02008-10-30 | News, Photos
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Audio Slideshow: Photos compete for the Prix Pictet
A major new global prize celebrating the work of both professional and amateur photographers has been awarded in Paris.
The Prix Pictet is the first competition of its type to focus on the global issue of ‘sustainability’ – and, this year in particular, on water.
The winner of 100,000 Swiss francs (£53,000) is the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquim.
Here – the head of the Prix Pictet jury, Francis Hodgson, shows off Aquim’s work and images from some of the 17 other photographers who made the shortlist.
Watch the slideshow here.
02008-10-30 | Uncategorized
James Howard Kunstler’s ever-lengthening moment in the sun | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
(((I have to admire the sober dignity and restraint with which this longtime prophet of Everything Falling Apart is watching everything falling apart. There could be a lot of self-indulgent finger-wagging and told-ya-so here, but he’s not wasting any energy on that. That’s good of him.)))
Related: Kunstler on Colbert and Kunstler on TED.
02008-10-30 | Funny
New Bond girl: A traitor to the Soviet Union | FP Passport
Russian Communists are attacking Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko, co-star of the new film, Quantum of Solace, for palling around with 007, a known “enemy of the Soviet people”
(Via beyond the beyond)
02008-10-30 | Internet, Reading
The Long Now Blog » reCaptcha your wasted time
One of the inventors of Captcha’s, those funny squiggly words used to prove your a human when you sign up for something, has now put this wasted time and human brain power to work.
ReCaptcha is now getting its difficult to decipher words from scanning projects like the Internet Archive’s and is using the human effort to digitize the words the computer cant recognize. Over a half million man hours a year can now go to digitizing books instead of just wasting your time.
Turning waste into fertiliser. Excellent.
02008-10-30 | Music
Recorded last Summer (2007):
[flv:snakecharmer-binaural.flv 450 337]
We will put our own video page together and unlike on YouTube the sound will be in stereo. Here is the first vid that was prepared. It’s “Snakecharmer-Binaural”, recorded last Summer during the recording sessions of Up Close. If you haven’t seen this performance, grab your headphones and check it out. Closed headphones like these are best – (Stevo and I always carry a pair with us, and I believe he actually mixed his first album on them!). iPod-type earbuds are not as good, but they improve if you cover them with your hands.
