Earth from Above | Hacker News Reader

Earth from Above

justpaste.it

82 pointsshawndumas24 comments

While these pictures are beautifully shot, I always find it interesting in similar pictorials of "Earth" that the U.S. is often represented by long tracts of houses in suburbia, or a system of byzantine highways. You'd think the entire U.S. population lives in houses that look the same and we all sit in heavy traffic each day. In fact, the same could be said for other pictures here as well; many just seem to promote existing stereotypes vs. the unique beauty that every one of these countries possesses.

I agree /w what you're saying. But at the same time, speaking for the US audience, many of the really unique and breathtaking sights here are fairly played out at this point (How many awesome pictures of the Grand Canyon have you seen?) Whereas Kyrgyzstan and Peru are completely new to me.

How about pictures of Detroit from above? Especially the areas where nature is starting to reclaim parts of the city. That would be a different view than the 'pre-packaged suburbs' image.

Could we save the "awesome pics!!!!" for other sites? Also - I can't find it quickly, but are the originals actually free to be cut and pasted on whichever site so desires?

If you are concerned flag it as inappropriate.

I am concerned people don't understand the point of the site if so many of them are voting for this. And it takes more than a 'flag' to communicate that.

What, specifically, is the point of this site that everybody that up-voted (presumingly because the post gratified their intellectual curiosity) is missing?

But, in the meantime, might I remind you of this section of the Hacker News Guideline [1]:

'Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. [...] If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.'

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[1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Agreed. This isn't reddit/r/pics.

If we're gonna be all arsy and quote the guidelines, they explicitly define as off-topic:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I think nature pictures are roughly in the same category as cute animal pictures, as far as HN is concerned.

http://s01.justpaste.it/files/justpaste/image11.jpg

  Little boxes on the hillside,
  Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
  Little boxes, little boxes,
  Little boxes, all the same.

from Weeds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8StRAJCork)

I'm really glad I don't live there, it looks really depressing, although it beats suburbs of Cape Town (http://s01.justpaste.it/files/justpaste/image15.jpg)

I would really like to use high quality copies of these photos for my desktop backgrounds!

Oh yeah, old picture taking guy, take me with you next time you go snapping random photos!

Amazing! So many different worlds on our single planet.

(For some reason it also reminded me of different "lands" on a single map in Heroes of Might and Magic III.)

Awesome, the office building I'm in is visible! :D And no, I kind of wish it was that interesting-looking fortress island in Japan, but it's not.

Funny :-) Same for me.

Hashima, AKA Gunkanjima or "Battleship Island". The kind of place that exists in dreams.

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/saiga/yuji/gallary/1974/1974-html/07-...

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/hashima.php

http://gakuranman.com/gunkanjima-ruins-of-a-forbidden-island...

Great links, thanks a lot. Now I'm not so sure I'd want to have my office there, looks a bit creepy.

That photo of the Danish suburbs is really depressing.

Really? The photo of the suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa [1] seems more depressing (to me at least) because of the extant poverty it represents.

Care to elaborate on why the other picture depresses you?

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[1]: http://s01.justpaste.it/files/justpaste/image15.jpg

I particularly had the South-African photo in mind as a comparison when I made my statement. Don't get me wrong, I don't approve poverty, I've lived for a couple of years on less than $2 a day and my parents still do, it's just that the Danish photo is so devoid of life, of human interaction, that makes it so depressing for me.

Maybe I'm a little bit biased because right now I'm reading James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed" (http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Institutio...), which has a couple of chapters against modern, centralized, well-planed architecture that is designed "to look good from a plane" (he gives Brasilia as a negative example). Now, I know these suburbs weren't probably planned by the Government, but the main idea behind their design and planning is the same, i.e. to look good from a geometrical point of view.

It depends on how you look at it. With a more contained and 'gathered' approach, I would think that it would foster a tighter 'community feel' between the neighbors than in a more spread out model. That doesn't seem devoid of human interaction to me.

Each house has tall hedges surrounding it, acting as barriers from neighbors. It seems you'd have to walk all the way around if you wanted to visit. Then, everyone parks in the circle so the car you drive is the most prominent feature of your home.

It looks cool, but I can see how someone might consider it odd.

But all properties are connected at a central point, making it easy to put together gatherings of everyone in the community (e.g. 'block parties'). As opposed to a similar number of houses in a grid pattern. That's just my impression though.

I thought it looked rather smart - if I did have to live in suburbia I'd far rather live somewhere like that than the usual grid layout.

[Edit: Given that there appears to be a football pitch between some of the circles it looks like the area surrounding the circles is parkland]

Exactly; and look [1] at all that ranging space. I think I would have loved growing up there.

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[1]: http://s03.justpaste.it/files/justpaste/image5.jpg

Note that I'm arguably being rather hypocritical complaining about regular grid layouts when I both live and work within the area covered by this picture:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Img/258568/0074592.jpg

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