We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Picture this … and this So, just three things here so far today, one very short and two rather serious. So here are a couple of curiosities.
First, there is this map, which was originally claimed to have been taken posthumously by Columbia before it burned and crashed. You want this to be true, don’t you? As did Michael Jennings. But as I commented at Michael’s, those killjoys at snopes.com have now killed this particular joy. But it is still a thing of beauty, and certainly has my little country looking its best. Snopes says it is “false”, but their map is even bigger than the one Michael put up, so they liked it even as they trashed it.
And the other is a beating heart, courtesy of b3ta.com. Who are those guys?
When you consider all the metaphorical baggage that has been loaded onto the human heart over the centuries, it turns out to be very small and yucky, and you can swap yours for another with “you” carrying on pretty much as usual. It’s just a pump.
And a picture is just a picture.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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It couldn’t have been Columbia for another important reason, and I find it hard to see how others have missed it.
The angle of light/dark border line as shown would mean the “photo” would have been taken during the run up to or wind down from a northern hemisphere summer. Through late May, June or early July the midnight sun ought to have come a bit further south.
That Snopes site is an amusing resource for debunking… although I’d really hoped that reports of this Japanese trend had been true. Too bad; I’m due to work there again sometime.
Actually Snopes has it wrong as well.
That image is actually much more interesting than a satellite photo.
You can tell it’s not from a Shuttle easily because the Shuttle’s orbit only sees a relatively small amount of the Earth (a few hundred km diameter circle). You can also tell quite easily that it is a composite because there are no clouds, and that simply does not happen, ever, for that entire region. Also, the night time image is much, much too bright compared to the day time image. And in fact the range of brightness between the nightime Earth and the daytime Earth is much too great for them to be captured in the same frame like that with any real, current imaging device. And, as Rand points out, you can see the undersea features, which aren’t visible in visible light orbital photographs.
My point is that it’s not even a composite. It’s based on satellite imagery, but it’s actually a computer-generated graphic. The web site that I point to allows you to view the earth from any angle and location.