drenched in the cold river that is our birthright,
and think, in silence, hell. What did I expect.
Rare ‘bamboo rat’ photographed at Machu Picchu PhysOrg
Best of the world in photos
The best images from around the world, chosen by Fairfax photo editors
For her beautiful ongoing photo series, which began with the book Swimming Pool, photographer Mária Švarbová captured the exquisite symmetry of synchronized swimmers paired with their likenesses as reflected in the stark, still, sterile waters of different pools built in Slovakia during the Soviet era. This combination evokes a deliberately rigid sense of order combined with a quiet sense of lonely melancholy.
Sterile, geometric beauty of old pools set the tone for these photographs. Each of them pictures a different pool, usually built in the Socialist Era, in various locations in Slovakia. There is almost cinematographic quality to the highly controlled sceneries that Maria captures …Frozen in the composition, the swimmers are as smooth and cold as the pools tiles. The colors softly vibrate in a dream-like atmosphere. Despite the retro setting, the pictures somehow evoke a futuristic feeling as well, as if they were taken somewhere completely alien.
Wikipedia is credited with the season’s “hottest streetwear collab
Reflections: Is New York becoming harder to love?
A stray dog makes a new start of it in New York. In so doing, she leads her owners to reassess the city’s cracks.
My Cousin, Milton
My cousin, Milton, worked for a cable company.
The boy I knew when we were children
had fists that were often clenched, his face set like
an old man whose life had been so hard,
it hardened him. But the man's hands opened to let
more of the world in. He sent the funniest
cards to family and friends at Christmas, laid down
cable so others could connect. Yet, he lived
alone, kept to himself much of the time, so when
his sister found his body, he'd been gone
a good while. He died young at fifty-seven, without
fuss or bother. No sitting by the bedside
or feeding him soup. He just laid himself down likea trunk line and let the signal pass through.
American Life in Poetry :: Terri Kirby Erickson
A middle-aged man in Japan rents for $9/hour for nearly any purpose not involving physical contact.
↩︎ CNN
PCWorld – These online classes will have you coding in no time at – “If you’re looking to learn coding or want to pick up another programming language, Python is a good choice. One of the terrific things about Python is how closely it resembles the English language, so you’ll often see words like “not,” “in,” and “or” in its scripts. Because of its readability, Python is commonly the first programming language schools teach. It’s a great launchpad for an aspiring coder…”
One of the world's best photographers refuses to play by the art market: he still charges $700 for his prints.
↩︎ The Economist
The lenses are adjustable prism filters that picks up images from outside the camera’s normal field of view, allowing for in-camera layering effects. You can check out more photos shot with these lenses on Instagram (though few quite as successful as Roe’s).
‘With Great Beauty Comes Great Resentment’ – The History Of Helen Of Troy
"Of all Helen's roles in the literary and artistic corpus (and it is a long career – she has been forgotten by not a single generation since she entered the written record 2,700 years ago), it is her part as fantasy whore that has been most tenacious. Her many sexual partners ... are trotted out by ancient and modern authors alike as the gossip columns would the client-list of a high-class prostitute. And so Euripides calls her a 'bitch-whore'; she is Shakespeare's 'strumpet'." … [Read More]
PCWorld – These online classes will have you coding in no time at – “If you’re looking to learn coding or want to pick up another programming language, Python is a good choice. One of the terrific things about Python is how closely it resembles the English language, so you’ll often see words like “not,” “in,” and “or” in its scripts. Because of its readability, Python is commonly the first programming language schools teach. It’s a great launchpad for an aspiring coder…”
The Ethics Of Art Photography: What Do Those Behind The Camera Owe Those In Front Of It?
Journalist Alina Cohen looks at four photographers' projects - street hustlers in L.A., high schoolers in a Southern town where the proms were still segregated, victims of the 1963 Birmingham (AL) church bombing, and small-town Irish teens on the day before their 18th birthday - and talks to the photographers about their obligations to their subjects. … [Read More]
↩︎ The Economist
The National Audubon Society has announced the winners of their ninth annual photography contest. The winning photos, which “evoke the splendor, resilience, and ingenuity of birdlife”, were drawn from over 8000 entries from all over the US and Canada.
The photos above are a great grey owl by Steve Mattheis, a long-tailed tit by Diana Rebman, and a flock of cobalt-winged parakeets by Liron Gertsman. Gertsman swept the youth category with the winning image and both honorable mentions. Here’s what he had to say about the parakeets:
Three days in a row I waited in a blind near a clay lick that Cobalt-winged Parakeets and other birds of the Amazon frequent. When hundreds of the birds finally descended from the tree canopy to the mineral-rich forest floor on the third morning, I was ready. I used a slow shutter speed to accentuate the blues in their wings. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of the birds or the deafening roar of parakeet chatter.
Holy moly, would you look at this photo taken by Gabriel Zaparolli!
This photo shows a distant lightning storm and asperitas clouds looming over the outskirts of Torres, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, as observed during the evening of June 10, 2018. On this long-exposure image it seems that most of the lightning consisted of cloud-to-ground strokes. Asperitas form in convective storms when the air in downdrafts (cooled by the sublimation of ice crystals) pushes through the cloud base.
Asperitas clouds plus lightning? What a capture.
From Edward Burtynsky (known around these parts for his aerial photographs of industrial landscapes) and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal & Nicholas de Pencier comes a film called Anthropocene.
The Holocene epoch started 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the last ice age receded. Geologists and other scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group believe that we have left the Holocene and entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Their argument is that humans have become the single most defining force on the planet and that the evidence for this is overwhelming. Terraforming of the earth through mining, urbanization, industrialization and agriculture; the proliferation of dams and diverting of waterways; CO2 and acidification of oceans due to climate change; the pervasive presence around the globe of plastics, concrete, and other technofossils; unprecedented rates of deforestation and extinction: these human incursions, they argue, are so massive in scope that they have already entered, and will endure in, geological time.
The film is one part of a larger “multimedia exploration” of the human epoch, which will include a book of new photography from Burtynsky, a traveling museum exhibition, interactive VR & AR experiences, and an educational program.
The lenses are adjustable prism filters that picks up images from outside the camera’s normal field of view, allowing for in-camera layering effects. You can check out more photos shot with these lenses on Instagram (though few quite as successful as Roe’s).
Victor Mather wrote about the origin of sports idioms like “wild-goose chase”, “hands down”, and “sticky wicket” for the NY Times. Some of these I didn’t even know were sports terms. “Back to square one” is an interesting entry:
As with many terms, there is a colorful explanation of the origin and a more prosaic and realistic one, though both originate with competition.First the colorful one: When soccer was first broadcast on the radio in the 1920s in Britain, there was concern that fans would not be able to visualize the field well. So the field was divided into numbered squares, with charts published in newspapers. That way the announcer could say, “The ball is passed into Square 4, then dribbled into Square 6,” and fans used to watching games in person would understand what was going on. Square 1 was the area with the goalie, so a pass back to Square 1 would be a restarting of an offensive move.The Oxford English Dictionary deflates that theory though, pointing out that the term’s use really began in the 1950s, some decades after the soccer broadcasting scheme stopped. It suggests the term actually comes from board games like chutes and ladders, in which players can find themselves sent back to the start.
That soccer explanation is more compelling, even if untrue. It’s fun to hear how practitioners of early media tried to represent sports to people who couldn’t view the game. For a time, baseball games were broadcast to viewers using various machines and even actors who “played” the game as reports came in via telegraph.
“A novel feature of the report was the actual running of the bases by uniformed boys, who obeyed the telegraph instrument in their moves around the diamond. Great interest prevailed and all enjoyed the report,” read the Atlanta Constitution on April 17, 1886. (And as if that wasn’t enough to entice you, the paper also noted that “A great many ladies were present.”) Although this live-action reenactment attempted at the opera house in Atlanta may have been the closest approximation of a real baseball game, it does not seem to have ever spread beyond Georgia.