on the beach

help zoe strauss get down to the gulf coast to document this catastrophic oil spill.

funding is now live.

project site: on the beach by zoe strauss

don’t throw, don’t bat

via: fans in a flashbulb

from mike mandel’s baseball photographer trading cards series, 1975

remember what the fella said

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

-harry lime

Boardwalk Empire

finally something good on tv again.

so looking forward to this…

el del bombo

manolo, el del bombo

photographs to look at: frances benjamin johnston

all images © frances benjamin johnston

at work

frances benjamin johnston with camera on balcony of treasury building, washington, d.c., 1888. photographer unknown

pick up the pieces

i want one!

artist peter hennessey creates full scale models of nasa satellites from wood, without the help of fancy 3D modeling software.

tuning it all out

“What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

“We want to be interrupted, because each interruption—email, tweet, instant message, RSS headline—brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch or even socially isolated. The stream of new information also plays to our natural tendency to overemphasize the immediate. We crave the new even when we know it’s trivial.

And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us in ever more varied ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive. We rarely stop to think that it might actually make more sense just to tune it all out.”

– nicholas carr  – the web shatters focus, rewires brain

also:

is google making us stupid