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Richard Swarbrick makes these great impressionist animations of sports events, mostly soccer but also cricket and basketball. Here's one to get you started...the 5-0 drubbing FC Barcelona handed to Real Madrid during a 2010 Clasico:

It's amazing how much Swarbrick's illustrations communicate with so few strokes...Mourinho's face is my favorite. Here's the actual match for comparison purposes. And here's Maradona's sublime goal against England in the 1986 World Cup (original video):

You can find many other examples of Swarbrick's work on his web site and on his YouTube channel. (via @dunstan)

• Diego Maradona
• illustration
• Richard Swarbrick
• soccer
• sports
• video

In 2015, artist Olafur Eliasson designed the Circle Bridge (Cirkelbroen) to span a canal in central Copenhagen. The pedestrian bridge was designed to slow people down a bit:

The bridge is made of five circular platforms, and it contributes to a larger circle that will form a pedestrian route around Copenhagen Harbour, where people — cycling, running, walking — can see the city from a very different perspective. As many as 5,000 people will cross this bridge each day. I hope that these people will use Cirkelbroen as a meeting place, and that the zigzag design of the bridge will make them reduce their speed and take a break. To hesitate on our way is to engage in bodily thought. I see such introspection as an essential part of a vibrant city.

Small boats can travel easily under the bridge but a section of the bridge also swings gracefully away to let larger boats pass. (via greg allen)

• architecture
• art
• Copenhagen
• Olafur Eliasson

In a Memorial Day reflection, historian Heather Cox Richardson highlights a pamphlet distributed by the US War Department to Army soldiers during World War II on the topic of fascism: what it is and how to combat it.

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power "under the guise of 'super-patriotism' and 'super-Americanism.'" And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a "well-planned 'hate campaign' against minority races, religions, and other groups."

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. "In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations."

Third, fascists would insist that "the world has but two choices — either fascism or communism, and they label as 'communists' everyone who refuses to support them."

It is "vitally important" to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, "even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy."

See also The 14 Features of Eternal Fascism, How Fascism Works, Toni Morrison's Ten Steps Towards Fascism, and Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.

• Heather Cox Richardson
• politics
• USA

The Inouye Solar Telescope is the largest and most powerful solar telescope in the world. The telescope is still in a "learning and transitioning period" and not up to full operational speed, but scientists at the National Solar Observatory recently released a batch of images that hint at what it's capable of. Several of the photos feature sunspots, cooler regions of the Sun with strong magnetic fields.

The sunspots pictured are dark and cool regions on the Sun's "surface", known as the photosphere, where strong magnetic fields persist. Sunspots vary in size, but many are often the size of Earth, if not larger. Complex sunspots or groups of sunspots can be the source of explosive events like flares and coronal mass ejections that generate solar storms. These energetic and eruptive phenomena influence the outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun, the heliosphere, with the potential to impact Earth and our critical infrastructure.

In the quiet regions of the Sun, the images show convection cells in the photosphere displaying a bright pattern of hot, upward-flowing plasma (granules) surrounded by darker lanes of cooler, down-flowing solar plasma. In the atmospheric layer above the photosphere, called the chromosphere, we see dark, elongated fibrils originating from locations of small-scale magnetic field accumulations.

(via petapixel)

• astronomy
• Inouye Solar Telescope
• science
• space
• Sun