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via Rachel Maddow
Archives for category: look over here!
You can now enjoy some French-language police action at You are listening to Montréal, the first international offering in a web mini-empire that includes four major US cities.More about the project here.
by Tamas Ladanyi (click to embiggen)
As evening twilight faded on March 7, sky gazers around planet Earth enjoyed a beautiful pairing of young crescent Moon and brilliant planet Jupiter. Along with stars setting in the west, the two bright celestial beacons, Moon above and Jupiter below, leave short trails in this well-planned time exposure, a composite of 54 individual frames each 4 seconds long. On its final flight, the Space Shuttle Discovery and International Space Station form the second close pairing in the night skyscape. Still glinting in the sunlight in low Earth orbit, they gracefully trace overlapping arcs from lower right to upper left.
Felicia Day wrote a great post today about unexpected encounters with people who have been affected by something she’s written, done, or even tweeted. I don’t know if I’m super hormonal right now, or kind of wound up from a particularly sad part of the TV I just watched, or what, but Felicia’s post really got me thinking. It’s a great reminder that the amount of effort it takes to be supportive, kind, or to draw attention to a worthy cause, can reap wonderfully disproportionate results.
Even in our day-to-day lives there are so many things we can do to positively affect the people around us—an extra smile for the bus driver, asking the girl at the cash wrap how her day is going, letting a car into the lane in front of you, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Pay it forward, as the saying goes. I am going to make it my mission to do one extra-kind thing a day, even if it’s as small as putting a supportive comment on Facebook, or putting extra feeling into it when I tell my mom ‘I love you’. Won’t you join me?
from Culinaut (click image to embiggen)
All of these photographs are so beautiful, I highly recommend looking at all of them over at the Atlantic. Here are a few selects (click to see larger versions):
The aurora australis provides a dramatic backdrop to a Scott Tent at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on July 14, 2009. (National Science Foundation/Patrick Cullis)
The Matusevich Glacier flows toward the coast of East Antarctica, pushing through a channel between the Lazarev Mountains and the northwestern tip of the Wilson Hills. Each of the smaller blocks measure nearly one kilometer across. After passing through the channel, the glacier has room to spread out as it floats on the ocean. On September 6, 2010, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image. (NASA Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon)
Inside an ice cave near Ross Island on November 25, 2008. (National Science Foundation/Robyn Waserman)
Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) field team member Anna Bramucci throws hot water into the air to watch it turn to ice crystals and vapor on a -25 F (-32 C) day at Lake Fryxell field camp in Taylor Valley, Victoria Land on March 30, 2008. (National Science Foundation/Chris Kannen)
Adelie penguins along the ice edge in the Ross Sea, seen on January 12, 2010. (National Science Foundation/Robyn Waserman)
You are listening to Los Angeles is a fantastic project Eric created. He combined LAPD police radio with some ambient tracks to create a soundscape that has caused at least one person two a lot of people to mention ‘Blade Runner’.
If you’d like more info about the project, or want to submit an original music track for the site, email Eric.
update 4: An iPhone/iPad app is in the works! Head over to Kickstarter and help take URL2.LA to the next level! Also – if you refresh your browser, you’ll see that Eric has added 12 new cities to the You Are Listening To family.
update 5: Eric was interviewed as the Kickstarter blog’s featured creator, and URL2.LA was featured in this week’s (Feb 10) Kickstarter newsletter.
update 3: Coverage in Japan! So This (or Sothis? No idea.) Also, an interview on Hyperallergic.
update 2: Boing Boing has posted a link to the newest ‘You are Listening to” site, You are Listening to Deep Thought.
update: the site has been linked to by the LA Times Tumblr, a bunch of other Tumblr users, Reddit (a couple times), Metafilter, the Daily What, it’s been posted on Nerdist, Boing Boing, LA Weekly’s blog, In Your Speakers, Buzzfeed, NBC LA’s blog, Dave Malkoff’s blog at KTLA (and also was featured during the March 28, 2011 10pm news broadcast, see below), Justine Bateman’s company Section 5’s blog, blogging.la, and LAist, and it has been tweeted by many, including Andy Baio from Waxy, Hotwire, Rob Sheridan, Richard Metzger, Joel Johnson, Mark Morford, and Tony Hawk. Gapers Block linked to the Chicago site. You can read interviews with Eric on Gentleforce and the Atlantic Cities, and it has been ‘liked’ over 3000 4000 11,000 27,000 times on Facebook! Plus, as a side bonus, my Flickr page for that photo of Los Angeles has gotten almost 200 hits…in the mere 27 hours since the site has gone live!
Some comments/phrases from listeners: Michael Mann, ‘Heat’, gripping, fucking brilliant, ‘Homeworld’, Soul Coughing, weirdly compelling, poignant, and a former LAPD police dispatcher called it ‘a masterpiece’.
Watch an amazing slideshow of photos from BBC’s new series, “Human Planet”. The photographer, Timothy Allen, narrates. What I would give to spend a year and half photographing some of the most amazing places and people on Earth!
by Timothy Allen (click to embiggen)
