German photographer Markus Reugels has gained quite a bit of attention over the years for his stunning and colorful high-speed photographs of the shapes and forms created when liquid is dropped into water. If you’ve ever been curious as to what it takes to get images like these, Reugels talks briefly about the equipment and technique he’s currently using and shares an image of his actual setup.
“Hon A B Lincoln…
Dear Sir
My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chautauqua County New York.
I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye
Grace Bedell”
Lincoln responded a few days later:
“Miss Grace Bedell
My dear little Miss
Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received — I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters — I have three sons — one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age — They, with their mother, constitute my whole family — As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?
Your very sincere well wisher,
A. Lincoln”
While he made no promises about the beard to Bedell, he stopped shaving and allowed the beard to grow not long after their exchange and was elected as the 16th president of the United States a few weeks later. On his inaugural train ride from Illinois to Washington, D.C., the president-elect stopped in Bedell’s hometown of Westfield, N.Y., and asked to meet her.
(Source: theweek.com)
life:
Today marks the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death.
Happily, if anyone had eyes to see, it was “Eisie.” The images that he captured on one afternoon in 1953 remain not only among the warmest, most casually intimate photos of Marilyn that anyone ever made: they also serve as a poignant record of a young woman on the very cusp of both genuine superstardom and years of gradually, ever-deepening misery. Defined less by her film work and more by her celebrity, her broken marriages (to baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio and great American playwright, Arthur Miller), depression, drugs, affairs — most famously and devastatingly, of course, with JFK — Marilyn Monroe’s life in the decade between that 1953 photo session with Eisenstaedt and her death in August 1962 has been chronicled, dissected, analyzed and sifted so thoroughly that there’s little need to recount it here.
LIFE.com offers this series of photos — most of which never ran in LIFE magazine — as both a tribute and a reminder: a tribute to the great, uniquely empathetic photographer who made them, and a reminder of the talented, beautiful, utterly alive young Marilyn who so bewitched the world, her whole life still before her.
Fish Heads by Tim Tadder
A series of underwater portraits using water surface tension to create beautiful textures surrounding the faces.
(Source: cosascool)
Infographic: Our Insanely Expensive War On Drugs
By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, fastcodesign.comWhat does it cost to send a drug addict to jail? Far more than it needs to, as demonstrated by this infographic.
Thanks in part to the War on Drugs, more than half of the inmates in the federal prisons are there because of drug-related…
Wonderfully imaginative work by Robert and Shana Parkeharrison. We think this excert from their artist statement sums it up best:
‘The use of color is intentional but abstract; proportion and space are compositional rather than natural; movement is blurred; objects and people juxtaposed as if by chance in a visual improvisation that unfolds choreographically.’
via Le Zèbre Bleu
The Super Kamiokande (Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment) is a neutrino observatory located under Mount Kamioka in Japan. It is designed to observe solar and atmospheric neutrinos, neutrinos from supernovae, and aims to search for proton decay. It is a cylindrical structure measuring about 40 m tall and 40 m across, is covered in over 11,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), and filled with 50,000 tons of pure water.
Neutrinos weakly interact with other particles, making it extremely difficult to detect them and observe their properties; in fact, they cannot be directed detected at all. Detectors are built underground to isolate it from other radiation. When a neutrino passes through the Super-K’s water tank, it will sometimes (hopefully) collide with a quark, causing it to change into a charged lepton (electron, muon, or tau). The very short version of what happens next is that the lepton will travel faster than the speed of light in water (not in vacuum), polarizing the water molecules; when they return to their ground state, Cherenkov radiation is emitted in a flash of light, which the PMTs detect. The last image is of a Cherenkov ring by an electron created from a neutrino collision in the Super-K, in perspective view.
