2010 Pakistan floods satellite image

Photo: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

M’zab Valley, Algeria

Photo: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

good:

“A woman and her son sit in the capsule of an electric tricycle as they drive along a main road.” When/where/how can we get one?

On the streets of Beijing: an electric tricycle

(via kateoplis)

Thoreau

The Kondyor Massif, Eastern Siberia.

Image credit:NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Helix nebula, 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.

(photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.)

Arkhangelsk (Archangel), Russia.

“You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis

Photo NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

longreads:

The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country: 

“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.

“The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York magazine

See also: “On the Square: Were the Egyptian Protesters Right to Trust the Military?” — Wendell Steavenson, New Yorker, Feb. 21, 2011

― Rachel Carson