A walk down the alleyway that leads from Paranal observatory’s entrance gate into its astronomers’ residence produces one of the most striking changes in surroundings a person can experience in a few footsteps.
Outside the air is parched and the ground bleached by sunlight from a sky that is hardly ever troubled by clouds. Push through the double swing doors and enter a rainforest — and a path that leads down through towering ferns and tropical plants to a swimming pool in the residence’s lowest level. As accommodation goes, it is exotic as you can get — though hedonism was far from the minds of the architects when they designed it.
To battle the arid conditions of the air at 2,621m Paranal, they wanted a way to keep it moist and fresh for the scientists staying there. The answer was a swimming pool and an indoor tropical garden that is constantly watered with supplies imported by trucks from the coast every day. Moist air from the pool and garden then circulates around the rest of the residence. The result is a building that is remarkably airy and light — until 7pm when, every night, all openings and windows, including the vast glass dome over the pool, are closed and shuttered automatically to prevent any glint of light from affecting observations made on the mountain top.
The scale and style of Paranal and its residence is extraordinary and movie producers have fallen over themselves in their attempts to film it. Most have been turned down — with the exception of the 2008 Bond film, Quantum of Solace, whose final scenes were filmed here. In contrast the last X-Men film was turned down flat because its producers wanted to fly helicopters near the observatory’s precious telescope complex.
Given the vast cost of building and running Paranal, filming was not allowed to disturb its tight observation schedule.
“I was woken up by the sound of someone repeatedly jumping on to the balcony in the room next to mine,” one astronomer said. “It turned out to be the actress Olga Kurylenko — who plays the film’s heroine, Camille. It was quite a shock. I mean you don’t get that sort thing happening at other observatories.”
In a meeting with Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste on Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) vowed to continue providing aid to Haiti. Taiwan supports Haiti with development in areas such as agriculture, healthcare and education through initiatives run by the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF). The nation it has established itself as a responsible, peaceful and innovative actor committed to global cooperation, Jean-Baptiste said. Testimonies such as this give Taiwan a voice in the global community, where it often goes unheard. Taiwan’s reception in Haiti also contrasts with how China has been perceived in countries in the region
US President Donald Trump last week told reporters that he had signed about 12 letters to US trading partners, which were set to be sent out yesterday, levying unilateral tariff rates of up to 70 percent from Aug. 1. However, Trump did not say which countries the letters would be sent to, nor did he discuss the specific tariff rates, reports said. The news of the tariff letters came as Washington and Hanoi reached a trade deal earlier last week to cut tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the US to 20 percent from 46 percent, making it the first Asian country
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) delivered a welcome speech at the ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum, addressing more than 50 international law experts from more than 20 countries. With an aim to refute the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim to be the successor to the 1945 Chinese government and its assertion that China acquired sovereignty over Taiwan, Lin articulated three key legal positions in his speech: First, the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were not legally binding instruments and thus had no legal effect for territorial disposition. All determinations must be based on the San Francisco Peace
On April 13, I stood in Nanan (南安), a Bunun village in southern Hualien County’s Jhuosi Township (卓溪), absorbing lessons from elders who spoke of the forest not as backdrop, but as living presence — relational, sacred and full of spirit. I was there with fellow international students from National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) participating in a field trip that would become one of the most powerful educational experiences of my life. Ten days later, a news report in the Taipei Times shattered the spell: “Formosan black bear shot and euthanized in Hualien” (April 23, page 2). A tagged bear, previously released
RSS