a memorable black and white short by Donato Sansone featuring the nightmarish cyclical tale of one man’s encounter with a disembodied head and a disembowelled cat.
Author Archives: Chompsky
Behold: the dusty central Milky Way rising over the ancient Andean archaeological site of Yacoraite in northwestern Argentina. To wit:
The denizens of planet Earth reaching skyward are the large Argentine saguaro cactus currently native to the arid region. The unusual yellow-hued reflection nebula above is created by dust scattering starlight around red giant star Antares. Alpha star of the constellation Scorpius, Antares is over 500 light-years distant. Next to it bright blue Rho Ophiuchi is embedded in more typical dusty bluish reflection nebulae though. The deep night skyscape was created from a series of background exposures of the rising stars made while tracking the sky, and a foreground exposure of the landscape made with the camera and lens fixed on the tripod. In combination they produce the single stunning image and reveal a range of brightness and color that your eye can’t quite perceive on its own.
(Image: Franco Meconi)
Behold: the sacred island mountain of Uluru, aka Ayers Rock, pictured against an equally extraordinary backdrop. To wit:
Uluru is an extraordinary 350-meter high mountain in central Australia that rises sharply from nearly flat surroundings. Composed of sandstone, Uluru has slowly formed over the past 300 million years as softer rock eroded away. In the background of the featured image taken in mid-May, a raging thunderstorm is visible. Far behind both Uluru and the thunderstorm is a star-filled sky highlighted by the constellation of Orion. The Uluru region has been a home to humans for over 22,000 years. Local indigenous people have long noted that when the stars that compose the modern constellation of Orion first appear in the night sky, a hot season involving lightning storms will soon be arriving.
(Image: Park Liu)
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Despite having broken his back in an accident in 1992, athlete Stacy Kohut continues to tempt fate on the slopes with an adapted 4-wheel wheelchair mountain bike.
In this film by Chris Ricci, Kohut shreds the downhill sections of Whistler Backcomb Bike Park north of Vancouver like a boss.
German educational design studio Kurzgesagt turns to a sobering truth of astrophysics: the fact that 94% of the observable Universe is so far from us that we will never go there, even if we achieve light-speed travel. To wit:
…there is a cosmological horizon around us. Everything beyond it, is traveling faster, relative to us, than the speed of light. So everything that passes the horizon, is irretrievably out of reach forever and we will never be able to interact with it again. In a sense it’s like a black hole’s event horizon, but all around us. 94% of the galaxies we can see today have already passed it and are lost to us forever.
And if that twists your melon, consider this: by the time you’ve watched the video, 22 million more stars will have drifted off beyond our reach.
A short by Joseph Bennett in which a banal conversation between two birdwatchers (voiced by comedian and co-writer Joe Pera) turns into an existential discussion about humanity’s place in the Universe.