jmsc:
Switch Restaurant located in Dubai.
Designed by Karim RashidThe restaurant is arranged along undulating walls that change colour continuously. :o
“Shocked to discover the statistic that 2 times more American soldiers that served in Iraq had died in 2009 by committing suicide than those killed in combat during that same year hadn’t been properly addressed in the press and is unknown by a majority of the general population, New York-based installation artist Sebastian Errazuriz took to the wall outside of his studio in Brooklyn.
Sebastian says:“The counting of dead soldiers outside my studio was long and surprisingly eerie; it was hard to forget that every brush stroke was a soldier who had died the previous year. A lot of people stopped to read the mural and were immediately impressed by the reality portrayed. Most of them seemed quite shocked and approached me to ask if what I was painting was real. I tried to explain that I simply wished to create a physical image that could capture people’s imagination, creating awareness of the current numbers in death, war and the infinite discrepancy between the resources and energies destined to fight and protect soldiers at war versus the energies invested in protecting their mental health and stability.”
(via byrna-brilyant)
So since the planets all came from our flattened protoplanetary disc, they all ended up in the same plane, meaning the solar system is flat: it looks like a frisbee, instead of like a ball. Except they’re not exactly in the same plane, but they’re close. The drawing above shows the solar system as seen edge-on.
The plane of the Earth’s orbit is called the plane of the ecliptic (because eclipses happen in this plane). The plane of the ecliptic is 1.6 degrees off of the invariable plane, which is a sort of average orbital plane of the entire solar system. If they were exactly the same, it would be 0 degrees off.
The other planets are also fairly close to the invariable plane, with Mercury being the furthest off by far, at 6.3 degrees to the invariable plane. The drawing above is not to scale of course, but you can see how close to flat variations in degrees this small are. Asteroids, comets, and other objects do not adhere to the invariable plane like the planets do, however.
pure architecture …
via geologyrocks:
Photo of the Day | Manpupuner Rock Formations | Komi Republic, Russia
via: thisisrussia
The Great Blue Hole and Lighthouse Reef, Belize (as seen from space)
The Great Blue Hole is a part of the larger Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a World Heritage Site of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
This site was made famous by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who declared it one of the top ten scuba diving sites in the world. In 1971, he brought his ship, the Calypso, to the hole to chart its depths.
(via crookedindifference)
JS Bach Chamber Music Hall
Zaha Hadid Architects have created a unique chamber music hall specially designed to house solo performances of the exquisite music of Johann Sebastian Bach. A voluminous ribbon swirls within the room, carving out a spatial and visual response to the intricate relationships of Bach’s harmonies. As the ribbon careens above the performer, cascades into the ground and wraps around the audience, the original room as a box is sculpted into fluid spaces swelling, merging, and slipping through one another. (via mikefenton)
Large images, here.
The most severe implications are philosophical. The result means that the rules we use to manipulate numbers cannot be assumed to represent the pure and perfect truth. Rather, they are something more akin to a scientific theory such as the “standard model” that particle physicists use to predict the workings of particles and forces: our best approximation to reality, well supported by experimental data, but at the same time manifestly incomplete and subject to continuous and possibly radical reappraisal as fresh information comes in.
