The British Library has announced that the Klencke Atlas will have its first-ever public showing this summer as part of a map exhibition.
It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to [Charles II] by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.
At the time of its creation, it was intended as “an encyclopaedic summary of the world.”
Link. Previously on Neatorama: The [other] Largest Book in the World
Comment (3)
Permalink
Please share:  email
this 
|
Photo: Snorky [wikipedia]
In the coal stripmine Hambach in Germany, there was a machine so big that it boggles the mind.the Bagger 288:
This is the 45,000 ton Bagger 288 digger built by Krupps in Germany, and it is the largest land based machine built by humans on the face of the planet.
It’s not fast, moving at about 2 meters a minute, but boy can it shift rubble.
It can dig up 240,000 cubic meters of dirt a day. That’s about the same as a football field sized hole that’s 30 metres deep.
And why do you need a machine so absurdly big? So we can strip mine coal out of the ground, transport it hundreds of miles on massive trains and take it to power stations where we burn it to make electricity. And where does quite a chunk of this electricity go? Strangely back to the digger, as it requires 16.56 megawatts of electricity to operate. You’re not going to find a lot of solar panels on this leviathan.
Once it starts digging, it literally will not stop. Anything in its path will be chewed up, including this 60 ton bulldozer. How, I ask you, do you miss a 60 ton bulldozer?
But what is the true purpose of such a machine? Let’s all welcome our new digger overlord, as explained by Rathergood.
|
Comment (37)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
When he gets bored with doing double backflips on his bike, skydiving without a chute, or inventing new sports like the Hydrojump, Travis Pastrana takes life easy with a casual drive in Long Beach, CA. Watch him sail this rally car 269 feet with the precision landing of an experienced pilot. Don’t miss his celebratory backflip into the water!
26-year-old Travis Pastrana set the world record for a rally car jump on New Year’s Eve, flying his Subaru 269 feet over water and landing on a barge in the harbor of Long Beach, California. The record blew away the old one set by Ken Block at 171 feet. Pastrana had to throw the car sideways and slam it against a wall at the end of the barge to stop the car, as he said the ramp was slick with dew. (Brian Lohnes)
|
Comment (3)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
A Japanese man has set a new world record for “maximum time aloft” for a paper airplane.
With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds. Using a plane specially designed for “long haul” flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.
There is a YouTube video of the record-setting throw, although it is not particularly exciting.
Mr.Toda has also announced plans to launch 100 paper planes from the orbiting International Space Station. The planes would be made with heat-resistant paper capable of withstanding temperatures of 250C and wind speeds of mach 7; he has not solve the problem of how to track the planes during their descent to earth.
Link. Photograph: Koji Sasahara/AP
|
Comment (13)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
I’ve been a big fan of the panorama photos of Jeffrey Martin of 360Cities for a while now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that he has just taken what could be the world’s largest spherical panorama, an 18-gigapixel shot of Prague.
Here’s how he did it:
I used a Canon 5d mark 2 and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a robotic device which turned the camera in tiny, precise increments, in every direction. All together, 40 gigabytes of images were shot. These images were then stitched together using PTGui. The resulting panorama was adjusted for color, contrast, sharpness, etc. in Photoshop. Afterwards, the image was cut into lots of “tiles” and uploaded to our server. When you view the image online, you only load a few of these “tiles” at one time.
How long did you spend stitching this panorama?
Between loading the initial raw files into the computer, and having the panorama stitched, it took about a week. It took 3 additional weeks to fine-tune the image.
What kind of computer did you use?
I used a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM. After a week of frustration, I also bought an SSD, which helped to speed up some tasks a bit. If I will make this image again, I will buy a new computer.
What is dimension of this panorama, and size it takes on disk?The final image exists as a 120 gigabyte photoshop large (PSB) file. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints. The panorama online exists as a few hundred thousand small tiles (in JPEG format), and they take up about 1 gigabyte of disk space.
Jeffrey was kind enough to invite all of us on a treasure hunt: in a couple of days, he’ll release a set of clues for you to find 30 things in the photo. The first person who got it right will win $1000.
Links: The Panorama | The Treasure hunt – Thanks Jeffrey!
|
Comment (8)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Around the world, people constantly have the drive to be immortalized in the Guinness Book of Records. Some try to fit the most billiard balls in their mouth, while others work together to make the world’s largest food of its type. Web Urbanist has a collection of the later and the results are somehow both sickening and mouth-watering.
|
Comment (4)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Recession? What recession? Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," has been sold at auction for a record price of $662,500:
"This is known as the black tulip of U.S. literature," said Francis Wahlgren, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s in New York, which expects to get from $500,000 to $700,000 for the book on Friday. To the best of Wahlgren’s recollection, the record is $250,000 for a copy of "Tamerlane" sold at auction nearly two decades ago.
No more than 40 or 50 copies of "Tamerlane" were printed, and only 12 remain. Poe’s name doesn’t even grace the cover of the 40-page book, which is credited to "a Bostonian."
|
Comment (0)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Photo via World Records Academy
55-year-old Indian citizen Kashi Samaddar has completed an almost-seven year trip around the world. He has visited all 194 countries in the world, thereby setting a world record.
He spent £350,000 to visit every country on earth in the shortest time possible and thereby earnt himself a mention in the Guinness Book of Records – just don’t expect to be thrilled by his pictures.
Samaddar’s mission was inspired by trouble he had in South Africa in 2002 over his Indian passport. Samaddar then vowed to visit every country in the world to show it could be done.
The globe trotting adventurer was determined to complete the whole trip using his Indian passport – despite opportunities to adopt Australian and Canadian citizenship – as he wanted to prove an Indian could travel the world.
He also wanted to highlight the difficulties some nationalities encounter obtaining visas to enter countries – a problem he is very familiar with.
‘The most difficult visa to get was Moldova, which took me almost three years with many rejections,’ he said.
‘The problem isn’t with big countries like America, England or places in Europe, a lot of the time it’s smaller countries who don’t know what they should be doing.’
To abide by Guinness Book rules, he traveled using only public transportation. The rules state you only have to set foot in a country to count it, which may explain Samaddar less-than-impressive tourist photographs.
The photo above is of Kashi’s last place visited: Serbia Kosova on May 27 of 2008.
Links: Article at Daily Mail | More at World Records Academy.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
|
Comment (190)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine named ten people as Adventurers of the Year, and invite you to rate each of them to help them determine the readers’ choice top adventurer. One of the profiles features 37-year-old Dean S. Potter, rock climber, tightrope walker, and BASE jumper. Potter set a world record in 2009 by jumping off a high face of Switzerland’s Eiger in a wingsuit and sailing for almost three minutes! The trip was 9,000 feet vertically and four miles horizontally. Links to all adventurers. Link to voting. -Thanks, Ethan!
|
Comment (6)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
A new species of golden orb spider has been found in South Africa. It is the biggest spider ever found that spins a web -and what a web it is!
The female of the new species of golden orb weaver spider has a body one and a half inches long with a leg span of five inches and weaves a web more than three feet wide.
The tiny male, however, has a leg span of just one inch. The variation of the Nephila species, named as Nephila Komaci, was discovered by US and Slovenian researchers in Africa and Madagascar
Nephila Komaci has a limited range and is believed to be an endangered species. Link -via Unique Daily
|
Comment (6)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
The largest shopping mall in the world is no longer the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. The South China Mall near Guangzhou, China is twice as big! This is not a success story; there are only about a dozen stores open in the giant facility. However, because the mall is considered “too big to fail”, it is kept open with a staff working every day. The series POV tells the story in a 13 minute video. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
|
Comment (17)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Poe the Clydesdale is an impressive 6′ 8″ tall and his owner, Shereen Thomspon, is seeking to have him admitted into the Guinness Book of World Records. Poe weighs over 3,000 pounds and stands at 80.8 inches high. The current record holder is shorter by a mere .8 inches.
The giant horse eats 10 pounds of grain and drinks 75 gallons of water per day. “He is extremely popular, but his size always means people keep a cautious distance from him — although they shouldn’t, as he is a real puppy,” Thompson said.
|
Comment (11)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
To get a little perspective, this is what the Burj Dubai (previously at Neatorama) would look like if it were built in downtown Manhattan. Gizmodo has a chart comparing some of the world’s tallest buildings if you’d like to envision others. Link -via YesButNoButYes
|
Comment (3)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Asylum blog has a pretty nifty post about 10 really old dudes and their jobs. For example:
Oldest cop: Manuel Curry, 84
Sadly, Sergeant Major Manuel Curry died earlier this summer. But he did so as America’s oldest active duty police officer, having spent 63 years patrolling New Orleans — no picnic. In fact, Curry gained acclaim for holding his post during Katrina, even as many of his much younger colleagues either abandoned the city or joined in the looting.Oldest plumber: Pierre John "Buster" Martin, 102
The London centenarian has garnered praise for his work ethic — he refused to take a day off for his 100th birthday and, at 101, attempted to go to work the day after being attacked by a group of thugs. Although rumors have circulated that Buster is really only 96.Oldest world leader: Robert Mugabe, 85
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe may be the number one argument for a mandatory retirement age: The former-revolutionary hero, and current oldest member of the heads-of-state club, is considered by many to be the world’s worst despot.
Good ol’ Mugabe! It’s good that he’s keepin’ active with all the dictator stuff: Link – Thanks Alex!
|
Comment (5)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
James Bowthorpe of London pedaled his bicycle 18,000 miles around the world in 174 days, 20 fewer days than the world record holder. He arrived back in Hyde Park to complete the journey on Saturday.
Mr Bowthorpe cycled through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States – taking flights where necessary – before coming back to Europe.
This week he pedalled through Spain and France before catching a ferry across the English Channel to Portsmouth where he met his mother and father.
He finished his ride back at his Hyde Park starting point accompanied by his brothers and 20 other cyclists.
The trip around the world raised £55,000 for research into Parkinson’s disease. Link -via Unique Daily
|
Comment (8)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Marcelo Bezos has been collecting pennies for the past 35 years, and when his father-in-law died from colorectal cancer, he decided to do something to raise awareness for the disease: building a record-breaking pyramid out of pennies!
Here’s the video clip of the Penny Pyramid Project from 2006 – the structure contained some 280,000 pennies (Marcelo’s most recent pyramid contains over 435,000 pennies):
[YouTube - turn your speakers down if you don't like O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, the techno version]
Thanks Marcelo!
|
Comment (12)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Move over, Bao Xishun and Leonid Stadnik (who was stripped of his title) the Guinness Book of World Records has certified that 27-year-old Sultan Kosen from Turkey is the world’s tallest man. Kosen is eight feet and one inch tall! What does Kosen want to do with his new fame?
“The first thing I want to do is have a car that I can fit in, but more than that I want to get married,” he said.
“Up until now it’s been really difficult to find a girlfriend. I’ve never had one, they were usually scared of me. I’m hoping now I will find one.”
He went on: “Hopefully now that I’m famous I’ll be able to meet lots of girls. I’d like to get married.”
Link to story (with video). Link to a biography and more pictures. -via reddit
|
Comment (7)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Sean Konrad caught a 48-pound rainbow trout. That’s a world record. But should it be? The trout he caught was a genetically-modified fish that escaped from a fish farm. It has three sets of chromosomes, which makes it sterile but able to grow unnaturally big. Konrad’s brother Adam caught the previous world record trout in 2007, which was also genetically modified. Whether this counts as cheating depends on how you see the sport of fishing. No matter where the fish came from, the fisherman still landed it, which involves a certain set of skills. However, fisherman elsewhere don’t have the opportunity to even try to catch a trout that big, because they don’t exist in nature. What do you think? Link
|
Comment (20)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Sarah, a cheetah at the Cincinnati Zoo, set a world record for the 100 meter dash today by covering the distance in 6.13 seconds. The event was held at Mast Farm, the zoo’s cheetah breeding facility. The race is a remote contest between Sarah and Zaza, a cheetah at Cheetah Outreach in South Africa. Zaza is expected to run her race later this month. To compare, the human world record is 9.58 seconds, held by Usain Bolt. Link to story. Link to Sarah’s blog. -via Metafilter
|
Comment (6)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Thousands of people turned out for an attempt to break the world record for the number of people doing a simultaneous Thriller dance in Mexico City. Organizer Javier Hildago says 12,937 participated on Saturday, which would have been Michel Jackson’s 51st birthday. Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records will take some time to determine whether all those people completed the entire dance routine. The current official record is 242 dancers from the College of William & Mary. Link
|
Comment (3)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Angelo Cammarata is finally retiring. The 95-year-old bartender has been serving customers at Cammarata’s in Pittsburgh for 77 years. That puts him in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-serving bartender ever. The family bar has been sold and will be under new management in a few weeks. The new owners asked Cammarata to stay on, but he is looking forward to taking it easy.
“Camm,” as people call him, started serving beer at his father’s North Side grocery the moment Prohibition ended at midnight on April 7, 1933. The memory is as clear to him as the strike of the library clock that signaled it was time to start opening bottles of Fort Pitt. His immigrant father built a bar on that site in 1935 and Angelo kept working there, taking a break to serve in the Navy in World War II.
Cammarata says the work kept him young. Link -via Fark
(image credit: Bob Batz Jr./Post-Gazette)
|
Comment (1)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
|
Comment (11)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Some people will go to great lengths to get into the Guinness World Records. Take, for example, this Chinese bride that got married in a wedding dress with a train more than 1.2 miles (2 km) long:
It took guests more than three hours to roll out the gown, complete with 9,999 silk red roses attached to it, in the northeastern province of Jilin, state news agency Xinhua said.
"Both the length of the dress and the number silk roses pinned on the wedding dress can make history," the report quoted groom Zhao Peng as saying.
Zhao, who has applied to Guinness World Records, said he was inspired after seeing a story on the previous record holder in Romania, where the dress measured just over 1.5 km.
"I do not want a cliche wedding parade or banquet," he said.
Link (photo: Reuters/Stringer)
|
Comment (8)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Think you can blow a pretty good-sized soap bubble? Chances are, it’s nothing like the creations of ‘Bubbleologist’ Samsam Bubbleman:
Samsam (real name Sam Heath) was aiming to pop the Guinness World Record set in 2005 in Minnesota, U.S., for a bubble of 105.4 cubic feet. He is not sure of the precise volume of his attempt in Finsbury Park, North London, but it stretched to 20ft by 5ft by 5ft at its biggest.
He is now waiting for official confirmation. ‘I’m confident it has obliterated the former record,’ he said.
Samsam, pictured with his creation, refused to reveal the recipe for his bubble mixture, saying it is the secret to his success.
‘With the right stuff you can make big bubbles with anything – a coat-hanger or even just your hands,’ he said. He developed the top-secret mixture over 20 years of trial and error.
The professional bubble-maker has been described as ‘the Willy Wonka of Bubbles’ by DJ Chris Evans.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
|
Comment (5)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Jake Bronstein of Zoomdoggle (featured previously on Neatorama) set a record for longest whisper chain, passing a message successfully through 59 people. The message was a marriage proposal to his girlfriend! Link (embedded video) -via Metafilter
|
Comment (6)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
22-year-old Tyler Bradt plunged over Palouse Falls in eastern Washington and set a world record for a kayak descent. The fall was 186 feet, which he covered in less than four seconds.
As rescue teams waited at the base of the falls Bradt calmly steered his fiberglass kayak into the raging water.
After disappearing under the water he emerged within six seconds with his broken paddle and sprained wrist.
‘Considering the waterfall, the injuries were pretty minor,’ he said.
The previous record for a kayak descent was 127 feet. Link -via Unique Daily
|
Comment (17)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
You’ve heard plenty about how the US beat the Soviets to the moon in 1969. There was another lesser-known exploratory scoop in January of 1960, when US Navy marine specialist Lieutenant Don Walsh and oceanographer Jacques Piccard climbed aboard the Trieste, a deep sea bathysphere designed by Piccard’s father Auguste Piccard, and dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It was the first time human beings traveled to the deepest part of the earth’s oceans -seven miles down!
At approximately four hours into their descent–several thousand feet above the sea floor–a sharp clang sounded through the pressure sphere and the vehicle shuddered violently. Once their wincing subsided, the men did what they could to inspect the craft and its condition. It seemed that the water pressure at this never-before-encountered depth–six tons per square inch–had cracked the outer pane of the lucite window. For the moment the vehicle itself remained watertight, but the damage was worrisome. The Trieste was outfitted with a few safety systems; for instance, the ballast doors were held closed by electromagnets, so in the event of electrical failure the doors would fall open and drop the ballast, causing the vehicle to rise to the surface. But such systems would be of no help to the men inside if the 1,000 atmospheres of pressure crushed their delicate passenger compartment. Moreover, no other vehicle in existence was capable of reaching such depths, which meant that if her float tank became compromised there was no chance of rescue. Nevertheless, the stalwart scientists opted to press on.
It was also the last time anyone dived that deep. Like the space race, once it had been done, no one saw the use in continuing to pay for such risky adventures. Read the entire story at Damn Interesting. Link
|
Comment (6)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
17-year-old Zac Sunderland arrived home in California Thursday after a year of sailing around the world solo in his 36-foot sailboat named the Intrepid. He is now the youngest person to ever pull off such a stunt. Sunderland covered 27,500 miles and dealt with pirates and severe storms.
“The hardest constantly was the tiredness,” he said. “I mean, you get over the loneliness, but tiredness, it’s an ongoing thing. Half the time I haven’t slept in 48 hours and it’s just hard to get enough rest.”
Sunderland said he made some good contacts along the way.
“It’s interesting just thinking back to the different places in the world because I have so many friends in different parts of the world that are like family, you know, and all these different experiences,” he said.
Link to story. Link to website. -via J-Walk Blog
(image credit: Lisa Gizara)
|
Comment (7)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Biologist Charles Anderson has uncovered what he believes to be the longest migration route of any insect in the world. He plotted the appearance of the dragonflies known as globe skimmers in the Maldives and deduced that they must fly from Africa!
In Uganda, they appear twice each year in March or April and again in September, while further south in Tanzania and Mozambique they appear in December and January.
That strongly suggest that the dragonflies take advantage of the moving weather systems and monsoon rains to complete an epic migration from southern India to east and southern Africa, and then likely back again, a round trip of 14,000 to 18,000km.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
|
Comment (1)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
|
Comment (2)
Permalink
Please share: email
this
|
Got
a neat story? Share it with the world by writing your very own Neatorama
blog post with the Upcoming
Queue. Who knows, you might just win something ... 
