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dvdp: 111109

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 03:08:06 -0400

111109

dvdp: backstage at Google Earth? (I HATE when there is no...

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 03:07:44 -0400

backstage at Google Earth? (I HATE when there is no source/credit for a post)

UPDATE: This scale-model is part of Futurama - an exhibit/ride at the 1939 New York World’s Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes. It tried to show the world 20 years into the future. Thanks to Euphues for the info!

dvdp: Hundreds of pictures of Earth, each taken at about 6AM ,...

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 03:07:20 -0400

dvdp:

Hundreds of pictures of Earth, each taken at about 6AM , showing the terminator - the day/night line - over the course of one year (2010sep-2011sep).
Taken by METEOSAT-9 Earth-observing satellite.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Save Newsweek.com: A Defense of Newsweek.com

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 03:06:56 -0400

Save Newsweek.com: A Defense of Newsweek.com:

savenewsweekdotcom:

It’s always nice to wake up and find out in the Times that your job is doomed. As they put it on Saturday morning, quoting the new CEO of the so-called Newsweek Daily Beast Company, Stephen Colvin: “Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger, and anyone who types the URL into their…

Photo

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:26:56 -0400

surisburnbook: I’m still trying to convince myself that this is...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:26:39 -0400

surisburnbook:

I’m still trying to convince myself that this is just a picture of Mary-Kate Olsen dressed as a smoking hobo, Photoshopped over another picture of a lovely father-daughter outing.

It’s not. This is Olivier Sarkozy out for a walk with his girlfriend and his daughter.

Suddenly my life doesn’t seem so bad.

tpdsaa: Submitted by CopyGuy.

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:26:23 -0400

tpdsaa:

Submitted by CopyGuy.

thedailywhat: On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:26:06 -0400

thedailywhat:

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[kony2012.]

tragedyseries: I have returned home! My mind swims with absurd...

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:33:39 -0400

tragedyseries:

I have returned home! My mind swims with absurd notions inspired by the soaring skyline, rich cuisine and fine friends found in that distant land. I thank you all for your patience during my absence. I’ve eagerly resumed the weighty business of applying ink to parchment.

nedroidcomics: Shredded Cheese

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:33:19 -0400

nedroidcomics:

Shredded Cheese

oh-so-coco: NEW YORK, NY.Through my new friends at tumblr...

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:32:59 -0400

oh-so-coco:

NEW YORK, NY.

Through my new friends at tumblr headquarters I’ve recently come in contact with a very talented young photographer named Jamie. She and her fiance create these beautiful images that are more than a photo, but not quite a video.

NOTE *Of course the technology to create GIFs has been around for decades but I believe its potential for both expression and impact within the fashion world has yet to be fully explored. Let me put it this way - film has been around for a century, does that mean that we’ve exhausted the possibilities? I for one am super excited to see how Jamie and others use multimedia within fashion in years to come.

nerdology: Above is the first digital camera. It was made by...

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:32:38 -0400

nerdology:

Above is the first digital camera. It was made by Steve Sasson working for Kodak in 1975. 1975! Using “a lens from a Super 8 camera, a whole stack of ni-cad batteries, a digital to analog converter from a voltmeter, [and] a highly experimental CCD.” Oh and that cassette tape on the side, thats are how the pictures are stored.

The camera captured a 100-line image onto that cassette-tape, yet even that tiny picture took a mind-numbing 23 seconds to write. Playback was possibly clunkier still, using another tape-player hooked up to a frame-storing devices that interpolated those 100 lines to an NTSC-compatible 400-line image and then showed it on a regular TV-screen.

Though it was built in 1975 and patented in 1978 it stayed hidden from the public until 2001. It still remains in Steve Sasson’s possession still.

[Wired]