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if you happen to stroll along the coast of fort kochi in india you'll probably come face to face with rows of these enormous and complex bamboo contraptions, hanging over the water and (to me at least) resembling huge wooden insects. they're actually called 'cheena vala', or 'chinese fishing nets', and are a permanent fixture around these shores having already been standing in some form or another for centuries following their initial introduction between the years of 1350 and 1450 (or so it claims on a plaque near the nets).

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especially when you consider how long ago they were originally designed, the structures themselves are incredible, and fairly effective. a huge net is attached to a 30m long (approx) cantilevered bamboo arm, the back end of which is attached by ropes to a number of rocks which act as an adjustable counterweight. to operate the larger of these nets can take up to 8 men, the majority of whom will raise and lower the rocks in order to raise and lower the net and another 1 or 2 usually walking the length of the beam to further control the net's journey.

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unsurprisingly the nets have become a tourist attraction in the area and most people who visit fort kochi return home with at least a couple of photos of the machines. just searching on flickr brings up some great pictures.

below: one of the huge nets being lowered into the water.



below: the net being raised.



some of the nets can be seen on google maps here.

since 2006, kazakhstan's new capital city of astana, itself an enormous hub of construction since it inherited the title in 1997, has been home to one of the world's most impressive and visually futuristic pyramids, known as the palace of peace and reconciliation. it was designed by british super-architects foster + partners, cost 8.74 billion kazakh tenge (i don't need to tell you bright young humans that this equates to approx. £35m) and was built to accommodate the triennial 'congress of world and traditional religions'. if there was ever a positive to be found for the existence of the idiocy we know and love as religion, this building could be it, as after an impressively rapid 2 years of design and construction, the end product is a masterpiece.

above: the visible 5-storey pyramid section of the palace is as high as its base is wide (203ft) and is to be the centrepiece of the country's 'presidential park'. 

above: a plan of the pyramid. the interior is just as impressive as the outer skin. this place is like a tardis and below the above-ground pyramid itself sits, amongst other things, an enormous 1'500 seat opera house - see final photo below.

above: the pyramid's 2 storey tip is home to the congress chamber, a space which has been surrounded by 10'100 sq feet of stained glass designed by renowned british artist brian clarke.

above: inside the congress chamber, possibly one of the smartest meeting rooms on earth.

above: the dove-covered stained glass of the congress chamber. 

above: the view as you look through the middle of the congress chamber's circular table. walking down to the next level takes you through nearly a whole storey of greenery, below which is the amazing atrium seen in the next photo.

above: the atrium, and another incredible conference table.

above: looking up from the atrium towards the upper section. this enormous space is surrounded by walls of rooms, 5 floors high, to be used both for meetings and accommodation. 

above: the opera house beneath the atrium. the domed ceiling sits below the enormous circular table belonging to the room above.

for more detailed info about the pyramid i'd suggest reading this article by ellis woodman.

photos found here, here and here.

mcdonalds ski-thru, lindvallen :: source

holy shit, that's a mcdonalds ski-thru.

those cunning mcbuggers obviously saw an opportuniy to reach out to the ski-bound community in their quest for continued world domination and build an adapted drive-thru, negating the need to leave the skis at the door. it opened in 1996 in the ski-resort of lindvallen, sweden and has been pumping people full of freshly heated big macs ever since. i had a quick look for other drive-thru variations, hoping i'd find fly-thrus near airfields and float-thrus in venice but to no avail. i did find a drive-thru built for snowmobiles though, again in sweden, this one in the village of piteaa...

mcdonalds snowmobile drive-thru, piteaa :: source

apparently it shut down a couple of years back due to poor demand.

then there's this one in singapore's east coast park...

mcdonalds skate-thru, singapore :: source

know of any others?

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see the diagonal line that runs through the orchard in the incredible photo above? that's the san andreas fault - a point where the edges of 2 tectonic plates meet - producing a visible displacement amongst the rows of trees. when they were planted years ago the rows were straight, but as the 2 ginormous land masses moved in opposite directions and rubbed against each other over the years the orchard was split. the top half of the field sits on the pacific plate, the bottom half on the north american plate.

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above: here's another fault line. it's called álfagjá rift valley and can be found in reykjanes, iceland. at one point along the rift the two plates (eurasian and north american), have been connected by the miðlína bridge, seen in the photo. on the left: eurasia, on the right: north america.

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above: another frightening tectonic rift, thingvellir, iceland.

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above: the incredible walls of a huge tectonic crack in aguateca, used as a defense by the mayas. the rift is 1 ½ km long and measures between 2 and 10 metres wide.

tectonic rifts of this magnitude usually develop at a rate too slow for the human eye to notice. however back in september 2005, a 60km long collection of cracks opened up in ethiopia's afar region, all over the space of 3 weeks. over the next year the fissures widened until in september 2006 a volcanic vent opened up and blew open a ½ km long crack. the area in question - the afar triangle - is a meeting point of 3 tectonic plates and geologists predict that soon (by soon they mean approximately 10 million years) it will sink and become a new ocean basin, splitting the continent apart.

a section of the cracks that appeared in 2005

the volcanic vent that opened up in 2006, surrounded by ash

a close-up of the huge vent

for more information, read this.

san ysidro border station, 1925 :: source

came across the above photo by chance today. it's san ysidro border station in 1925, the same border station that is now the busiest on earth. although it looked fairly busy even in 1925 with 4 or 5 lanes of queueing cars, these days it has a whopping 24 lanes of northbound traffic for those travelling through from tijuana to san diego and another 6 southbound lanes for those going the other way. every day up to 50'000 vehicles pass through this gate, plus another 25'000 people on foot, and that's just into the united states. plus it's just about to be expanded.

here it is today...

northbound traffic at night :: source

traffic leaving mexico :: source

the station as seen on google earth

the station will be even larger in 2014 after expansion :: source

and this, very close to the station, is a tiny portion of the border they're attempting to cross...

on the left, san diego. on the right, tijuana :: source

10 points if you correctly guess this building's purpose.

my guess was some kind of indoor holiday centre or water park.

incredibly, turns out it's a hospital in mestre, italy. designed by studio altieri spa and costing €200,840,705, construction work on this beauty, nuovo ospedale di mestre, was completed in january of this year. the hospital is home to 680 standard beds, 20 dialysis beds, 20 cribs and 16 operating theatres. now obviously these interior shots are just of the main entrance hall so i can't be sure how the actual wards and rooms compare in terms of design, but even so, what a positive way to welcome the public to a building which would usually cause panic and nausea purely due to its dull, predictable aesthetics. and that's all before you're told to sit in the waiting room for 3 hours with a 5 year old copy of autotrader to read. next time you're in the area and your hotel turns out to be a dump, might be worth breaking a small bone and checking in here.

much respect to the italians responsible. for more technical info, go here. photos from here.

seems like a good enough reason to post a couple of pics of hospital de la santa creu i sant pau, a stunning hospital in barcelona. it was built in the early 1900s and thankfully has been deemed a unesco world heritage site.

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roden crater :: photo source

for the past 30 years or so an astounding renovation has been underway below roden crater, a 3km wide dormant volcano crater located northeast of flagstaff in arizona, the brilliance of which probably won't be apparent until the large-scale art installation opens when ready, apparently in 2012. the artist responsible, james turrell, 'studied optics and perceptual psychology' and is known as a sculptor of light, over the years having used natural and artificial light to help create his work, many in the form of optical illusions, and challenge people's perceptions of the world around them. many of his pieces involve something called a skyspace, essentially a room which has had precisely calculated sections of the ceilling and/or walls removed in order for light to enter the room at a specific angle. a definition from scottsdalepublicart.org...

a skyspace is a large, elegant viewing chamber with benches along its interior walls. the skyspace creates an illusion which makes viewers feel as if they are seated in an ocean of air. the visual phenomenon of the skyspace is created through its exacting architecture coupled with a complex lighting system. at sunrise and sunset, changes in the natural light give viewers the sensation of the sky descending upon them. the unusual visual effect (called celestial vaulting) achieved within the skyspace is quite difficult, if not impossible, to describe.

with roden crater, turrell has taken on an enormous task and surely one of the most ambitious art projects ever created. after purchasing it back in 1979 and years of meticulous planning he set about sculpting and hollowing the upper parts of the volcano by removing endless tons of earth. he has since filled those spaces with numerous light-filled chambers and a huge 854ft long concrete tunnel which serves as an entrance from the side of the volcano. depending on the location of these chambers and/or the current position of the sun, moon and stars, different light shows will be experienced by the viewer and various astronomical events will be given a truly unique viewpoint.

the crater's bowl itself and the top of 2 skyspaces :: photo source

on the left is a tunnel connecting the heart of the volcano to the skyspace, seen on the right and below :: source (pdf)

a close-up of a skyspace at roden crater :: source

a few weeks ago roden crater was featured on a great series called 'sculpture diaries' and a camera crew were invited in by turrell for the first time. it looked absolutely phenomenal on film - turrell has obviously devoted an enormous chunk of his life to this project and it shows. just the architecture within roden crater is exceptional, but to then realise this has all been created in a gigantic dormant volcano is quite something. i remember reading somewhere, before i'd seen much of it myself, that this would be considered a wonder of the world when eventually completed. i can absolutely understand why. unfortunately i'm unable to locate an embeddable version of the programme to show you, however you can still watch the episode for a couple of days on the channel4 website here (it's the episode shown on the 14th september and roden crater is featured towards the end). bear in mind that it's probably only viewable to people in the uk so you may have to find a way round it. if anyone locates a copy on youtube let me know and i'll add it.

[edit] here's the excerpt. it's crap quality and there's no sound for some reason. it's still worth watching though.



below are some screencaps from the programme. they're not great quality but it's the best i could do.

 for more articles about roden crater, see metropolismag.com, maria lewis and lasersol.com. also worth reading is this metafilter post from 2003.

the last few days have consisted of me copying, pasting and re-formatting every post i ever wrote from google's cache onto blogger. i just finished and as a result my wrist is ruined, i'm bored senseless and i've got a couple of hundred posts waiting to be published. over the next hour or so i'm gonna publish them one by one - i just wanted to warn those people who still have the site on their feed reader as these might clog it up.

the downside to all this bollocks is that the posts now have different urls, meaning the rankings deputydog did have are probably buggered. i don't really care. i'm finally free of wordpress and google now host the site for me. i'm assuming there'll be plenty of problems with the posts, whether it's formatting issues, missing photos etc. if you come across any just let me know. i've also lost all comments from all posts, something which pisses me off beyond belief. there were thousands of 'em and some weren't left by freaks and actually made sense. not a lot i can do.

when this is done i'll start getting some new material on the site.

in future the following things will never be touched by me: wordpress and servers. i can't begin to tell you the amount of time i've spent in the past year attempting to keep this site up-and-running when i could've been spending that very time adding content instead. whilst wordpress is brilliant in many ways, the one fact to keep in mind is that it's the most resource-sapping piece of shit i've ever had the displeasure to use and unless you have the money to buy an indestructible dedicated server or the technical brainpower and willpower required to fiddle with settings constantly, i would not recommend attempting to run even a mildly popular blog using their software on your own server. and as for hosting companies, i can't even bring myself to talk about it. fucking idiots.

so anyway, a couple of weeks ago the site went down due to a combination of problems and i subsequently hit brickwall after brickwall. in the end i decided to dump my setup as it was just too demoralising and move the site to blogger, google's blogging platform. i don't give a toss about lack of features at the moment, as long as i don't have to worry about servers and then periodically have to pay through the nose for atrocious customer service. the site's extremely bare as you can see and at the moment i'm attempting to redesign the one half-decent blogger layout i could find. due to the problems i mentioned and retarded staff, all my old posts are in limbo at the moment, so bear with me. even if i do get hold of them again all the urls are gonna be different which will cause me even more problems, and that's provided i can find a way to import posts to blogger from wordpress, a process which apparently isn't common at all.

in short, the past 2 weeks have been a gigantic ball-ache and it could still get more frustrating. i'll be trying to post new stuff asap but who knows. my temporary email address at the moment is ddogblog@gmail.com. if you've sent any emails in the past couple of weeks, i haven't recieved them.

here's to technology.