The other day I was driving past the 2010 stadium being built in Green Point and I was amazed by how far it seems to have come. I still worry that they aren’t going to be ready in time, but it does look pretty impressive.
Here is a site that posts photos of the progress as it moves along. The ones below are from 21 April 2008. Long way to go….
Wired recently had an article on this Swiss pilot who has spend the last few years developing some rocket wings that he straps to his back. Basically he jumps out of a plane, unfolds the wings and powers up the rockets. He is able to steer pretty well (enough to do barrel rolls), build up some good speeds (over 300kph) and crucially land safely.
Very cool, but I’m sure it’s not as safe as he makes out.
This must have been pretty freaky. It seems that the pachyderm is in a rather ‘friendly’ mood if you know what I mean – still scary though…
Click for a larger view of the image – the guys expression is pretty cool and you can see what he is looking at
NewScientist has an awesome headline on one of it’s stories today: “Great tits enjoying the warmer weather”. I think that one might get quite a lot of traffic…
Anyway, the article is actually about how a species of birds in the UK known as great tits have responded to global warming by laying their eggs earlier. They need to time their laying pretty precisely and over the last 30 years their laying has shifted 2 weeks earlier in the spring.
So here is that picture of some young great tits:
I like this photo. At first I didn’t realise what was going on, but it shows the tracks of a rabbit moving across some snow when BAM an owl nails it. You can see the wings of the attacking bird imprinted in the snow – and no more rabbit tracks…
China is an amazing place – massive, beautiful, and so different to what we Westerners are used to. It is a wonderfully beautiful country and I have blogged about it before.
National Geographic has this short photo essay of aerial photographs of China – “China From Above“. Below are some of the better images.
This one shows limestone pinnacles along the Li River
Blooming fields of rapeseed weaving through the hills. I like the way these steep hills look as if they regularly pop out of a flat landscape.
This one is interesting. They have planted rows of vegetation alongside the roads to keep the desert sands back. The buildings dotting the roadside every few miles house the workers who maintain the greenbelt.
I don’t want to further confuse people about the concepts of evolution, but this is kinda funny…
This is really cool…
This is a pretty cool extreme close up of a grain of salt and a peppercorn. It was taken using an electron scanning microscope and the original was in black and white – it was coloured digitally. Still pretty cool. Source
Here is a weird and interesting page showing pictures from an exhibition of portraits of people before and after their deaths. It’s pretty haunting to see – one of those things that gets you to think about things differently. Clicking through to the pictures enhances the effect because there are little excerpts about the people before and after death.
This is the text from the guy on the left above:
Peter Kelling, 64
First portrait: November 29 2003
Peter Kelling had never been seriously ill in his life. He was a civil servant working for the health and safety executive, and didn’t allow himself any vices. And yet one day he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. By the time I met him, the cancer had spread to his lungs, his liver and his brain. “I’m only 64,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t be wasting away like this”Second portrait: December 22 2003
At night he was restless, he told me, and kept turning things over in his mind. He cried a lot. But he didn’t talk about what was troubling him. In fact he hardly talked at all and his silence felt like a reproach to those around him. But there was one thing that Peter Kelling followed to the very last and that was the fortunes of the local football team. Until the day he died, every game was recorded on the chart on the door of his room
The associated blog says that a lot of people are offended by these pics. Bollocks… Death is a fact of life and these guys all consented to being part of the exhibition. Facing mortality might be distressing but instead of getting offended you should explore your feelings and thoughts. Hard thoughts should be faced not hidden behind outrage.