Day 73 & 74 - March 17 & 18 - Monday & Tuesday - Indian Ocean

We have had two sea-days to recover from our wonderful time in the Seychelles.  I personally needed it.  My thighs yell at me every time I descend the stairs onboard.  I have no problem walking my 2 to 3 miles every morning nor do I have much discomfort ascending the stairs, just while going down.  The loong steps I had to make descending the mountain on Sunday obviously took a toll!

 We have had some beautiful pre-dawn and sunrise mornings.

You do have to be up early to catch it though.  Pre-dawn begins around 5:30 AM and the sun broke the horizon at 5:57 AM this morning.

On Monday, we had sea birds following the ship all day.  I got many photos which I inputted into Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Merlin bird app.  Every photo came back identified as the Red-Footed Booby.

It is disappointing that you can't actually see the feet in any of the photos.  Apparently, the identity is made on the location of the sighting, the size, wing form, markings and most importantly, the blue beak.  The red-footed booby is not seen from the mainland and is smaller and slenderer than the other boobies.  If you are a birder or only have a casual interest in identifying birds you see, I highly recommend the Merlin app.

With 2 sea days, we have attended a number of lectures and one live entertainment.   Last night we had a rock pianist who gave a great performance.

Harrison Treble from Bristol UK started performing at the age of 8, being taught by his grandmother songs by Rock'n Roll greats such as Jerry Lee Lewis.  

The performance was a dynamic collection from Lewis, Elton John, Billy Joel and others.  It was very high energy!

From pure entertainment to deep thought, we attended a lecture on Artificial Intelligence by Steve Burrows, CBE.  Burrows is a world renown engineer who has hosted National Geographic "Time Scanners" series as well as Discovery Channel’s show “Engineering The Impossible”. Steve’s roll call of projects reads like a dream list of landmarks with a portfolio including the Birdsnest Olympic Stadium in Beijing, Apple’s new headquarters in California, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the City of Manchester Stadium. And as well as helping to create some of the world’s most iconic structures, Steve’s knowledge in forensic engineering has been used to help assess the structural damage after catastrophic attacks on buildings in Manchester and Kenya.  The title of CBE comes from Queen Elizabeth bestowing the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009.

I thought this chart to be particularly interesting.  It shows when various measures of artificial intelligence exceeded human performance.  Six years ago, the five basic measures of artificial intelligence surpassed that of humans, and it has continued to grow by leaps since then.

As can be seen by the packed showroom, there is a great interest in where we are headed in this area.

To finish out this post, I include a photo of the map we keep on our cabin wall.  By my count we have 17 ports of call in Africa, including tomorrows in Mombasa, Kenya, and 7 in Europe before our trip comes to an end.