Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Secret Underground City

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Stories of secret underground bunkers, refuges and even cities have always fascinated me, so it was quite a suprise to find that there is one not too far from me.

100 feet beneath the village of Corsham in Wiltshire, England, is a secret subterranean cold war city called Burlington, which the British Government was to have retreated to in the event of a nuclear war.

Immense and impressive as it was, and still is to some extent, it somehow doesn’t seem adequate.

Interactive map of Burlington

One of the escalators connecting the city with the surface.

Rainbow Apartments

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

These “reversible destiny” apartments in the Mitaka area of western Tokyo are quite something.  They look constructed from some kind of giant futuristic lego. Their interiors are every bit as challanging as their exteriors too, with uneven floors, hidden power sockets, oddly placed doorways and climeable walls.

Take a look at them here. And take a virtual tour here.

I’ts wonderful that something like this is commercially viable. I’m not sure what they will look like in a few decades time, but I bet they’ll still be more appealing than some of the shoebox crap I see around me.

Tokyo Time Lapse

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Have you ever stood alone at the window of a hotel room high up above a city and watched the world go by below?
If you have, watching the video below will recapture something of that experience.
Who are all those people? What are they doing? Where are they going?
In some of the shots you can see the Park Hyatt Hotel, as featured in the film “Lost in Translation”.

Visit the photographer’s, Samuel Cockedey, site here.

Life Size Gundam

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Gundam

To celebrate 30 years of the Gundam manga phenomenon a life size model of one of the giant mechs has been built in Shiokaze Park in Tokyo.
It’s almost sixty feet high and a splendid testament to something uniquely Japanese.
Pity my home town doesn’t have something similar rather than the rather dull victorian statue it currently sports.
Anyway, see more images at Engadget, here.

One Way Ticket To Mars

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

It’s an approach that seldom gets aired; that one way to explore Mars is to send people there on a one way trip.
It does make sense on may levels and is, after all, the way the new world was colonised.
The most dangerous aspects of a vist to Mars are the lift off and landings and the exposure to radiation and other hazards en-route. These would be halved if the aim was to stay on Mars once there.
I doubt there would ever be a shortage of volunteers for such a voyage. Quite the opposite in fact.

Read the full article, by Paul Davies, here.

Gurkha Justice

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

Joanna Lumley with Tul Bahadah Pun

It is terrible how the Gurkhas are being treated by the British government. These people fight for our country and then are treated like scrounging criminals when they retire.
It makes me embarrassed to be British, it really does.

From the website

“Britain has had no greater friends than the Gurkhas. They have served all across the world in the defence of our Country for nearly 200 years. Over 45,000 died in the two World Wars as part of the British Army. They are still fighting in the British Army today.”

I very rarely sign petitions. Very rarely indeed. But I signed this one.

UPDATE: 29th April. It seems some politicians in Britain have a sense of decency after all. Story here

One Image of the American Dream

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Luther Books

I came across this striking photograph the other day. It’s one of a set of similar images taken of the abandoned schools in and around Detroit.
The caption reads…

“Living the Dream”. Several boxes of books commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. found in the Detroit Public Schools’ Roosevelt Warehouse, where tens of thousands of other textbooks and countless other supplies have sat rotting for more than two decades.

See the rest of the images, and many other mind grabbing images at Viceland

The Red-Dead Canal

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

This is a project under serious consideration that will build a conduit between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea with the purpose of comabatting the fall in level of the Dead Sea.

So serious, in fact, that a $15m feasibility study was started earlier this year.

Another example of how rare common sense is these days.

You only need to look at who is for and who is against the idea.  On the for side there are the policy makers and bureaucrats of the abutting countries, Israel, Palestine and Jordan.  On the against side, everyone else including environmentalists, scientist and even represntatives of the mining industries in the area.

Not that it takes any kind of genius to spot that pumping 60 cubic metres per second from one body of water into another totally seperate body is going to cause all manner of ecological and environmental issues.  Nor that building and maintaining a 180 km pipe to carry the water  through hostile and earthquake prone terrain won’t also bring about a huge selection of problems.

$5Bn is the estimated cost.  And we all know that figure will balloon, just like with all mega projects.

Anyway, take a look here for more information and marvel once more at the heads-in-the-sand approach governments around the world have to solving problems of their own making.

The proposed route