Ralph Cooksey-Talbott is a landscape photographer who studied under Ansel Adams in Yosemite in the 1970's. Ansel published one of his photographs in the portfolio section of his book "Polaroid Technique Manual." Ansel and Orah Moore, another of Ansel???s students, suggested that he shorten his name to Cooksey-Talbott, and that's the name he's worked under ever since.

Cooksey is currently doing vertical panoramic photography that is reminiscent in composition to monumental Asian landscape ink-on-silk paintings. He calls them Vertoramas and I think they are exceptionally beautiful. Besides selling prints, Cooksey provides many of his images as free desktop pictures (here's some zipped sets or just check for a Free Desktop link across the top when you're browsing his galleries). And he's also put up a lot of informative tutorial articles and videos on his site.

Cooksey-Talbott Gallery

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Three German children under the age of 8 were caught trying to get to Africa so two of them could get married. In warm environs, no less.

When asked why they were going, groom-to-be Mika explained his seemingly simple plan.

"We wanted to take the train to the airport, and then catch a plane, then we would unpack, and get married once we arrived. Then we wanted to go for a little holiday," he said.

There???s a slightly different version of the story on SkyNews, with a quote from a shocked and amazed mother. Now that may be taking free-range kids a bit too far!

Child elopers' Africa plan foiled (Thanks, Katie Wilson!)

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Ed Begley, Jr, says:

Thought I would send along this video from my friend Jay Leno about a new wind turbine called the MagWind from Enviro-Energies that he and I will be installing soon. As many of you have asked about "vertical axis wind turbines," I thought you'd like to see the latest in this technology.

Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, claims to have invented a reactor that makes hydrogen atoms drop to an energy state below ground level, which causes them to release "100 times as much energy as you’d get by just burning the hydrogen." IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it's poppycock. Nevertheless, the company developing the technology has received $60 million in funding.

“This is scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, an MIT scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s had time enough to find its ground state.”

Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also a Nobel laureate, says that quantum mechanics is “consistent with just about everything we know about atomic physics, so the onus is firmly on anyone who wants to discard it to prove his case.” He adds, “I don’t see that [BlackLight] has got anywhere near doing this.”

But turn to Randell Mills, the founder, chairman, chief executive, and president of BlackLight Power, and he’ll tell you that this lower-energy hydrogen, which he calls hydrino, is very real indeed.

“We produce hydrino on demand,” he tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that his team has isolated and characterized hydrino’s properties using spectroscopy and has even created hydrino-rich materials it can provide for analysis.

The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.

Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers.

Justin Hall twittered this website:

"The Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition has joined BlueServo in a public-private partnership to deploy the Virtual Community Watch, an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime. The TBSC BlueServo Virtual Community Watch is a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico border that feeds live streaming video to www.BlueServo.net. Users will log in to the BlueServo website and directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fence."

Question Copyright has a 42-minute interview with Paley on the heartbreak of having to strangle her acclaimed art.

After pouring three years of her life into making the film, and having great success with audiences at festival screenings, she now can't distribute it, because of music licensing issues: the film uses songs recorded in the late 1920's by singer Annette Hanshaw, and although the recordings are out of copyright, the compositions themselves are still restricted. That means if you want to make a film using these songs from the 1920s, you have to pay money ??? a lot of money.

It's a classic example of how today's copyright system suppresses art, effectively forcing artists to make creative choices based on licensing concerns rather than on their artistic vision.

The music in Sita Sings The Blues is integral to the film: entire animation sequences were done around particular songs. As Nina says in the interview, incorporating those particular recordings was part of her inspiration. To tell her ??? as many people did ??? to simply use different music would have been like telling her not to do the film at all. And that's part of her point: artists "internalize the permission culture", which in turn affects the kinds of art they make.

"Over the last six years songs have been $0.99 [79p]. Music companies want more flexibility. Starting today, 8 million songs will be DRM free and by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs will be DRM free," he told the crowd.

Apple has also revised its pricing structure, offering a two-tier system with songs available for $0.69 and $1.29. Prices will vary slightly in the UK.

At present, the firm has a one-price-fits-all strategy - currently 79p per track - with no subscription fee.

The new model will have a varied pricing structure, with what the company calls "better quality iTunes Plus" costing more.

Usually, frugality is good for individuals and for the economy. Savings serve as a reservoir of capital that can be used to finance investment, which helps raise a nation's standard of living. But in a recession, increased saving -- or its flip side, decreased spending -- can exacerbate the economy's woes. It's what economists call the "paradox of thrift."

U.S. household debt, which has been growing steadily since the Federal Reserve began tracking it in 1952, declined for the first time in the third quarter of 2008. In the same quarter, U.S. consumer spending growth declined for the first time in 17 years.

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, author of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, tells the entertaining story of what it's like to be sucked into a black hole.

Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.

Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.

Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.

A Harvard Law professor representing some students sued by the recording industry for illegally downloading music has filed a motion to broadcast online the proceedings of two cases being heard by the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

The professor, Charles R. Nesson, argues in the motion that to stream the court proceedings over the Internet ??? or as the students put it in their request, 'admit the Internet into the courtroom' ??? would help the public understand the legal issues at play in the industry???s lawsuits against thousands of computer users, many of whom are college students.

The plaintiff, the Recording Industry Association of America, which announced last month that it would stop bringing new cases against students in favor of working with Internet Service Providers to take action against repeat offenders, has described its lawsuits as an educational effort focused on illuminating the consequences of illegally sharing music ??? something Mr. Nesson takes a jab at in the motion.

'Surely education is the purpose of the Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are challenging,' the motion reads. 'How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone upon them.'

Our new agreement with rights holder TONO gives us rights to publish radio and TV shows we aired a long time ago. But the agreement NRK has with rights holders IFPI and FONO only allows us to publish shows that has been aired the last four weeks. And since ???Our daily Beatles??? was aired in 2007, we have to pull it from the podcast (see below for details about the agreements).

Ethan Ham sez,

Turbulence.org recently released ???Tumbarumba,??? a project by Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (Ethan Ham). Tumbarumba is an anthology in the form of a browser add-on. To read the stories, readers must stumble upon them while browsing the web. The browser add-on will occasionally insert a story fragment into a web page as it loads it. The result is a disorienting surreal sentence that sometimes is nonsensical and sometimes amusingly close making sense. If the reader spots the fragment, they can interact with it in a way that will cause the full story to appear???albeit in the format of the web page on which it was found.

The authors in the anthology are:

Haddayr Copley-Woods, Greg van Eekhout, Stephen Gaskell, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, John Phillip Olsen, Tim Pratt, Kiini Ibura Salaam, David J. Schwartz, Heather Shaw, Jeff Spock

Mummy? is a practically wordless, six-page popup that follows the travails of a little boy who's looking for his mother in a castle full of monsters. The left panel shows junior saying "Mommy?" and the right panel shows a leering monster; flip it up and see how the boy has defeated it. Mommy?'s dimensionality is fabulous -- the monsters explode in all directions, portrayed in fabulous grisly style that's a cross between Big Daddy Roth and Marc Davis's Haunted Mansion ghouls.

The flip-up right panels showing the monsters' comeuppance are witty, marvellously engineered, and deeply satisfying. The ending -- the Bride of Frankenstein bursting through the door, saying, "Baby!" -- is a great touch. This is the kind of papercraft you can feel good about giving to a kid (even if you don't want to part with it).

Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming ??135,000, breaking our original target of ??5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I'm very excited to tell you that 800 buses ??? instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for ??? are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life", in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen.

From today's launch, two hundred of the buses will run in London, because the campaign was originally started as a positive counter-response to the Jesus Said ads running on London buses in June 2008. These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians "will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell ??? Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire prepared for the devil". Our rational slogan will hopefully reassure anyone who has been scared by this kind of evangelism.

"As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories.

These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels. The inability to determine the worth of these novels has fostered uncertainty about novels in general, and even about the cultural condition of the institutions that own them. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of literature has become challenged.

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in the creation of this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and the National Book Foundation continued to award these novels their top ratings, even as unread copies piled up all over America.

Maker Faire seeks to inspire, inform, connect and entertain thousands of Makers and aspiring Makers of all ages and backgrounds through the public gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, students, authors and commercial exhibitors.

The first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March 2009 as part of Newcastle ScienceFest - a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation.

In the last decade Newcastle has joined forces with neighbouring Gateshead and has transformed itself into one of Europe's most exciting places. Architectural icons such as the gigantic Angel of the North (whose 54m wingspan is longer than a jumbo jet!) best symbolises the region's unquenchable thirst for creativity and sense of fun.

We've blogged Robbins's amazing home movies here before. The man's a hero of the medium. Well-deserved congratulations indeed.

From the Library of Congress???s press release:

Disneyland Dream (1956)
The Barstow family films a memorable home movie of their trip to Disneyland. Robbins and Meg Barstow, along with their children Mary, David and Daniel were among 25 families who won a free trip to the newly opened Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., as part of a ???Scotch Brand Cellophane Tape??? contest sponsored by 3M. Through vivid color and droll narration (???The landscape was very different from back home in Connecticut???), we see a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott???s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956. Home movies have assumed a rapidly increasing importance in American cultural studies as they provide a priceless and authentic record of time and place.

The film, along with 15 other Barstow Travel Adventure titles, is available for viewing and downloading at the Internet Archive.

* Best novel: Little Brother, Tor, 2008
* Best related book: Content, Tachyon, 2008
* Best novella: True Names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum), published in Fast Forward, Pyr Books, 2008, edited by Lou Anders * Best novelette: The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, Tor.com, July 2008

No matter what you plan on nominate, I urge you to send in your form! Hugo participation seems to dwindle every year. The present form's just a PDF, but they're promising a web-based one shortly (I'll post again when it's live).

Taking a step to the side, let us briefly consider phylum Mollusca class Bivalvia. Yes, bivalves at first seem boring - little sessile clam-like things that they are. However, bivalves engage in the one behavior that heretofore I think sounds like the most delightful sexual activity ever. Free spawning. I mean, seriously, think of it, you catch a sudden whif of the right scent, the right temperature, or a little shake, and then EXPLODE in pleasurable gamete release. I, myself, have had this happen right in my face in an orgy of mussel bukkake, but picture the potential for some nubile nymphet subjected to the experiments of a dastardly doctor in fusing the sexual needs of a scallop with the body of his scientific muse.

This is of course not to mention the abilities for bivalves to form threadlike attachments with their byssal gland, and the ever shape-changing, muscular, pulsing, turgid, bivalve foot. Or, the bizarre, soft, delicate anatomy of free swimming shell-less bivalves who, if airborne, could wreak erotic havoc on an entire countryside if presented by the proper author or animator.

Here, in addition to military-style discipline, some 60-odd patients at his center undergo a three-month regimen of counseling, confidence-building activities, sex education, and in about 60 percent of the cases, medication. The treatment is designed to address underlying family and psychological problems, and boost their self-confidence.

There are a handful of young women here, going "cold turkey" from "Audition" and similar games, where players engage in dance battles, decorate virtual homes, and have virtual husbands and babies. (One female patient had amassed 68 "husbands," says Tao, with a sigh).

After a year of research spanning four continents and interviews with dozens of people across the virtual world of the Internet Dancing Ink Productions is pleased to announce the release of our findings from the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project on Thursday, January 29 at 6 PM Eastern at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Space is limited so please RSVP to attend the event.

The report will include a trilogy of deliverables, including formal public diplomacy policy recommendations for the Obama Administration; a broadcast-quality short machinima documentary; and a graphic book chronicling the people, places and findings of the project.

Only 14 days until we get a change in administration. Maybe the new guys will appoint someone who understands that Arabic writing doesn't make airplanes fall out of the sky. Kudos to the ACLU for kicking ass and taking names on this one.

The lawsuit claimed Jarrar, 30, invoked the First Amendment but acquiesced after it became clear to him that he would not be allowed to fly if he did not cover his shirt with one given to him by JetBlue officials.

"All people in this country have the right to be free of discrimination and to express their own opinions," Jarrar wrote on his blog. "With this outcome, I am hopeful that TSA and airlines officials will think twice before practicing illegal discrimination and that other travelers will be spared the treatment I endured."