Friday 20 August 2010

This photo won the London Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award for 2009.



Then, several Spanish photographers recognized that wolf, and revealed the chance image was a setup.

Im not sure if i care because this image looks amazing.

Thursday 19 August 2010

Another fox related link but a bit more obscure

Karen O'Leary creates hand-cut city maps from paper. She just finished Paris!

This is just too amazing!

Wednesday 18 August 2010

Saw this and loved it

I saw this and loved it i have a couple of friends who will love this




You can actually buy this from www.thinkgeek.com



Im so sorry matt.

I recently discovered Fox-Tossing, a 17th/18th century European pastime that is exactly what it sounds like.
People would go out in a field and set up a little fenced-in court. Then high-society types would stand, in pairs, holding slack ropes. Then a bunch of foxes would be released into the court. When the foxes ran over the ropes, the players pulled the ropes tight, launching the foxes up into the air. Repeat until all foxes are dead.



Fleming's Deutsche Jaeger (published in 1719) produced this
image, and commented on it saying "Skilled male tossers could toss a fox 24 ft. high. At a famous fox-tossing in Dresden there were tossed some 687 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers, 21 wild cats, and at the end 34 young wild boar and 3 wolves...."

This is both funny and wrong!

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Richard Smith, a 41-year-old care worker from Carlisle, England, has legally changed his name to Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand: "It's just a strange name I like the sound of." English and Welsh name-changing procedures are much simpler than US equivalents: the ancient tradition of "deed-poll" name change has made it possible for people to change to all kinds of wonderful and wacky things

Freedom of speach but not of music

In 1940 Igor Stravinsky re-orchestrated 'The Star Spangled Banner' for the Boston Symphony. Someone alerted the Boston police, who arrived at Symphony Hall, confiscated the instrumental parts to the Stravinsky orchestration and arrested Stravinsky for 'tampering with public property.
Igor Stravinsky



The Hunch back of Notre Dame, fact or fiction?


New evidence suggests that the iconic character of Quasimodo was not entirely the brainchild of Victor Hugo, author of the famed 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).

Historians recently found references to a "hunchback sculptor" working at the cathedral in British sculptor Henry Sibson's memoirs, now in the Tate Archive. From The Telegraph:

In one entry, he writes:

"the French government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and it was now in progress ... I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures for Notre Dame and here I met with a Mons. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse (no this does not mean sex) with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers."


In a later entry, Sibson writes about working with the same group of sculptors on another project outside Paris, where he again mentions the reclusive government sculptor, this time recalling his name as "Mon. Le Bossu". Le Bossu is French for "the hunchback".

He writes: "Mon Le Bossu (the Hunchback) a nickname given to him and I scarcely ever heard any other. "


William Dieterle's 1939 version of the Hunch back

Wednesday 11 August 2010

See its out to get us one by one

The Akansha Food Products unit in Lucknow, India has claimed its 6th victim.
A worker slipped into a 6 foot vat of Tomato Ketchup. The woman was unable to swin to the top so five other workers jumped in to save her, these workers were overcome by the fumes and also died. Two workers are still critical in hospital.

Moral of this story is donteat Tomato Ketchup as you are killing innocent people.

Sunday 1 August 2010

A little geek history

The idea for a laptop was first developed in the late '60s, Alan Kay of Xerox then wrote about coming up with a 'personal, portable information manipulator' in a 1972 paper, calling it the 'Dynabook'.

Alan is credited for conceiving the idea of a portable computer in 1968, when computers still weighed over 100 pounds and ate punch cards.

His concept was a very thin, highly dynamic device that weighed no more than 2 pounds, which would be an ideal tool for children to learn programming and science. Alan’s Dynabook was never made, but characteristics of his concept can be seen in the mobile computers we have today.

Steve Jobs (mr apple) took a tour of Xerox PARC in 1979, and some say that his visit is still unfolding with the release of the iPad, which resembles Alan Kay’s description of the Dynabook.

Steve Jobs this month personally mailed an iPad to Alan, who praised Apple’s tablet as “fantastically good” for drawing, painting and typing.

The first commercially available portable computer was the IBM 5100. The first flip laptop appeared in 1982 and was the GRiD Compass 1100, which was used by NASA scientists and cost $8,150.




IBM 5100



GRiD Compass 1100

Thank you Mr Alan Kay