
Photo by Jonas Bendiksen. “RUSSIA. Altai Territory. 2000. Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies.” (via @robinsloan)

Photo by Jonas Bendiksen. “RUSSIA. Altai Territory. 2000. Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies.” (via @robinsloan)
The Moscow film company behind some of the greatest classics of Soviet cinema on Wednesday said it had agreed to make dozens of its best-known movies freely available on YouTube.
Now I need someone to tell me what to watch.
Tsar Bomba was the biggest man-made explosion we’ve ever had, back in 1961. The mushroom cloud in the video of the Tsar Bomba explosion went almost 40 miles up.
–PC Magazine previews Sony’s forthcoming e-book reader, or at least a slightly less-than-full-featured proto. Accepts not only e-books but PDF files and RSS feeds as well. Looks great. This little guy could be wonderful for people like me who are almost always reading something and/or plotting what to read next.
–Well, it looks like I’ve stumbled unknowingly into a series of Russia-related posts. I’ll round out the mix with a collection of a couple thousand posters from our dearly-departed USSR. Propaganda, advertising, all kinds of good stuff. On a side note, this is also the only post I’ve suggested that got Kottke’d, which makes me 1 for 2. For a brief moment, I was a star.
–A fine collection of photos of an old-school Russian submarine base. Looks like it’s straight out of a videogame. [via bb]
–Six-and-a-half billion people on this planet. And I’m only one pixel.
–Here’s an interesting essay & audio piece in the New Yorker on Mozart, written by a guy who has spent some time listening to the master’s works–all of them. “A hundred and eighty CDs… reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. During a slow week last winter, I transferred it to an iPod and discovered that Mozart requires 9.77 gigabytes.”
–Russia not only has a lock on the club scene, it’s also got the biggest hole in the world. I hope they do something cool with it when the mining peters out, like a waterslide. [via digg]
Update: I ought to have done some fact-checking. The biggest man-made hole in the world, Bingham Canyon, is actually here in the States. That’s 4000 feet of hole-ness outside of Salt Lake City. I still think the Russian one looks cooler, but they are both begging for a water park. Or some trees.
–I’m a sucker for conspiracy theory and revisionist history. The Associated Press reports on a newly-discovered copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln, a letter urging governors to support a Constitutional amendment to protect slavery. But then again, as historian Thomas DiLorenzo writes, this isn’t really news. I’m not usually much interested in biography, but I’m looking forward to DiLorenzo’s new book arriving this fall.
–Says Vanity Fair, no one does late-night like the Russians…try clubbing in Moscow.
—“Advertising has forgotten how to be subtle”. [via ald]
—All about books in the bathroom. Is it “a symbolic way to replace whatÄôs lost through the act of voiding,” or more like “listening to music while youÄôre vacuuming”?[via pt.i]