Free Republic

New York City's spring art auctions get underway Tuesday with exceptional pieces by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Vincent Van Gogh and others whose work continues to fuel a robust market for impressionist, modern and contemporary art. Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)," estimated to bring over $140 million, is poised to become the most expensive artwork sold at auction, while Giacometti's "Pointing Man" could set an auction record for a sculpture if bidding soars to an expected $130 million.

When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at close to one sixth the speed of light, or approximately 28,000 miles/second. Scientists now have a new tool to take movies of such superfast movement in a single shot. Researchers from Japan have developed a new high-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second. That speed is more than one thousand times faster than conventional high-speed cameras. Called STAMP, for Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography, the new camera technology "holds great promise for studying a...

The Truth About Adverts: Selling the White Woman™ Artist Hank Willis Thomas’s latest show in New York strips the copy from advertisements to expose what the images are actually selling – a very white, highly controlled ideal of femininity woman on giant ice cube The Refreshest, Part II, 1990/2015 Arwa Mahdawi 29 April 2015 Hank Willis Thomas’s work examines the ways in which advertising has fabricated notions of gender and race, and then convinced us all to buy into them. “I always talk about racism as the most successful advertising campaign of all time,” Thomas says. His work serves as...

A video photoshop request

We talk to professional photographer Julian Calverley about making art with a phone -- and the importance of Instagram. See the photo on the linked site: Julian Calverley Taking photos has long been one of the main selling points of the iPhone, but mobile photography has largely remained the realm of enthusiastic amateurs, populating Instagram and other social networks with artful snapshots. With their lower resolution and lack of upgradeable lenses, phones haven't played a big role in professional photography. Commercial photographer Julian Calverley, however, views his iPhone as more than just a casual tool. More accustomed to working with...

Mary Keefe, a 19-year-old Vermont telephone operator whom her neighbor Norman Rockwell immortalized as his model for the heroine of “Rosie the Riveter,” the World War II feminist anthem that empowered women to leave home and pinch-hit in military plants, died on Tuesday at her home in Simsbury, Conn. She was 92. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Mary Ellen Keefe. Mrs. Keefe was a redhead, like the Rosie who appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of The Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943, but she had never wielded a rivet gun (not until an appearance...

Opened my e-mail this morning and just flat out enjoyed this short

And now for the rest of the story...

Just ads and pictures mostly from the 50's and 60's.

An overzealous selfie photo snapper was arrested in Santa Cruz, the California Highway Patrol said Friday. A CHP motorcycle officer said he noticed a woman was driving on Highway 1 while taking selfies of herself with a cellphone. Cara Baldwin, 44, of Santa Cruz, was driving in heavy Thursday 5 p.m. rush hour traffic near the Morrissey Boulevard exit. Using a cellphone without a hands-free device while driving is illegal in California. When the officer tried to get Baldwin's attention, she did not notice, and almost hit the officer's motorcycle, the CHP said. Baldwin was eventually pulled over, and the...

How Twitter marks the cultural year's high and low points: from the Oscars, to Jeremy Clarkson's 'fracas'

“Photographer Catalin Marin was taking photos of Dubai’s sunrise from the top of a building when he accidentally dropped his iPhone from the roof—and the device captured its entire 40 story plunge on video,” Reem Nasr reports for CNBC. “Amazingly the phone was without a scratch and on top of everything it captured the whole fall on video as I was filming at the moment I dropped it,” Marin wrote in a blog post,” Nasr reports. Read more in the full article here. Catalin Marin writes, “Unfortunately the shoot was cut unexpectedly short when I managed to drop my phone...

At the end of 2014, Nikon issued a notice saying that fake D800E DSLRs have been discovered during service center repairs. Technicians found that the cameras were actually ordinary D800 DSLRs (a few hundred dollars cheaper) that had their covers replaced with D800E shells. Nikon issued an update today saying that other models are being faked as well, namely the D610 and D4S

In case anyone missed the two hour season premier last night. It says no login required so I'm guessing its available to people who aren't Xfinity subscribers.

A photograph that has posed a Civil War mystery, puzzling historians for three decades, appears to be a long-surviving hoax. The mysterious photograph of what appeared to be a far older photo — showing a figure in a coat and hat and the blurred image of a warship — surfaced in 1986. Some historians believed it might be a photo of the CSS Georgia, a Confederate ironclad that sank 150 years ago in Georgia as Union troops captured Savannah.

Folio Society to publish 50th Anniversary copy of 'Dune'

Pro tip: Don’t fly your camera drone too close to chimpanzees. They might knock it out of the air using a stick. That’s what happened to one camera drone user over in the Netherlands while flying a drone in a zoo’s chimpanzee habitat. One of the chimps decided that “enough is enough”

Maria Altmann, an octogenarian Jewish refugee, takes on the Austrian government to recover artwork she believes rightfully belongs to her family. We saw this movie tonight and just loved it. The Austrian interiors were sumptuous, and Helen Mirren was outstanding -- approaching her role with tenacity and good humor. We give it 4 thumbs up and 5 stars. It's the best movie we've seen this year. Comments?

He had three drill sergeants, two of whom were sadists. Thank God it was the easygoing one who saw it. He was reading a magazine, when he slowly looked up and stared at Everman. Then the sergeant walked over, pointing to a page in the magazine. “Is this you?” It was a photo of the biggest band in the world, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, and this was a story about his suicide. Next to Cobain was the band’s onetime second guitarist. A guy with long, strawberry blond curls. “Is this you?” Everman exhaled. “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

This is an old post from back right before Ted Cruz announced, but there is a number of pretty good posters the Patriot Retort's Dianny Came up with! Hope you enjoy!!