Birds Like You've Never Seen Them
Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman’s mind-blowing book — and totally engrossing website — Bird.
Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman’s mind-blowing book — and totally engrossing website — Bird.
If you’ve never really gotten a good look at Mars, here’s your chance: The Big Picture has collected 35 striking photographs from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting and photographing the planet since 2006.
Photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in and photographing the slums of Nairobi, Caracas, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Bendiksen’s photos of family homes portray a reality that clashes with popular perception.
We blogged about musical stairs in Stockholm that try to encourage stair-climbing rather than escalator-riding. One of the issues with this “nudge,” as Dubner wrote, is that it’s probably more fun for people to descend them than to ascend.
These stairs in Lisbon, however, address that problem by appealing to the calorie conscious.
The Independent featured a series of before-and-after photos from photographer Lois Hechenblaikner’s book Off Piste: An Alpine Story that show “how skiing changed the Alps” during the last few decades.
When people use cardboard signs to ask for money, their success depends on a number of factors, including the sign’s explicit message, the target of its solicitation, and even whether a passing historian happens to find it worth buying. Consider the following approaches, turned up in a scan of Flickr photos.
Over at The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s awesome photo blog, there’s a series of pictures showing the aftermath of a catastrophe (probably an explosion) at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam in south-central Russia on August 17.
The library on board the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is well-stocked with Freakonomics as part of its Navy Reading Program. According to Flickr user Roxanne Darling, it’s the most-read book on the ship.
So does this make you want to go locavore, since so much fuel was likely used in transporting them around the globe, and maybe they’re not the freshest almonds?
If you couldn’t see the eclipse firsthand, you can see a collection of photos from Flickr users in India and China, posted on Flickr’s Group Pool. Here are some of our favorites:
On his website Fancy Fast Food, designer and writer Erik Trinidad revamps fast-food meals to look like plates you’d see at a five-star restaurant.
His tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look.”
A new study by a research team from Tokyo’s Keio University found that pigeons can distinguish between paintings the researchers consider good and bad.
The Obamas have a Flickr account. Its photos are labeled “United States Government Work” — definitely not Creative Commons material — and most of them look like standard PR material.
Incentives, or nudges, to get people to do things — like donate organs, lose weight, and pick up dog feces — are everywhere; some work better than others. Here are a few that various Flickr users have come across:
George Foreman named all five of his boys after himself, but only one has taken up pro boxing. I met the retired boxer and “grillionaire” at his son’s pro debut last Saturday. George III won, but in a bout that some say looked rather unevenly matched.
The Cardsofchange website posts photos of revamped business cards sent in by the recently laid-off. The cards, most of which are marked up in pen or marker, reflect what each person has done since losing his or her job.
By jingo, what a boom it was! So much so that I just noticed a local Philly contractor, perhaps more honest than most, who named his business “Bubble Builders.” In a sign of the times, I haven’t seen a single customer enter over the past few months.
With the housing bubble now truly behind us, you might imagine that Bubble Builders either needs a new name or a new line of business. What would you recommend?
When it’s paired with a book of photographs by filmmaker David Lynch and an invitation to fill the blank CD with tracks from an illegally downloaded album. That’s the weird new distribution scheme being floated by musicians Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse.
This photo, sent to us by blog reader Mike Martin, shows how some residents of Newtown, Australia, deal with their junk mail. The sign says it’s a science experiment, but we’d imagine that impaling your junk mail on a fence can also be highly therapeutic.
Photographer Anna Skladmann‘s “Little Adults” portraits feature children of Russia’s Nouveau-Riche who have “been raised to become ‘Elite’ and behave like little adults.” But as Very Short List wonders, with a financial crisis underway, will Russia’s rich kids start behaving more like kids? (Related: Russia moves ahead of De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer — and immediately starts . . .
A blog reader named Lee emailed us a photo he took on Highway 86 in Imperial, California. “It made me wonder if [the economy] is really that bad that even dead people will lose their resting places,” he writes. “What will they do? Evict the dead?” Photo: Lee We called Victor Carrillo, the supervisor for Imperial County listed on the . . .
Since we first asked you to send us your Freakonomics-related photos, you’ve responded from all over the world, and with an impressive variety of images, ranging from innovative ways to stop overzealous newspaper deliveries … To signs of hyperinflation: So keep sending your photos here, and, as usual, tell us why they’re Freak-worthy.
Tent cities have been cropping up across the country and around the world. The Times‘ Jim Wilson recently put together this series of photos of tent city life outside Fresno, California. (NOTE: This post originally linked to a different set of photos which the photographer has since requested be removed.) [%comments]
The paparazzi are like 18th-century pirates in that it’s hard to understand and control them until you realize that they’re rational, economic actors. The Obama administration seems to understand this. The White House has been strategically releasing photos of the Obamas in an attempt to drive down the value of paparazzi shots. The avalanche of Obama photos recently released to . . .
According to NPR, recession-themed marketing is a way to “rais[e] money from lower expectations” and “turn bad times into glad times” by selling thrift, good value — and, as Gawker claims, more sex and alcohol. This photo, taken in a New York City subway station, then, is the perfect recession-ad sampler: Photo: Ryan Hagen
To get Google to open a major routing center in Lenoir, N.C., and bring with it 200 jobs and about $172 million in local investments, the state and local governments offered the company $200 million worth of incentives, reports The Lenoir News-Topic, including sales-tax-free electrical power and computer purchases. When the deal was signed in 2007, some members of the . . .
| North Korea launched a threatening-looking rocket over the weekend. It crashed harmlessly into the sea. Wonder what North Korea actually looks like on the ground these days? Two Austrians recently entered the country by train, through a border crossing that has been closed to tourists since 1994, and took these rare and fascinating photos of life in the Hermit . . .
Why are these ominous British posters (photographed by David Byrne) informing you of your rights? Photo: David Byrne A stylistic riff on the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters from the Blitz, these new posters are a publicity campaign for a promise by police to be more engaged with their communities. The evidence is mixed on whether or not community . . .
Chris Markl Chris Markl Reader Chris Markl emailed us these photos of signs from Nairobi offering insurance against political violence, terrorism, and riots. If Sudhir Venkatesh is right, we probably won’t be seeing similar insurance pitches in the U.S., though maybe London could use them. Markl wonders why another type of insurance isn’t offered in the U.S. by now: the . . .
Are such products too weird to take hold in the U.S.? Remember that the Walkman, the great cassette-tape ancestor of portable CD players and iPods, also started out as one of those wacky Japanese inventions.