Saturn’s moon Titan “sliced” by Saturn’s rings. This shot was possible because the Cassini spacecraft can orbit inside the rings, and if the angles are just right you get amazingsauce like this.
(via Discover Magazine)
Oh Saturn, you are the super model of our solar system.
First ever direct English translation of Solaris published
First ever direct English translation of Solaris published
“Stanislaw Lem’s most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.”
About time.
Soup: Local Media Isn’t What People Want: They Want Liquid Media
Soup: Local Media Isn’t What People Want: They Want Liquid Media
The truth is that the numbers for AOL’s Patch efforts look bad, based on the southern California numbers leaked to Business Insider. It’s especially bad when you contrast them with traffic generated by Huffington Post, with is topical, not local.
….
From the Article:
“Patch’s SoCal group started out with a huge number of sites to begin with – about 70. By March, that number was up to 74. If each Patch only employed ONE writer, that would mean that a Web site staffed with 74 people was only able to get 1.2 million uniques. That’s a pathetically low number in comparison to what other Web outfits are able to do. AOL’s other big media property, the Huffington Post, gets about 30 million uniques with just around »
Advice to someone who just moved to NYC and wants to break into the comedy scene:
One, I would take some classes at the UCB. Two, the secret to the success of The State was we never waited for anyone to ask us to do anything, or for anyone’s approval to do anything. We just fucking did stuff. We were shooting all the time, writing all the time. We would put up a live show every couple of months. We were aggressive. If you wait around for an opportunity to come up, it’s not coming. It isn’t, ever. Opportunities are not coming. The only opportunities that are coming are the ones you create. Otherwise you are just waiting around.
Thomas Lennon (via Splitsider) (via anthonyking)
This is spot-on. Take UCB class, meet other awesome people, and go out and »
“If you sit down, you’ll never get up.”
— Winston Parkinson
I’ve been down in Houston for the past few days as part of a family “Men’s Trip” for Father’s Day to see my 91-year old grandfather, Winston, compete in the Senior Olympics. He won the national gold medal in archery for his age group, 91-94.
He told me, “See I don’t have any competition so I gotta have some sort of goal— I wanna beat the world record.” And of course he did that by a long shot. In fact, he beat the world record on the first day, considering the final score is your total score from two days of shooting.
It’s true, he didn’t have any competition. There aren’t that many 91 year old archers in the US, but he’s still going strong. He leaned over and shouted »
#Bosnia, 1992 يقتلونهم ثم يركلونهم في البوسنة!
Ron Haviv: ‘I was shaking when I took the shot. None of them was looking at me, so I lifted my camera, just trying to get them in frame. When I put it down, they looked over. They didn’t realise I’d taken photos.’ Photograph: Ron Haviv/VII
These are the Serbian warlord Arkan’s men. They’ve just executed these Muslim civilians – a butcher, his wife and sister-in-law; the start of what became known as ethnic cleansing.
I had taken a photograph of Arkan with a baby tiger, which he’d liked, and he’d agreed for me to travel with his troops to photograph his “mission”. The soliders were yelling at me not to shoot, but I’d promised myself I’d come out of this with an image to prove what was happening.
I was »
Batting Practice
Caught at Safeco stadium.
As we become increasingly dependent on computers and the Internet to mediate our communications with others, the integrity of our social and political networks requires that we have complete control of those computers. Without that control, not only are we liable to have our communications with others blocked and filtered, the evidence of reality itself can be suppressed. Concerts, police actions, and political demonstrations can be censored from the Internet-enabled conversation. These events can, in an increasingly important sense, be made unwitnessable – deleted from social memory. It is difficult to overstate how dangerous a prospect this is. We come near the territory of Orwell’s “1984″ here; Apple’s video-suppressing devices would create memory holes. The “walled garden” would imprison not just its users but reality and history. We must not allow this to happen.
Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think
Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think
“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
[and later:]
“The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.”
This is not what I was hoping the situation was turning out to be.
‘Viral’ puts the focus squarely on one metric of success: number of views. Is that really accurate? Is The Annoying Orange better than Break A Leg because it has more views? Is Total Request Live better than The Sopranos? Web video pioneers and the advertisers who want to love them get all hopped up about quantity… without stopping to question the quality. We should know by now that for any industry that wants to sustain and valuate itself, that is an untenable position.
For those of us that want internet video to be a real profession, a career and a valid artistic medium, we have to move past this idea of viral.
We don’t want a world full of only fragments, of aimless memes zipping around the noosphere. We want storyline. We want arcs. We want trilogies. We want new myths and »
Alain de Botton sees classification as an opportunity to reorganise knowledge so that it might be more helpful to us in everyday life, while Anthony Burrill finds his ability to classify his own life is a route to happiness. Their double-sided collaborative poster addresses stereotypical perceptions of seemingly opposing approaches to life. (via Gregory Han)
Bill Cunningham New York
Go see it.
A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop
A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop
Does what it says on the label. Reference.
The Missing Link OSC/MIDI Translator is a standalone hardware device which contains its own WiFi radio, and translates specially-coded OSC messages sent from your mobile device or computer into standard MIDI messages to control synthesizers, drum machines, mixers, digital audio workstations, or anything which responds to MIDI commands. It does this with low latency, high flexibility and configurability, and without the need for a computer anywhere in the control chain. Multiple wireless OSC devices may connect simultaneously to The Missing Link, making collaboration easy.