Mind-Bending archetecture

"Venice Architecture Biennale: Dutch architects NL present this series of images in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale."
(From De Zene)

For example :

What if airliners flew in the same V-formation as most birds?



And how would YOU feel if you saw THIS coming at you down the highway?


These are just two small snapshots of the complete works, which are all very well-done and really cool to look and think about. See the full images here :
http://www.dezeen.com/2008/09/12/virtual-realities-by-nl-architects/

"Summer Breeze"

Summer Breeze from Paul Staab on Vimeo.

Finnish Summer

Finnish Summer from Marco Menestrina on Vimeo.

Okay, since I'll probably be away from the internet for the next week, and since I found LOTS more great summer videos, I'm keeping the summer-video-theme running for another week.

Enjoy!

Britain from Above (WAY above)

"A new BBC series makes use of satellite technology to create stunning images of Britain from above. Mark Sanders reports. Andrew Marr presents the series Britain from Above, the first episode of which will be broadcast on Sunday 10 August at 2100 on BBC One. "




Video and photo have always had a strange relationship. Sometimes a video can show things that a photograph can not, but sometimes a photo can show things that a video can not. Specifically, a video is many, many photographs shown in rapid succession - one after another. What you see looks like smooth motion, but every frame (still image that makes up the video) shows only one moment in time. There are a couple ways to alter this - slow motion takes many more frames, and then plays them at a slower speed, so what we see on video appears to happen slower then it does in real life (in some cases,thousands of times slower - like popcorn popping.) Video can also be done in time-lapse, where frames are removed, so that action happens faster then it does in real life - such as taking the construction of a building shot for a year, and condensing it down to an hour-long video.

This video take yet ANOTHER approach. This video tracks the flight paths of airplanes, the connections of cell phones, and the paths cabs take through London, and shows it on a map. Eath path is shown by a line drawn on the map, like the path was actually drawn on the map. But instead of leaving each path on the map, even long after the airplane has landed, or the cab reached its destination, the paths fade away after a time. The result is a great composite, and a really cool video. Check it out here


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7539529.stm

Where the Hell is Matt?

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I know I embedded this video, but it actually gets better. . .Youtube is offering this video in high quality, so click the video, go to the youtube page for it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY) and click "watch in high quality" right below the bottom right corner of the video. It's MUCH better, and a feature that will hopefully be on ALL youtube videos soon. Going back on topic. . . . .

So, if you're wondering just who in the world this guy is, how he managed to travel around the world, and why he's dancing on the internet, check out his "about me" page here

http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/about.shtml,

and check out his homepage here
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/

Serious about archetecture. . . . .

Image from story/AP


"HUNTS POINT, Wash. — Rolling the waterfront house onto a barge on Lake Washington took just over 20 minutes. The house's maritime trip to British Columbia will take a bit longer.

In an effort to preserve a spectacular home at a bargain price, a Canadian family is moving the 3,360-square-foot, two-story house from its lakeshore location in this suburb east of Seattle to a site near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.

According to public filings, the former owners bought the home for $9.4 million; but they just wanted the 44,000-square-foot lot.

So they contacted Nickel Brothers House Moving USA Inc., which then listed the home for $335,000, including moving the entire thing."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,368952,00.html

View Earthrise from Mars

"The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

. . .

On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact the red-filter image was almost completely saturated, the Blue-Green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the infrared image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release. The moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera."


It may not look like much, but on that one tiny blue and green orb exists all six billion or so of us - and has existed, as far as we know, every human being ever made/created/evolved/whatevered. Everything that we know, and everything that we ever have known is contained on that little sphere.

Whats even more amazing is that twelve people from that little blue-green orb in the bottom left have actually managed to travel through space and walk on the surface of the moon, all the way on the other side of the picture. If that isn't amazing, then I don't know what is.


Image, caption, and full-size photo from
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/
multimedia/mro20080303earth.html

24 Hours of Air Traffic

Everyone at some point has used either Mapquest or Google Maps to locate something, and seen onscreen that little orange or red dot superimposed on a map above some place or other. The FAA does the exact same thing with airplanes. It knows and tracks where every airplane is in US airspace, and the data can be displayed just like that little dot in Google Maps. Except the FAA isn't tracking one airplane. It's tracking THOUSANDS of planes. Oh yeah - unlike buildings, the airplanes are moving. Put it all together, and you get a really cool animation.

Watch the video here, I know it gets a little slow after 30 seconds, but it picks up again and gets even cooler after the first minute. Explinations are included in the video, as the blog I'm linking to doesn't say all that much.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2007/11/24_hours_of_air_traffic_never_1.html