Tonchidot: Sekai Camera

Canned demo vaporware, or possibly the greatest advance in the integration of mobile location-based contextual video-driven telephony with user contributed content the world has seen?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/tonchidot-madness-the-video/

Thanks Haru-chan!

Leica S2 with 56% larger sensor than full frame

Photokina 2008: Leica has unveiled a brand new autofocus DSLR system designed for professional users, which is configured around a 30x45mm sensor (i.e. 56% larger than 35mm full-frame).

Details at dpreview

Is Google evil?

Randall Stross looks at whether Google's relentless collecting, processing and commercializing of our most personal information begs for public oversight, in this article (designed to promote his book Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, Free Press, 2008)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/24/EDV1134BDS.DTL

Get to know WeeGee the Famous

He captured tenement infernos, car crashes, and gangland executions. He found washed-up lounge singers and teenage murder suspects in paddy wagons and photographed them at their most vulnerable -- or, as he put it, their most human. He caught couples kissing on their beach blankets on Coney Island and the late-night voyeurs on lifeguard stands watching them. And everywhere he went, he snatched images of people sleeping: drunks on park benches, whole families on Lower East Side fire escapes, men and women snoring in movie theaters. He was the supreme chronicler of the city at night. --bio continues at http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/weegee/

Selected Works online at the Weegee's World courtesy of the International Center for Photography Midtown

more biography here:
Weegee: Paparazzi or Social Documentarian?

Thanks Koga-san!

Financial Death Spiral Made Simple

TIME: How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street

The Monkees - Porpoise Song (Theme From HEAD)

Nice article on Araki by Andrew Lee

And the Japanese art scene certainly
differs from other countries. Takashi
Murakami and other Japanese artists
argue that there is no distinction between
high and low art in Japan because “art”
was a concept introduced from the west.
Araki agrees. “In my mind there is
absolutely no hierarchy. Just like all
women are beautiful. I really don’t like
the idea of what is right and what is
wrong. What is sacred, what is profane.
What is art and what is obscene. I don’t
want that kind of categorisation.

http://homepage.mac.com/a.lee/main/writing/araki221005.pdf

Far out talk by Sir Martin Rees

Sir Martin Rees: Earth in its final century?