Reflections

The conventional history of Indian cinema states that the first Indian feature was made by Dadasaheb Phalke who in 1913 made the film Raja Harishchandra thereby inaugurating the Indian film industry . However there are reasons to doubt this narrative. It is well established that long before this, Mahadeo Gopal Patwardhan had filmed a Marathi feature “Shambharik Karolike” and exhibited it with the help of a magic lantern in 1885. This may not have used the standard moving picture technology, but even so, another filmmaker, Hiralal Sen has legitimate claims to be considered the first Indian film maker. In the Calcutta of the fading years of the nineteenth century an English entrepreneur named Stephens ran a flourishing business exhibiting short films entitled among others “A running train,” “Man washing streets by water pipe “and so on. Most of his exhibitions were at the Star theatre in Calcutta, but he also ran shows in the suburbs and rural areas of Bengal. At this time, Father ...

Reblogged from GRRL Scientist: hosted by the Guardian website.The was originally posted in Maniraptora . Once the most abundant bird in the world with a population size estimated to be somewhere between 3 and 5 billion in the early and mid-1800s; the sudden extinction of the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, in 1914, raises the question of how such an abundant bird could have become extinct in less than 50 years. A newly published study combines high throughput DNA technologies, ecological niche modeling and reconstructions of annual production of acorns upon which the birds fed to show that the passenger pigeon was not always super-abundant. Instead, it was an "outbreak" species that experienced dramatic population fluctuations in response to variations in annual acorn production. Thus, the extinction of the passenger pigeon likely was due to the combined effects of natural population fluctuations and human over-exploitation. It was one of those career-alter...