I would pay much more attention to my bike odometer if it showed how much bacon I earned from my exercise.
“Bacon” symbol by Jacob Halton, from The Noun Project.
Tag Archives: photography
Where are the Real People?
Last night I played a few rounds of Real People, a Parker Bros. game from 1991. In a lot of ways, the game felt like a precursor to reality TV programs. The publisher must have issued some kind of casting call or solicitation to get people to share a photo and answers to questions like:
- Reputation in High School
- Pet Peeve
- Secret Fantasy
- Personal Motto
The 400 people profiled in the game do not make up anything resembling a random sampling of Americans. Reading through their responses, it’s clear that these were generally extroverted, attention seeking, and generally happy people. Nobody used the words, “medium” or “average” to describe themselves.
I’d like to know if there has ever been an attempt to connect the 400 cards to actual people. It’s been over 20 years since the game was published and it would be fascinating to see if any of these ambitious, outgoing, people did anything with their lives.
The game contains 400 cards that each have a black and white headshot on one side and 10 facts about the person on the other side. (1991 was a good year for people with big hair, by the way). One player draws four cards without looking at the faces and puts them into a display rack so that she can read the facts for one of the four Real People. The other players take turns asking questions to learn the facts about the players. Once you think you know which of the four faces matches up with the answers to the questions, you write your answer and stop asking questions. The fewer questions needed to correctly guess, the higher your score.
Looking backwards, astronomically
An ammeter photographer captured the most detailed image of the night sky ever recorded. Nick Risinger used six cameras from a variety of vantage points in the western United States and South Africa to gather the thousands of images needed for his 360 degree view of the stars. The photograph represents stars 3,000 times brighter than they would appear to the naked eye.
Risingler’s image shows a state of the cosmos frozen in time. The light captured in his cameras traveled uncountable thousands and millions of miles before reaching the lens. In the span of the two years it took him to capture all 37,000 images that make up the full sky survey, some of these stars must have gone into supernova or collapsed.
You can purchase prints and high resolution downloads of this image at Nick Risinger’s website: Photopic Sky Survey.
Frozen Venetian canals, snow capped Milan: pictures of ice box Europe
The Atlantic has an excellent photo gallery of ice box Europe, including the frozen canals of Venice, snow frosted St. Ambrose Cathedral in Milan, and a Polish man living in an underground steam duct to escape the lethal temperatures.
Lego Man in Space
Two Canadian teenagers set out with the goal to capture images of the curvature of the Earth. They rigged up a camera and weather balloon and launched it into the upper atmosphere – with a lego man.
The lego man reached an altitude of 80,000 feet. (As some have pointed out, this is technically near-space. The lego man was never in “orbit” either.) After the balloon popped, the lego man and the camera fell back to Earth. The lego man was discovered in tact.
I love the light hearted approach of this project. After seeing a Lego store in Chicago last week, I vividly remembered the sense of fun Legos brought to me as a kid. If you want to learn more about the project or see some of the other images, I suggest checking out their facebook page.
