The Tungurahua volcano, Ecuador, January 11, 2010. Photographed by Cecilia Puebla.

Colosseum made of illuminated ice at the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, Harbin, northeastern China, January 3.

A selection of Martian landscapes.

Josef Hoflehner’s wide-angle photos of low-flying aircraft at Princess Juliana International Airport.

The Caribbean airport has some interesting signage too.

Just 8 km in diameter, Saturn’s moon Daphnis casts its shadow. The tiny moon’s gravity creates waves in Saturn’s A ring that extend above the plane to a height of 1.5 km. Image taken by Cassini in visible light on June 26, at a distance of approximately 823,000 km from Daphnis.

More, with animations. Related: Planetary Bling.

50 years of space exploration.

1 meg version here. Zoom version here. Image by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco. Via Coudal.  

You’ll be pleased to hear that Misty Keasler, quoted above, has published a book of her photographs, Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan. Among her subjects is the Hotel Adonis, Osaka, which offers patrons a Naughty Nurse Play Area and a Hello Kitty S&M Room.

Ms Keasler is interviewed here. Via Coudal.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot is feeling a little dirty, a little compromised. In a typically understated piece, titled Newspapers Must Stop Taking Advertising from Environmental Villains, Mr Monbiot ponders “the extent to which newspapers should restrict the advertisements they carry.”

Readers will doubtless be shocked to hear that newspapers, and their columnists, depend on advertising…

It pays my wages. More precisely, it provides around three-quarters of newspapers’ income. Without it, they would not exist: certainly not in their current form, almost certainly not at all. For all their evident faults, newspapers perform a crucial democratic service: without professional reporting, it is impossible to make informed decisions.

And here’s a small compendium of the Guardian’s “professional reporting,” without which “it is impossible to make informed decisions.”

The problem at hand, at least for Monbiot, is this. Advertising is bad, you see. All of it. Very, very bad.

I believe that advertising is a pox on the planet. It is one of the forces driving us towards destruction, as it creates needs that did not exist before and promotes consumption way beyond sustainable levels. I believe that it is also socially damaging, turning ours into a more grasping, more atomised society, focused on material display rather than solidarity and community action.

Sadly, no evidence is offered to support this tangle of emphatic supposition. Though questions do spring to mind. Exactly how would one go about measuring the alleged “atomising” and “socially damaging” effect of an advert for cheap flights or a car, or for something more mundane – say, a nice pair of shoes? Exactly how much shoe advertising, or shoe consumption, constitutes wickedness? Is there a preferred, morally elevated, level of shoe ownership?

[Adverts] generate behavioural norms, telling us, in effect, that the goods and services which are destroying the biosphere are acceptable, even beneficial. I believe that their presence in the newspapers makes hypocrites of all those of us who write for them. Our editorials urge people to reduce their impacts. Our advertisements urge people to increase them.

Actually, the charge of hypocrisy isn’t dependent on accepting adverts for things readers may want and for which they’re willing to pay. The prodigious hypocrisy of Monbiot’s employer, Alan Rusbridger, has previously been noted, and in Monbiot’s case there are other, more immediate, reasons to mutter “hypocrite.” Not least the amount of air travel the columnist indulged in to promote his book on the unacceptability of air travel, an activity he saw fit to equate with child abuse. 

“I’ve always had this really strong appreciation for… dark.”

I think you’ll like this. Here’s the trailer for Jeanie Finlay’s Goth Cruise, a documentary following 150 Goths on a five day sea journey from New Jersey to Bermuda and back again. With 2,500 “Norms” for company. Brace yourselves for some coloured hair and collective non-conformism.

“I’m really not Goth. I enjoy the aspect of the music… and the dressing up. But when it comes down to it, I don’t think I fit the Goth template.”

If you possess black lipstick and a counter-cultural attitude, you’ll be thrilled to hear this year’s outing takes in Key West and Cozumel, Mexico.

Via Coudal.

Further to this, today’s Telegraph has an extract from Hyok Kang’s account of his childhood in 1990s North Korea, This Is Paradise!

I was born on April 20 1986 in a village not far from Onsong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, close to the Chinese border and Siberia. The city is divided into ku (districts) and ban (classifications) of 20 families. My parents lived in ban number three, in a semi-rural zone. The house was like dozens of others built on the same model and lined up in rows. There was a door, a single window, and a roof of curved orange tiles. The walls were white, but they had been painted blue to a height that I must have passed about the age of eight or nine. Each time the district officials came to check the hygiene of the houses, as they regularly did, they ordered us to change the colour of this lower part: to green, now blue, now light brown, but all the houses in our ban had to be the same colour; perhaps because dwellings, like everything else in North Korea, are the property of the people. That means that nothing belongs to anyone.

Via sk60, The Vice Guide to North Korea is worth watching. Shane Smith pays a visit to Pyongyang. Surrealism ensues. Part 1 is embedded below.

Parts 2-14 can be viewed here.