cinnamon thoughts.

While in the US two weeks ago I had the chance to buy a print issue of Wired with the article Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine. Whether you believe everything or not doesn’t make this a less interesting read:
The point of the system […] was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American [...]

Photos of the 2008 eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile—its first eruption in about 9000 years. Be sure to scroll at least down to the sixth picture!
Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008.
Full article at boston.com

Here are some great HDR photos from Japan.
High Dynamic Range imaging is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques.
I find this technique quite amazing as good HDR photos almost look like a painting.

I’m watching Sigur Rós’ Heima right now — a documentary film about their free 2006 Iceland tour. It is a great DVD for everybody who likes Sigur Rós or Iceland.
Last year, in the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Rós played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the biggest and [...]

Finally I’ve found the time to upload about 50 of more than 400 photos of our trip to Iceland this summer.

That’s what I was wondering when I heard about the exploding steam pipe in NYC today. Transportation of heat, granted — but during summer?
Luckily those pesky interwebs have the answer to this question: Why the heck does New York have steam pipes, anyway?
tags: explosion, New York, NYC, steam pipe

Retrofuturo — or IL FUTURO VISTO DAL PASSATO as Fabio Feminò puts it — is a 35 page series of mostly pictures and magazine covers from the past (up to 80 years old) showing how the people living then thought our world would look like today.
It includes classics like flying cars, enormous cities, moon bases, [...]

Take a look at this wonderful collection of photos from 1929 taken in Germany. The atmosphere is very quiet and peaceful. It looks like a place you wouldn’t deny holidays from the city life at — if there wasn’t the problem of the almost 80 years passed since then.
All pictures are taken from a book [...]

Simon Dale built a truly amazing Low Impact Woodland Home for his family which is dug into the hillside. The building process took nearly 1500 man hours and cost only £3000. The main tools used are a chainsaw, a hammer and a one inch chisel.
The used materials are mainly natural and the house has a [...]

I’ve finally created my own geolocation application I wanted to have for a long time. It is a web application to show the geographical location of your current IP address on a map. An elegant solution is possible using Google Maps and MaxMind’s free GeoLite City database.

You can either visit GeoMapLookup to do a lookup [...]

As some kind of a followup to my last post this one is about photos of abandoned forts at sea from the time of the second World War.
The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 [...]
Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area. Each fort consisted of a group of [...]

On this Japanese site you find pictures of a hugh sewer.underground infrastructure to prevent floods in Saitama. Sadly I can’t read Japanese but I guess it’s in one of the largest cities in Japan.
According to Wikipedia:
The G-Cans project (首都圏外郭放水路 Shutoken Gaikaku Housui Ro or Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel) is an underground infrastructure mainly [...]

Es gibt immer wieder Perlen im Internet zu entdecken: Bilder, wie sie sonst nur in Dokumentationen im Fernsehen zu finde sind. Bei Flickr postet Raul Gutierrez seine Fotos, aber auch direkt in seinem Photo Blog gibt es die Bilder (in groß) aus Mexico, Texas, China, Kambodscha und Orten, von denen ich noch nie zuvor gehört [...]