Fall Out

(via nevver)

The Dream is Over, April 4, 1968

The sun, partially obscured by the Earth.

The photo was taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, during its eclipse season – a period of the year when the satellite slips behind Earth for up to 72 minutes of every day.

(via fuckyeahspace)

The Loneliest Whale in the World.

In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:

She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing—too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.

(via erickimberlinbowley)

film-grain:

Painters on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, October 7, 1914.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.

I shut the lights off at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in Baltimore last night, but it’s not so easy in a large landmark like the tower, where there are five completely separate timers and control mechanisms, spread out over twenty-two stories, so my Earth Hour started at 8:25, 8:29, 8:35, 8:38, and 8:42 and ended with a similar spread. The worst part was that the mechanical timer for the lights in the clock faces is a brutal heavy brass steampunk-looking thing that I taped up with eight layers of tightly-bound duct tape, and it still managed to break loose early and restart the clock lights at some undetermined time without my intervention.

Seeing as I was on the verge of fainting from climbing the last seven floors on steep ladder/stairs, I opted to stay on the roof of the tower, 288 feet over Lombard and Eutaw Streets, for the duration, and watched the city going on its way around me. No other large building killed their lights, alas (particularly the old Baltimore Trust Company tower/Bank of America building, our only real rival for pride of place on the skyline, the brightly-lit SOBs), making me wonder if people would just assume some kind of electrical failure was involved and blame the facility manager (me). The air was clean and brisk and the sky as full of stars as you can expect in Baltimore, so I put on my mp3 player and a nice playlist of mid-seventies funk and spent an hour dancing over the disco-ball tabletop of the city, surrounded by helicopter fireflies.

Fire trucks came and went, in one case racing to a fire in West Baltimore that I could see clearly from my vantage point, and the Shock Trauma helicopter lifted off from the hospital below to rescue someone, and the funk kept on keepin’ on. Almost at the end, a single police helicopter buzzed the tower, catching me in the twitchy blue-white light of the perp-spotter beam, and a stern voice barked out of the beating cacophony of the churning blades—

“What are you doing?”

I shrugged and yelled back, “I’m dancing!”

I’m sure they didn’t hear me, but they buzzed off nonetheless. I grooved along till 9:29, then switched over to “One More Night” by Can and started the long, slow climb back to earth.

– sonascope’s earth hour contribution, MetaFilter

yerawizardharry:

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenomenon before – but they also report that there are now less mosquitoes than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitoes are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

claytoncubitt:

I fight evil, Brooklyn

(via destroyangels, jessiglehart)

“The best thing about Kate Beaton’s internet celebrity was watching all the miserable stalker nerds go from wanting to fuck her to hating her because she told them to stop being so creepy and gross.”

– “Women are like children” – Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert (via 3liza)

alexsegura:

Hey, @agent_m — check it: The Original Godzilla (via MONSTER BRAINS)

mohandasgandhi:

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

treehouseboat:

feitoamao:

knit cables do it for me sometimes

The Great Aran off Kanagawa…