Despite programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, Uncle Sam is woefully monochromatic when it comes to federal graphic design. In other countries, paper currency is a work of national treasure, and topographical maps are often so beautiful they could hang in a museum. In the good ol’ USA, though, it took more than two centuries before we put more than a smidge of color on the money and even then it was so desaturated Pantone would barely recognize it. USGS topo maps have all the lyricism of something you’d find on the bottom of your shoe. What wonderful surprise, then…CONTINUE>
Posts tagged as:
space
The Dark Side of the Moon Ain’t So Dark
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Time Lapse: When the Biggest Stars Come Out to Party
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No matter how much time you spend outdoors, you will never see the Milky Way like this. Even on the best viewing nights, the galactic bulge is just little more than a smudge in the sky. But with a digital camera, an extended shutter speed, and some patience, you can snap pics that will you blow you away. And with a simple method of stitching together still images, you can produce a gorgeous little film like William Castleman’s…CONTINUE>
Man has dreamed about flight ever since man could dream. But Icarus is one thing. A chair tied to balloons is another. There’s whimsy, even innocence, to slipping the bonds of gravity and ascending to wherever the universe takes you. Wingsuits, gliders, and their ilk are “falling with style”, but balloon flight is more like pollen drifting on the breeze–or like Charlotte’s children at the end of Charlotte’s Web, when they cast themselves from the web into their destinies. It doesn’t happen without hope…CONTINUE>
How many people are in space right now? Six, according to this very simple, cool little website. Actually, I would add one more: The barista at Pain du Monde yesterday who insisted that a macchiato has milk in it, made said macchiato incorrectly, then screwed up the remake.
You never know what you’re gonna see out there. One night in the Grand Canyon, after 20-plus miles of hiking, my buddy Dave and I convinced ourselves—for about 10 minutes—that we were being following by a UFO. If only we’d had this dope UFO identification chart.
It looks like someone hung a circuit board out to dry, but that’s the freshly powered International Space Station passing the limb of the Earth a few days ago. The ISS was resupplied by the space shuttle Discovery, which brought a set of giant solar arrays and, rumor has it, a twelver of tallboys and the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs disk pirated from mininova.org.
Who says NASA needs its budget cut? Not after dropping eye candy like this on us: Here’s a beautiful shot of Mt. Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first ascent overlaid on it.
There’s nothing like a big old honkin’ kicker to get your jib stoke on, so how about one that’s light years high? The Hubble Space Telescope grabbed this shot of giant gaseous cavity (sounds the the Snowbird tram on a Sunday morning) in a region of space called NGC 3324. Glowing gas and shadowy dust create the dramatic image, which is a composite of light emitted by hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur gases. Click on through to see it bigger, along with a few more radical Hubble snapshots.
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Before There Was The Hurricane, There Was the Double Daffy
Time Lapse of the Milky Way over Hawaii
Al Gore: The Truth, Even With Mistakes, Is Still Inconvenient
