Clockwise:

1. Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

2. Lowering of the last element (YE-1) of the CMS detector into its underground experimental cavern.

3. Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1.

More at Boston.com’s The Big Picture.

Uniformed Letter Carrier with Child in Mailbag:

After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

More at the Smithsonian Institution photostream and New York Times.

via ryan north:

Here’s an experiment which could be pretty rad! I’m going to link to the Flickr images tagged “haylookit” here for the next few days, and maybe INDEFINITELY. If you have something you want thousands and thousands of like-minded strangers to see, try uploading it to Flickr and tagging it with “haylookit”! And if you want to see something that some stranger on the internet thought you’d like, click here!

AWESOME IMAGES ONLY, PLZ

“UPDATE: Guys this is awesome.”

Turn your point and shoot into a super camera:

If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera.

Other enhancements include “longer exposure times (up to 65 seconds), faster shutter speeds (1/25,000 sec or faster), automatic bracketing of your photos, and more.”

How cool is that?

A BMW forum has a great set of photos of the space shuttle processing, from shipment of the external fuel tank to liftoff. (Why it’s the car forums that always have these cool stories, I do not know.) Reminds me of a more localized version of the trip a 200-ton piece of a particle detector took from Deggendorf, Germany, to a laboratory in Karlsruhe, only 400 kilometers away.

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location – Or, A Short Treatise on How The New York Times Handled the Slowest News Day in the History of Newspaper.

Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe [NSFW] – Bert Stern, the photographer responsible for the most famous photos of Marilyn Monroe, has recreated the series with Lindsay Lohan. Maybe it’s Lohan’s fake blonde hair, or maybe it’s just my eyes’ dislike of the obscene, but the whole thing comes off as a terrible idea. Still, Lindsay Lohan naked, hurray?

Upside-Down-Ternet – The 100% fun, safe, and nerdy way to deal with those hooligans stealing your wireless internet. In other words, this XKCD strip.

This week on NPR’s In Character: Cookie Monster:

Homeless: Can you build a life from $25? – An interview with Adam Shepard, who left his comfortable life to start anew on the streets. Inspired by Nickel and Dimed, he went armed with only $25 and the clothes on his back to see if he could go from the streets to a furnished apartment, car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

Just how tough are NASCAR fans? – Like Adam Shepard above, Hampton Stevens had a goal: With only $20, a cell phone, and a camera, Stevens had 24 hours to find a ride to the Subway 500 and a $75 ticket to the sold-out race. Just as inspiring.

Homer Simpson – a portrait in the style of Rembrandt. His eyes have never been more captivating.

Unphotographable is a catalog of pictures not taken by photographer Michael David Murphy. A photo album with no images, just thousands of words.

This is a picture I did not take of a bride, standing in the middle of Canal St. in New Orleans at midnight, lit-up by the headlights and honks of approaching cars, and the turning sirens atop a police cruiser, in which sat her groom, who was shown the back seat after being pulled over for revving his Pontiac at a stop-light, and then burning out to liven things up a bit on their way to the reception, but cops on Friday night don’t always have a sense of humor, and quickly pulled the couple over, so quickly the Pontiac ran-up the curb onto the sidewalk, and when the cops found a plastic bag of something in the front seat and threw the groom in the cruiser, his bride, standing in traffic, holding her bouquet (her dress an immaculate satin & shining in the police lights) had a look her in eye that said this whole marriage thing just might be going nowhere fast.

What I find most compelling about Murphy’s descriptions is how perfectly they recreate their intended moments. Like a slowly developing Polaroid picture, he reveals little bits of the scene at a time. Above, the camera focuses on the lonely bride, then the police cruiser, the groom, the Pontiac, and so on until finally stepping backward to capture the entire picture. Lacking any actual photographs, Murphy is still able to incite a vivid image of the scene.

Unphotographable is also one of those sites you find and instantly smile at, thinking “What a great idea!” I have a digital camera, and would barely call my picture-taking a hobby, but hardly a day goes by when I do not turn a corner and wish I had my camera on me to photograph what I see. So I can only imagine how it is for people whose passion it is to constantly artistically frame the world.

(How long do you think until someone creates a companion site featuring drawn versions of the unphotographs?)