid. One of the special exhibits was the Secret Lives of Seahorses. Pretty cool little things.
Anyway, apparently I’m not as young as I thought I was. Friday night started off with an Armenian food festival with my family and friends. This was followed by going to Redwood Shores for a Nevin’s birthday. Stayed out pretty late and early next morning I had breakfast with Candice in the Castro District at this great café called Toast. At 11, I drove to Walnut Creek to attend a 12 hour bachelor party. The day’s activities included paintballing, dinner at a really expensive steakhouse and bar hopping for hours. At midnight, I made a run back to San Francisco to attend my friend Chris’ birthday party in North Beach ending around 4am. The kicker… 8:45am wakeup call from my mom for Sunday brunch.
I wiped out on Sunday afternoon.
This is for the group Macro Mondays. Every Monday a macro photograph is submitted for the week's challenge. This week's theme was "Weightless".
Taken with a Nikon D300 w/ a 35mm f/1.8 Nikkor Lens
Ponyo(崖の上のポニョGake no Ue no Ponyo?, literally "Ponyo on the Cliff"), also known as Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, is a 2008Japaneseanimated film by Studio Ghibli, written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is Miyazaki's eighth film for Ghibli, and his tenth overall. The plot centers on a goldfish named Ponyo who befriends a five-year-old human boy, Sōsuke, and wants to become a human girl.
The film has won several awards, including the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year. It was released in Japan on July 19, 2008 and August 14, 2009 in the US and Canada, where it reached #9 in the box office charts for its opening weekend.
American poster for Pony
Plot
The plot is centered on a fish-girl who lives in an aquarium in her father's underwater castle with numerous smaller sisters. When her father takes her and her siblings on an outing in his four-flippered submarine, she is driven by a desire to see even more of the world and swims away. She ends up stranded on the shore of a small fishing town, and is rescued by a boy named Sōsuke. After taking a great liking to her, Sōsuke names her Ponyo and promises to protect her forever. Meanwhile, her father, Fujimoto, is looking for his daughter, upset that she ran away. He calls his wave spirits to return Ponyo to him. Sōsuke is heartbroken by this, and goes home with his mother, Lisa (or "Risa" in some translations), who tries to cheer him up, but to no avail. Ponyo and her father have a confrontation, where Ponyo refuses to let her father call her "Brunhilda". She declares her name to be Ponyo, and voices her desire to become human because she has started to fall in love with Sōsuke. Her father silences her with difficulty and goes to summon Ponyo's mother. Meanwhile, Ponyo, with the help of her sisters, breaks away from her father, and uses his magic to make herself human. This causes an imbalance in the world, which in turn results in a huge storm. Riding on the waves of the storm, Ponyo goes back to visit Sōsuke. Lisa, Sōsuke, and Ponyo stay the night at Sōsuke's house, hoping the storm will be over, whereupon Lisa leaves the house to check up on the residents of the nursing home where she works.
Granmamare, Ponyo's mother, arrives at Fujimoto's submarine. Fujimoto notices the moon has come out of its orbit and the satellites are falling like shooting stars. Granmamare declares that if Sōsuke can pass a test, Ponyo can live as a human and the world order will be restored. If he fails, Ponyo will turn into sea foam. Sōsuke and Ponyo wake up to find that most of the land around where the house has been covered by the ocean. Lisa has not come home yet, so with the help of Ponyo's magic, they make Sōsuke's toy boat life-size and set out to find Lisa. While traveling they see ancient extinct fish swimming, such as the Gogonasus and Licosus. After landing and finding Lisa's empty car, Ponyo and Sōsuke go through a tunnel. There Ponyo loses her human form and resumes the form of a fish. Sōsuke and Ponyo are taken by Fujimoto into the ocean and down to the protected nursing home where they're reunited with Lisa and meet Granmamare, both of whom had just had a long private conversation. Granmamare asks Sōsuke if he can love Ponyo even if she is a fish or human. Sōsuke replies that he "loves all the Ponyos". Granmamare then allows Ponyo to become human once Ponyo kisses Sōsuke on the surface. The film ends with Ponyo jumping up and kissing Sosuke, turning while still in the air into a little girl.
The Flower of Life (FOL) is a geometrical figure composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles, that are arranged so that they form a flower-like pattern with a sixfold symmetry like a hexagon.
Leonardo da Vinci has studied the Flower of Life's form and its mathematical properties. He has drawn the Flower of Life itself, as well as components therein, such as the Seed of Life. He has drawn geometric figures representing shapes such as the platonic solids, a sphere, a torus, etc., and has also used the golden ratio of phi in his artwork; all of which may be derived from the Flower of Life design.
Monad being the source or the One meaning without division.
Monism is often erroneously seen in relation to pantheism, panentheism, and an immanent God. However, the concepts of absolutism, the monad, and the "Universal substrate" are closely related.
