Saturday 22 December 2012

And now for many people it's holiday time

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Just Up: 1905
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Just Up: 1905
Calumet, Michigan, circa 1905
“Just up, Hecla Shaft No. 2”
Copper miners topside
8x10 inch dry glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co
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Lots of great comments added including explanation as to why people in this part of the world eat pasties – yes, the Cornish ones!

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
A life in books. Joe Queenan can’t stop touching them, smelling them, scribbling in them, and reading them - 6,128 of them, to be exact... more

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Salt water vs. infrastructure
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Salt water is still winning.
Unfortunately.
Remember back during the Fukushima crisis, when you heard a lot of talk about why the people trying to save the plant didn’t want to use sea water to cool the reactors? There were a number of reasons for that (check out this interview Scientific American’s Larry Greeenemeier did with a nuclear engineer), but one factor was the fact that salt water corrodes the heck out of metal. Pump it into a metal reactor unit and that unit won’t be usable again.
Continue reading [and discover what salt water is doing to the New York subway and utility systems].

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1867: Hell on Wheels: Across the Continent on the Union Pacific Railway
via Retronaut by tehrkotmedia

More images here

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The greatest artist of our time? It’s the man who closed the gap between art and technology. It’s George Lucas, or so says Camille Paglia... more

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Google Earth Finds More Strange Patterns in the Chinese Desert
via New on MIT Technology Review

Google Earth reveals an 8 km line of artificial grid-like structures in the Chinese desert. Now one researcher says she know why it’s there.
Continue reading

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The Moon Illusion Explained
via How-To Geek by Jason Fitzpatrick
When the moon is on the horizon it looks radically larger than it does up in the sky; check out this video to see the science behind the illusion.

[via Geeks Are Sexy]

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
We like our politicians authentic – and funny. Though prepared political humor is inauthentic, it’s effective. Can a bon mot win votes?... more

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Breathtaking Photographs of Sunrises from the Top of Mt. Fuji
via Flavorwire by Emily Temple
For five months a year over four years, self-taught Japanese photographer Yu Yamauchi lived in a small hut on the top of Mt. Fuji, some 10,000 feet above sea level, and rose every morning to shoot the absurdly magnificent sunrises. The resultant project, Dawn, which we spotted over at Feature Shoot, is a breathtaking reminder of the beauty and changeable nature of the natural world – each of these photographs was taken from the same spot, the colours and shapes changing not just by the day, but by the second. “This space, ‘above-the-clouds’, exists far from the ground where we live our daily lives,” Yamauchi writes. “It is also a space between the earth and the universe. Being there simply reminds me of the face that we live on the earth which is a planet within an infinite space of the universe.”
Stop by and see Dawn at Miyako Yoshinaga gallery in New York, where it will be [was] on display through November 21, or head on over to Yamauchi’s website to see many more beautiful sunrises.
I would normally bring you my choice from those which Emily has provided on Flavorwire but I made the grave mistake of looking at the 55 images on Yamauchi’s website - number 33 is magnificent.

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Beautiful, Intricate Cut Paper Artworks by Calvin Nicholls
via Flavorwire by Emily Temple
Ontario-based artist Calvin Nicholls, whose work we recently spotted over at My Design Stories, has combined a lifelong interest in wildlife with an equally long love of art to create these gorgeous white-on-white paper sculptures depicting nature scenes and portraits of animals that bristle with depth. It’s amazing to us how real his animals feel, even with the barrier of a computer screen, without any attempt to colourize them. Click through to see a few of our favourites of Nicholls’s work, and then be sure to head on over to his website to see much more.
And I have to share my favourite.



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