katetropa

B℮n

The Selby

Young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem

cursivebuildings:

In photography, focus is a kind of virtue. You figure this out on your own from the start.
In life, though, you ought to have a teacher… I always thought of ‘focus’ as another way to say ‘ah kid, you’re missing out on everything else.’ I wasn’t wrong, you see, but for a long time I missed the virtue bit. I missed that time is a series of questions w/essay answers. The only wrong answer is not to consider the question at all.

(&, of course, these rules can be broken.)

John Vachon for the extensive and fantastic Documerica Project (1971-1977), where the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970’s. Via Coudal

Bas Princen, Moqattam ridge (Garbage City, Cairo)

ericmortensen:think4yourself:

Did Netanyahu Know? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Joe Biden was kicked in the balls as he came to Israel with a simultaneous “fuck you” by the Israeli government announcing new settlements - 1600 houses - in East Jerusalem. The immediate spin was that Netanyahu was blindsided by the actions of his Interior Department and was embarrassed. But Haaretz reports today that these 1600 are just the beginning: “Some 50,000 new housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the Green Line are in various stages of planning and approval,” planning officials told Haaretz. They said Jerusalem’s construction plans for the next few years, even decades, are expected to focus on East Jerusalem.

Popular Science has partnered with Google to offer their entire 137-year archive online for free. You can also browse the archive online via Google.

Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of its the most desolate sections and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural. Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years and pump new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods that would be cleared, the city would offer to relocate residents or buy them out. The city could use tax foreclosure to claim abandoned property and invoke eminent domain for those who refuse to leave, much as cities now do for freeway projects. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month.

Previously

“This discovery and new approach using organic catalysts could lead to well-defined, biodegradable molecules made from renewable resources in an environmentally responsible way,” IBM said in a release. The “green chemistry” breakthrough using “organic catalysts” results in plastics that could be repeatedly recycled, instead of only once as is the case with petroleum-based plastic made using metal oxide catalysts. Plant plastics could also be made “biocompatible” to improve the targeting of drugs in bodies, such as cancer medicines aimed at killing cancer cells but sparing healthy ones, according to IBM. “We are really starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with it.”

Hotel Biasco

Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula

After analyzing dozens of Hollywood films, a team of researchers has found evidence that the visual rhythm of movies at the shot level matches a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation, the same pattern that is found in dozens of naturally occurring phenomena, including the length of the human attention span.

These results suggest that Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length. For example, action sequences are typically a cluster of relatively short shots, whereas dialogue sequences (with alternating shots and reverse-shots focused sequentially on the speakers) are likely to be a cluster of longer shots. Professor Cutting of Cornell believes obeying the 1/f law makes films “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,” and this makes them more gripping.

Modern action movies are particularly adept at matching the audience’s attention span in this manner. The full paper is available here. Via Kottke

markus nurmi

Andrew Sullivan:

I was worried, to tell you the truth, after Jon’s failed run-in with war criminal John Yoo. But Stewart totally destroyed the McCarthyite mediocrity last night. He didn’t get into Thiessen’s disgusting defense of the brutal torture of al-Qahtani, but he completely devastated the vile insinuation that because Thiessen believes torture made America “safe” - his sole evidence being seven years of no attacks, which Stewart briliantly reminded him could have been said of the no-torture Clinton administration record as well - Obama was somehow endangering American lives.

My favorite point was the lawyers defending pedophiles. Thiessen went so far to say that a lawyer who defended pedophiles in court should be suspected of supporting child abuse.

Thiessen’s arguments were both morally repugnant, legally absurd, McCarthyite and ignorant. For this, he gets a weekly column from Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post. That tells you all you need to know about Fred Hiatt and what has happened at the WaPo.

Jean-François Lepage

claytoncubitt:

Chris Moore, via Showstudio, Alexander McQueen’s last collection

“These were the final pieces Lee Alexander McQueen created before he took his own life. The patterns for the garments were cut on the stand by McQueen himself.” -Alex Fury

The man created a new silhouette every single season. Genius.

Victor Churchill butcher shop designed by Dreamtime Australia, and their iPhone app, Ask The Butcher

Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. The agency’s medical guidelines say that after a case of “psychological resignation” by a detainee on the waterboard, an interrogator had to get approval from a CIA doctor before doing it again.

When Sea Levels Attack

Zoo 1 by fotambulo

themattsmith:

Kate, I put Audrey in the snowsuit you got her and we went for a walk today.

Good God, your daughter is sooo edible!

elvira:themadeshop:

“The fact is that Kafka’s humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary U.S. amusement. […] I opine to them that some of our deepest and most profound collective intuitions seem to be expressible only as figures of speech, that that’s why we call these figures of speech “expressions.” […] And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke - that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. […] You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”

via (and emphasis added by) afirry

In honor of the Oscars, I present you the Great Kate: “It does everybody good to be hit.”

If you’ve never seen Lion in Winter, you’re seriously missing out on two fascinating characters and O’Tool and Hepburn at their peak.

Lucien Clergue, La Garde Freinet (Nude With Stars), 1971

Shelled offices of Bosnian daily newspaper, Oslobodenje, by Richard Moss

Raimond Wouda, Jaca, 1995

Noah Kalina

Dear President Obama,

I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff. I would like to humbly offer myself, yours truly, as his replacement. I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that’s been created around you. I will work for $1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp. And I will help you get done what the American people sent you there to do. I don’t need much, just a cot in the White House basement will do.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have always admired Rahm Emanuel (if you don’t count his getting NAFTA pushed through Congress in the ’90s which destroyed towns like Flint, Michigan. I know, picky-picky.). He is what we needed for a long time — a no-apologies, take-no-prisoners fighting machine. Someone who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and pound the right wing into submission. Far from being the foul-mouthed bully he has been portrayed as, Rahm is the one who BEAT UP the bullies to protect us from them. That’s certainly what he did in 2006. After six long, miserable years of the middle-class getting slaughtered and the poor being flushed down the toilet, Rahm Emanuel took on the job of returning Congress to the Democrats. No one believed it could be done. But he did it. Big time. He put the fear of God into the party of Rush and Newt.

But the Republicans were not going to go quietly into the night. You see, instead of having just one Rahm Emanuel, they are ALL Rahm Emanuels. That’s why they usually win. Unlike most Democrats, they are relentless and unstoppable. When they believe in something (which is usually themselves and the K Street job they hope to be rewarded with someday), they’ll fight for it till the death. They are loyal to a fault to each other (they were never able to denounce Bush, even though they knew he was destroying the party). We thought we were all done with this craziness, but we were mistaken. Like a beast that you just can’t cage, the Republicans convinced not only the media, but YOU and your fellow Dems, that 59 votes was a *minority*! Precious time was lost trying to reach a “consensus” and trying to be “bipartisan.”

Well, you and the Democrats have been in charge now for over a year and not one banking regulation has been reinstated. We don’t have universal health care. The war in Afghanistan has escalated. And tens of thousands of Americans continue to lose their jobs and be thrown out of their homes. For most of us, it’s just simply no longer good enough that Bush is gone.

You’re such a good guy, Mr. President. You came to Washington with your hand extended to the Republicans and they just chopped it off. You wanted to be respectful and they decided that they were going to say “no” to everything you suggested. Yet, you kept on saying you still believed in bipartisanship. Well, if you really want bipartisanship, just go ahead and let the Republicans win in November.

Let me be clear about one thing: The Democrats on Election Day 2010 are going to get an ass-whoopin’ of biblical proportions if things don’t change right now. I don’t know what your team has been up to, but they haven’t served you well. And Rahm, poor Rahm, has turned into a fighter — not of Republicans, but of the left. He called those of us who want universal health care “f***ing retarded.” Look, I don’t know if Rahm is the problem or if it’s Gibbs or Axelrod or any of the other great people we owe a debt of thanks to for getting you elected. All I know is that whatever is fueling your White House it’s now running on fumes. Time to shake things up! Time to bring me in to get you pumped up every morning! Go Barack! Yay Obama! Fight, Team, Fight!

I’m packed and ready to come to D.C. tomorrow. If it helps, you won’t really be losing Rahm entirely because I’ll be bringing his brother with me — my agent, Ari Emanuel. Man, you should see HIM negotiate a deal! Have you ever wanted to see Mitch McConnell walking around Capitol Hill carrying his own head in his hands after it’s just been handed to him by the infamous Ari? Oh, baby, it won’t be pretty — but boy will it be sweet!

Retardedly yours,
Michael Moore

Click through for the entire infographic.

Is your argument that there is randomness in the universe but we cannot see it because of the human desire to see structure, or the stronger claim that there simply is no randomness in the universe?

I would not even use the word ‘desire.’ I would put it in Kantian terms. Kant says just as space and time are not out there but are our ways of making jigsaw puzzle pieces that our perception can put together, so too causality is our way of taking those space-time pieces and fitting them together. These causal chains have neither beginning nor end, so arguments for a first cause or a God will always fail. To think of randomness is terrifying to us; the difference between structure and randomness corresponds to the Kantian difference between the beautiful and the sublime.

Cabinet Magazine, Issue 1 (via the wonderful petitchou)

+

The conclusion by a panel of 41 international scientists, that it was an asteroid that caused the disappearance of the dinosaurs, has come in a bid to end decades of speculation. The asteroid, the size of the Isle of Wight, slammed into the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico at 20 times the speed of a bullet causing earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and wildfires. The destruction, 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs in a matter of days. Large marine reptiles, like the mosasaurs and the plesiosaurs, the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs, giant snail-like ammonites and many species of marine plankton, were also obliterated.

findout: honeyniss:

Rajasthan, India—- Sandstorm

One of my favorites photos by the amazing Steve McCurry.

Greenland by Olaf Otto Becker

Secret Cities of Yemen

ibán ramón

s.v.g (2009)

Scorched Earth by Michael Wells

Maddow exposes Republican anti-health Senators as liars+hypocrites:

“The Country needs you to grow up.”

Boyd Ferguson’s home in South Africa

Boyd Ferguson’s home, South Africa

The 250-year-old fig tree in the dinning room of the extraordinary Cape Town home of avid collectors and custodians of Indian antiquities, Mitch Dolby and Danny Meyer

BLDBLOG: The “art of glacier growing,” as New Scientist calls it, is “also known as glacial grafting and has been practiced for centuries in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Karakorum ranges. It was developed as a way to improve water supplies to villages in valleys where glacial meltwater tended to run out before the end of the growing season.” The artificial glacier, then, is simply a traditional landscape-architectural technique that manipulates and amplifies pre-existing natural processes. It is vernacular hydrology writ large. So how do you build an artificial glacier?

First, you need a site, and that site should be mountainous; altitudes higher than 4,500 meters are thermally preferable. Once the site is selected, ice is brought to rocky areas where there are small boulders about 25 centimeters across. The rocks protect the ice from sunlight, and often have ice trapped in the gaps between them. This seems to be critical to a successful planting. Also critical is the glacier’s “gender”. Yes, glaciers have a gender: “A male glacier is one that is covered in stones and soil and moves slowly or not at all. A female one is whiter, and grows more quickly, yielding more water.”

Previously

A ‘pay-to-confess’ telephone hotline for Catholics too busy to go to church has been condemned as ‘utterly unacceptable’ by bishops in France. The service - called the Phoneline to the Lord - charges users 30p a minute to confess their sins to an automated answering machine. When the number is called, a soothing male voice says: ‘For advice on confessing, press one. To confess, press two. To listen to some confessions, press three.’ But with soft organ music playing in the background, the voice warns: In case of serious or mortal sins - that is, sins that have cut you off from Christ our Lord - it is essential to confide in a priest. The hotline was set up at the beginning of the Christian fasting period of Lent by Paris-based telephone messaging service AABAS. Its creator told French news agency AFP she could only give her first name as Camille as she had already received threats about the service from irate Catholics. She said: The idea is to confess sins which are not capital sins, but minor sins, directly to God. Callers do not talk to a person but can confess their sins and listen to prayers, music or other people’s confessions in an atmosphere of piety and reflection.

icelandicbutterflies:

our favorite little lamancha goat. she is so naughty and wonderful.

you’re killing me, Louisa.

last night’s moon

17th century Ottoman tent from the Dresden State Art Collections

Olympic Roundup

wreckandsalvage:

Journey of Action (@JourneyofAction)

Brother and sister are driving the Pan American Highway from Alaska to Argentina, documenting the trip with weekly videos, stopping along the way to talk to people about volunteerism in America.

thegooglymoogly:

icelandicbutterflies:

one of many good reasons not to wear diamond rings while farming

Louisa + baby goats! So adorable.