PHOTOS
Home Page
The site’s “Home” page header contains a portion of a photograph at Wikipedia – of the United States Capitol rotunda’s domed interior – that was taken by Matt H. Wade. Matt’s 2005 photo, and my derivative image, are both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Matt’s photograph was taken from behind the bronze statue of George Washington, which is a prominent feature of the U.S. Capitol rotunda. The statue was cast by William Hubbard in 1853, and is one of multiple castings from the marble portrait of Washington that was carved in 1790 by the French neo-classical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.
U.S. House & Senate Page
The site’s “U.S. House & Senate” page header includes the inscription Equal Justice Under Law, as sculpted by Robert Ingersoll Aitken for the frieze on the west facade of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. That image also came from a photograph at Wikipedia taken by Matt H. Wade. Matt’s 2005/8 photo, and my derivative image, are both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The other images in the header of that page are public domain images that public employees have helpfully made available on-line at the Library of Congress. On the left is a photograph of the House Chamber during a session sometime between 1905 and the early 1920s (before the Chamber was unwisely converted to ill-suited auditorium seating, without desks or lecterns), from a Harris & Ewing photograph collection gifted to the Library of Congress in 1955. On the right is a photograph of the newly-redecorated Senate Chamber, taken December 30, 1936, just before the opening of the 75th Congress on January 5th, 1937, also from the donated Harris & Ewing collection.
Lawmakers in Action Page
This page header also contains public domain images that public employees have helpfully made available on-line at the Library of Congress and at Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository of Wikipedia. It features The Mace in the House Chamber, from a 2011 photograph made available by the Office of the Clerk of the House, and, specifically, a detailed look at the eagle and globe atop the US House Mace, one of the oldest and most important symbols of United States government. The shaft is surmounted by a silver globe, 4 ½ inches in diameter, which is engraved with the seven continents, the names of the oceans, lines of longitude and major lines of latitude. The Western hemisphere faces front. The globe is encircled with a silver band marked with the degrees of latitude, on which is perched an engraved solid silver eagle with a wingspan of 15 inches.
Also included in the “Lawmakers in Action” page header is a depiction of the primary pre-1860 Senate Chamber, entitled “View of the Senate of the United States in Session, MR. BENTON ON THE FLOOR, from a large Engraving Published by E. Anthony,” signed by J. Rodgers. [Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri (author of the resolution to expunge from the Senate Journal the resolution of censure on Andrew Jackson, for whom Benton was a former aide-de-camp) served in the Senate between 1821 and 1851.]
Federal Judging Page
The site’s “Federal Judging” page header is a portion of another Matt H. Wade photograph made available at Wikipedia. Matt’s photo, and my derivative image, are both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The photograph is of The Contemplation of Justice, which was sculpted by James Earle Fraser when the Supreme Court building was constructed in the early 1930s. Fraser’s statue sits on the west side of the Supreme Court building, opposite the U.S. Capitol, on the north side of the main entrance stairs. Unfortunately, since the symbolically-potent decision of the members of the Court, for “security” reasons in May, 2010, to bar the public from using the main (west-side) entrance to the building, this statue and its companion, “Authority of Law” on the south side of the steps, are likely to be noticed by few who now enter the Supreme Court building.
Voices of Merit Page
A portion of another Matt H. Wade photograph at Wikipedia is used for one of the headers of this page. Matt’s 2010 photograph of a renovated 1850 covered bridge in New York State, and my derivative image, are both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The photograph is of Buskirk Bridge, which is a wooden covered bridge in the hamlet of Buskirk, New York, United States. It crosses the Hoosic River and connects Washington County and Rensselaer County. It was built in 1850 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. (Photo taken from the Rensselaer County side.)
FONTS
The site’s name (in three of the five headers mentioned above) and all post titles are written in Fertigo Pro Regular, a webfont created by Jos Buivenga of exljbris. A valid license to use that free exljbris font may be obtained at this myfonts.com link. Copyright (c) 2008 by Jos Buivenga. All rights reserved. [Licensed pageviews: unlimited.]
The site’s sidebar titles are written in Fontin Small Caps, a free webfont also created by Jos Buivenga of exljbris. That exljbris font may be obtained from the designer at his exljbris foundry website. The font remains the intellectual property of Jos Buivenga.
The U.S. House & Senate header image includes scrolls from the Nymphette webfont by Lauren Thompson of Nymphont. FontSquirrel.com is an authorized distributor of that free font.
RELATED IMAGES
The site’s favicon was created by Assaf Shtilman and released by the designer to the public domain. The use of multiple header images, as described above, was made possible by a custom-header enhancement – written and made freely available by Francisco de Azevedo (a.k.a., Marventus) – to the free Graphene (WordPress-theme) software, based on code by Graphene developer Syahir Hakim.
About those (absent) “social sharing” buttons:
Did you know that buttons like these allow Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and others to track your online browsing activities on every site that includes one of these buttons, even if you never click the buttons and (in some browsers) even if you have third-party cookies disabled?
ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as the Facebook “Like” button or the Twitter “tweet” button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them. Unlike traditional solutions, ShareMeNot does this without completely removing the buttons from the web experience.[…]
ShareMeNot targets a different type of tracking: the tracking done by websites with which you have an account, such as Facebook or Google. These trackers allow other websites to embed buttons (such as the Facebook “Like” button or the Google “+1” button) that you can use to share the current website with your profile on that site.
These buttons are found on many sites across the web. Whenever you see one of these buttons, the tracker (e.g., Facebook or Google) that provides it knows that you are visiting the current site, even if you don’t click the button and in some browsers even if you have third-party cookies disabled. This tracking does not happen anonymously if you are logged in to (or in some cases have ever been logged in to) the tracker’s site, since that tracker knows which account you’re logged in with. This tracking is possible because of how browsers work: your cookies as well as the address of [the] site you’re viewing are sent to the tracker whenever one of these buttons is loaded. Disabling third-party cookies prevents this kind of tracking in Firefox (but not in Chrome), but prevents the buttons from functioning correctly.
For more, see ShareMeNot’s FAQ page or the main ShareMeNot Add-on site (the Add-on works with Firefox browsers ver. 3.6 & up, and, as of March, 2012, in beta form with Chrome browsers ver. 17 & up). Readers may also be interested in this Facebook-blocker Add-on for Firefox, or this Facebook-blocker Add-on for the Opera browser. [As far as I know, the recent, laudable “Do Not Track” advancement detailed here does not solve this social-sharing-button web-tracking problem (PDF link to a recent, informative research paper by the ShareMeNot creators).]
From the Facebook-blocker for Firefox Add-on page:
Do you know what the “I like”-Button is? A means of sharing what you like? Yes, true. And what else? A means of saving a near-complete history of your online activities!
Whenever you visit a page that has the “I like”-Button, the button tells FB [Facebook] about that visit. And if you are logged in to FB, FB will be able to save the information that YOU visited THAT PAGE at THAT TIME. And since you are logged in to FB all the time out of convenience, FB has a complete profile of all pages that you ever visit (i.e of all the pages with this fiendish button, when was the last time you saw a page without?).
In short, I don’t intend to let this site be a party to such surreptitious automated corporate tracking and logging of the on-line activities of unsuspecting internet users.
OCTOBER 1, 2012 ADDENDUM
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