All those children these pictures shown parading, seeing, posing, even sometimes peering, all those children the world over trying their hardest to get through the riddles of life, its variousness, its spells of good or bad. One hopes and prays for every one of them, for what their lives ended up being. . . .

When They Were Young: A Photographic Retrospective of Childhood Library of Congress Exhibition

Scientists have made the first conclusive discovery of water vapor in
the atmosphere of a planet beyond our solar system, or exoplanet.
This artist’s rendering shows a gas-giant exoplanet transiting across
the face of its star. Infrared analysis by NASA’s Spitzer Space
Telescope of this type of system provided the breakthrough. The
planet, HD 189733b, lies 63 light-years away in the constellation
Vulpecula. It was discovered in 2005 as it transited its parent star. (source)

Dust makes this cosmic eye look red. This eerie Spitzer Space Telescope
image shows infrared radiation from the well-studied Helix Nebula (NGC
7293), which is a mere 700 light-years away in the constellation
Aquarius. The two light-year diameter shroud of dust and gas around a
central white dwarf has long been considered an excellent example of a
planetary nebula, representing the final stages in the evolution of a
sun-like star. (source)

Slave Britain is an art exhibition which examines the 21st century trade in human lives. I’ve read about human slavery before but the combination of pictures with text just makes it more striking.

The photographs, by Panos photographers Karen Robinson and David Rose, represent a rare and intimate insight into the mechanics of this fastest growing form of modern day slavery and explore the devastating impact it has on people’s lives.

The exhibition seeks to expose the reality of trafficking in the UK and the action needed to tackle it. The participating agencies are lobbying the UK Government to make good on its recent promise to sign and ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings in order to guarantee minimum standards of protection and support for trafficked people.

Just found out that the Guardian has a small collection of Yakuza pictures. Worth a look if you have the time.

In Japan, organized crime and criminals come under the general heading of Yakuza. According to tradition, the name is derived from the worst possible score in a Japanese card game. It comes from Japan’s counterpart to Black Jack, Oicho- Kabu. The general difference between the cardgames is that in Oicho- Kabu is that a winning total of the cards is 19 instead of 21. As you see, the sum of 8, 9 and 3, is 20, which is over in Oicho-Kabu. In a hand resulting in a score of 20, the worst possible score, a player’s final score would be zero.

Among the losing combinations, the phonetic sound of an 8-9-3 sequence is ya – ku – sa. It’s from there the name, yakuza is derived… without worth to society. This doesn’t mean that they have no use for the society, it means that the members are people that somehow do not fit in the society, in other words societies misfits.

The Yakuza were itinerant gamblers, peddlers, renegade warriors and roving bandits. They served shoguns and municipalities and their legend includes a distinct Robin Hood quality that recently emerged during the recent Kobe Earthquake. The Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza clan quickly mobilized providing on the scene assistance to Kobe’s earthquake victims long before the national government resolved to act. (Source)

Found this bunch of interesting warning signs. Kinda 90s style futurism but I dig it. Looking at them makes me feel like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing.

Chaos control is likely to be very useful in many future applications. But chaos is sensitive, so interfering with such a system might be unadvisable.

Exactly what kinds of hazards could occur with mature cognotechnologies is hard to imagine. This sign represents a general hazard, perhaps the induction of inconsistent beliefs, infinite loops or mistaken perception.

A warning sign for black holes, event horizons, naked singularities and other spacetime engineering hazards. Of course, purists will point out that orbits around black holes are just as stable as around any other mass – they don’t suck things in without some friction mechanism – and that many other nasty metrics are not even symmetric. But some physical realism ought to be sacrificed for visual saliency. A black spiral signals an obvious, dynamical danger.

My symbol is intended to both remind of a Penning trap (for early applications where we just have a few antiprotons) and a starlike explosion (for bigger amounts). It is also in reverse, to hint at the anti-aspect of antimatter.

A system that evolves freely is potentially very adaptable and creative. It could also become nearly anything, with consequences ranging from the annoying to the disastrous. It is likely unlimited self-evolution will need to be contained carefully even as we mine it for truly new inventions. The arrows nicely hint at a chaos-star as well as replication.

As we learn to affect our brains better there is an increased risk for addictions, to gain pleasure from something harmful or that we edit ourselves to like our current state no matter what. The poppy represents such motivation traps.

Initial information and photographic results from thisSaturday afternoon attempt to make George Seurat’s famous painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte come to life with real people (Friends of Riverfront) on the banks of the Rock River in Beloit.

The weather cooperated beautifully with one glaring exception… the wind was ferocious… which kept things cool but shredded at least two umbrellas.

This must have taken a long time to set up. See the full set here.

Wired has a great set of pictures by Ed Burtynsky, a Toronto based photographer (Link).

Toronto photographer Ed Burtynsky has photographed industrial landscapes for more than 25 years. From 2003 to 2005, he traveled to China several times to capture images of the country’s industrial growth.

A film crew followed Burtynsky on his fifth trip in 2005 to shoot the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which opened this month in New York. A TED prize winner, Burtynsky manages to convey the scope of China’s growth through images where raw statistics have failed.

Here’s a wicked collection of pictures from BoredStop. Imagine what would happen if Fire was Made of Water. Very sexy.