On December 30, 2010, amateur astrophotographer Chris Kotsiopoulos set out to capture an entire day in a single photograph. After several days of preparation and nearly 30 hours alone in a stationary position, Kotsiopoulos produced this incredible image: The ‘day part’ is composed of a dozen of shots covering the landscape from east to west and the Sun’s course from sunrise to sunset. The Sun’s position was recorded exactly every 15 minutes using an intervalometer, with an astrosolar filter adjusted to the camera lens. In one of the shots, when the Sun was near it’s maximum altitude, I removed the filter in order to capture a more ‘dramatic’ shot with the Sun’s glare. After the sunset, I took various shots with the camera facing west – northwest in order to achieve a more smooth transition from the ‘day part’ to the ‘night part’ of the picture. The ‘night part’ is also composed of a dozen of shots covering the landscape from west to east. After the ‘transition’ shots I mentioned above, I took a small startrail sequence, with approximately half an hour duration, and the camera facing northwest. Then at 19.13 local time, I turned the camera to north and I started taking the all-night startrail which lasted almost 11 hours. After the 11 hour startrail I turned the camera to northeast and I shot a half an hour startrail, and finally with the camera at northeast and east some ‘night to day’ transition shots. Read the Kotsiopoulos’ entire explanation at  Greeksky . View more Pictures of the Day . Via Today and Tomorrow .

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Picture of the Day: Capturing a Full Day in a Single Photograph

Q:  I’m an iPad owner that is overwhelmed by the number of applications available. Where should I start if I’m looking for a way to utilize the iPad’s screen for browsing through photos? FLICKPAD Free lite version | $4.99 | Version: 2.1.3 | Shacked This one’s for those of us who travel in photo-happy circles. We’ve gotten a taste of what the iPad can do with loads of pictures (Exhibit A: the Photos app and its nifty stack-of-pix and scrolling grid layouts). Now we want the same treatment for those other two big sources of picture plenty: Facebook and Flickr. Flickpad is a special-purpose viewing, sharing, and commenting tool. Its name reveals its main method: you “flick” photos on and off a screenwide lightbox. Especially when you’re flooded with new pix, the app’s review-and-release system (you flick viewed photos offscreen and a replacement from the same album instantly appears) is not just efficient, but also great fun. PICK & PRESERVE : The app’s calendar-based approach (you can view this week’s haul, last week’s, or move day by day) is great for catching up on photo-viewing chores you’ve had to put aside for things like, you know, work. Save the gems you like best to a Flickpad favorite album and email any pic you like to anyone, even if they’re not a member of one of these networks (yep, still a few of ‘em out there). TONS O’ TOOLS : Other treats: double-tap any picture to see the full album it belongs to; hide friends whose photos you don’t want to see; and, in the Flickr icon, tap Explore to see a greatest hits selection — sorta like a tour through your friends’ best pix … if your friends were all pro photographers. HONORABLE MENTION: QUBICAL $0.99 | Version: 1.0 | Aleryon Half the fun of Facebook comes from the photos your pals share. But unless you’re on full-time news feed patrol, it’s easy to miss the latest pix. And even the ones you do see show up in that boring “click Previous, click Next” layout. This app stakes its future on a pretty distinct bet: photo browsing’s more fun when pictures get laid out like tiles on a twirlable 3D cube. And you know what? As you exit the Land of Lists and feast your eyes and fingers on the app’s photo-filled cube, the temptations to tap, to pinch, to — whoa, there, fella … these are your friends — well, let’s leave it at this: Qubical’s a fun way to browse. CUBE CONTROL : Grab the cube by tapping and holding anywhere onscreen (not just on the cube itself) and pivot it by moving your finger. Shrink or enlarge the box by pinching or spreading. For your autorotating pleasure, tap the arrow-around-the-pole icon. The app’s also got Facebook’s commenting hooks built in, so you can add comments. PICTURE POWER : Double-tap any friend whose photos you want to see an then head to the Albums icon. Here’s where you can roll through whatever photo collections your buds have broadcast. See something you like and wanna view it, uh, normally? Just tap the picture for a regular shot frozen in plain ol’ 2D space across your screen. Tools mentioned in this entry: APPLE IPAD More questions? View the complete Toolkit archive . Excerpted from Peter Meyers’ Best iPad Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders . Copyright 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission . Read more Atlantic Technology Channel book excerpts .

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iPad Apps: Best App for Friend Photo Browsing

Two big awards ceremonies were held over the weekend, and with them came a definite shift in momentum with regards to which film has the best shot at winning that coveted Best Picture Oscar. Both the DGA (Directors Guild) and SAG (Screen Actors Guild) awarded top honors to The King’s Speech over The Social Network, which is the first sign that the tide is changing, even though the latter film won the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Drama). With the DGA, only six times throughout history has a different person taken home the Oscar, so they’re usually on the money with their picks. SAG is a little more all over the place, but their additional praise of The King’s Speech has easily given it a slight edge over The Social Network, even though many (including myself) still… Read More Read Comments

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Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Directors Guild (DGA) Pick ‘The King’s Speech’ Over ‘The Social Network’

The nominations are out, and we finally have the list of ten films competing for Best Picture of the year. Sure, you have your obvious frontrunners in The Social Network, The King’s Speech and Black Swan, but there are seven other great films right alongside those three hoping that maybe this will be their year. Heck, Toy Story 3 was the best reviewed film of the year, as well as the highest grossing, so maybe it will swoop in and pull off an upset. Or how about The Fighter, which may sweep the supporting categories with wins for both Christian Bale and Melissa Leo (both of whom swept these categories at the Golden Globes). Then you have your second tier Best Picture contenders like 127 Hours, The Kids are All Right, True Grit and Winter’sBone that are more than capable of… Read More Read Comments

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Oscar Poll: Which Film Do You Want to See Win Best Picture?

We’ve patiently waited for our first look at one of this summer’s most anticipated films, and now we finally have it. Behold the first full cast photo from X-Men: First Class. In the picture we have (from left to right): Michael Fassbender

Online ramblings from Jared Lee Loughner paint the picture of a person disgruntled with everything from his sordid work history to grammar to handicapped people to his round-the-clock struggle with aggression.

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Gaming site ramblings tied to suspect

Yesterday you devoured my five Golden Globes locks ahead of Sunday night’s ceremony, but as always you know I love to hear from you all. So instead of doing some boring roundup of who all the critics think are going to win at this year’s Golden Globe Awards, why not see what you think instead. Because, ya know, that’s more fun anyways. We won’t go through every category because that’s a bit much, so let’s just focus on the two Best Picture categories. Remember, the Golden Globes hand out awards for Best Picture (Drama) and Best Picture (Comedy/Musical), which really spreads the field out. The five films featured in each category will not make up the ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, so now is the chance to get crazy with your votes.

As folks ponder which films will be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, we are reminded that the Golden Raspberry Awards are once again upon us. The Golden Raspberry Awards (or Razzies) are awards given out to the year’s worst films. Naturally, with the exception of Sandra Bullock showing up last year to accept her bad acting award for All About Steve, none of the nominated films show up to participate because, um, why would they?

William Jacobson updates his post on Matt Yglesias’s racist-baiting , and responds to my comment : Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts that Barbour was ignorant of history. Fine, call him ignorant. But don’t call him someone who had “affection” for “white supremacist” organizations, or who was a “fan of moderate strains of white supremacist ideology.”  Coates claims that Yglesias and others in the left-blogosphere did not use the term “racist,” but if you say that someone has an “affection” for a white supremacist organization, or shares such ideology, aren’t you calling them a racist? That is the tactic I so despise in Yglesias’ attack on Barbour. If you have the proof Barbour is or was racist, show us the proof. But if you don’t have it, don’t make the logical jump.  Yglesias knew exactly what he was doing by framing his accusations as such. And it had nothing to do with painting Barbour as ignorant; it was all about making the racism charge stick. Coates, whose writing I have praised in the past, should acknowledge why Yglesias framed the “affection” argument as he did. Let’s not play word games; Matthew Yglesias sought to portray Haley Barbour as a racist, but the quote upon which Yglesias based the accusation did not prove the charge. I don’t want to seem ungrateful–I most certainly appreciate Jacobson’s praise. But I would like to respond to the notion that saying one has an affection for a white supremacist organization is tantamount to calling them a racist.  This is a picture I took last summer, while visiting a small-town in western Tennessee. I went independent of the Atlantic, and mostly as a guy looking to see how the aftershocks of the Civil War exist in the places where it was actually fought. This picture is of a living history exhibition in a small town which sent a lot of soldiers off to fight in the Confederate Army. Since the Civil War, the town has shrunk to a double digit population My opinions are quite clear–the facts show that the Confederate Army was not simply a white supremacist organization, but perhaps the most literal and deadly instrument of white supremacy ever. The people who were presenting the living history quite clear had affection for the Confederate Army, and for the Confederate cause, itself. By Jacobson’s standard, it would be fair to call these people racist. I would strongly disagree.  To be clear, the most bothersome aspect of the presentation was when they were hemmed into discussing causes, and offered up an ignorance of secession that went beyond willful–it was total, it was the air, it was Tennessee–at least as they knew it. But I talked to a lot of these people. They fed me and the group I was traveling with (Barbecue, cole slaw, potato salad. Damn good.)  of which I was the only black person. I really got no inkling that they were racist. They were doing this exercise in a graveyard where there forebears were buried, and I got the sense that were much more tied by the a belief in blood as identity, than any antagonism towards blacks. What I saw was a profound need to see their ancestors as honorable. As I’ve written before, I’m powerfully acquainted with that impulse. I’m also well acquainted with its pitfalls.  It’s possible the people in that town just put the old southern hospitality act on me. But I have never been interested in charging people without evidence. The point here is that one need not literally believe in white supremacy to have an affection for its instruments, anymore than one need been be a full-throated anti-Semite to have an affection for the instruments of Nazism . People have all sorts of motives–of which, I would classify ignorance willful and otherwise, not malice, as the most common. Moreover, ignorance is still, in and of itself, dangerous. When your governor of a state with one of the largest black communities in the country, and the largest percentage of black people in the country, a lack of malice toward those communities should be a base-line. Not hating black people is entry level for a conversation. It isn’t the conversation itself.

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Affection

As someone whose job is to study hackers, I have nothing but admiration for the journalists and authors who have penned wonderful books on hackers . Bruce Sterling is one of those luminaries and without fail, I always assign a few chapters from The Hacker Crackdown , which reveals in stunning and humorous ethnographic detail the cultural logic of the hacker underground. Given that WikiLeaks can only be understood in light of hacker values and traditio ns, I was wondering when Bruce Sterling would chime in to connect the dots between WikiLeaks, the organization, and the wider culture of hacking from which it emerged. He finally did, and like most of his writing, it is a tour de force: lyrical and seductive, thought provoking with many excellent points. It is important to read. But by the end, I felt Bruce Sterling the fiction writer’s presence was too strong in painting a problematic, one-dimensional and static picture of the role of hacker culture in the WikiLeaks saga; the gist is that once a black hat hacker, always a black hat hacker. But first, the single most problematic statements concern not Julian Assange but Private Bradley Manning. According to Sterling, Manning is a black hat hacker in the making whose downfall follows from the fact he was guided by a false picture of hacking. In the words of Sterling, he “believes the sci-fi legendary of the underground. He thinks that he can leak a quarter of a million secret cables, protect himself with neat-o cryptography, and, magically, never be found out.” Putting aside the fact that we still don’t know for a fact whether Manning leaked the cables, we certainly don’t know much of anything about Manning’s personality, desires, or political intentions,  much less his relationship to hacker circles. All we have are some chat logs reported in Wired and shrouded in considerable mystery . Hypothetically what Sterling says could be true and I would not be surprised if it were the case that Manning is “a hacker-in-uniform.” However, it seems deeply irresponsible to claim Manning is a hacker when he in solitary confinement unable to respond in any form . In fact, this narrative feels like the erection of the mythological picture of the events, which Sterling is supposedly dismantling. Now, there is no denying Julian Assange is (or at least was) a bona fide hacker (PDF) and, as I repeatedly heard, astonishingly talented. I do believe that for the most part, once a hacker, always a hacker in some fashion. His commitments to information freedom and encryption are clear indications that hacker commitments fundamentally shape his politics. And yet is he really just a “darkside hacker” whose politics are unchanging and timelessly rooted in cypherpunk dreams? Anyone who has paid attention to WikiLeaks in just the last year can see that WikiLeaks changed strategies and tactics. Assange’s political philosophy ( analyzed in great detail here ) is not one that simply comes from being a “dark hat” hacker, even if it is consistent with it in some areas. My own experience working with hackers is that, like most people, they change their views as they grow up. That remains true even if they express those politics through technological means. It’s important to remember that hackers have a variety of positions , even if there is a general and accentuated commitment to information freedom. Bruce Sterling would have us believe that Julian’s Assange’s actions are a fundamental manifestation of an unchanging hacker (and very very dysfunctional) personality, one that is simultaneously obvious and “banal,” opaque and mysterious (“he’s something we don’t yet have words for”) and effective (“He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack”). Now, I won’t defend Julian Assange’s personality here. In fact, his characterization of Assange as having a very difficult and very problematic personality is well known. It’s so problematic that Daniel Domscheit-Berg, intimately involved early on with and WikLeaks, left to help start another organization, OpenLeaks set to be in operation later this winter. His forthcoming exposé of the WikiLeaks organization, I suspect, will do a lot to clear up many of the mysteries around the organization. I suspect the picture won’t be pretty, but will likely be more accurate than Sterling’s account. And this brings me to my final point, which I hope will allow me to complicate the story — however engaging — told by Sterling. Domscheit-Berg, among others who were involved early on with WikiLeaks could not stand by the authoritarian actions of Julian Assange and left to start a new and distinct organization. But this important fact does not make it way into Sterling’s story. For Sterling, all “hackers” and geeky types are fanatical supporters of WikiLeaks. My own experience interacting with many transgressive hackers this winter has been that they cannot stand WikiLeaks or Assange (but that is subject of another post). There is no denying that there is tremendous support for WikiLeaks among geeks — although much of it came after the backlash against WikiLeaks; there is no denying that hackers will attempt to impact politics through technological means; there is no denying that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange deserve some critical scrutiny, which is what Sterling dished out. But I am less sold on the idea that the form of exposure so powerfully provided by WikiLeaks does not have some merit. Personally I find myself sympathetic toward the purported mission behind OpenLeaks. They are seeking to do something similar to WikiLeaks but transforming it by injecting a dose of much needed transparency and accountability. And yet, due to the obsessive media spotlight on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (including Sterling’s piece) the public may be led to believe that there is only one way to spread leaks, when in fact WikiLeaks helped to usher a paradigm that can be tweaked and hacked to better serve democratic goals. Illustration by the inimitable Exiled Surfer.

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Hacker Culture: A Response to Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks

Starting in June 1969 and lasting for several months, Niagara Falls, one of North America’s most iconic locations, was bone dry for the first time in more than 12,000 years. There were no falls. U.S. engineers diverted the river away from the American side so that loose rocks could be removed from the base. The project was eventually abandoned, but during that time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was able to strengthen certain areas to slow the gradual erosion of the site. In November, the temporary dam was destroyed and the mighty Niagara River went cascading over the rocks once again. Six million cubic feet of water flow over this site every minute, according to the Daily Mail , which has more images of the barren landscape. This picture was recently unearthed by Russ Glasson. His in-laws took it back in the 60s, and it had been sitting in a shoebox in the garage ever since. Image: rbglasson/Flickr . View more Pictures of the Day .

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Picture of the Day: Niagara Falls Without Water

An al Qaeda member wanted by the FBI for the U.S.S. Cole bombing has surfaced in Yemen-despite being reported dead two months ago following a CIA drone strike. Fahd al Quso, apparently living in a mountainous region of Yemen, had his picture taken with…

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‘Killed’ Al Qaeda Resurfaces

My friend Marc Fisher writes today about a person who has to be the world’s most egomaniacal burglar. The thief broke into Marc’s house, stole his son’s laptop (among other things), and then posted a picture of himself on the son’s Facebook page: He felt compelled to showboat about his big achievement: He opened my son’s computer, took a photo of himself sneering as he pointed to the cash lifted from my son’s desk, and then went on my son’s Facebook account and posted the picture for 400 teenagers to see. In the picture, the man is wearing my new winter coat, the one that was stolen right out of the Macy’s box it had just arrived in. “I’ve seen a lot, but this is the most stupid criminal I’ve ever seen,” marveled D.C. police Officer Kyle Roe, who stayed with us for hours as we waited for the crime scene technician, who painstakingly lifted dozens of fingerprints from nearly every room in the house. You have to read the whole thing; it’s a fairly incredible story. One incredible detail (at least for someone who is also a resident of Washington, D.C.): Marc and his family are still waiting, four days later, to speak to the detective assigned to the case. 

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A Very Post-Modern (and Very Stupid) Burglary

The various critics groups from around the country are beginning to announce their favorite films of the year, and not surprisingly David Fincher’s The Social Network is leading the pack, with Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan following closely behind. Those who have announced their winners include The Los Angeles Film Critics Association, The Boston Society of Film Critics, The New York Critics Online and the Broadcast Film Critics Association, with the New York Film Critics Circle announcing today. All those names may not mean much to you, but the fact that they’re all picking The Social Network as the top film of the year indicates that it’s now the clear frontrunner to take home the Best Picture Oscar in 2011. Granted, the Broadcast Critics only announced their… Read More Read Comments

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Critics Groups Pick ‘Social Network’ as Top Film of 2010 – Do You Agree?

Ever since District 9 took the world by storm with its inventive, low-budgeted storytelling (snatching up a Best Picture Oscar nomination in the process), folks have been eager to see what that film’s director, Neill Blomkamp, puts out next. District 9 star Sharlto Copley – who Blomkamp helped “discover” with the film – has since gone on to star in other movies like this past summer’s The A-Team, and now it looks like the two are going to try to strike gold twice. Deadline reports that Copley has signed on to play a role in Blomkamp’s project, titled Elysium. The film, which is currently looking for a studio to distribute after Blomkamp struck a deal to produce and finance it independently from a Hollywood major in order to make a film on his terms, is said to be… Read More Read Comments

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District 9′s Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley Reteam on ‘Elysium’