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?
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.'
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.
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:
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.
