Yet another blog post about pools! This time there is a round up of “cool pools”.
The best by far is this “inverse pool” illusion created by having a shallow pool with a glass bottom above a room. To people above the pool it looks like others are walking around underwater. To those inside it looks like they are in the pool too. Pretty cool effect.
I recently found three blog postings with some pretty cool photos:
There are a few rubbish pics, but most of them are worth a look (note that you may have seen some of these in forwarded mails). Here are some of my favorites to whet your appetite.
HowStuffWorks has this article detailing colorblindness. Quite interesting reading – but there is quite a lot of detail. Included in the article is this demo simulating how the world looks to those who suffer from colorblindness.
Click on the buttons to see what the image looks like to people with different types of colorblindness. This means that they would not notice a difference in the image when the button is pressed.
When I read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth my imagination was caught by a part of the story where the heroes are lost without water for days and almost die of thirst. The superb Adrift and Survive the Savage Sea both tell stories about people struggling for survival while lost at sea. It seems that people can survive quite long without food, but lack of water kills pretty quickly.
How Stuff Works has a pretty detailed article on the subject at the moment. What are the answers?
At the end of the article they have included a little story about a hunger strike by some IRA prisoners in 1981. Nine of these guys starved themselves to death with one guy lasting 73 days without any food!
Wired has this gallery showing the prototype logos that were developed for Google in the early days. Ruth Kedar is a graphic designer who was working at Stanford University at the time and she “had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude.”
The actually gallery has quite a lot of descriptive text – this is from the final version of the logo:
“There were a lot of different color iterations. We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn’t follow the rules.”
Here are some of the iterations on the logo that we now all know so well.
I seem to be on a swimming pool theme… I just read about the biggest pool in the world. It is a saltwater pool in Chile that is truly monumental:
It is pretty amazing. Here is a link to a short report on the pool.
National Geographic has this photo of the National Aquatics Center in Beijing which will be used for the 2008 Olympics. They call it the “Water Cube” and I think that it looks really great.
The official site has a few more pics which also make it look amazing:
Wired has this photo gallery from a new book called An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. The photographer gets access to areas not normally open to the public and gets some interesting photos. Two that I liked are shown below.
These are “stainless-steel nuclear waste capsules” in a pool of water. There are almost 2000 capsules at this site in Washington State and the blue light is a kind of radiation.
And this is an “avian quarantine facility” in New York. All imported birds must be kept here for 30 days in order to prevent bird flu from getting into the country.
Here is an interesting set of photos showing the dunes reclaiming a little ghost town in Namibia. Abandoned since the 50’s the sand dunes have started shifting back through the town. Random, but beautiful.
I recently heard about a place called the Body Farm. It’s a 2.5-acre research area in the Tennessee where forensic anthropologists study the decomposition of human bodies. They have 150 corpses in various circumstances and stages of decay.
We have clothed and unclothed bodies, in the sun and the shade, in water. They’re in automobiles, trunks of cars, houses. What we’ve tried to do is reconstruct as many situations in which police find skeletal remains as possible.
They use the information in order to better deal with real crime scenes. Makes sense, but what a strange (and smelly) place to work. The image above shows a couple of bodies decomposing in a cage that prevents animals from getting at them.
Wired has an interview with the founder.