Man decorates basement in Sharpie

Ususally I'm wary when I hear about projects done in sharpie or duct tape. There are a lot of people doing really cool things with both materials, but there are also a lot of people making complete crap out of both materials.

This guy, I must say, has done a real classy job with black sharpie.

"When Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over. . .

Says Kratzer, 53, the associate general counsel for Lexmark: "People are amazed that with something as simple and inexpensive as a Sharpie, you can decorate a whole basement."

How did this Sharpie world start? With a single swipe of the marker.

Kratzer started mid-wall, with the Salon by Picasso. Then he thought, well, taking a design out to the edge of the wall wouldn't be overwhelming.

Then the rest of the basement flared off that first wall."

Check out the rest of the really cool article, and the cool rotating photograph showing all 360 degrees of his sharpie-done basement.

http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/532854.html

Finnish Summer

Finnish Summer from Marco Menestrina on Vimeo.

Okay, since I'll probably be away from the internet for the next week, and since I found LOTS more great summer videos, I'm keeping the summer-video-theme running for another week.

Enjoy!

Really cool airplane cabin photos!

Ever wondered what the pilots see while coming in for a landing at a busy airport?
Isn't it just the worst to find out you've got the window seat, then realize that the wing blocks your view of anything interesting?

Take a look at this list of 10 really cool photos of airplane cabins in different situations - from night landings like the image above (by Ismael Jorda, link inlcuded in the top 10 list), to acrobatic airplanes with nothing but the ground above and the sky below (upside-down).

View the top 10 list, along with links to the original images here
http://www.canadabizmart.com/bootstrapper/collection/spectacular-cockpit-photos/

View Earthrise from Mars

"The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

. . .

On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact the red-filter image was almost completely saturated, the Blue-Green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the infrared image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release. The moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera."


It may not look like much, but on that one tiny blue and green orb exists all six billion or so of us - and has existed, as far as we know, every human being ever made/created/evolved/whatevered. Everything that we know, and everything that we ever have known is contained on that little sphere.

Whats even more amazing is that twelve people from that little blue-green orb in the bottom left have actually managed to travel through space and walk on the surface of the moon, all the way on the other side of the picture. If that isn't amazing, then I don't know what is.


Image, caption, and full-size photo from
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/
multimedia/mro20080303earth.html

3d Panorama Photography

I think Friday is going to be a frequent two-for-one day, and quite possibly also the day for random posts that I just feel like sharing, even if they don't quite fit the theme of this blog. I haven't found any like that yet, so we'll see about that later.

The first entry for today is a series of 3d panoramas of various locations. I've seen these before, and they're really cool. You can click and scroll from side-to-side, look up and down,or zoom in and out on some of them. Its essentially like you're standing in the center of a bubble, with the images of everything you can see around you, but all in one photograph. It's pretty cool, and I've seen some neat ones of really interesting places before.

http://www.panoscan.com/MK3/ExampleSelect.html