Image by Za Rodinu via Flickr

Stuff I thought was interesting from April 14th through April 19th:

• Tea Party Financiers Owe Their Fortune to Josef Stalin – The Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin’s godless empire of the USSR.
• Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons – The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.
• Daily Kos: State of the Nation – When a President is all Heart – Yesterday, after ordering hospital visits rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians, president Obama called Janice Langbehn, a woman from Florida who in 2007 lost her partner for 18 years, Lisa Pond. Apparently, the president read the story last year. So last night he called Langbehn from Air Force One to tell her about the new policy.
• Internet Filter Not Needed, Says US Ambassador to Australia – The US ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich has criticised the Rudd government’s plan to filter the internet, saying the same goals can be achieved without censorship.
• House season finale shot with Canon 5D Mk II – For those doubters of having a “sub-standard” video mode in DSLRs, you might want to wait for the season finale of House (featuring the superbly sarcastic Hugh Laurie) to see what can be done with a video-capable DSLR

Cover via Amazon

Stuff I thought was interesting on April 13th:

• The 7 Most Horrifying Things Ever Discovered in a Human Body | Cracked.com – Most experienced surgeons and doctors will say they’ve seen it all. Most surgery is fairly routine, and it’s only occasionally that you slice somebody open and some really crazy shit pops out. Have we found you a list of some of the craziest shit? Why, yes.
• Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe? – According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.
• How North Koreans See Themselves – And Why it Matters – Immersion in propoganda, race-based nationalism and the un-figure-outable vortex of Juche Thought: Colin Marshall talks to B. R. Myers, author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans see Themselves and Why it Matters“

St. Mary Lake in Glacier National Park (U.S.)

Stuff I thought was interesting from March 31st through April 8th:

• 2 more glaciers gone from Glacier National Park – Yahoo! News – Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, the U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday.
• France24 – N.Korea leader sets world fashion trend: Pyongyang – The trademark suit sported by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is now in fashion worldwide thanks to his greatness, Pyongyang’s official website said Wednesday.
• SETI@50: the Wow! signal | COSMOS magazine – The most famous signal in SETI history was detected on the night of 15 August 1977 at the Ohio State University Big Ear Observatory. Has anything happened since?
• Scientists discover first multicellular life that doesn’t need oxygen – The discovery of the new species, which live buried in sediment under the Mediterranean seafloor, is significant in that it marks the first observation of multicellular organisms, or metazoans, that spend their entire lifecycle under permanently anoxic conditions.
• Avatar Dances in Fern Gully’s Dune – An image depicting plot similarities between a series of “hero saves persecuted peoples” films.
• Crisis in Kyrgyzstan – The Big Picture – Boston.com – Widespread anti-government protests in Kyrgyzstan recently turned violent, with groups of opposition protesters attempting to storm some government buildings, and clashing with riot police.
• Stuart Redler
• Landscape Photography by Yorkshire Landscape Photographer Tim parkin
• Using coloured filters with black & white film

Today I picked up an Epson v500 scanner from umart, as I’m keen to get back into a bit of film photography and the Microtek sadly is just not up to par.

This is my first slide scanned through it – shot back at a Brisbane Meetup get-together at Fingal Head, back in 2008.

Shot using my Mamiya M645 1000S (procured from Cash Converters!) with a 45mm Mamiya Sekor lens, on Fujichrome Velvia 100. I believe it was shot at f/22 but I have no recollection of the exposure time.

Waterway to Orbit by James Vernacotola

Explanation: The 32nd shuttle mission to the International Space Station, STS-130, left planet Earth on February 8. Its early morning launch to orbit from Kennedy Space Center‘s pad 39A followed the long, graceful, eastward arc seen in this 2 minute time exposure. Well composed, the dramatic picture also shows the arc’s watery reflection from the Intracoastal Waterway Bridge, in Ponte Vedra, Florida, about 115 miles north of the launch site. In the celestial background a waning crescent Moon and stars left their own short trails against the still dark sky. The brightest star trail near the moon was made by red supergiant Antares, alpha star of the constellation Scorpius.

Source: NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

PhotographyBB Online Magazine

PhotographyBB Online Magazine Issue #26 is now out.

Topics include

• Social Media
• Lightroom 3
• Photography in Tanzania
• Raw vs. JPEG
• Travel Photography Tips
• Portraiture and Landscape Photography Basics
• Becoming a professional photographer

Download it here – PhotographyBB Online Magazine Issue #26 or read it online using Google Docs

Chinese boy has 31 fingers, toes

A Chinese boy with 31 fingers and toes is set to undergo an operation to remove the extra digits.

The six-year-old boy, whose name has not been released, has 16 toes and 15 fingers.

The condition is known as polydactyly.

‘Man with the golden arm’ saves 2million babies in half a century of donating rare type of blood

An Australian man who has been donating his extremely rare kind of blood for 56 years has saved the lives of more than two million babies.

James Harrison, 74, has an antibody in his plasma that stops babies dying from Rhesus disease, a form of severe anaemia.

Parents don’t act on cyber-safety fears

Most Australian parents are concerned about the safety of their children online. But new research shows that parents don’t back up their concerns with meaningful actions, and that in any event they might well be concerned about the wrong risks.

Volcanic Eruption in Iceland

Chile: The Earthquake Picture I never Sent

“I never sent this poorly-focused photo of the earthquake survivor. The preconception of what makes a good photograph, the aesthetics, the layers of composition, and the sharpness or lack of it, all became reasons not to choose it. It was some time later when I realized that the sadness of the out-of-focus man with his pet is still transmitted as pain and devastation even through the picture’s technical defects, and banishes all the photographic concepts I hold true in my own little world. I blame Reason for overcoming Emotion.”

Chinese consumed millions of gallons of toxic sewage oil: study

Chinese cooking oil siphoned from restaurants’ waste tanks and stripped out of raw sewage is being resold on the cheap and has for years tainted approximately one out of every ten meals cooked in the eastern nation, according to a recent study.

World’s Biggest Cities Merging into “Mega Regions”

The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast “mega-regions” which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people, according to a major new UN report.

Image by DnaX88 via Flickr

Here’s something interesting – Quantum Film. Currently the imaging sensors in digital cameras are limited in resolution to dimension, by the physical limitations of the sensing diodes themselves. Another major factor in digital imaging is the cost of manufacturing sensors, which increases exponentially with sensor size, due to the increased likelihood of defects.

“Quantum Film” is promising to turn all this on its head by offering a supposedly cheap, high-density sensor solution.

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