Posted by Alex in Baby & Kids on September 3, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Fearful of germs and crime (after a spate of lurid killings of children), Japanese parents can now bring their children to the super-safe and germ-free Fantasy Kids Resort park:
Mothers bringing their children to Fantasy Kids Resort have to fill out application forms and present IDs for annual membership. About 20 uniformed staff members watch over the children and 16 security cameras hang from the ceilings.
Visitors also have to check their shoes in a foot locker — for security as well as hygienic reasons.
"It prevents crime because you can’t run away barefoot," said Satoru Hagiwara, president of Fantasyresort Co., the operator of the park.
The staff is also fastidious about cleanliness. Mothers who arrive with strollers are asked to wipe the wheels with anti-bacterial soap. The park’s big sand box uses sterilized sand.
Matthew Sheil designed and constructed this 747-400 simulator in his home!
In 1998 I began the design and constuction of my 747-400 simulator.
The approximate size of the simulator is 13ft wide x 11ft long and 9ft high. It will include every switch and panel in the 747-400. The Simulator has been built to accept full motion and visuals at a later date.
Star-endorsed basketball shoes have long been one of the great rip-offs in footwear. Nike wants $130 for a pair of Zoom Kobe I sneakers and $110 for Zoom LeBron IIIs. You’ll pay at least $90 for Allen Iverson’s signature shoes, the Answer. (The question: What costs too much?)
But now cheap is suddenly cool. New York Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury has just put his name on a line of cheap athletic wear and shoes, dubbed Starbury. Marbury’s signature Starbury One basketball shoes retail for a mere $15.
The area is called San Zhi. There are no named architects since the whole site was commissioned by the government and several local firms. They were trying to create a posh luxurious vacation spot for the affluent and rich streaming out of Taipei. Now this is where things get weird. The local papers say there were numerous accidents during its construction, and as news spread to the urbanites of the island state, nobody wanted to vacation there, much less visit. Locals say the area is now haunted by those who died in vain and because they are not remembered, they linger there unable to pass on.
This explains why the area was abandoned. If the site is haunted, no amount of redevelopment is going to bring the masses to that spot. Even demolishing it is out of the question because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is a HUGE no-no in Asian culture.
Posted by Alex in Pictures on September 3, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Texas A&M
From the website:
Spirit acquired this view of the Martian sunset from Gusev Crater on April 23, 2005. Using data from images such as this, scientists have learned that twilight on Mars is longer than on Earth, lasting for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. Dust high in the atmosphere scatters light to the night side of the planet. Similar twilights are seen on Earth following major volcanic eruptions.
A huge mysterious door-like structure has recently been discovered in the Hayu Marca mountain region of Southern Peru. Hayu Marca, 35 kilometers from the city of Puno has long been revered by local Indians as the "City of the Gods", and has never been fully explored because of the rugged mountain terrain. Although no actual city has ever been discovered, many of the rock formations of the region resemble buildings and artificial structures. The door, or the "Puerta de Hayu Marca" ( Gate of the gods/spirits) has been at some time in the distant past carved out of a natural rock face and in all measures exactly seven meters in height by seven meters in width with a smaller alcove in the center at the base, which measures in at just under two meters in height.
Michel Guyot is building his castle the medieval way:
Once upon a time, deep in the forests of Burgundy, a man was haunted by a vision. He dreamed of building a castle, with turrets, great walls and a moat. Some people wondered if he was mad.
This was, after all, 1996.
And yet Michel Guyot set out to build his castle the hard way — the medieval way. With only hammers and chisels to carve the stones. With only horses to cart the rock. Without power tools.
Ten years later, Guedelon castle is about one-third finished, with imposing sandstone walls that rise up out of the red Burgundy soil. It’s a living history lesson and a successful tourism project: Last year, 245,000 visitors admired the work of Guedelon’s stonecutters, carpenters, potters, rope-makers and blacksmiths.
ACTION PHILOSOPHERS is a comic book series detailing the lives and thoughts of history’s A-list brain trust in a hip and humorous way that proves that philosophy is not just the province of boring tweed-enveloped college professors.
Ever wonder why we haven’t been visited by aliens yet? Or, for those who said that we have been visited by alians, then: Ever wonder why not even more aliens come to visit?
I blame pluto: turned out we sent the wrong map for our alien overlords friends! The Pioneer plaque [wiki], which was put on board the spacecraft Pioneer 10 and 11 showed 9 planets! No wonder they can’t find us!
Jeff de Boer makes intricate armors for cats and dogs (amongst other very cool stuff). This one is titled "16th Century Samurai Siamese". See more: Link
Posted by Alex in Pictures on September 3, 2006 at 12:10 am
Extreme Origami. From the website:
In the dojo of the origami purist, there are only two rules: The folder may use just one sheet of square paper, and the paper cannot be cut or torn in any way. Following these rules to make a figure like a peace crane, with four basic features—a head, a tail, and two wings—is relatively easy, and origamists traditionally proceeded by trial and error, unfolding and refolding a piece of paper until it started to resemble, say, a swan. For hundreds of years, origami’s most complex patterns topped out at 20 steps.
These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art by writing a computer program that can generate the blueprint for ultracomplex origami sculptures. Even with digital assistance, figuring out the sequence of folds that will create a beetle and all its ornaments is a mathematical problem of staggering complexity. Still, the reigning champion of intricate origami is a 23-year-old Japanese savant named Satoshi Kamiya. Unaided by software, he recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.
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