Cooper Griggs

Russian blogger Marat Burkhard told Radio Free Europe that working in an infamous "troll factory" generating fake internet posts and comments was "Orwellian." "Whatever we're told, that's what we'll write about, no questions asked, and we don't want ...

Green Mantis
#fbf #Bali #Indonesia #asia #2009 #praying #mantis #insect #green #bug #cool #worldtour #trip #travels #macro

News: Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen suggested that church attendance should be mandatory for all U.S. citizens.

Rumor: Expired boxes of cake mix are dangerously toxic.

David Badash has the story. (Tipped by JMG reader Scott)

“Immortality” by Lunar Baboon

a-mini-a-day:

Oh my god. Miniature pallets as coasters.
Source.

“I took a panoramic picture of our living room. But my cat decided to walk through.” -Jannik Görtz

 

— Julie Andrews discussing Lady Gaga’s Academy Awards tribute to The Sound Of Music, which premiered 50 years ago and will be lavishly re-premiered tonight in Hollywood, in a new interview with Los Angeles Times

With the announcement of our 100th Flickr Commons institution yesterday, we wanted to take a closer look at some of the stories behind iconic photos from the collection. This selection represents a few of our favorite stories, but we highly encourage you to explore the Commons further on your own.

The U.S. National Archives, Richard M. Nixon and Elvis Presley at the White House, December 1970. Elvis Presley was famously obsessed with police badges, owning a huge collection of them. A notable hole in his collection was a badge from the then Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (a predecessor of the DEA); he reportedly believed that “..with the federal narcotics badge, he could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.” On an overnight flight in an impromptu visit to Washington D.C., Elvis wrote a note to President Nixon requesting a meeting so he could get a “narc badge.” The visit was arranged the same day. A remarkable description of the meeting can be found here.

George Eastman House, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936. This stunning portrait of the human face of the Great Depression in 1930’s America is popularly known as Migrant Mother. Commissioned by the Resettlement Administration to document migrant farm workers in California, Dorothea Lange (a remarkable photojournalist and major early influence in documentary photography) came across the destitute Florence Owens Thompson and her family, and shot a series of portraits. This image, and Lange herself, became a subject of controversy when Florence Thompson was rediscovered in 1978. About the picture, she said “I wish [Lange] hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.” (source).

The Library of Congress, Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee (LOC), 1944. Rosie the Riveter became an iconic cultural idea in World War II in the United States. As significant chunks of the labor force were outside of the country, all parts of the population – notably women and people of all races – became involved in traditionally male-dominated fields, including aircraft and munitions factories. Sadly the name of the subject in this photograph is unknown.

Royal Australian Historical Society, 03 – Sydney Harbour Bridge Construction, 1930. Although the start of construction predated the depression era of the late 1920s and 30s, the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed in the middle of the depression and was a major source of local employment. This image shows a point in construction close to where the two sides of the arch were to meet; two gigantic creeper cranes can be seen on either side. These cranes were used to lower steelwork to points below, including the deck of the bridge. An iconic structure in its own right, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a feat of engineering at the time.

NASA on The Commons, Cresent Earth rises above lunar horizon, December 1972. This remarkable image of Earthrise was taken by astronaut Ronald E. Evans in the command module of Apollo 17 orbiting the moon while his colleagues were descending to the surface in the lander module.

New York Public Library, Head of the Statue of Liberty on display in a park in Paris, 1883. The Statue of Liberty was not a gift from France to America – it was the brainchild of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. He made several trips to the United States from France to pitch his idea of “Liberty Enlightening the World” to leaders of several cities. In 1872, he partnered with Edouard de Laboulaye to create the Franco-American Union, which raised funds to build the statue. In 1878 the statue’s head was on display for the Paris Exposition (the image above), and in 1884 the completed statue was on display in a courtyard next to Bartholdi’s studio – with a massive funding shortfall to get it to the United States. Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the daily tabloid New York World launched a campaign to raise funds to finish the project. Hundreds of thousands of dollars from private citizenry was raised as well as a significant donation from a laxative maker that advertised on the pedestal of the statue for a year. In 1886, ten years late, the statue was finally erected on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor.

National Archives of Norway, Sex Pistols i Norge, 1977, 1977. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols performing at the Student Union in Trondheim, Norway, 1977.

The U.S. National Archives, “The Tetons – Snake River,” Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming., 1941. In 1941, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams was commissioned by the Department of the Interior to take photographs of National Parks and reservations. This striking example of Adams’ mastery of landscape photography became one of the few images stored on a Voyager Golden Record: phonograph records containing records of life and culture on Earth and placed aboard Voyager 1 and 2.

Public Records Office Of Northern Ireland, Titanic, 1912. Built in Belfast, the RMS Titanic was the largest ship of its era. This is an image of the Titanic leaving for a day-long sea trial, where it was declared seaworthy. 12 days later and 5 days into its maiden voyage, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank.

via http://kottke.org/12/10/girl-with-a-pearl-earring-and-point-and-shoot-camera

via http://i.imgur.com/miC8i.jpg

There are more music streaming apps than the world needs. But there hasn't really been a streamlined experience for electronic dance music listeners until now. Most of the popular apps -– Spotify, 8tracks and Pandora -– have a plethora of dance music...

Amazon thinks it has a way to entice you away from the likes of Dropbox or Google Drive: real, honest-to-goodness unlimited internet storage. It just launched two Cloud Drive plans that let you upload as much as you like, with the primary difference ...

Nigeria's Consumer Protection Council (CPC), with the backing of the country's government, is threatening to throw telecom executives in jail unless they improve their call quality. The African nation has seen mobile phone adoption rates soar over th...

kateoplis:

Oh.

Barack Obama called HBO series The Wire "one of the greatest pieces of art in the last couple of decades" in an interview with the show's creator that was released today at the Bipartisan Summit for Criminal Justice Reform. The Wire chronicled the effects of the drug war as it was waged on the streets of Baltimore in the early 2000s, detailing how both drug use and the clumsy, heavy-handed law enforcement response to it devastated many urban communities.

As Simon summed it up, "what drugs don't destroy, the war against them is ripping apart."

Interestingly, Obama spoke of the incarceration problem as much from an economic perspective as from a social justice one. "The challenge," he said, "is folks go into prison at great expense to the state, [and] many times [are] trained to become more hardened criminals while in prison, come out and are basically unemployable and end up looping back in" to the prison system.

"When you break down why people aren't getting back into the labor force, even as jobs are being created, a big chunk of that is the young male population with felony histories," Obama said. "So now where we have the opportunity to give them a pathway toward a responsible life, they're foreclosed. And that's counterproductive."

Fiscally speaking, mass incarceration is "breaking the bank," Obama said. "It means everyone's taxes are going up, and services are being squeezed." Many elements in the Republican party have become receptive to these message in recent years. But in the Senate especially there remains a hardline of lawmakers who cut their political teeth during the tough-on-crime era and who remain enthusiastic proponents of harsh sentences for drug offenders, despite reams of evidence showing they don't work.

The Justice Department under Obama deserves a great deal of credit for taking administrative steps to reduce the burden of incarceration, including modest sentencing changes and an explicit hands-off approach to the states that have legalized marijuana. But as Obama notes in the interview, the real work of reform will have to be done through Congress.

You no longer have to head to Provo if you want Google Fiber in Utah -- Google has revealed that it's bringing its gigabit internet access to the state's capital, Salt Lake City. The company is short on details, but it won't have a ready-made fiber n...

There are an estimated five billion people worldwide who lack reliable internet access but Facebook is reportedly "ready to spend billions" in order to change that. The Menlo Park-based company has recently announced plans to deliver global connectiv...

News: Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson made controversial remarks about atheism and morality.

bjornenlinda:

Buster Keaton Escapes

by uaiHebert

The whiteboard at my gym. -hankhill72

by Pie Comic