Your public servants are hard at work, innovating at the intersection of waste, love and water. Make a Valentine’s Day reservation with your romantic counterpart to visit this spot in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, as per the press release:
Department of Environmental Protection Announces Second Annual Valentine’s Day Tours of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant
For Those Seeking an Alternative Valentine’s Day Experience, a Tour of the Greenpoint Plant Will Both Educate Visitors on the Essential Wastewater Treatment Process and Provide Breathtaking Views of the City from Atop the Famous Digester Eggs
Fresh maple syrup in two maple leaf-shaped bottles, with other bottles behind. Police officials have arrested three men who allegedly siphoned the sweet treat from 16,000 storage barrels stored in a Quebec warehouse.
We were not sure what to think at first, and were not sure anyone would believe it either. But seeing is believing thanks to this NPR follow up story:
A couple of recent posts by Crist, and the design process he mentioned, have led us to add some new design-oriented sites to our scanning process. This one may not be the most visited, but it has some interesting material:
Archstoyanie is a creative festival that kicks off every year in the forest of Nikola-Lenivets, Russia. This year, the architects from Salto created a performance piece called ‘Fast Track’ – a 170 foot long track made of a trampoline! Designers Maarja Kask, Karli Luik, and Ralf Lõoke built the Fast Track to challenge the concept of infrastructure that only focuses on technical and functional aspects and tends to be ignorant to its surroundings.
Click the banner above to read more about what you see below.
Most reporting on this recent scientific finding had a fun spin, for obvious reasons. But was it Ig-worthy work? While only subscribers to the New England Journal of Medicine can access the study directly, the most serious review (and the most entertaining illustration) of its significance is here:
In the study, Messerli explains:
“It seems most likely that in a dose-dependent way, chocolate intake provides the abundant fertile ground needed for the sprouting of Nobel laureates. Continue reading →
Commercials can occasionally be worth the viewing. Some of us have been viewing this ad for decades now, and still coming back to it for inspiration. No high minded intent on the ad above–just good clean fun.
In honor of all those who prepared for what would have been today’s New York City Marathon, we remind you of one of last year’s participants. If Christoph Niemann cannot put a smile on the face, hope may seem lost.
But even then, it just takes a bit more effort. He drew and annotated the whole Marathon experience. He started with the pre-race sleep patterns; continued with a self-critique of the first art of the day; and he was off to the races, so to speak.
We have pointed to his wit on at least one other occasion, but we suspect today in particular there are plenty of people who will appreciate his efforts one year ago today. The visuals and verbals do not fail to entertain (click the image to the left for the whole experience). From sunrise to sunset we see the artist at work, deep in thought and sharp in perspective:
If you did not know his poetry already, here is as good an introduction as any. If you knew his work but had not seen or heard him, this is worth the few minutes he commands of your attention. And if you thought poetry was in decline as an art form due to decreased interest in a multi-media-saturated modern world, you may have been right; or wrong.
Vaska the cat, one of the Hermitage Museum mice hunters, seen in the museums yard, with an antic statue on the background, in St. Petersburg, in this April 25, 2004 photo. Cats have been part of the Hermitage’s security system since its founding days. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
Winding beneath the magnificent halls of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, with its Da Vincis, diamonds, Greek statuary, Egyptian parchments, enormous number of paintings, mechanical peacock clock, and other treasures, there is a catacomb of cellars. It was into this windowless nether region—far below the Winter Palace’s expansive view of the waters of the Neva—that Maria Haltunen and I had cautiously descended. As I followed her through a narrow, imperfectly-lit corridor, full of large pipes and jutting wires, Haltunen gasped. “Look!” she said.
In the semi-darkness, a little being had appeared. He perched, a foot-tall shadow, on a water pipe.
“Oh, you are a fat one!” said Haltunen, jangling the chain of her I.D. pass like a talisman as she approached the pointy-eared creature. “How nice you are!”
Ig Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention (a brassiere that can quickly convert into a pair of protective face masks) assisted by Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle (left), Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman (right). Photo credit: Alexey Eliseev, 2009 Ig Nobel Ceremony
While a group of graduate and undergraduate students from Singapore, Korea, the Philippines and the USA were in Kerala generating content for the stop motion summary of their internship experience, another group of students in Lausanne were just finishing their own stop motion fun. Watch to the end to see the “making of” segment, which is just as fun as the finished product.
From the innovators who get paid to think outside the normal boundaries, and who brought us the disposable cup above, the website explains what they do in general and what they did in this case:
Sardi Innovation is an Outsourcing Business Innovation Center.
Cookie Cup, “Sip the cofee then eat the cup” The cookie cup is made of pastry that is covered with a special icing sugar that works as an insulator making the cup waterproof and sweetening at the same time.
Cookie Cup [has collected] very important Awards in Ecology, Marketing, Business Strategy and Design sectors.
“…more than 3000 people will take part in a huge pillow fight in Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure! You can bring pillows from home or buy them at the place of the fight for very low prices (from 100 rubles). Except the flashmob “Pillow Fight”, the organizers will hold many interesting competitions for you while DJs will be playing their music all the time.”
That earlier news about Gorky Park reopening mentioned a museum in his honor, so we could not resist investigating. And we found an amazing collection of images (credits for all photos are embedded in the base of the images).
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It is difficult to find any information about the museum, which seems not to have its own website, so desk research is limited to some travel magazines and books that cover Moscow, like this one: Continue reading →
Thanks to our friends at Colossal for pointing us here:
I can’t speak from personal experience about the political climate in Yekaterinburg, Russia but if we take this video from the ad agency Voskhod at face value it appears the powers that be neglected the city’s infrastructure one day too long. Continue reading →
The Atlantic‘s website for mobile devices has run an article with the graphic above under this headline:
Why Does Canada Have a Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve?
Yes, difficult to believe. So click the image above to get the full story:
On Friday, news broke that thieves had stolen $30 million dollars worth of Quebec’s strategic maple syrup reserves. Much as the United States keeps a stock of extra oil buried in underground salt caverns to use in case of a geopolitical emergency, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has been managing warehouses full of surplus sweetener since 2000. The crooks seem to have made off with more than a quarter of the province’s backup supply. (I personally suspect these guys.)
Thanks to the Boston Museum of Science’s Theater of Electricity for this application of Tesla genius. We should not be surprised if, by now it may have been patented and commercialized elsewhere by some outpost of the Edisonian tradition. So what. The Tesla tribe moves in mysterious ways, and eventually prevails.
We got so busy that we neglected to notice your work and its wonderful home until just now. I may have heard someone say boingboing before, but I did not know what it meant. Now I have one data point to help me understand it. It looks in spirit and even in content much akin to our own style and interests on this site.
If work brings you to India, or any of the other locations where you see contributors on this site, please let us know.
Every Monday and Wednesday evening, starting at 8:30PM, a group of Puerto Ayora residents gathers at Parque San Francisco to play Ultimate Frisbee together. About half of these 25- to 35-year olds are teachers at Tomás de Berlanga, and others work at the Charles Darwin Foundation or around town.
Parque San Francisco is a long and fairly narrow stretch of land between Charles Darwin Avenue and the shore, and to walk from Baltra Avenue (the main road that crosses the whole island from north to south) to the main pier one has to walk through the part of the park that skaters, Ecua-volley players, and Frisbee players use at different times of the day: youngsters anywhere between eight and eighteen years old are constantly skating on the cement space enclosed by steps lengthwise, a stage on one end, and a large cement ramp on the other. Metal rails are often laid out to practice rail-grinds or hopping over the rail while the skateboard rolls under it. Skaters dominate this part of the park (the other parts are a sandy playground and some benches shaded by trees lining the coast) for most of the day, until 4:30PM or so when the volleyballers come out to set up two courts on one of the rectangle. These Ecua-volley players (who deserve their own post) then share half the park with the skaters, with the occasional stray ball or board, until the late evening, when volleyball stops and the skating continues on.
All of us photobugs and travel-junkies have struggled with the age-old question: which lens should I bring on my River Escapes backwaters adventure or my Roman holiday or my trip to the moon?
As a casual photographer, I’m not crazy about specs. I don’t get the numbers and technical terms! JUST TELL IT TO ME STRAIGHT! I know there are people out there who are like me, so Ben, Milo, and I will make it as easy as possible to understand which lens YOU need to bring on your next vacation! We’d also love to know what YOU brought on your last vacation!
See which of description fits you best:
I’m out to shoot wildlife. Tell me what I need to know.
I love architecture and the built world. What should I bring with me?
I’m a tourist who’s going to stick out like a sore thumb, but I really want to capture candid portraits of interesting people– help!
I’m going to a naturey place filled with dust/humidity/dirt/whatever and I don’t want to constantly change my lens. What’s the best daily walk-around lens?
I’m going on a service trip and I’ll be working on a construction site. How do I make it look epic?
Here’s what we’ll be introducing from our private collections today:
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM with 2x extender
Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM
Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
ALRIGHT, I’M READY!! NOW SHOW ME THE 5 LENSES I SHOULD BRING ON MY NEXT VACATION!!!
Organikos 
