m1k3y

Korowai tree house, Papua New Guinea.

il

Model: Gemma Ward

I don’t think I’ve been haunted by any one image from the internet more than I am this particular image of this particular girl walking down a Brooklyn street. I keep trying to figure out why it—and she—have been something of a mild obsession for me since I found it over a year ago and I consistently draw a blank. There are better things to look at on street view and significantly more attractive bodies with blurred heads lurking the side streets of major metropolitan areas, but this girl stays with me. I hope that by putting down my thoughts I’ll somehow get closer to figuring out the appeal of this picture, or at least exorcise the obsession to some degree.

I spend a lot of time wondering where she’s going; maybe it’s because she walks with such a purpose. I play the scenarios out in my head multiple times, and my best guess is the simplest: a girl gets up one summer day in 2011, puts on whatever she has lying around her apartment, goes to buys a snack. On her way home, the google street view car takes a picture and commits this Williamsburgette to the internet and here I am, more than a year later, writing about her.

Then again, it’s not necessarily that simple; I still end up writing about her, but she could be walking to her boyfriend’s apartment, her girlfriend’s loft, or maybe back to the couch she’s crashing on because she’s only visiting Williamsburg for a week from a small town in central Michigan. I have no idea where she could possibly be coming from. I don’t know, I’ll never know, and it’s this banal non-mystery: guessing the insignificant, pedestrian occurrence that was briefly interrupted by an enormous corporation that makes her more intriguing.

Obviously, though, most of my interest lies right there with the girl herself. Starting from the bottom up: brown untied(?) shoes captured mid-stride, her weird knees, her thighs rising upwards like ice cream cones supporting the blueberry sherbet of her almost too-short shorts, her purse, its string cleaving her torso in two and resting on her exposed left shoulder (there must be a word for the style of shirt she’s wearing, but I don’t know it), and finally, her face, blurred, unrecognizable, framed by her bangs (what if a Brooklyn girl didn’t have bangs!). And her cap—god, that cap!—adorning her head like icing on a trendy cupcake.

I spend a lot of time wondering what’s in that grocery bag. Look at the way she’s carrying it, slung over her shoulder with three fingers, so fucking suave, smooth as anything. I can’t get a good look at whatever shapes are outlined in the bag or the brand on it. I imagine it’s something vegetarian, but this is probably because I have particular ideas about the dietary habits of the women of Williamsburg, or did when I first saw this girl on street view.

I have a theory. Perhaps the reason why this picture haunts me every time I search street view (in a way, I’m always looking for this girl) isn’t because this girl is special, but because she’s almost entirely un-special, pedestrian in both noun and adjective. In my mind, she’s an everywoman for a particular type of white Brooklyn young person. Look around and you’ll notice this girl waiting for the L train this afternoon. I swear I’ve seen this girl walking down my street and shopping at the same stores I do. She’s any girl I’ve ever checked out at a bar, made out with in the dark, bored to death with a discussion of Paul Verhoven’s oeuvre. She’s the friend of all your friends. This girl has broken my heart at least twice.

I’m not sure how well that theory holds up, though. Even after all this, I’m still left with questions. I’m still thinking about her. Where was she going? Where did she come from? What is she doing right now? I wonder what she was thinking when the street view car drove past, if she ever saw it coming, if she even knew what the car was, that it would capture her at her most casual and put it on the internet. I wonder if I’ve actually met her. I wonder if she follows this blog.

staceythinx:

Alejandro Guijarro photographs the chalkboards of some of the brightest minds in quantum physics for his continuing series Momentum. He went to research facilities like CERN and many of the top universities in the world to find them.

itsfullofstars:

sagansense:

NASA Mega-Rocket Could Lead to Skylab 2 Deep Space Station

NASA’s first manned outpost in deep space may be a repurposed rocket part, just like the agency’s first-ever astronaut abode in Earth orbit.

With a little tinkering, the upper-stage hydrogen propellant tank of NASA’s huge Space Launch System rocket would make a nice and relatively cheap deep-space habitat, some researchers say. They call the proposed craft “Skylab II,” an homage to the 1970s Skylab space station that was a modified third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket.

“This idea is not challenging technology,” said Brand Griffin, an engineer with Gray Research, Inc., who works with the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

“It’s just trying to say, ‘Is this the time to be able to look at existing assets, planned assets and incorporate those into what we have as a destination of getting humans beyond LEO [low-Earth orbit]?’” Griffin said Wednesday (March 27) during a presentation with NASA’s Future In-Space Operations working group.

A roomy home in deep space
NASA is developing the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch astronauts toward distant destinations such as near-Earth asteroids and Mars. The rocket’s first test flight is slated for 2017, and NASA wants it to start lofting crews by 2021.

The SLS will stand 384 feet tall (117 meters) in its biggest (“evolved”) incarnation, which will be capable of blasting 130 metric tons of payload to orbit. Its upper-stage hydrogen tank is big, too, measuring 36.1 feet tall by 27.6 feet wide (11.15 m by 8.5 m).

The tank’s dimensions yield an internal volume of 17,481 cubic feet (495 cubic m) — roughly equivalent to a two-story house. That’s much roomier than a potential deep-space habitat derived from modules of the International Space Station (ISS), which are just 14.8 feet (4.5 m) wide, Griffin said.

The tank-based Skylab II could accommodate a crew of four comfortably and carry enough gear and food to last for several years at a time without requiring a resupply, he added. Further, it would launch aboard the SLS in a single piece, whereas ISS-derived habitats would need to link up multiple components in space.

Because of this, Skylab II would require relatively few launches to establish and maintain, Griffin said. That and the use of existing SLS-manufacturing infrastructure would translate into big cost savings — a key selling point in today’s tough fiscal climate.

“We will have the facilities in place, the tooling, the personnel, all the supply chain and everything else,” Griffin said.

He compared the overall concept with the original Skylab space station, which was built in a time of declining NASA budgets after the boom years of the Apollo program.

Skylab “was a project embedded under the Apollo program,” Griffin said. “In many ways, this could follow that same pattern. It could be a project embedded under SLS and be able to, ideally, not incur some of the costs of program startup.”

Living beyond the moon
Griffin and his colleagues envision placing Skylab II at the Earth-moon Lagrange point 2, a gravitationally stable location beyond the moon’s far side.

Over the past year or so, NASA has been drawing up plans for a possible manned outpost at EM-L2. A station there would establish a human presence in deep space, serve as a staging ground for lunar operations and help build momentum for exploring more distant destinations, such as asteroids and Mars, advocates say.

The Skylab II concept could also help ferry astronauts to these far-flung locales, Griffin said.

“You can build multiple vehicles,” he said. “If we were to send this one, the first one, out to Earth-moon L2, you could build another that that could be a transit hab. So rather than having to go back and use space station parts, you would be able to pick these off the line.”

I love Skylab.

new-aesthetic:

“A 787 Dreamliner Drew the Boeing Logo Across the United States What you’re looking at is the real-time geographic tracking information of flight ZA236 as it was coming back to its home base in Washington state. It flew across the United States, drawing this gigantic Boeing logo.”

A 787 Dreamliner Drew the Boeing Logo Across the United States, via Phil G.

Previously on NA: how about we draw a 747 in the sky!