FIRE AND MATCHES ART

FIRE AND MATCHES ART

A bright spark artist has come up with incredible sculptures made from spent matches – and he doesn’t even smoke. IT specialist Stanislav Aristov began making the beautiful artwork to satisfy a burning desire to create something beautiful. Since then the 28-year-old has gone on to fashion some amazing sculptures from a smokey butterfly to a burning heart.

 

 

Farmer plants heart-shaped meadow for late wife | One farmer’s enormous labor of love

Farmer plants heart-shaped meadow for late wife

One farmer’s enormous labor of love

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It might not be the Taj Mahal but the sentiment is the same for Winston Howes, the English farmer who created this beautiful memorial for his wife.

A devoted farmer painstakingly planted a tribute to his late wife, Janet, using 6,000 oak trees to etch out a giant heart in the middle of his field in South Gloucestershire, England. Howes, 70, and a gardener spent weeks planning and setting out each oak after his wife died suddenly 15 years ago. He planted the fledgling trees across a six-acre field after carefully marking out a heart shape in one half of the grass, with the heart pointing in the direction of her childhood home. The stunning crop was captured in its full beauty after a balloonist sailed over the farmhouse and photographed the field from the air.

When his wife Janet died fifteen years ago, Howes carefully planted 6,000 oak trees in the shape of a heart, the end of which points to her childhood home, and that labor of love has now grown into her own sacred grove of sorts in South Gloucestershire, England.

 

Man takes virtual augmented reality girlfriend for a walk in the park

The proliferation of relatively cheap motion sensors in recent years, combined with development tools such as Microsoft's Kinect SDK, means that augmented reality (AR) hacks are really starting to take off. As if to showcase just what's possible with current consumer AR tech, a Japanese YouTube user has produced a video of a virtual date with computerized J-pop star Hatsune Miku.

Using Asus's Xtion Pro sensor, "alsionesvx" takes Miku to a park, demonstrating her position in the real world by having her stand behind a tree. He even interacts with her, moving her tie and hitting her on the top of the head, with pre-programmed results. It's only towards the end of the video that the less wholesome potential of this technology comes into focus — future users might not be so restrained, particularly without a YouTube audience.

VINTAGE EXERCISE MACHINES

VINTAGE EXERCISE MACHINES

 

A nice collection of photos of exercise machines from circa 1920.

 

 

“CRAZY HOUSE” IN VIETNAM

“CRAZY HOUSE” IN VIETNAM

 

This house in Dalat, Vietnam, is officially called Hang Nga Guesthouse. However all locals refer to this unconventional building as “Crazy house”. Crazy house’s architect is Hang Nga, a woman whose father was the President of Vietnam back in 1980s. The building’s overall design resembles a giant tree, incorporating sculptured design elements representing natural forms such as animals, mushrooms, spider webs and caves.

 

Images source

 

If Titanic Had Twitter

Today marks 100 years since the R.M.S. Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, taking the lives of over 1,500 souls  with her in those icy waters. And over the last year or so, the commercial side of the enterprise has been heating up at an amazing pace.

The Titanic has always had an allure about it - an amazing feat of engineering that was brought down on its maiden voyage, tales of heroism and chivalry (women and children first), class struggles and unforeseen safety needs. Indeed, it now stands as one of the greatest lessons of all time of man's hubris in the face of nature, and will forever remind us that we need to plan for the worst possible contingencies despite our confidence in our own technological advances.

Naturally, the 100th anniversary brings about its own special observance from longtime admirers as well as those who may have just discovered the story. The Wall Street Journal tallied some of those events and products ("Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Titanic Business 100 Years Later"), such as viewings of A Night to Remember, memorial celebrations in significant locations like Belfast, Southampton and Cherbourg, a Titanic fragrance from salvaged samples of essences carried by a perfume maker who traveled on the ship, recreations of the meals, and much more.

But one of the more creative acknowledgments of the anniversary has to be from The History Press, a British publishing company that started the @TitanicRealTime Twitter account to chronicle the progress of the ship as if sent from aboard the ship itself. The tweets began exactly a month before and have picked up pace on the last day of the ship's voyage on April 14-15.

Each of the tweets is hashtagged with the appropriate person or category of people aboard from which it would have come. For example, crew members, officers, engineers, the captain, first class passengers, Thomas Andrew (the ship's builder), the bandleader, passengers in the lifeboats, the Carpathia (the ship that rescued the survivors) and more all have their own hashtags. And as the events unfold, we're able to witness the observations firsthand - sometimes very eerily.

Here are some representative tweets from the account (which has over 400 in total):

A chilling and haunting reminder of what happened that fateful night. It's amazing to think of all of the engineering advances that went into what was then the largest moving object in the world. There are a number of things that went wrong on that voyage that led to the death of so many - the way the instructions to port round the iceberg, the reversal of the engines, the safety regulations that didn't keep up with the advances in the ship's size, the speed with which the ship sank, etc. But just in terms of the advance of communication, the Marconi wireless that they had on board seems so primitive compared to what we have at our fingertips with smartphones every day now. Think of how different the outcome might have been with better communication tools!

May we be thankful for what we have at our disposal today and forever remember the passengers, crew and officers of the Titanic.

I leave you with this short playlist of songs that were said to have been the last played by the band as the passengers assembled for lifeboats: "Song d'Automne" and two different versions of "Nearer, My God To Thee" from the 1958 film A Night to Remember and of course the 1997 film Titanic.

In addition to those heartfelt notes and tragic images, I also like to listen to Gavin Bryar's very odd and mesmerizing album The Sinking of the Titanic, with its haunting sounds of creaking metal, muffled voices and wistful strings.