Color Photos of Germany's WWII Surrender
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Photo: Ronald Playforth
Early in May, 1945, officers from the German army and Gestapo met with Allied commanders, including Field Marshall Montgomery to offer their country’s surrender at his headquarters near Hamburg. Interestingly, the only color photographs of this event were taken by a clerk, Ronald Playforth, who hid in the trees during the meeting.
Thequintessential wrote a brief synopsis of this event:
His pictures show Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, the most senior member of the delegation, General Eberhard Kinzel, chief of staff of the north west Germany army, and Major Friedl, a 6ft 6ins Gestapo chief. They were received by Field Marshall Montgomery, with his customary black beret and army uniform, who, when the Germans tried to negotiate, reportedly gave them a ‘tongue lashing’ about the bombing of Coventry and the horrors of Belsen. The delegation reported back to their HQ and Admiral Karl Doenitz – Hitler’s successor – and were given permission to sign the surrender papers, which they did the next day, May 4. When it was all over Montgomery is said to have leaned back and said simply: ‘That concludes the surrender.’
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Colors of the World's Flags
Media designer Shahee Ilyas has created pie charts showing the colors of the flags of over 200 nations.
Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.
Embedded on top is a screencap of a portion of the display, alphabetically arranged (Afghanistan, Albania…); the original at the artist’s website will display the name of the country when a mouse is passed over the pie chart. The larger pie chart on the bottom is a composite of all the colors from all of the flags.
Via The Life and Times of Michael5000, who notes that the color violet/lavender/purple is notably absent from world flags (as is gray).
Photographing Light

Photo by Alan Jaras
Alan Jaras has a creative way of composing his photographs. By focusing a beam of light through transparent, textured materials, and recording that light directly onto 35mm film without the use of a lens, he produces dazzling works of color and light. The images are scanned to a computer, but no CG was used at all. Check out his featured work at two different host sites, or his Flickr.
My Modern Met Link and Neu Black Link
An Apple with a Split Personality
Ken Morrish of Colaton Raleigh, Devon, England picked a bizarre Red Delicious apple off his tree. It looks as if someone stuck together half of a green apple and half of a red apple, but these colors are natural.
John Breach, chairman of the British Independent Fruit Growers Association, said: ‘I’ve never seen this happen before to a Golden Delicious. It is extremely rare. It is an extreme mutation.
‘There has been the occasional case of this type reported. If there was a whole branch of apples with the same colouring then fruit experts would get even more excited.’
Jim Arbury, fruit superintendent at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, said it was probably the ‘result of a random genetic mutation’.
‘This is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different,’ he said.
Morrish is keeping the apple in his refrigerator because so many people want to see it. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(image credit: Archant Devon)
Helga Steppan's Chromatically Arranged Belongings

In her art series See Through, Swedish artist Helga Steppan arranged all her material belongings into separate piles based on color:
This way of working can be clearly seen in the series ‘See Through’ for which Steppan audited all of her belongings and divided them into a full spectrum of different colour groupings to photograph: White, Black, Yellow, Red, Miscellaneous, Blue, Orange, Green, Pink, Grey, Purple, and Brown.
The final images are visually seductive and ask the viewer to consider whether they can discover the artist’s persona reflected in the meticulously constructed installations of her material possessions.
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The Color of Dinosaurs
Scientists thought they’d never know what colors the dinosaurs were, since fossils are rock-colored and even recently-discovered mummified scraps of the animals are faded. Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale, was researching fossil feathers when he discovered that melanin granules survived in their original shapes and patterns, which can be compared with existing feathers to determine their original color.
Perhaps the most surprising and most exciting application of this research is that it may allow us to predict the colors of many dinosaurs.
“These include many of our most well loved dinosaurs,” says Prum. “Like velociraptor, the dinosaur that chased the kids around the kitchen in Jurassic Park, was actually fully plumaged.”
While these dinosaur feathers were not used for flight until the appearance of the transitional species Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, they were probably useful for warmth. Prum says we could even learn more about the color of one of the most famous dinosaurs of all, Tyrannosaurus rex.
“In the classic mural The Age of Reptiles in the Yale Peabody museum, they depicted T-rex, which is one of the iconic, huge, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs,” he says. “Recent fossil discoveries have shown that the closest relative of these huge tyrannosaurids actually had tiny skin appendages or fossil feathers—’dino-fuzz.’
Link (with video) -via Metafilter
Rainbow Frog is Worshipped as God
In India, a newly discovered color-changing frog has been worshipped as a god. Reji Kumar, the person who found it, keeps the frog in a glass jar at his home where hundreds of people come to see it every day.
Apart from the obvious biological findings this hopping lava lamp can provide, it also gives an additional insight as to how religions and spiritual groups can emerge. I don’t blame them either. Who needs color-saturating hallucinogens for spiritual transcendence when you have a kaleidoscopic animal?
I say this new rainbow frog will become the new symbol for racial equality, just as long as it doesn’t croak (which is actually a concern).
The frog was a dazzling white colour when Reji, who is from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, in south India, first spotted it.
Then it changed to yellow and had gone grey by the time he got it home.
“By night the frog was dark yellow, and then it became transparent so you could see its internal organs,” Reji, a life worker, reportedly said.
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by robkullberg.
Amazing Multicolr Search Lab

With Multicolr Search Lab by Idée Labs, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images according to colors (in this case, a set of up to 10 colors). It’s quite speedy and neat!
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by McJohnny.
7 Color-Changing Wonders of the Animal Kingdom
How many animals do you suppose we pass in nature and never notice? Masters of evading humans and other predators, many creatures avoid being seen even at close range. Some of these are color-changers with amazing abilities to mimic not only their natural environs but even, in some cases, the behavior and movement of other species so they can pass as predators rather than as prey.
The ability to change color seems like an animal superpower at times – some of them can alter their appearance to blend with the colors, materials and textures of virtually any surroundings. For some this ‘costume change’ happens quickly, for others it is seasonal – for many it helps them avoid predators, for a few it enables them to sneak up on prey. Culled from around the animal kingdom, here are seven of most impressive color-changing species in the world.
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
ADD OCD DIY? Obsessively Organized-by-Color Bookshelves
Call it art, call it obsession, but the results are a rainbow of awesome to be sure. Some of these were done as personal pet projects but one in particular involved the reorganization of an entire store to fit into one big color spectrum of books. Practical? Perhaps not. Appealing? On an aesthetic level: absolutely.
Some of us are more particular about the appearance of our interiors than others – perhaps to a fault. Sick of seeing your books sloppily organized by type, or, worse yet, having them randomly disorganized across a series of bookcases? Sorting your favorite volumes by color may just satisfy that too-organized part of yourself.
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
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Tweak Your Brain With Colors
Psychologists at the University of British Columbia have conducted a study on the cognitive effects of colors. They found that red helped subjects concentrate while blue led to greater creativity.
“Think about red, and what comes to mind: stop lights, stop signs, danger, ambulances…People want to avoid those things, and that’s why they do better on detail-oriented tasks…Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean, safety…When their environment is safe, people are more explorative.”
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by whitespace.














