a thread for miscellaneous things we like

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Posted by actor Kevin Spacey in his twitter account, this link to some lovely colour film of London in the 20s:

http://vimeo.com/7638752


Rob and Dave, you might like this. I found it strangely moving. It's funny how seeing things in colour makes them feel more familiar, less distanced in time. The cars and buses are awesome. And almost everyone you see, male and female, is wearing a hat! The women actually are all wearing cloche hats, which I love.

Surprising in a way how little London has changed in 85 years as well.


*eta*

No idea why the thread is appearing twice, can one of the mods delete the second thread please?

[RobB]

What lovely footage, thank you for the link.

Wonder if the little girl by the Peter Pan statue is still alive?

A few of the board members here will recognise Whitehall of course as we walked down there together the other year,on the way to Parliament Square.

4000 London buses? Just one of them in 1927 condition would be worth a small fortune now.

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Yes I was thinking about the little girl too, she would be approaching 90 now. I loved the kid feeding the birds in Kensington Gardens as well, the outfit! And I was struck by the women all wearing knee-length dresses as well, when you think that probably as little as 10 or 15 years before women were still wearing their skirts down to the floor.

And of course it is sobering to think that in another 12 years, many of those men you see in the footage would be fighting in the Second World War.

[RobB]

And of course it is sobering to think that in another 12 years, many of those men you see in the footage would be fighting in the Second World War.

yes,and those kids could easily have been killed in the blitz?

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From the Smithsonian website, some of these night sky images are so gorgeous:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedi ... -2013.html

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Gorgeous indeed. I so envy brilliant photographers (Elfy, where are you?). What a beautiful world we live in, essentially.

Beth, I have a couple of widgets on my computer which give me National Geographic's photo of the day and NASA's photo of the day, every day. One click to download them - and put them on your desktop or wherever. I have tons of favourites now! Free to install.

We've just done a photoshoot for the latest album I've been involved in, and I'm just sorting through the pics from the photographer for the album cover-which I get to make, heh heh. Even in lo-res they look fantastic. I love doing creative visual stuff - because I don't have any expertise,and no-one has any expectations of me, unlike in music. Our photographer took 9 Gb, that's NINE GIGABYTES!, worth of pictures in one morning shoot. He's already chucked out about 4 Gb-worth before I even get to have a look. They're all brilliant. Hmm, I think we're going to have about 93 pictures on our album cover.

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Beth, I have a couple of widgets on my computer which give me National Geographic's photo of the day and NASA's photo of the day, every day. One click to download them - and put them on your desktop or wherever. I have tons of favourites now! Free to install.

Couldn't find the widget, but for anyone else who's interested, here is the link to the Nasa page:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html


And the National Geographic page:


http://photography.nationalgeographic.c ... f-the-day/

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Here's the page to DL the NG widget-dunno if it only works for Macs, though...

http://www.saggiamente.com/2010/01/13/n ... scrivania/

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Thank you.

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I found this amazing and strangely beautiful image on another forum - bat embryos:

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I love how you can see its little bat facial features already in the first one! Very striking.

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Wow-when you think how small the average bat is (about the same as a small mouse) those embryos (embryi?) must be microscopic.

[RobB]

They remind me of little alabaster chess pieces.....or that kind of thing anyway.

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Ha, I know what you mean Rob!

Bats are totally fascinating to look at. My cat brought one in one night, how the hell she managed to catch a bat I don't know, she is a demon hunter - it's the only time I've been able to see one up close, they're completely amazing.

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They also look a bit like some kind of specialised pasta - like ravioli....