Take a photographic journey into the past with Illustrated Past, which offers glimpses of life in Brittany, a trip to Tunis and Algiers, scenes of Dutch daily life. These examples are excerpts from the Dutch book, De Aarde en haar Volken (Project Gutenberg), or The Earth and its Peoples (Google auto-translation). Where the 1906 edition featured photos from around the world, the 1877 edition featured etchings (Gutenberg; Google translation).
♪ "So kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you'll wait for me. Hold me like you'll never let me go..." ♫
Inspired by Andrew Sullivan's recent post on views outside airplane windows, BuzzFeed compiled a collection of "100 incredible airplane window views" from Flickr. (bandwidth-heavy single page version.) Click through slideshow at Business Insider.
We tend to think of blogs that showcase large images as a phenomenon of the past few years. But NASA's Earth Observatory has been posting its Image of the Day since April 1999 (when its first "large" image available for download was a 214 KB jpeg of the North Pole). Now, Image of the Day has downloads of images in multiple formats, most of which measure in megabytes, not kilobytes, and these stunning images of the earth's surface give context to the human activity down below: a toxic spill in Hungary, wildfires in Mexico, the growth of a coal mine in West Virginia, agriculture in Brazil, snowmelt flooding in Fargo, North Dakota, last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, artificial islands in Dubai, the aftermath of Japan's recent tsunami.
30 Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth "From 400 miles away, the earth transforms into abstract art. The global landscape is impressionist, cubist and pointillist." Nice NASA images from 2000, downloadable as wallpaper.
Hi-res satellite photos of Earth Four pages worth, desktop wallpaper sized.
Google Earth threatens democracy The planet's military bases apparently cannot hide from Google's all seeing eye.