Lego-naut

Two Canadian teenagers have sent a Lego man 80,000ft into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a homemade helium balloon. The pair managed to capture the entire journey using four cameras.

>> more in the Guardian

X above London

An X above Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London

>> Click here to view slideshow

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet

From Fight for the Future.

Tell US Congress not to censor the internet NOW!

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the US government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting "creativity". The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites-- they just have to convince a judge that the site is "dedicated to copyright infringement."

The US government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that's for a fix that won't work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

Today's sunrise

This morning's sunrise over North London

>> View set on Flickr

Sepideh Vahidi & Pouya Mahmoudi

یکی بود که میخوند , There was one who was singing
Sepideh Vahidi & Pouya Mahmoudi

Happy New Year

London's fireworks display - filmed from Primrose Hill, North London.

Forugh Farrokhzad

My new portrait of Forugh.

Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) was an Iranian poet and film director. She is one of Iran's most influential female poets. Forugh was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast.

The interview of Iraj Gorgin with Forugh Farrokhzad (in Persian)

Opie's style

My portrait in the style of Julian Opie. In Opie's style, the human face is usually characterised by black outlines with flat areas of colour, and minimalised detail, to the extent that an eye can become just the black circle of the pupil.

Christmas Wreaths

Christmas Wreaths in Hampstead, North London

>> View set on Flickr

Soul Cake

An apple, a pear, a plum, a cherry,
any good thing to make us all merry!

African Bull Frog ant crusher

Ouch!

The Pale Blue Dot

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers from Earth. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot against the vastness of space. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan. He later used the image as the main title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.