This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through December 2007. The visualization does not include a narration or annotations; the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.
This visualization was produced using NASA/JPL’s computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2.. ECCO2 is high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization. The dark patterns under the ocean represent the undersea bathymetry. Topographic land exaggeration is 20x and bathymetric exaggeration is 40x.
credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
In a massive spectacle held in Pyongyang over the weekend, North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong Un, addressed an audience of thousands. His appearance was part of a week-long celebration of the birth of the nation’s founder Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un, who was recently named “supreme commander,” promised to continue a military-first policy, despite chronic economic and food shortages. Foreign photojournalists invited for the celebrations have been sending back hundreds of images — but viewers back home must work to read between the lines. As you view these images, keep in mind that the photographers are strictly limited, only able to capture pre-approved subjects in sanctioned settings. These shapes, colors, and choreographed formations form the image North Korea wants to project. But even photographs like these can give us glimpses of an individual among the masses, inspiring empathy or curiosity. As we look at these members of a long-impoverished, tightly controlled society, we can only study their faces and imagine what they might truly be thinking.
Look at the top photo. None of the dancers are smiling.
I don’t want to pretend like North Korea is better than it is, but look—are the dancers supposed to be smiling?
I am not a Korean person, nor am I a Korea scholar, but I do know that smiling is not at all part of traditional Japanese dance or musical performance—solemn expressions are part of the atmosphere. I’m not sure the expectation should be that everyone needs to be smiling?
I also want to point out that when you’re doing a choreographed dance in the States—where smiling during performance is part of the whole shtick (can’t you hear the dance coach hissing at the nine-year-olds to SMILE from offstage?)—your smile is absolutely done on purpose, because much of the time your natural expression would be one of concentration.
Look, North Korea is a horrible place in basically every conceivable way. But searching for drops of pathos in these photos is sort of embarrassing. People are eating leaves and dying of starvation and being systematically abused in concentration-style labor camps. What do we want from the people who are not going through that? I really feel like the need to see some flicker of something in these faces says most about how we like to think about the people under totalitarian regimes—i.e., that they’re all secret, silent rebels. I don’t think that’s true.
I didn’t intend it that way — I just thought it was strange to see dancers who weren’t smiling. Still, this is much more incisive than the bit I wrote.
