Whenever, wherever, however they can, folks around the world gotta cop a few Zs. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack on Aug 16, 2011 - 46 comments

The official Google Earth plugin is one free download that makes all sorts of cool stuff possible in your browser. There's a full screen version of the program (complete with underwater views and 3D buildings) which can be searched by entering queries at the end of the URL. There's a framed version with support for layers, historical imagery, day/night cycles, and the Google Sky starmap. Less useful but more fun are Google's collection of "experiments" demonstrating the possibilities of the Earth API, including a "Geo Whiz" geography quiz, an antipode locater, a 3D first-person view of San Francisco, a virtual route-follower, and MONSTER MILKTRUCK!, a crazy fun driving simulator that lets you careen a virtual milk truck through the Googleplex campus, ricochet off the Himalayas, or explore any other place you care to name. Lots more can be found in the Google Earth Gallery -- highlights include a look at mountaintop removal mining, a real-time flight tracker, a guide to trails and outdoor recreation, a 360 panorama catalog, geotagged Panoramio photos, and the comprehensive crowdsourced Google Earth Community Layer. And while it's too large to view online, don't miss loading the Metafilter user location map into a desktop version of Google Earth! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Jun 9, 2011 - 15 comments

Still Lifes
"Supposedly the still life came to the fore when religion and the state became replaced by the middle class. Do you know when that was. The world began to be run by people who just wanted a lot of shit. And would go anywhere to get it. The Dutch who invented our own dear New York and this is why it is this way—full of people who want stuff—they were the stars of this moment, collecting shit from around the world and putting big piles of it on shelves, in boats, taking it somewhere else. And making paintings of it. And really this moment never ended. They would paint marketplaces, and the thing that's funny is that if you were a painter and you weren't being paid to paint someone rich you would just probably paint some stuff and sell it in the market and so the place where all this was happening of course got painted too—it's dizzying." (via dd)
posted by kliuless on Aug 1, 2010 - 30 comments

love-pictures "found and taken photographs that are experienced as much by the heart as by the head."
posted by tellurian on Mar 2, 2010 - 18 comments

Jean M. Fasse (Red Cross during WWII, and later the Special Service). Shirley Ann Thacker (WAVE). Just two of the interviews from the extensive collection of material (photographs, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, oral histories and posters) at the Women Veterans Historical Collection.
posted by tellurian on Oct 14, 2009 - 4 comments

School Lunch From Around The World
posted by Joe Beese on May 31, 2009 - 86 comments

Erik Petersen. Danish newspaper photographer. Died in 1997. He took a number of pictures around WWII. He never developed them. Fortunately, sixty years later, someone else has. Now they can be found in a book. Here's a bit of bloggery as well.
posted by IndigoJones on Jun 2, 2005 - 14 comments

The World Heritage Tour is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a documentary image bank with panoramic pictures for all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites [warning: frames]. Examples include the tomb of Sety I, discovered in 1817 and permanently closed to the public in 1991 and the baroque churches of the Phillipines. [more inside]
posted by Irontom on Jun 10, 2003 - 11 comments

This is an amazing photograph of what the world looks like at night, from a low orbit. Although this is found in a subdirectory of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, I'm not sure how to get to this pic by surfing the site, nor do I have any information on what was used to do the photographing. The link was sent to me in an email.

Anybody know the details on this one?
posted by lizardboy on Jan 2, 2001 - 13 comments