Approximately 18,000 shark fins drying on a rooftop in Kennedy Town, Hong Kong. A public outcry in 2010 forced traders to stop drying fins in the streets and move them out of sight. Photo: Paul Hilton
(via youdontneedtofollowme)
After seeing links to it over and over on my dash, I had to see what the fuss was all about. And - WOW - what an incredible “gigapan” image of Mt. Everest. The image is 2 gigapixels, which is huge. I picked out a few interesting ones, including a cave, weird geology, a peak, and tents.
My colleague Prof. Brian Helmuth of USC and I tried out his gigapan equipment this past summer in the Netherlands, but alas, we kept running out of time. You can see some of his gigapans of ocean/shore ecosystems, here.
A Gigapan system is really a simple robot on a tripod that you mount your camera on to. It’s not difficult, but does take a lot of time to set up. The robot pivots up and down, taking several pictures in sequence. Once it’s finished, software stitches the photographs together. Anyone can do it. You can see bigger(!) gigapan pictures of Paris, Dubai, Machu Picchu, etc., here.
This picture of Mt. Everest is part of climate research project, documenting the effects of climate change on the mountain. From The Guardian:
Filmmaker and climate-change campaigner David Breashears spent this spring taking around 400 images of Everest and its near neighbours from a vantage point above base camp through a 300mm lens. Now he’s released them digitally stitched together to form one image – click here to see the full image.
The result is a stunning panoramic photograph of the Everest region – with a twist. You can zoom in on specific areas and see the roof of the world in extraordinary detail. From a distance small colourful dots mark the location of base camp. Zooming in, you can pick out each tent clearly – and a man bending down as he washes his face.
The high definition also allows viewers to examine the mountain’s icefall – and even pick out climbers descending between terrifying ice cliffs and crevasses. Think of it as an extreme, alpine version of Where’s Wally.
Breashears, who turns 57 tomorrow, set up GlacierWorks (glacierworks.org) five years ago to produce imagery highlighting the impact of climate change in the Himalayas. He knows Everest well, having directed the hit IMAX film about the peak and reached the summit himself five times.
But even he finds himself poring over his creation with renewed interest. “I find things I’ve never noticed before, especially on how climate change is affecting the mountain.”
By comparing his panorama with photographs from the 1950s, Breashears has been able to pinpoint just how much ice is gone from the mountain: “There are 49,000 glaciers in the Himalayas and most are showing a dramatic and accelerated melt rate.”
Via The Guardian
The Western media has chosen not to run the graphic pictures of the children killed in Gaza this weekend (nota bene: this is not the picture above, which shows members of the Daloo family during the children’s funeral yesterday).
Priest Giles Fraser asks: do pictures of children killed in Gaza force us to face a gruesome reality?
Let’s start slowly, carefully, with what can be said. Photographs show four small children dead on the cold aluminium surface of the morgue.
They are positioned in such a way that they look like they might be sleeping together. Are these pictures real? Are they staged? That already feels too suspicious a question to be asking so early on. And one’s emotional instincts will rail against the premature engagement of critical faculties. But one needs to bracket out the feelings just for a moment.
Earlier photographs have come in from multiple reputable agencies showing these children being pulled out of the rubble. Other images show numerous film crews witnessing the same event. The children’s bodies are accompanied by the press to the morgue. Those who are trained to spot discrepancies in this sort of story believe that it hangs together. The pictures are real, so it is concluded. And once that is accepted, one immediately feels more than a little uncomfortable that their provenance was ever questioned. Like disbelieving a rape victim when she first tells you her story.
So they are real. Dead children, killed by an Israeli missile while still in their pyjamas and the sort of clothes suited to playing in the street. The western media has chosen not to show them.
Read the rest here.
Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP
First science academy in Tunisia in XIX e century.
I would love to sit in one of these classes and, of course, understand what was being said.
Eloïse Lagrenée has posted on her Facebook page a picture by Yemeni photographer Bushra Almutawakel, illustrating how women could vanish into darkness and invisibility, step by step, under fundamentalist pressure and the full niqab. It has been shared over 1,500 times.
Now do one where the women vanish into darkness and invisibility, step by step, under non-fundamentalist pressure.
Inky cat footprints!
From p. 170 of Clavis Bibliorum: The Key of the Bible, Unlocking the Richest Treasury of the Holy Scriptures by Francis Roberts (1675). Original from Princeton University. Digitized August 12, 2008.
Obviously the cat was trying to paw our attention to something in the text. We should inform Nicolas Cage and Dan Brown about this, it might involve popular works of biblical art and strange religious organizations with strong political ties to the state.
I want to believe.
Women and Violence in El Salvador, a slide show: http://nyr.kr/Q8mN46
