On photographing a crisis:

How many more images of contorted, exasperated, horrified and desperate traders can we take? For the last two weeks, as the financial markets have remained frozen and the stock markets — at least until this week — plummeted to ever lower depths, newspapers, Web sites and television news have offered up a parade of faces buried in hands, mouths agape in dismay and arms flailing in the air as traders watch stock prices fall off a cliff.

On the other hand, though, photographing a crisis set off by speculation in funds that few have ever heard of, resulting in the freezing up of a finance system that hardly anyone understands, presents a unique set of challenges.

The article includes a link to a gallery of photographs that have been used to illustrate stories on the crisis: my favourites are the images of a sinking economy, help on the way and seeking shelter.

[Via FP Passport]

Haruki Murakami at a recent reading, responding to a question about reader mail:

I like stupid questions. A guy sent me an email about squid. He asked 'are their tentacles hands or feet?' I told him he should give a squid ten pairs of gloves and ten pairs of socks and see what happens.

[Via kottke.org]

After a little nudge from Stu, the Guardian have put up a page giving access to all their interviews from a single location (with, naturally, an accompanying RSS feed.)

The Way Movies Were in the Seventies.

[Via LinkMachineGo]

You learn something new every day:

[Newly appointed Daily Sport editor...] Pam McVitie is unapologetic in her estimation of what the British male wants in a newspaper – "Men basically like looking at pictures of sexy babes. People can deny it if they want, but it's a fact."

[...]

But McVitie, 41, doesn't have a problem with the fact that her working day now requires her to perform a nipple count (which must hit no less than 26 per issue).

Did her predecessor get a promotion for pushing that figure up from 24 per issue in the previous reporting year, I wonder? Does a male nipple have the same value as a female nipple?¹ Will her next annual report to the owners include a tasteful chart summarising the Mean Daily Nipple Count over the year just gone and projecting trends over the next reporting year?

[Via Roy Greenslade]

1. Yes, I think I can guess the answer to that one too… ↩

Aspiring psychohistorian, Doctor Who geek and now Nobel Prize winning economist: surely Paul Krugman is a shoo-in for Guest of Honour at the next Worldcon?

[Via i blog, you blog, they blog]

It's about time:

• 24 Colorful Caterpillars.
• The Grand Lisboa in Macau.¹
• Lake Toya.
• A Toy Soldier.
• The sea of Ice.
• Across the Valleys
• Bright Bolide.
• One Foggy Day…
• Bang!
• Colourful.
• CMYK.
• Prrrrr.
• Lightning in sunset.
• Baily's Beads near Solar Eclipse Totality.
• Io's Surface: Under Construction.
• A visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body.
• The streets of alicante.
• Kurage Lightings.
• The Changing Room.
• Parc Jarry, Montréal.
• Sunset Pool.

1. My first thought on seeing this photo was that Ming the Merciless had established his first embassy on Earth. ↩

While he was making his new television series, Stephen Fry tried his hand at ice cream making:

'It's very cold,' I observe.

'Many are cold,' says Sean, 'but few are frozen.'

Before I have time to throw something at him, the tour party enters.

'Welcome everybody,' beams Sean. 'This is a special occasion. You will be trying a new flavour, mixed by our Guest Flavorist, here. His invention is called …?'

'Er … I … that is … um …'

'… is called "Even Stephens"!' extemporises Sean happily.

You know, I'd rather like to go and hide out in an Igloo of Books for a while.

[Via FFFFOUND!]

Today's newspaper is tomorrow's chip wrapping vanity art for the seriously rich:

Vanity is not yet dead in the City. Financiers have been commissioning nude portraits of their wives made from collages of newspaper clippings telling the stories of their own financial conquests.

Natasha Archdale, a model turned artist, tears strips from the City news pages that tell of the big deals to incorporate into paintings that cost up to £15,000 a time.

[...]

Archdale’s clients include Moussaieff, the Israeli-born British socialite who married Ólafur Ragnar GrÍmsson, the president of Iceland, in 2003. She has her own naked picture and also commissioned an Archdale portrait as a gift for Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of Blackstone Group, the American private equity firm. It featured his wife Christine.

Moussaieff said: "I have yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves."

[Via Crooked Timber]

UCSD's Geisel library is possibly the best-looking library I've ever seen.

This night-time shot is my favourite image, but the fact is that it looks striking from pretty much any angle.

It seems that Sarah Palin has at least one supporter in Japan:

[In Fukui City...] sits Masunaga Optical Manufacturing, maker of the Palin frames. Satoru Masunaga, the company’s C.E.O. (his grandfather started the firm, in 1905), wears specs from the company’s high-end line. Palin's frames – MP-704, color No. 34, about three hundred and fifty dollars before lenses – he considers "middle class." Personally, he hopes Palin will become Vice-President. "Before this happened with Palin, we sold five hundred pieces of this style a month in the U.S.," he said. "Now we cannot count. Since the beginning of September, there have been more than ten thousand orders."

Do people really go out and buy a particular model of spectacle frame just because their favoured political candidate happens to wear them? Or is it just that Tina Fey wanted to stock up with lots of props for her famed Palin impersonation, just in case she ends up playing Sarah Palin for the next sixteen years?

Behold the Sound Wave:

Records were melted and sculpted to form a cascading wave, dotted with bursts of colorful labels. The resulting structure speaks to the inevitable waves of technology that render each successive generation of recordable media obsolete. The piece also aims to physically manifest the ephemerality of music as well as one man's musical tastes, as represented by his personal record collection.

[Via Five Acres with a View]

It's been a while since I saw a good movie trailer mashup: The Dark Knight versus Toy Story 2.

[Via kottke.org]

Last.fm Chief Operating Officer Spencer Hyman:

The music industry is blessed with a cornucopia of lawyers.

Amen to that.

[Via Idolator]

Overheard on the A Train:

Bimbette: Well, the human brain weighs 3 lbs.

Friend: So?

Bimbette: So, I'm not really 110. I'm really 107. If you don't count my brain.

Emily Lakdawalla reports that NASA has heard from an old friend:

ISEE-3 was originally launched on August 12, 1978, as the International Sun-Earth Explorer to a halo orbit about one of the Earth-Moon libration points to study Earth's magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Then, in 1983, it employed several lunar gravity assist flybys to send it on a new journey, for which it was rechristened the International Cometary Explorer, through the tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner. ICE approached within 7,800 kilometers of the comet on September 11, 1985. In 1986, it turned its instruments toward Halley's comet, participating in the international observation campaign, and becoming the first spacecraft to investigate two comets.

ICE is now in a solar orbit. I had assumed that it, like lots of other spacecraft from the Old Days of planetary exploration (which is any time before I graduated from college), was derelict, nonfunctional, and dead. It turns out I was wrong. [...]

Gordon Bigelow's Let there be markets: The evangelical roots of economics is three years old but still well worth a read:

Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets – not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature – now serves as the unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate. As mergers among media companies began to create monopolies on public information, ownership limits for these companies were not tightened but relaxed, because "the market" would provide its own natural limits to growth. When corporate accounting standards needed adjustment in the 1990s, such measures were cast aside because they would interfere with "market forces." [...]

Paul Cornell is bringing The Culture to Radio 4 next year:

The other great fun thing is the radio play, an adaptation of Iain Banks' "The State of the Art" for BBC Radio 4, which should go out early next year. We've recorded it, with Sir Antony Sher as the Ship (he's exactly what you expect one of Banks' ships to sound like), Patterson Joseph (who's probably best known for Neverwhere) as Linter, and Nina Sosanya as Sma, and the BBC production job is terrific. I can write 'we feel the presence of the Ship floating beside the car' and they can actually do that! Iain's approved the script. I really want to do some more SF for this lot. Good people.

I don't think Antony Sher ever struck me as an obvious candidate to play a Mind, but I can certainly get behind Nina Sosanya as Diziet Sma.

[Via The Stage Blog]

The WETI Institute proposes a new approach to finding extraterrestrial intelligence:

Mankind has always felt the urge of actively doing something of extraordinary relevance. By doing so, we have caused a great deal of grief and disaster. The WETI Institute proposes to abandon our reckless anthropocentric ambition, and to strive for a more humble approach of letting the universe explore us instead.

[Via James Nicoll]