Daylightsavingsand my love story with old reader comes to a close...leaving me just like everyone else :(
When Google Reader finally closed its doors, it shoved thousands of teary-eyed RSS fans into cyberspace, adrift, where we flailed around desperately for a suitable replacement. Many services rose to the challenge, but the incoming wave was a lot to handle. Too much for one of our favorite alternatives—The Old Reader—which is taking a page from Googs and shutting down as well.
    
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After being strapped onto the front of a 15-story controlled explosion and launched clear out of the atmosphere to live in an experimental laboratory orbiting around the Earth at thousands of miles an hour, the least NASA can do is give you a good meal.
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At the Google I/O after party the other night, there was one bartender in particular that stood out. It wasn't the drink he made, or the friendly chatter. It was more than he weighed several tons and could break you with the flick of the wrist. Meet the Makr Shakr.
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Many tunnels in Sydney, Australia aren't tall enough to permit tractor trailers to move through safely. This animated gif shows a warning system that informs truck drivers when they're about to crash into a tunnel entrance. When sensors detect a vehicle that is too tall, the system pours water across the entrance to the tunnel and projects a stop sign onto that water curtain.
Luo Gang was five years old when he was kidnapped from his home in Sichuan province, China, and taken to Fujian province. He was adopted by a family 1500 miles away.
“Everyday before I went to bed, I forced myself to re-live the life spent in my old home,” he said. “So I wouldn’t forget.”
But the only memory Luo had of his hometown was of two bridges.
He drew a rough map of his hometown from memory, before posting it on “Bring Lost Babies Home”, a Chinese website devoted to locating missing children through the help of volunteers.
Soon afterwards, a volunteer wrote back with valuable information - a couple from a small town in Sichuan’s Guangan city had lost a son 23 years ago. The time matched Luo’s abduction perfectly.
Luo searched for pictures of the Sichuan town and found they looked familiar to him. To confirm his suspicions, he turned to the satellite version Google Maps. The minute he zoomed in on an area called “Yaojiaba” near the Sichuan town, Luo recognised the two bridges.
“That’s it! That’s my home,” shouted Luo, in tears.
Luo was reunited with his parents soon after. Link -via Fark
Previously:Lost Boy Used Google Earth to Find His Mother
From 1957, a disturbing, patronizing, racist Shell ad for pesticides, selling the superiority of big agribusiness.
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Take a look at photographer Jared Lim‘s portfolio, and many of his photographs might look to you like they’re the product of liberal Photoshop Clones Stamp usage. They feature repeating shapes, colors, and patterns found in various cities’ urban environments.
Based in Singapore, Lim is an urban explorer — he calls himself a “wanderer” — and says he has always been drawn to geometry, lines, curves, patterns, and abstract designs.
Thus, architectural photography has been a natural fit for him ever since he picked up a camera. While traveling to different cities around the world for his travel industry job, Lim captures things that catch his eye in monochrome, in color, and on the street.
In an interview over on Chase Jarvis’ blog, Lim says he does minimal editing on his images:
I try to get my composition and lighting right during shooting so as to minimize the amount of post correction work. Post work mainly involves correction of lens distortion and perspective, because I am rather meticulous in my composition. I love strong colors and most of my work reflects that.
You can find more of Lim’s work over on his website and on his 500px page. You can also connect with him through Facebook.
(via The Fox is Black)
Image credits: Photographs by Jared Lim and used with permission
Some photographers make a name for themselves by creating portraits of children, while others create similar images of wild animals. Photographer Robin Schwartz does both — at the same time.
Since 2002, Schwartz has been photographing her daughter Amelia while the young girl interacts with all kinds of creatures in the animal kingdom. Subjects have included everything from dogs and cats to monkeys, kangaroos, and elephants.
Schwartz says her goal with the photographs is to present the animals as an ordinary part of our world, so the photographer refrains from glamorizing the animals or using them in cliché ways.
Amelia herself plays a big role in the creation of the images. The girl has become accustomed to requesting various animals to meet and coming up with concepts and color palettes for the photo shoots. From the time the project started — when she was just 3 years old — Amelia was taught to not fear animals, that the animals are her siblings, and that they’re a “part of her natural world.”
That isn’t to say that Schwartz and her daughter are reckless with their image making: due to the care they put into doing things correctly and in a safe manner, the worst injury from an animal Amelia was received so far was being bitten in the face by a cousin’s dog — and that was during a routine non-photo-related family visit.
Here are some of the photographs Schwartz and her daughter have created so far:
You can find more of Schwartz’s photographs over on her website. The project’s are titled Amelia’s World and Animal Affinity. A photo book of Amelia’s World was also published back in 2008.
Amelia Photographs by Robin Schwartz (via Slate)
Image credits: Photographs by Robin Schwartz and used with permission
The 2,700+ year old city of Palermo, Italy is well known for its gastronomy (the art of food eating) and its four main street markets. One of the busier ones is Il Capo, or “The Cape,” a market with Arabic origins that mainly contains various foods and fish stalls.
22-year-old Italian photographer Manfredi Caracausi recently completed a project that focuses on telling the story of Il Capo. He shot portraits of the merchants manning the stalls and pictures of the goods they sell. The photographs are then displayed as a series of diptychs.
Caracausi says that markets of Palermo are a major part of the history of the city, and help make Palermo what it is. Walk around in the streets, and you’ll be greeted by a thousands different colors, shapes, and smells.
If you regularly pay a visit to the market, you’ll notice people who seem suspended in time, as if they have been there forever. They’re the merchants who set up shop on a regular basis, greeting the crowds of people who shuffle through the market streets looking for things to buy and eat.
By shooting these photographs, Caracausi says he is trying to represent a place that is beautiful to him. His goal is to tell the story of the timeless merchants of the Cape and the goods they sell.
If you’re interested in learning more about the markets of Palermo, the New York Times published an interesting article about the subject back in 2007.
You can find more on this project on Caracausi’s blog and website.
Image credits: Photographs by Manfredi Caracausi and used with permission
This collection by Romain Jacquet-Lagreze will have your head spinning in a dizzy state of confusion. The French photographer and graphic artist created Vertical Horizon as a visual exploration of Hong Kong and it's rapid growth towards the sky. Using a unique perspective, Jacquet-Lagreze presents the ever-growing city in a repetitively graphic expression of its architecture. More » 
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‘The Unseen Seen‘ is a project by Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler that captures the beauty of classic cinema in an unconventional way.
By way of his friend Volkmar Ernst, Riedler was able to get access to the old film roll archive of the The Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. He then photographed a few hundred rolls — ranging from those of classic movies to ones with interesting titles — to produce a series of beautiful film roll images that speak volumes about the films themselves.
Reidler’s stated goal is to show you a picture of an object (in this case a film roll) and let your imagination do the rest. Some rolls bear a sometimes fascinating resemblance to the movies they contain, and simply looking at the pictures can conjure up memories of those films from days gone by.
Here is a selection of images from The Unseen Seen series:
Each roll was photographed in a makeshift studio in the archive’s cinema and backlit using film lights to get the desired effect. To learn more about this project or see more of Reidler’s photography, you can head over to his website by clicking here.
(via Feature Shoot)
Image credits: Photographs by Reiner Riedler and used with permission.
During the deadly earthquake that hit Ya'an, a rural area in China's southwestern province of Sichuan, a television reporter who was getting married left her wedding to report on the disaster. She was still in her wedding gown:
Chen Ying, an anchorwoman at a television station in earthquake zone Ya'an, was getting married on Saturday when the earthquake hit her city.
Local media said she rushed back to her job to report on the earthquake in her wedding gown.
A breeding bull stands under infrared lights, used to relax his muscles, at an artificial insemination centre in the village of Hohenzell, Upper Austria April 9, 2013. The centre exports cattle semen to more than 52 countries worldwide. Photo: Leonhard Foeger / Reuters
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This vintage picture has been making the rounds of the internet in the past couple of days, but it was first posted three years ago by redditor jordanofthehill. His grandfather raised the animals from infancy and as they never had to catch their own food, it never occurred to the lion and the bear that lunch was walking between them. As a further example, here is a picture of jordanofthehill's father as a young boy. Link
This certainly looks like an ad for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it was published about 1305. Discarded Images is a collection of medieval illustrations and manuscript illuminations that cover the entire range of what could be seen and/or imagined in the Middle Ages. Many of the images are NSFW. Continue reading for some funny examples from the site that are SFW. Link -via Metafilter
Captions are from the blog entries. 
hey cat. stop licking your butt on the Book of Maccabees or you’ll get an arrow!
April Fools’ Day :P 
DANGERS OF READING
cats’ habits 
lustful friar
RABBIT’S FUNERAL
RABBIT PLAYING ORGAN (with dog calcant)
happy new year!
Evil Dead/Army of Darkness
This British dish is spelled stargazy or stargazey. And yes, those are real fish heads:
Stargazey pie sounds rather quaint, but this Cornish dish of pilchards baked under a pastry crust won't appeal to everyone - it traditionally has fish heads poking through the crust, so they appear to be gazing up at the sky. Legend has it that the dish originates from the village of Mousehole, where a plucky fisherman called Tom Bawcock once saved his fellow villagers from starvation by braving the stormy seas to catch a record haul. The fish were baked poking out of the pies, to prove to everyone that there was fish inside.
America fought two wars to get away from this kind of food.
(Photo: goodiesfirst)
This time-lapse, shot by photographer Bevan Percival on New Zealand’s North Island, has to be one of the most beautiful we’ve ever shared. Shot over the course of six months using a Canon 5D Mark II, various lenses, and a Dynamic Perception 6′ Stage Zero motorized dolly, it will keep your eyes glued to the screen all five minutes and fifty-nine seconds.
In keeping with the stunning visuals, Percival’s description isn’t about the gear he used or even the places he went. It’s about what inspires him to do what he does and how it has impacted him:
I’m driven by chasing fleeting moments of dramatic light on beautiful landscapes and also capturing the night sky and milky way in all its glory is a real buzz. Not to mention curling up out under the stars beside all the gear for nights at a time catching some sleep here and there between checking the gear, changing batteries and staring up into eternity with spectacular meteors burning up in the cosmic shore out of the corner of your eye.
To see more of Percival’s time-lapse work, you can check out his Vimeo profile by clicking here.
(via DIY Photography)
LA-based photographer Johnny Tergo has taken an interest the kind of drive-by we can actually get behind. A frequent commuter, Tergo decided to use time on the road to his advantage—by building a custom camera and lighting rig in his Chevy Silverado that lets him snap studio-quality shots of unsuspecting passers-by. More » 
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In the old days, Mars was peopled by one vast thinking vegetable, and the Moon was peopled by stick-wielding bat-men and moth-winged moon maidens.
From the Smithsonian Institute Image Collections:
This portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs purports to illustrate the "discovery of life on the moon." In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing for the New York Sun, claimed that the noted British astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Flora and fauna included bat-men, moon maidens (with luna-moth wings), moon bison, and other extravagant life forms. Locke proposed an expedition to the moon using a ship supported by hydrogen balloons.
The first order of business for Earthlings? Enslave the Moon men and slaughter the Moon animals!
Other discoveries made in the moon from Sigr. Herschel (Via Meine Kleine Fabrik)
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Los Angeles-based photographer Johnny Tergo project “Passenger Side Window” is all about the art of the drive by shooting. The series was captured using a complicated camera rig Tergo built into the passenger seat of his Chevy Silverado.
In building the rig, his goal was to bring a studio-lit aesthetic to candid photos of pedestrians, captured from the perspective of someone sitting in a passenger seat.
The rig consists of a Canon 1D Mark IV, a Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, a laptop, an iPad mini, two studio lights, and a reflector. One of the lights sits in the passenger seat with the rest of the camera gear, while the second light and a reflector are located closer to the rear of the truck.
After spotting a potential subject, Tergo adjusts his cameras exposure and his off-camera lighting before moving in for the shot. Since the photos are captured without the pedestrians’ consent, they occasionally yell at him after a shot is snapped.
Here are some of the photographs Tergo has captured so far using the drive-by truck studio:
This project reminds us of Jonathan Castillo’s Car Culture series, which also involved a lighting rig built into a car. However, Castillo’s project is a bit more iffy where safety is concerned — he photographs other cars and drivers rather than people standing or walking on sidewalks.
You can find more of Tergo’s Passenger Side Window photos over on his website.
Passenger Side Window by Johnny Tergo (via Wired)
Image credits: Photographs by Johnny Tergo and used with permission
With a population of over 7 million people packed into an area of 426 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. As with other places where development cannot expand horizontally, apartment buildings tend to get taller and taller in order to provide living space for all the inhabitants.
German photographer Michael Wolf decided to capture this population density through a series of photographs studying the architecture of these high rises. The project is titled “Architecture of Density.”
The photographs offer a closeup view, turning the buildings into mesmerizing patterns of edges, windows, balconies, and air conditioning systems. In most of the photographs, the buildings completely fill up the frame, and the repetition is disorienting.
The photographs have been published as a hardcover book. Here’s what the description says:
Stunning and sobering, the photographs of high-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong by German photographer Michael Wolf reveal his personal fascination with life in mega-cities. Having lived there for several years, Wolf began to document Hong Kongs extreme development and complex urban dynamics, and how these factors play into the relationships between public and private space, anonymity and individuality, in one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. His close-up view takes the repetitive facades and colourful palettes out of their architectural context, instead offering urban patterns.
You can find more photographs from this series (and larger versions of these) over on Wolf’s website.
Thanks for sending in the tip, Nienke!
Image credits: Photographs by Michael Wolf and used with permission
Maico Akiba, an artist in Japan, imagines tiny human worlds living and growing on the backs of enormous animals. You can view more images in his SEKAI series at the link. There's a lot more than just turtles all the way down.
Link -via Spoon & Tamago
From the Imperial War Museum in London, a couple of incredible photos of nurses testing out infant gas-masks: "Three nurses carry babies cocooned in baby gas respirators down the corridor of a London hospital during a gas drill. Note the carrying handle on the respirator used to carry the baby by the nurse in the foreground."
GAS DRILL AT A LONDON HOSPITAL: GAS MASKS FOR BABIES ARE TESTED, ENGLAND, 1940 (via Kadrey) 
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Here's how to have your chocolate bar and eat it, too, one square at a time. Now if I could only get this to work with jelly beans! Continue reading for an explanation.
See, the chunks that are cut along the diagonal "grow" a little as they slide into place! Link -via Daily of the Day
Prepare yourselves for the silliest and most absurd video of the week: "The Beach Boys Shred 'I Get Around.'" If you recall the group's classic hit, you'll have to agree that the soundtrack to this vintage video from 1964 pales by comparison.
But that's what makes it so downright hilarious. No danger of copyright violation here, because the flimsy result bears little resemblance to the original. But you know what? It's still recognizable. Almost
SEE ALSO: The Beach Boys Crowdsource Videos for "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes & Villains"
Our favorite: The half-hearted guitar playing. Sounds like an electric guitar without an amp. Nice.
